Young Avengers #15 – Review

By: Kieron Gillen (story), Becky Cloonan, Ming Doyle, Joe Quinones, Jamie McKelvie (art), Jordie Bellaire, Maris Wicks, Matthew Wilson (colors)

The Story: Clearly, you’ve been through a real dry spell if you’re willing to kiss yourself.

The Review: I was a little puzzled at first why Gillen would choose to spread out his New Year’s finale over two issues, but then I realized that this is his last opportunity to do all the character building he neglected to do during the life of the series.  It’s a bit like realizing at the last minute during an essay exam that you forgot to mention a key point of your thesis and being forced to cram it into the conclusion.  It doesn’t belong there, but at least you got it in.

This “better late than never” quality permeates most of this issue, as Gillen tops off his series with fitting resolutions for the Young Avengers who didn’t get their time in the spotlight last month.  Of course, when you’re trying to make a point with time running out, it’s never going to come out as coherent as if you had started earlier, which is probably why our last moments with Noh-Varr and Prodigy feel unsatisfyingly incomplete.  Just like with Kate and America, Gillen needed to have put in more work earlier to really clinch these final moments.

The Witching Hour #1 – Review

By: Too many to list—or even to review.  Just check out the issue.

The Story: Will you catch any of these folks speaking with the devil?

The Review: These Vertigo showcases are proof positive that there really are an endless number of ways to look at the world, or even just one thing in it.  Both Ghosts and Time Warp offered stories that dealt with actual spirits and time-travel, but just as many stories that explored spirits and time as concepts, and a few that struck at the subjects on both a literal and figurative level.  It’s pretty amazing to see what the imagination will dream up when prompted.

Take Brett Lewis’ “Mars to Stay,” which in both substance and form resembles less like anything having to do with witches and more like a hard piece of science-fiction—the hardest kind, given how Lewis doesn’t take too many liberties with the fiction to deliver science that actually falls within the realm of possibility, if you have a cynical view of the way people work.  Maybe that’s where the witchcraft lies, in the slow, creeping way that the stranded crew’s psyches break down, as if infected with a curse.  Either way, it’s an impactful, haunting tale, despite having no clear connection to magical women whatsoever (and it doesn’t hurt that you get Cliff Chiang’s starkly sharp art illustrating the whole thing).

Mara #4 – Review

By: Brian Wood (writer), Ming Doyle (art), Jordie Bellaire (colors) and Clayton Cowles (letters)

The Story: Professional volleyball may be no place for a super-being, but the military is happy to have Mara.

Review (with minor SPOILERS): This issue doesn’t have much zap to it.  After three issues chronicling the downfall of Mara Prince from “Super-Star Volleyball Icon” to “Horrible Cheater!”, this was the issue to show how the military really doesn’t care about fighting fair.  It was a predictable place for the comic to go, but the execution is off and it results in a story that doesn’t ask any interesting questions or cause any passions to be aroused.

Mara #2 – Review

By: Brian Wood (writer), Ming Doyle (art), Jordie Bellaire (colors)

The Story: Having been revealed as superpowered, Mara finds her fans becoming skeptical.

Review (with SPOILERS): The biggest storytelling success of this issue is that it brings Mara to her rock-bottom point.  This is a 6-issue miniseries, so the storytelling needs to be snappy so that we spend more time on the interesting parts.  By laying Mara low at the end of this issue, we can spend more time on what happens next and less on the star-worship of professional volleyballers.  That’s a good thing because the market for volleyball comics is probably very small.

Brian Wood usually has “something to say” in his writing, so I suspect he’s playing around with (a) the morality of steroids, HGH, EPO and other, current performance-enhancing drugs and (b) our modern-day culture which reveres and pays so much money and attention to athletes.   And then lurking in the background is Mara’s twin brother who is a solider in some far-flung war.  Is he similarly “enhanced”?  Will Mara be asked to fight in the war now that everyone knows about her superpowers.  Is it “cheating” when she uses her powers in volleyball, but “heroic” if she uses her powers to slaughter a platoon of enemies?

Mara #1 – Review

By: Brian Wood (writer), Ming Doyle (art) & Jordie Bellaire (colors)

The Story: In the future, a young woman finds stardom as a professional athlete….but perhaps there is a secret to her success.

Review (with a minor SPOILER): Let’s hand it to Brian Wood for coming up with different sorts of futures than we often see in comics – or fiction in general.  While I really do enjoy stories like The Walking Dead or The Road where you are forced to consider things like the ethics of cannibalism, those stories do all have a similar vibe to them.  So, it’s nice to see something different.  The world that Wood introduces us to in Mara #1 is said to be “war-obsessed”, but it is obsessed in the way of “I like to watch FoxNews reports on drone strikes in Pakistan.” Surely there are parts of this future world that are war-ravaged, but we don’t see them in this issue.  Everything is spiffy and clean, and while it is slightly futuristic, it isn’t unrecognizable compared to the present day.

Fantastic Four #600 – Review

By: Jonathan Hickman (writer), Steve Epting, Rick Magyar, Carmine Di Giandomenico, Ming Doyle, Leinil Francis Yu & Farel Dalrymple (line art), Paul Mounts, Andy Troy, Jordie Bellaire, Javier Tartaglia & Jose Villarrubia (colors), Clayton Cowles (letters), Lauren Sankovitch & Tom Brevoort (editor) 

The Story: Marvel gives their first family a 100-page, $7.99 extravaganza featuring lots of cosmic action and the return of a familiar face…

Five Things:  [SPOILER WARNING]

1. ________ is back!  I purposely omitted the name because it seems kinda douchey to give a SPOILER WARNING and then put Johnny Storm’s name in bold right below.  But, he’s back!  And, he’s back in a new and improved way after his time in the Negative Zone.  This is really no surprise and given the Marvel often brings characters back a month after they “die” (Bucky) it is probably a huge show of restraint that they let Johnny be presumed dead for ~9 whole months.  If you’re a Marvel hater, you could work up a lot of rage about the cheap ploy of killing someone (but not really) and then milking that death in press releases before the death, releasing a ploy-bagged issue on Tuesday and then having special issues honoring Johnny in the immediate aftermath.  But….I’m glad to have him back, especially in the way that Hickman handles his return.  Speaking of that……

2. We learn about _______’s experiences in the Negative Zone.  I mostly loved this section where we learned that Johnny wasn’t really dead.  He was just held captive by Annihilus and forced to fight in gladiator matches alongside some Universal Inhumans and where he has died multiple times only to be restored by that nasty Annihilus.  The whole thing was really nicely done.  It showed Johnny’s pain at being there, his unwillingness to give up, the fact that Annihilus has his number, etc.  Really good stuff.  The only quibble I have is that the story added 2 pages to the moments before Johnny’s “death” with him talking to Ben Grim through the closed portal.  The original “death” was soooo nicely done with Ben feeling grief stricken, Johnny being brave, etc., so this added scene just cheapened it.

3. Kree, Inhumans, Annihilus, other Inhumans…..  I have to admit that this part of the plot is getting away from me.  While I’m actually reading it, I think it’s cool, but then when I sit down to type a review a whole 6 hours later….I really can’t remember many of the details and that tells you the story is too complex because none of it is sticking.  I actually blame the artists for this.  Comics are a visual medium and none of the artists who’ve worked on FF the last few months have nailed a scene from this complex plot such that it’s burned into your brain.