Birds of Prey #11 – Review

By: Duane Swierczynski (story), Travel Foreman & Timothy Green II (pencils), Jeff Huet & Joseph Silver (inks), Gabe Eltaeb (colors)

The Story: Poison Ivy’s killer course on how to save the planet.

The Review: Look, none of us are naïve here.  We all know that there are some people in this world who can stand a little killing.  And I’m not talking about the ones who are clearly disturbed, like serial killers or child rapists.  I’m referring to the jags who see you waiting-signaling for a parking space and zip into it anyway, the corporate honchos who do everything short of snatching cash from your hands, the guy who leaves his pee all over the toilet, etc.

But horrible as these folks are, you don’t actually believe they deserve death (at least, I hope not because otherwise I suggest you seek counseling).  It just goes to show that our valuation of human life outweigh a whole slew of awful human behavior.  At the same time, most of us acknowledge somewhat hypocritically that there are things far more important than us.  It’s only when we have to practice that idea that we begin reconsidering our priorities.

Birds of Prey #9 – Review

By: Duane Swierczynski (story), Travel Foreman (pencils), Jeff Huet (inks), Gabe Eltaeb (colors)

The Story: We have a serial killer and a group of pretty women—who’ll come out on top?

The Review: Another “Night of the Owls” tie-in.  Huzzah.  In all seriousness, though, it’s not like I think Batman-spawned plot is terrible—I haven’t even read it, after all—but it just doesn’t feel like any of these titles which have crossed over with the storyline really needed to.  The formula is simple: enter an undefeatable Talon; hero of the hour struggles against it for a while; hero finds some method (clever or no) to subdue it; fade out.

Lo and behold, that is exactly how this issue pans out.  Swierczynski makes an attempt to give Henry Ballard, the Talon in question, a bit of character, but like the Talons of Batgirl and Batman and Robin, the haste in which the issue wraps makes it impossible for you to develop any sentiment toward him whatsoever.  He has a whole shtick about the unchangeable nature of history (“Gotham’s streets are the same.  The blood flows in the gutters just the same.  The crimes, the wicked acts, the atrocities…all the same.”), but Swierczynski doesn’t explore that theme enough to make it worth your attention.

Animal Man #8 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (writer), Steve Pugh (artist), Travel Foreman (penciller), Jeff Huet (inker), Lovern Kindzierski (colorist)

The Story: Let this issue be a wake-up call to permissive, indulgent parents everywhere.

The Review: This may sound a tad hypocritical coming from someone who loves Young Justice so much, but I find the concept of kids getting caught up in the increasingly violent world of superheroics, frankly, rather disturbing.  Much as the Fantastic Four’s Franklin and Valeria try to emphasize the cuteness of the idea, I think that in any real life scenario, we’d get a result more along the lines of what happened to Red Arrow’s daughter in James Robinson’s Cry for Justice.

If you never considered this troubling problem before, you’ll almost certainly start thinking about it after this issue.  Maxine’s childlike confidence and legendary status may have lulled you into thinking nothing can really touch her, but here we see, in graphic fashion, that at the end of the day, she’s still a little kid with vulnerable flesh.  Lemire may like his warm, corny father-son moments, but he’ll let a four-year-old girl get mercilessly ravened by various animals when the story demands it.  The moment is an immediate punch in your gut, telling you once and for all that this series is not messing around with this horror stuff.

You don’t even have the comfort of feeling better when Maxine saves herself from bodily death, since it requires her to jump through some grisly body-snatching and body-disposing hoops to get it done.  Rather than charm you, her toothy smile and peppy, “It didn’t hurt at all.  It kind of felt good,” simply gives you the willies.  The only thing separating her on the creepy factor from the Children of the Corn is her obvious love and loyalty to her family, but her reckless and naïve behavior means we can’t count on those qualities alone to mean she won’t doom them all.

Animal Man #7 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (writer), Steve Pugh & Travel Foreman (artists), Jeff Huet (inker), Lovern Kindzierski (colorist)

The Story: No rest stops on this family trip—we’re on the lam from killer beasts, remember?

The Review: Practically every superhero comic on the stands bears some kind of peril within.  When our heroes are fighting to save their cities or fellow man, they’re also fighting to save themselves.  Theirs is a high-stakes business, where failure often means the loss of their lives.  What makes the danger in Animal Man feel so much more potent and real is the fact that Buddy’s not the only one at risk here; it’s his whole family that is being threatened.

More than anything else, the constant risk to the Bakers maintains the series’ choking tension.  It gives the Rot not one, but several targets to lurk after, so any time a Baker goes off anywhere on his or her own, your wariness increases for their sake.  When Buddy leaves Cliff to his own devices in this nowhere, desert town, everything takes on an ever-so-slightly sinister aspect, as if you expect at any moment some stranger’s good-natured smile will burst out with fangs and seize the boy in his grip.  No doubt this paranoia got instilled into you by the Hunters’ body-snatching tricks from previous issues.

Besides the multitude of physical dangers in play, perhaps there are even greater ones closing in on the Bakers’ spiritual well-being.  The tension within the family grows more intense with each harrowing episode.  Ellen’s mom finally airs her feelings about the whole situation, and while telling her daughter that Buddy “was trouble from the moment you first started dating” seems a bit unfair, she has a point.  Lemire has crafted a bit of a double-edged sword in creating such a strong family unit for this series, because it does make you think how insane it is to even attempt to do your superhero thing if you have loved ones to fear for.

Yet Buddy seems oblivious to the problems eating away at his own family.  You can’t deny that he’s tops in the “cool dad” department (“Cliff, we gotta go…that was the Justice League, they need us!”), but when it comes to the more deeply-rooted issues, he’s a bit too lax.  It’s not just that he dismissively asks, “What’s her problem?” when Ellen’s mom storms out.  By this point, Buddy’s had two dreams of impending doom, and while he reacts with appropriate dismay at the evil portents for Maxine, he doesn’t quite seem as attuned to the equally dark signs for Cliff.  Remember Cliff’s spilt guts in #1?  Doesn’t it seem foreboding that here, in Buddy’s vision of the “future,” you see a grown-up Maxine, a geriatric yet spry Buddy and Ellen, yet no Cliff?

Animal Man #6 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (writer), John Paul Leon & Travel Foreman (artists), Jeff Huet (inker), Lovern Kindzierski (colorist)

The Story: Well, Buddy, you’re giving Clooney a run for his money on that Oscar, I’ll say that.

The Review: I have a screenwriter friend who’s a big buff for the canon of artistic cinema—loves everything Stanley Kubrick, big Criterion collector, all that good stuff.  Because I’m a lit nerd, I tend to view movies with a pretentious sniff, but under his influence, I’ve grown to see film as the potential art form it is—Twilight movies and unceasing Alvin and the Chipmunks sequels be damned.  And anyway, as a comics reader, I can’t exactly stay on a high horse.

I will say, however, that the bulk of movies tend to be more formulaic, predictable, and given to cliché than almost any other medium, even the decent ones.  Three pages into “Tights,” the last (?) movie Buddy starred in before his run-in with the Rot, you already know the angsty place the plot is heading long before Chas (Buddy’s “character”) lands himself in the hospital with an estranged wife and crying kid beside him, begging him to stop his vigilantism before it’s too late.  The premise of “Tights” also comes a bit too late in the “superhero down on his luck”-type story.

The beauty of art, though, is that no matter how much it follows formula, it can still be affecting and powerful depending on its execution.  And Lemire sure knows how to execute.  He’s not the type to insert this kind of thing into an issue just as a fun gimmick.  What “Tights” really does is give you a character study on Buddy himself through the guise of his film counterpart.  The last five issues have been so chock-full of action and plot elements that we haven’t really gotten a chance to know our hero as a person, so this sequence comes as a quiet, welcome break.

Now, we’ve seen the Baker family in action, so we know the distant father, mother, and son in the movie are at least not true to life (so to speak).  We also know Buddy is a pretty wholesome and well-adjusted guy, compared to the depressed, falling-apart drunk on screen.  There is one thing they share: an addiction to heroism, one they can’t quit even in the face of very real danger.  Red Thunder finds himself incapable of dealing with even the youngest threats of modern society, while Animal Man is poorly equipped to deal with the abstract, overwhelming foe he’s up against.  Red Thunder gets beat up; where will that leave Animal Man, I wonder?

Two significant moments in the issue signal how this movie clip will play into upcoming story.  First is Red Thunder’s admission to his grieved ex-wife and son: “I—I can’t quit…I can’t do anything else.  Without the costume…I’m nothi—”  Whether this bears any reflection to Buddy’s determination to see this horror through, even with the risk to his family, we’ll have to see.  It’s also significant to learn Cliff’s the one watching his dad’s movie this whole time.  We’ve seen in earlier issues how taken he is with his dad being in the hero business, but he just had a scary run-in with the Hunters Three, and witnessed his dad getting beat around.  It may well be he’s having second thoughts about how cool any of this is.

Animal Man #5 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (writer), Travel Foreman & Steve Pugh (artists), Jeff Huet (inker), Lovern Kindzierski (colorist)

The Story: This is one parade of animals I can live without.

The Review: Like anything else, serial fiction has its upsides and downsides.  On the upside, there’s a lot to be said for a story that has enough time on its hands to explore any direction it darn well pleases and develop its characters as far as they can go.  The problem is for a story to go on for that long, the main character has to stick around for a good, long while, which means their survival in any kind of dangerous situation is practically assured.

That makes writing your traditional superhero comics a bit tricky, to say the least.  While the goal is to challenge their powers by placing them in some kind of peril, for the most part, you’re never all that concerned anything drastic will happen to them.  But then, Animal Man is hardly your traditional superhero comic.  From the onset, Lemire has imbued this title with a constant, sweaty tension, allowing danger to lurk on every page.

To begin with, our hero is much lower on the power scale than his League counterparts.  We saw last issue how ineffective, even at its most potent, his skill set is against the Hunters Three, and here, separated from direct contact with the Red, Buddy proves even less effective against just one of the Hunters.  Yet from the looks of things, it doesn’t seem like there are many on Earth who can handle these flesh-feeding terrors, except those with powers over flesh themselves.

Animal Man #4 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (writer), Travel Foreman (artist), Jeff Huet (inker), Lovern Kindzierski (colorist)

The Story: Over the mountains and through the woods, to Grandmother’s house we go…

The Review: Animal Man’s cult popularity comes less from anything inherently cool about his powers or himself, but more from the way writers have used him for highly experimental, even radical, storytelling.  When you think of Animal Man, you tend not to think of his iconography or mythos, but rather the fact that he once starred in one of Grant Morrison’s delightfully bizarre works.  What you know of him as a character is far less concrete.

Lemire has been filling the gaps in that area since this series started, and done it quite poetically too, though he poaches off Swamp Thing’s continuity for some of it.  You especially can’t help seeing the resemblances in this issue: humans acting as avatars of the Red, returning to the Red once their work is done to become Totems in the “Parliament of Limbs.”  Here, just as in Scott Snyder’s sister title, the Red has found its greatest avatar of all to fight its greatest enemy of all.

We’ve seen hints of how far Maxine’s power can go, particularly in reanimating the corpses of several small animals.  But now we really get a sense of the difference between her, a true avatar of the Red, and Buddy, a mere “agent,” as the Totems called him last issue.  Buddy’s ability to channel the powers of animals makes for some entertaining action, but Maxine wields power over flesh itself, as she shows when she heals her daddy’s wounds, molding his skin like clay.

Superior #4 – Review

 

By: Mark Millar (writer/creator), Leinil Yu (pencils/creator), Gerry Alanguilan, Jason Paz & Jeff Huet (inks), Sunny Gho & Javier Tartaglia (colors), Clayton Cowles (letters) & Cory Levine (editor)

The Story: The cute reporter gets into the Superior game and the big bad villain is revealed (kinda).

What’s Good: I’ve enjoyed Superior and this is issue 4 out of 6, so it is naturally going to be a transitional issue.  If you understand that going in, you’ll be fine with the story as Millar and Yu are mostly moving the pieces around so that they can wrap up the story.  It is enlightening to see who and what the creators think are important.  There is a huge focus on the reporter, Maddie, who goes to great lengths to finally meet Superior.  But, I was a little surprised that our focus also drifted towards Simon/Superior’s parents and the actor who played Superior in the movies.  I honestly don’t know what role those folks are going to play, but I’m sure that Millar has something up his sleeve.

One very cool moment in this issue revolved around a role reversal between Simon/Superior and his buddy Chris.  If you remember back to the first issue of the series, Chris was the ONLY friend who stuck by Simon when he was wheelchair bound by disease and actively took up for Simon when the other kids teased him.  Here we get to see Simon/Superior return the favor when Chris runs into the neighborhood bullies.  One thing that I love about Simon/Superior is that he is super NICE.  Most stories where a young person gets power/fame/money have an obligatory portion of the story where they crap all over their friends and fall in with a bad crowd.  Sooooo glad that we aren’t forced to see that, but Millar is too good of a storyteller to go down that path.

And, the kinda shocking part of this issue happens right at the end when the space monkey shows back up.  Last issue there was an allusion that Simon may have unwittingly made a Faustian bargain to get his powers.  Here the monkey makes an offer to the head bully and it just reinforces that notion.  Of course, in true Millar fashion, he doesn’t beat around the bush by calling the source of power some vague “supreme evil” or anything like that.  He just goes for the “S”-word and in so doing will get his comic banned from Sunday School.  That’s kinda what I love about Millar: He is willing to push the envelope in his stories.  It doesn’t always work, but you don’t do new and exciting things by playing it safe.

The art is mostly a plus for me.  I love Yu’s layouts.  He always manages to put the viewer’s eye right where they need to be to appreciate that scene.  That’s really a gift that you appreciate when you see other comics doing it wrong.  Put this skill in the category of “harder than it looks” and “underappreciated”.  There are also huge kudos for the design of Superior himself.  I love that he’s drawn as a big, muscular dude who is wearing a uniform versus a nude man without genitals who just has a costume added by the colorist.  It’s also more work to do it that way because I’m sure that the rough layout had a basic human form onto which the costume is drawn.

Superior #3 – Review

By: Mark Millar (writer/creator), Leinil Yu (penciler/creator), Gerry Alanguilan, Jason Paz & Jeff Huet (inkers), Sunny Gho & Javier Tartaglia (colors), Clayton Cowles (letters) & Cory Levine (editor)

The Story: Now that Simon Pooni has been transformed into Superior and kinda gotten a hold of his powers, it’s time for him to start getting into some heroic action.

What’s Good: This comic really has a big heart and I think it accurately depicts what would happen if a ~11 year old paraplegic boy suddenly did get super powers: He wouldn’t immediately just start proclaiming himself as Superior, puff out his chest and save the day while stopping to pose for the cameras.  He’d probably fix things and then hide from the resultant attention out of fear that he’d possibly done something wrong or that his parents would find out.  So, as we go though this issue, which is really an exploration of Simon’s coming to grips with his ability to save lives, it was a neat choice by Millar to not have it readily apparent how the space station was saved except for some blurry images on camera phones and the random eyewitness report.  I really enjoyed this approach much more than if Simon had posed at the scene of his heroic act and announced himself because it emphasizes that this is really a little boy in a superhero’s body.

Of course, this cannot simply be a comic about a little boy becoming a superhero…  There must be some conflict and drama!  For that we return to the mysterious Space Monkey who granted Simon’s wish to become Superior in the first place.  I don’t want to give away the very cool twist on the final page, but it looks like Simon might have gotten himself into a bigger situation than he originally bargained for.  Can’t wait to see how that shakes out.

The art in this issue is pretty strong.  One of the things I like about Yu’s pencils is that he draws Superior as a guy wearing a tight uniform as opposed to drawing a nude man who happens to get colored red later.  Superior still has bulgy muscles that show off anatomy, but he also has fabric bunching in all the right places.  Nice to see a little more realism in that regard that we usually do.  Yu also has a couple of scenes that allow him to just go crazy drawing architecture, space stations, submarines, etc.  Some of this looks like it might have been sampled from photos, but I don’t really care.  It is just nice to see an artist show commitment to excellent art extending beyond the main characters in the scene (although sometimes the “main character” is a submarine).  I’m unsure what Yu’s background is, but this is always something you see from artists who were trained as professional illustrators and it is sometimes missing in comics.