Ms. Marvel #6 – Review

By: G. Willow Wilson (writer), Jacob Wyatt (art), Ian Herring (color art)

The Story: She’s the best at what she does and what she does is squee.

The Review: Our little Ms. Marvel’s growing up so fast. It seems like just last month she was still in origins stories and all of a sudden she’s already having her first superhero team up!

With the Inventor still looking for her, Kamala is slowly coming into her own as a hero. It seems like our bird/brain villain’s shadow is everywhere in Jersey City and it immediately sets up a tense and interesting status quo for the series.

This issue confirms the identity of the Inventor hinted at last month and establishes him as a perfect foil to Kamala. One part Kingpin, one part Ultra-Humanite, the Inventor walks the same line between the comical and the competent as Kamala, though he leans towards the later. If this were any other comic, his appearance could easily have been a scene-stealer, but this is Ms. Marvel.

G. Willow Wilson continues to build upon the groundwork she’s laid with Kamala’s character. She’s much more confident as a hero and has more opportunities to demonstrate her intelligence and bravery. I particularly love one moment when Kamala shows off her knowledge of physics as she tries to figure out how best to use her powers and it’s all the better for the frantic, dorky way she implements the idea. Indeed, despite a significant upswing in her competence, Ms. Marvel is still the lovable, everyman character we met half a year ago and Wilson knows how to draw the humor from that as well as how to endear the character to her audience.

There’s a rule of writing that says that, if possible, you should put your character in the most extreme situations possible, the ones that most stridently reveal their character. For a fangirl like Kamala, pairing her with Wolverine is just such a situation. The very sight of him reduces comics’ most beloved new heroine to doge speak!

JLA: The Age of Wonder – Review

By: Adisakdi Tantimedh (writer), Galen Showman & P. Craig Russell (artists), Dave McCaig (colorist)

The Story: I say, up in the sky!  It’s a bird, it’s a plane—oh, wait, those don’t exist yet.

The Review: I wasn’t sure how to classify these DC Comics Presents books.  Even though they’re released as “issues,” they really represent a collection of previously printed series, like a trade or graphic novel.  Function trumps form in my book, so graphic novels they will be.  Now that DC’s reaching out to a wider audience, it’s an ideal opportunity to showcase some of their great storylines of the past, and remind us why they’ve remained relevant for so many years.

The very concept of the Elseworlds imprint reveals how deeply rooted in the social conscious DC’s characters are.  Most people are well acquainted with their iconography and origins, and writers can use that familiarity to their advantage by crafting stories where we know from the start who the characters are and what motivates them.  This leaves our attention free to focus on the story’s premise and its underlying message.

To that, we must look first to the period, which spans the Second Industrial Revolution, one where America was at the very forefront.  It is significant that this technological era was the last to be characterized as a “revolution.”  While later decades yielded undoubtedly remarkable products, these largely built upon inventions inspired into being in the late 19^th century.  Never before had progress advanced so quickly and with such enthusiastic acceptance and popularity.

Now imagine the introduction of superhumans to this equation.  In any circumstance, they’d have a destabilizing effect on the world, but here, in a clever twist by Tantimedh, Superman and his ilk seem more like sideshows to an age that had more than enough marvels to wonder at.  If anything, our heroes only accelerate these groundbreaking events, and even then, not by much.  Even though in this world the Germans launch the first atom bomb against another nation, they do so in 1911, less than forty years before us Americans did the same thing for real in WWII.