Young Avengers #13 – Review

By: Kieron Gillen (story), Jamie McKelvie (art), Stephen Thompson & Mike Norton (inks) Matthew Wilson (colors)

The Story: All it takes is one kiss to save the universe.

The Review: Looking at the cover to this issue, there’s a bit of false advertising going on.  It seems to suggest this title is about a group of diverse, confident, noble youths, working as a team to do some good in the world, when it’s actually about a god accomplishing his own ends and figuring himself out while a group of diverse, confident, noble youths try to do some good in the background.  Heck, Loki isn’t even on the cover, yet he’s dominated the series thus far.

You can’t really blame Gillen for playing favorites; Loki has been a pet character for him since Journey Into Mystery and under Gillen’s pen, Loki has been more charismatic and interesting than he has in ages—outside the movies, of course.  But when you hold a series out as a team effort, there are limits to how much you can train the spotlight on only one member.  Once Gillen reveals Leah as a magical byproduct of his own guilty conscience,* making Loki his own antagonist, it takes the series’ singular focus to a kind of excess.

Young Avengers #12 – Review

By: Kieron Gillen (story), Jamie McKelvie (art), Stephen Thompson & Mike Norton (inks) Matthew Wilson (colors)

The Story: As they say, the hope of the future lies in our world’s children.

The Review: It kind of surprised me when I realized that this series is a year old now.  Relatively, one year is nothing in the lifetimes of ongoing comics.  At best, a title can manage to push out two, maybe three, arcs within that period, which isn’t a whole lot of room to establish a fully-fleshed out world, much less rock it with big, revolutionary changes.  But a year’s worth of issues isn’t something to sniff at, either.  You can cover a lot of ground in that amount of time.

With Young Avengers, Gillen hasn’t gotten nearly as far as he should after a dozen issues.  The core Young Avengers were already pretty well-established going in, so it’s not as if Gillen had a lot of character development he had to go through in his story.  In theory, the only work before him was to create a compelling storyline and explore the appeal and dynamics of his heroes.  Somehow, Gillen has fallen short in both tasks.

Presidential Material: John McCain #1 – Review

By Andy Helfer (story), Stephen Thompson (art), and Len O’Grady (colors)

The Story: From Vietnam to his ascension as the Republican Nominee for President, this book takes a long look back at John McCain’s colorful and interesting life.

What’s Good: This book is wildly entertaining and shows just how crazy John McCain’s life has been. It starts off very somber, with the sad details of McCain’s life as a POW for five long years. From there, it opens up and we get all kinds of dirt on John’s life (not to mention his ancestors) and exploits.

At many times I found myself laughing so hard because I couldn’t believe what I was reading! There’s so much scandal, drama, and intrigue here it almost seems like a fictional tale. But make no mistake! John McCain remarried only one month after his divorce. He almost beat up a guy who went digging for information from his ex-wife. He used a soap box to debate another rival because he was six inches shorter, and the list goes on and on. The fact that he crashed a bunch of planes, was a womanizer, and took out power lines in Spain (causing blackouts) makes this one hell of a read. Kudos to Andy Helfer for this comic – it’s very apparent that he had as much fun writing it as I did reading it.

Stephen Thompson’s art is amazingly good. While there’s a lot of blatant photo referencing at work here, the story is easy to follow and the depictions feel grounded in reality.

What’s Not So Good: The slimeball tactics by George W. Bush and Karl Rove that were employed on McCain during the 2000 election only help to reinforce the fact of how dirty the Bush campaign was. I guess Al Gore wasn’t the only one who was robbed.

Conclusion: There’s so much ridiculously crazy (and questionable) stuff that John McCain did that’s portrayed here, it almost makes me wonder how people could vote for the guy! That said, this is miles more entertaining than the Barack Obama book in both the writing and artistic vision. If you can only afford one, this is the one to get. They need to make a movie of this!

Grade: A

– J. Montes

A Second Opinion

Who would have thought that old man McCain’s story is interesting enough to be translated into an engaging comic book! The first few pages could basically be a storyline for The Punisher! I love it! During some of the events described of his youth, there were many times that I said to myself that we could have been buddies (I’m talking about his crazy lifestyle involving women).

This book isn’t all about parties, however. McCain has had many downs in his life. I know it’s based on facts, but some parts portrayed him in a very negative way. I’m hoping that the script was run for approval by his office at the least (I doubt it).

I would buy this comic regardless political affiliations, as I’ve already did with both “Presidential Material”. It’s an interesting piece of history. And to the loser of this race: I’ll be selling your comic on eBay!

Grade: A

– Daniel Yanez