Wolverine and the X-Men #2 – Review

By: Jason Aaron (writer), Chris Bachalo (pencils & colors), Tim Townsend & Jaime Mendoza (inkers), Rob Steen (letters), Jordan D. White (assistant editor), Daniel Ketchum (associate editor) & Nick Lowe (editor)

The Story: How long did you think it would be before the new mutant academy got trashed?

Five things: 

1. Go Iceman! – One neat thing about getting a new writer on an X-Men title is that most of them pick a pet character.  It gives you a little insight into the pitch they must have made to get the writing assignment in the first place.  They’ve all got interesting ideas about some of these characters and schemes that no one has tried before.  So, it’s really cool that Iceman is stepping up in this series because he’s always been the lame hero who wasn’t quite sold on even being a hero.  Mostly he was just the guy who wanted to be an accountant who slid around on ice slides and fired snowballs at Magneto.  Haha!  Jason Aaron obviously thinks that Iceman can be a major difference maker and this new manifestation of his abilities where he creates multiple snowmen and then controls them all is super-cool.  Oh yeah….and he impulsively plants a kiss on the lips of Ms. Pryde.  I LOVE that!  Even though the Kitty-Colossus thing is kinda a staple, I get sick of seeing them just pining for each other and continually ripped apart by fate.  Maybe it’d be cool to see Kitty (who has always been practical) decide it just isn’t in the cards for her and Peter and go in a more practical direction?

2. Love /Hate the new Hellfire Club. – On one hand, these kids are really funny because they’re a perfect canvas for Aaron’s black sense of humor: hearing such nasty things coming out of such young mouths.  One the other hand….I just cannot buy kids as a threat to the X-Men.  I really don’t care if they’re super smart.  It just flies in the face of my experiences with kids in real life.  Sure, adults will humor them and laugh at their jokes and sometimes act like we believe their white lies, but even average adults are usually 10 steps ahead of smart kids and the X-Men aren’t average adults.

3. LOTS of newness in the character line-up! – Other than Wolverine and Kitty, almost all of the characters in here are either new, updated versions of older characters or characters who have been underused.  A quick list:  As mentioned above, we have a new Iceman.  Rachel Grey has been off the board for a long time.  Idie is a new creation in the last year.  Broo the Brood is new from Astonishing X-Men.  Quentin Quire hasn’t been used in forever.  And this Kid Gladiator and his bodyguard Warbird I think are 100% new.  Coming off an era in X-Men titles where it felt like every story featured the same ten characters, this is SOOOOO fresh.

X-Men: Prelude to Schism #3 – Review

By: Paul Jenkins (writer), Will Conrad (art), Lee Loughridge (colors), Rob Steen (letters), Sebastian Girner (assistant editor) & Nick Lowe (senior editor)

The Story: Cyclops recollects a special woman in his life as he grapples with a momentous decision regarding the future of the X-Men.

What’s Good: By now, it’s pretty obvious what this miniseries is, so wishing for it to be more is unrealistic (although we’ll get into that below).  This issue feeds us a pretty strong dose of Cyclops and him missing his mother as he’s grappling with this HUGE decision that the X-Men are facing.  It shows how his mother was with him as a young boy who was starting to have issues with his mutant powers (nasty headaches) and how she sacrificed herself so that Scott and his brother could survive after the small plane they were flying in developed problems and they only had one parachute.

It also had a nice bookend to that situation by showing Cyclops talking with Emma before informing the gathered X-Men of his decision.  I liked how he asked her, “How sure am I?” and she probes his mind to see how many doubts and fears he has.  What an interesting way to spot-check your decision making process!

The art is effective.  It’s nothing awesome, but it tells the story effectively and all the characters look like they should.

X-Men: Prelude to Schism #1 – Review

By: Paul Jenkins (writer), Roberto de la Torre (art), Lee Loughridge (colors), Rob Steen (letters), Sebastian Girner (assistant editor), Daniel Ketchum (associate editor) & Nick Lowe (editor)

The Story: Something is coming to Utopia that is causing the X-Men to contemplate an evacuation and (if marketing is to be believed) this will cause a SCHISM between Cyclops and Wolverine.

What’s Good: Roberto de la Torre’s art is really nice.  He draws with a style that looks like it is based in photo-reference and then gets all kinds of scratchy.  It’s almost like he is taking the accurate anatomy of photo-reference and then inking over the top to inject vitality to the characters.  Given that this issue consists mainly of characters standing around and talking, it really needed visually appealing and interesting art or it would have just been boring as hell.  I really enjoyed de la Torre’s work on Daredevil recently and I’d LOVE to see him stick around the X-titles for a good long time because I prefer his art to about 5-6 artists who have been getting regular work out of the X-office.  Lee Loughridge also does a very nice job coloring.  Almost this entire issue takes place in the shadows and he manages to do his part to keep a slow-paced issue interesting.

The story itself….  Well, there is some good here if you’re really into the Cyclops – Xavier relationship.  Jenkins does a nice background of the time the two of them have spent together as Xavier is recognizing that Cyclops/Scott truly has grown up and HE (not Xavier) is the leader here.  Probably the highlight of this story is the flashing back to the early years of Scott’s time with Xavier.

Sigil #1 – Review

By: Mike Carey (writer), Leonard Kirk (pencils), Ed Tadeo (inks), Guru eFX (colors), Rob Steen (letters), Sebastian Girner (assistant editor) & Nick Lowe (senior editor)

The Story: Troubled teenage girl with odd birthmark keeps having very vivid dreams where she is whisked away to another reality featuring pirates.

What’s Good: First, a caveat; I read a grand total of ZERO issues of any CrossGen titles when they were first coming out, so I have no experience with the previous Sigil series and am wholly reviewing this as a new reader.

If you follow the sales trends for comics, you’ve no doubt heard the refrain that the comic publishers need to do something to “grow the market”.  Somehow we’ve got to get more people buying comics!  But, the trick is that you don’t grow the market by just offering up a 6th ongoing X-Men title that will appeal to the hardcore X-Men fans.  It would help to bring in people from outside the “normal” comic demographic, and to do that the publishers are going to have to create some stories that aren’t about superheroes.

With that thought in mind, Marvel deserves some credit for relaunching Sigil in this sales environment.  It probably won’t sell all that well (Avengers and Batman aren’t even selling all that well right now), but they need to experiment with tossing some “other” types of stories out there as miniseries and see what might be able to get some traction.

I really enjoyed Sigil.  It tells a very straightforward story of a girl named Sam Rey.  She’s a high school kid whose mother has died and her dad appears to be doing the best he can for her, but life doesn’t seem to be easy.  She’s not popular at school, struggling in some of her classes and getting picked on by the bullies.  But, through all of this, she keeps getting whisked “away” in kinds of lucid dreams where she sees a world of pirates who may have some connection to her dead mother.  I was very intrigued by the story on a few fronts.  For one thing, I’m an unabashed fan of teenage-girl-growing-up stories.  You can just tell that this is going to have some of the vibe that makes me enjoy stories like Batgirl or Morning Glories.  For another, any man with a daughter is probably going to feel a connection with this title just because it shows a father who seems like a real dude.  He’s not an alcoholic, or abusive, or so consumed with his work that he has no time for his daughter. He’s just a normal dad doing the best he can under trying circumstances.

Finally, I’m just intrigued to see what happens with the story.  Anytime you read a new first issue (a TRUE first issue, not the Wolverine #1 of the month), you have to ask, “Do I want to see how this turns out?”  And, in this case I do.  I want to see what the nature of the magical power that is summoning Sam between worlds and I want to know how this connects with her mother.

The art is quite good.  It seems a little on the side of photorealistic, but in a good way.  I’d compare it to the months when Salvador Larroca is doing his good work and it isn’t “Greg Land bad stuff” by any stretch.  It just looks like the artist has uses photographs to inform him about what certain facial expressions look like and that’s a great thing.  It tells the story very effectively and that’s the most important thing.

CBLDF Liberty Annual 2010 – Review

By: Various including Darick Robertson, Fabio Moon, Gabriel Ba, Garth Ennis, Paul Pope, Evan Dorkin, Rob Liefeld, Gail Simone, Scott Morse, Geoff Johns, Scott Kolins, Brian Azzarello, Frank Miller, Terry Moore, Jeff Smith, Skottie Young, Jimmy Palmiotti, Amanda Conner, Ben McCool, Billy Tucci, Larry Marder and more

The Story: Comic creators collaborate on an anthology comic to raise money to protect free speech!

What’s Good: You know what’s good: free speech!  Too often the term “free speech” is only thought of as it applies to journalists, but as soon as you start eroding artists abilities to portray their art in whatever why they please because some people find it distasteful, you start to threaten some of the essential liberties that are part of what it means to be human (much less American).  There are places in the world where people cannot say and print what they please and there are people in the good old USA who occasionally give a comic shop a hard time about displaying comics with – gasp – wanton violence or – double gasp – naked people or – triple gasp – naked people doing naughty things! And by “hard time” we mean “take the comic shop to court”.  The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is a non-profit that helps comic shops and creators defend themselves against such intrusions into free speech and every so often they put out an Annual to raise awareness and money.

X-Men: Second Coming – Revelations: Blind Science #1 – Review

By: Simon Spurrier (writer), Paul Davidson & Francis Portela (art), Chris Sotomayor (colors) & Rob Steen (letters)

The Story: The X-Club gets a taste of a nasty future where Hope wasn’t quite the savior of mutants.

What’s Good: I really enjoy Dr. Nemesis, so it was good to see the X-editors give the X-Men’s science team (the X-Club) a chance to shine in this one-shot tie-in to Second Coming.  This issue picks up right after the events in Second Coming where the X-Club is investigating a strange oilrig kind of apparatus that Bastion had created.  When we last saw them, it looked like they were going to get blown up, but instead they seem to get whisked off into a possible future.

And what a future it is.  I won’t spoil the set-up, but let’s just say that in this future, Hope wasn’t quite the savior that Scott Summers had hoped.  Of course, this future is bleak as hell.  Is there any other kind of future that is featured in an X-book?  However, as routine as the “bleak future” is in X-books, this has a pretty neat set-up.

One of the other things that I enjoyed about this issue is that it brought back the mutant “cure” that Dr. Kavita Rao developed during the first story arc of Astonishing X-Men.  What is more, the cure get’s used in a very interesting way.

Elephantmen #25 – Review

By: Richard Starkings (writer), art by various

The Story: In a recap of sorts, we follow the inner monologue of one of Hip and Ebony’s fellow agents at the Information Agency, as he reflects on the history of the Elephantmen.

What’s Good: I love Elephantmen, but this is the first really good “jumping on point” issue that has come out since the series started.  It gives a nice recap of the series to date, complete with lots of footnotes to previous issues if you want to know more.  Of course, you’d be better off buying the trades or tracking down the back issues, but if you refuse to do that, this issue will get you pretty well caught up before spending the last 2 pages introducing the ominous new story arc that will carry this series for the near future (which looks like a lot of fun, btw).

The other hook on this anniversary issue is that it is drawn with 25 splash pages, each by a different artist.  In some ways, this issue is a little like having an Elephantmen themed sketch-book.  Not surprisingly, my favorite page was by Ladronn who is probably most responsible for the look of the series.

Battlefields: Dear Billy #3 (of3) – Review

By Garth Ennis (writer) Peter Snejbjerg (pencils, inks) Rob Steen (colors).

The Story: Since this is the first review of a three-part series, and the final installment in it, please allow, dear WCBR reader, for me to delve into the general story of the entire Battlefields: Dear Billy title.

This series stars an English nurse named Carrie who survives the worst kind of abuse by the hands of her Japanese captors during the second world war. The way she processes her pain, in both sickening and beautiful ways, fuels this brief but memorable story. Her rotating roles of both hero and villain, victim and oppressor, add depth and realism to this story that is rarely found in any literary medium, let alone comic books. In these pages, Garth Ennis does an almost unspeakable  job of displaying the human condition in all its glory and all its dirt, with all its warts and with all its halos.

What’s  Good: There is noting wrong in the slightest with this comic. It should be studied and emulated. Ennis’ prose is uncannily subtle and powerful. One can get lost in the beauty and transcendence of a single sentence at the top of a panel, and then need to squirm uncomfortably from another line at the bottom of the same panel.

Peter Snejberg’s illustrations are open, simple, and powerful. A perfect compliment to Ennis’ narration.

What’s Not So Good: It ended.

Conclusion: There was a time, I am told, long ago that a comic book reader could get all different kinds of comics. Sports comics, western comics, space comics, and war comics. Must have been great to be a fanboy back then (I for one would love a good NFL based series). Well, Dynamite Comics publishes a true war comic here, breathing hope into a stifling Superhero based comic market. (On the side, I must add that no other comic publisher excites me more of their current offering than Dynamite).

This is my first foray in Garth Ennis’ work and I have to say, he lives up to the hype. Granted, this shouldn’t be a surprise as I have read that both Brian K. Vaughn and Robert Kirkman think he is one of the, (if not the) best out there. I have been weary of reading titles such as Crossed and Back To Brooklyn, which Ennis helms, because of the nature of their content, but these historical nonfiction tales really call out to me.

I realize that in this review I haven’t revealed much of the specific plot and that is because the story is so tightly written that I am afraid any detail might spoil it for the poor lug who hasn’t read this series yet. Quite soon this series will be collected into a small TPB and sold for less than ten bucks. Buy it! Or, if you can find them, get the whole series now with the three beautiful Cassady covers. I cannot not wait for the next series of Battlefields to hit the shelves!

Grade: A

-Rob G