The Best of July (2007)

Written by Chris Fluit 
Wednesday, 25 July 2007
                                  Captain America 28

from Marvel, by Ed Brubaker, Steve Epting and Mike Perkins

I saw a recent headline that declared “Captain America Still Dead.”  Yup, Captain America died a couple of issues ago and his title has continued on without him.  And it’s still one of the best superhero comics on the stands today.

This issue intercuts between several storylines, giving us glimpses of each and moving them all along.  Two of those stories follow the three characters that are now at the heart of this book: Bucky Barnes aka the Winter Soldier, Sharon Carter and Sam Wilson aka the Falcon.  These three characters are the people who knew Captain America the best and the story is about how they’re dealing with the after-effects of this tragedy.  The Winter Soldier is in his own story, trying to track down those responsible for Cap’s death and kill them.  Currently, he’s blaming Tony Stark aka Iron Man and that’s who he’s tracking down in this issue.  Sharon and Sam are the other central characters.  They’re still working for SHIELD and the Initiative, but they’re reluctant about it.  They want to find whoever’s responsible for Cap’s death but they’re not quite willing to go rogue in order to do it.  So instead of going after SHIELD, which is what the Winter Soldier appears to be doing, they decide to go after the Red Skull who was mixed up in all of this as well.

Besides the three central characters, we end up following a couple of other characters in sub-plots.  The first is Tony Stark, the former Iron Man and the current Director of SHIELD.  It makes sense that we spend time with Tony in two ways.  One, he was Captain America’s opposite during the Civil War and two, the Winter Soldier is currently trying to kill him.  We get some interesting scenes featuring Tony, especially one in which he gets into a bit of an argument with Professor Charles Xavier.  The other sub-plot features the villainous Sin. She’s the daughter of the Red Skull and had appeared earlier in this series with her boyfriend Crossbones.  Now, Sin is ready for a larger role and she starts to gather a new Serpent Society around her.

 Issue 28 is very much a transition issue yet it’s done so well that we don’t mind.  We want to know what’s going to happen next.  We want to know if Winter Soldier will be able to get close enough to Tony Stark.  We want to know what Sin is going to do next.  And we want to know how Sharon and Sam are going to take down the Red Skull.  It’s amazing that a book which has lost its lead character can be this good.  Amazing, yet true. 

 

Dynamo 5 #5

from Image, by Jay Faerber and Mahmud A. Asrar
 
This book is often compared to Noble Causes- which is understandable, given that they’re both written by Jay Faerber.  But I think the better comparison is another Image book: Invincible.  Really, it’s that good.  And I say this as someone who enjoys Noble Causes quite a lot and has even championed it over the years.  Dynamo 5 is better. 

Invincible is a book about a teenaged superhero and, as such, has been compared to the teenaged superhero by which all others are mentioned: the original Spider-Man.  Dynamo 5 is about a family bound by circumstances as much as by blood.  They’re a family, but not in the traditional sense.  And just as Invincible is the modern heir to Spider-Man, Dynamo 5 has the potential to be the modern heir to the Fantastic Four.  Honestly, it’s that good.  
 
The team features five half-siblings.  They share a common father, the great superhero Captain Dynamo, but they all have different mothers.  For some of the characters, the revelation isn’t that big a deal.  In fact, it’s kind of cool if you’re living in a foster home to find out that your dad is Captain Dynamo.  For others, the revelation is shocking, even devastating.  They had dads that they thought were their real fathers.  And now they know that their mothers weren’t faithful to their husbands. 

Issue 4 took a break from the action to give us a glimpse into those relationships and situations.  Issue 5 brings us back to the action, but not in the same way we had seen in the first three issues.  In those issues, the team had been gathered and mentored by Maddie Warner, Captain Dynamo’s widow.  She had proven to be a tough leader, setting aside her own grief at her husband’s death and her own shame at his infidelity.  But in this issue, she’s confronted with the possible return of Captain Dynamo.  And that means that she isn’t there for the team of teenagers as she was in their initial adventures. 

Suddenly, the kids are on their own.  It’s a necessary step.  We see which kids have already established a loyalty to Maddie.  We see which kids are ready to step up as leaders.  And, naturally, we see that not everything is at it seems. Captain Dynamo hasn’t returned.  Rather, he has at least one other child that Maddie didn’t know about and her mother just happens to be a super-villain.  Yup, things are getting pretty complicated. 

Dynamo 5 has it all: archetypical powers assigned to atypical characters, family connections and complications, plot twists, dynamic superhero action and astoundingly beautiful art.  This is the next Invincible and it’s new enough that it’s not too late to get on board at the beginning.  

 

GI Joe: America’s Elite 25

from Devil’s Due, by Mark Powers and Mike Bear

I’ll admit it: I was looking forward to this issue more than anything else in July.  That could’ve been a bad thing.  My expectations could’ve been so high that any book would’ve actually been a disappointment.  And while this issue wasn’t exactly what I expected, it also wasn’t a disappointment. 

This is the first part of a year-long epic called World War III.  At the end of the previous issue, Cobra Commander was in possession of all of the secrets of GI Joe and all of the military power of Destro.  And he was ready to wage war.  So I expected this issue to be the opening salvo of a war.  I expected attacks and explosions and things blowing up.  But that’s not what we got.  We did get the opening salvo of a war, just a different kind of war.

The issue opens with a couple of Joes taking out some Cobra snipers in Dagestan.  It then shifts back to headquarters for a great scene between General Joe Colton (the Joe in GI Joe) and one of his information guys running down the threat board.  It reminds me of the issue of Avengers in which Alan Davis joined Kurt Busiek on the title.  It’s a fanboy’s dream, seeing all of the villains up on a computer screen. 

From there, we jump to Darfur where a former Army Ranger is meeting with Cobra Commander.  We don’t know what’s going on quite yet, though the Commander talks about bringing justice into a region that the world has ignored.  And then, we’re on the move again, checking in on the sniper situation in Dagestan before moving to Scotland and the hand over of MARS (Destro’s military headquarters) to Cobra.  These opening pages are dizzying, but in a good way.  It feels like so much is going on and we’re flitting from one place to another.  And every scene brings something exciting and new, or potentially terrifying.  

The issue just keeps getting better from there.  Eventually, we learn what Cobra Commander is up to.  He isn’t planning to hit the Joes directly.  At least, not yet.  Instead, he’s arming factions in every conflict around the globe: in Dagestan, in Darfur, in Chechnya, in any place where people are ready to take up weapons.  But Cobra isn’t interested in outcomes.  He’s interested in chaos.  He’s arming both sides of the conflicts.  He’s inflaming the trouble spots around the world.  And he’s forcing GI Joe to spread itself too thinly around the globe even as they’re trying to expand and strengthen their presence at home.  Sound familiar, at all?  Yup, there are some interesting real-world parallels to this story, though Powers does a great job of not letting his fictional conflict become a direct analogy for the real world. 

While it wasn’t the explosive beginning that I had expected, it was still a great issue, building tension to a slow boil rather than starting out with a bang.  Plus, there are some great fan extras.  The cover features every single Joe to ever appear in comics, on TV or as a toy.  There’s a second copy inside, complete with an index.  And there’s an “identified threat matrix” in the back: five pages of entries regarding every Joe enemy ever used in the comics, complete with status updates such as deceased, in custody and at large.  The fan in me was drooling at the extras even as I was enjoying the story as a reader. 

Green Lantern 21

from DC, by Geoff Johns, Ivan  Reis and Oclair Albert

 I wasn’t always a Green Lantern fan.  From his appearances on SuperFriends, in Justice League of America and Justice League Europe, I always found Hal Jordan kind of boring.  I liked Kyle Rayner a lot better and would pick up the occasional issue of Green Lantern while he was the lead but I still didn’t collect the title on a regular basis.
 
Geoff Johns and Green Lantern: Rebirth changed my mind.  That was one of the best superhero stories I’d ever read.  And now, the Rebirth team is back together bringing us the next big epic in the Green Lantern saga.  So far, it’s shaping up to be every bit as good as that earlier story.

The basic premise is simple: Sinestro, the Green Lantern’s greatest foe, is putting together a corps of his own made up of those who cause great fear.  We’ve seen the gathering of the Sinestro Corps in back-up features for several months.  We’ve seen their spies at work in Green Lantern Corps.  And they finally initiated the war in the Sinestro Corps special, which would have been included in a Best of June column had I written one. 

Now, we get to see how the Green Lanterns react.  It’s not going to be easy.  They’re bandaging the wounded.  They’re replacing the fallen.  And they’re bickering with one another.  Some Lanterns still don’t trust Hal Jordan.  Some Lanterns are blaming each other for what’s happened.  Even the Guardians are divided with two of them breaking off from the rest.  The Green Lanterns would have their hands full with the Sinestro Corps even if they were at peak efficiency.  In their current state, they barely have a chance. 

Which is great story-telling.  We love to root for the underdog.  The Green Lantern Corps is so powerful that it’s hard to cheer for them in that way.  They have 7200 members, each of whom has an all-powerful weapon.  They should never lose.  But Geoff Johns has taken the Corps’ strength and turned into a weakness and in so doing he’s taken the concept’s weakness and turned it into a strength. They’re actually facing a foe stronger than they are.  They’re being forced to fact their greatest fears.  For the Green Lanterns to win, they’re going to have to overcome the very things they’re afraid of and come together as a team.

I can’t wait to see what happens next.  It was amazing just catching the opening of the story.  Now, we’ve gotten flashbacks as to Hal Jordan’s greatest fear and a cliffhanger ending in which we discover that Kyle Rayner has been co-opted onto Sinestro’s side.  It doesn’t get much better than this.

 

Spike: Shadow Puppets 2

from IDW, by Brian Lynch and Franco Urru

 The new Buffy: The Vampire Slayer series from Dark Horse is one of the year’s biggest hits, averaging more than 100,000 copies sold per issue.  That’s a good thing.  Of course, that has a lot to do with the fact that Joss Whedon- the creator of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer- is actually writing the comic book.  However, there’s another book out there that’s every bit as good as Buffy.  It’s not actually written by Joss, but it does feature his characters. And it’s so well Lorne that you can visualize it as an episode of an actual Joss-produced TV show.  It’s Spike: Shadow Puppets.

 I’ll admit that this is my first go at a Spike comic book so I don’t know if all of the earlier attempts are this good.  But I do know that this is one great comic.  Brian Lynch has the Joss patter down.  He’s got the quirky dialogue that we know and love from the tv show.  And all of the characters have their own distinct way of talking.  Spike “sounds” like Spike.  Lorne talks like Lorne. Lynch even goes so far as to have other characters make fun of Spike’s British lingo.  It’s great fun and it gives exactly the right feel to the book.
 
Furthermore, this mini-series is a sequel of sorts to one of the best episodes of the Angel TV show.  Smile Time was an episode in which some demons possessed the puppets of a children’s TV show and used their ratings to suck the life energy out of the kids’ who were watching.  Angel eventually shut down the operation, but not before being turned temporarily into a puppet himself.  It was a great episode, rich with humor and a little bit of pathos.

This mini-series is that good.  Smile Time is back.  They’re now big in Japan.  Lorne has gotten wind of it through his entertainment contacts and he’s asked Spike to go and check it out.  Which they do.  The first issue was a great buddy-movie as Lorne and Spike traveled to Japan.  It made me long for Spike to have a TV show of his own and I speculated about who would be in his supporting cast.  With this issue, Lynch begins to build a supporting cast around Spike.  He adds Beck, a pyrokinetic that Spike had previously saved from a monster asylum, George, a protoplasmic fish and the kind of character that’s a lot easier to do in comics than in TV and Tok Shinobu, a ninja. 

Of course, by the end of this issue, Lynch turns both Spike and Lorne into puppets.  We knew it was going to come, but Lynch manages to make it fun and unexpected anyway.  He hits all of the right beats.  He keeps the action going.  He lets the one-liners fly while he’s doing so.  And he adds quirky supporting characters and villains at every turn. 

Plus, Francisco Urru does a great job as the artist.  He manages to convey the likeness of the characters without being slavish to photo-realism, kind of like Georges Jeanty on the current Buffy comic.  And he does a great job with some of the action scenes, especially the opening one in which hundreds of felt ninjas doggy-pile on Spike.  This issue was great fun.  I only wish more people were checking it out.

 

Star Wars: Legacy 14

from Dark Horse, by John Ostrander, Jan Duursema and Dan Parsons

I’ve written about this series often, and it’s sometimes hard to think of new things to say.  But I still had to include it in this column because if I’m writing about “the best,” than Legacy qualifies.  This is a great title.  It’s set about 100 years after everything else in the Star Wars world, which puts it about 125 years after Return of the Jedi.  The world of Star Wars is already a rich one, yet Legacy takes it even further.  This is no simple line between the good guys and the bad guys.  Instead, Ostrander and Duursema have introduced multiple factions.  The Sith rule the galaxy openly.  Yet a faction of the Imperial nobility and military have rejected Sith rule.  That’s right, it’s the Empire vs. the Empire.  Meanwhile, the Jedi have been broken and are either in hiding or on the run.  One Jedi-in-training, has even become a smuggler.  Cade Skywalker, the heir to the great Skywalker legacy works on the wrong side of the law.

This issue furthers Cade Skywalker’s story.  He feels bad that he had betrayed a Jedi healer at one point.  And so he decides to break into the Sith prison on the capital planet of Coruscant and free the healer that’s been imprisoned in his place.  It’s not that Cade has embraced his lineage.  Rather, he simply doesn’t like having anyone own him, or having to owe anyone.  The issue gives us glimpses of the ruling Sith, the soldiers that fight for them and the seedy under-belly of Coruscant.  It’s almost like a Blade Runner take on Star Wars.

The Sith remain distant yet fascinating creatures.  Duursema has given them some great looks, from the leaders’ skull helmet to Darth Talon’s red skin and tattoos to Darth Nihl’s pale face and penetrating eyes.  These are some villains you can be afraid of.  Even the minor villains look good.  It’s amazing what blood red skin can do for a bad guy.

It’s also interesting to visit Coruscant’s criminal quarter, to see villainous versions of familiar races like Wookiees and to have the protagonist of our story deal with a Hutt on friendly terms. 

Plus, the art is beautiful.  I just can’t say enough about how rich and textured this book looks.  Duursema draws handsome men, beautiful women and incredible aliens.  She knows how to handle the quiet negotiations as well as the vivid light-saber duels.  I admire the art so much that I tend to read this book more slowly than others. 

Finally, there’s a great ending to this issue.  In some of the previous issues, there have been some hints that Cade might be ready to reclaim his Jedi heritage and forsake his criminal behavior.  But any hint that this book was about to transition to a traditional hero book was an intentional misdirection.  Cade’s rescue fails.  He manages to free the healer from his prison cell, but he’s caught trying to leave the compound.  And Cade may be a Skywalker but he hasn’t worked with a light-saber in years.  He’s defeated and we’re left with the sense that he’s about to become a pawn of the Sith.  This is another book that has it all: beautiful art, a rich universe, intriguing characters and a true sense that you have no idea what’s going to happen next.

 

Y: The Last Man 57

from Vertigo, by Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra and Jose Marzan Jr.

There may be some people who think that Y: The Last Man is a book about a specific science-fiction situation: the last man on earth.  It’s about a mystery: what killed all of the other men?  It’s about politics: what happens when all of the men are dead.  And, yes, Y: The Last Man deals with all of those things.  But like all great works of literature, it’s not really about those things.  It’s about the characters.  It’s about the characters living in that situation.  It’s about how they deal with it, how they respond, how they cope.

Over the past year, that has become clearer and clearer in terms of Y: The Last Man.  The previous arc answered all of the big mysteries and conspiracies.  We know why all of the other men died.  We know why Yorick survived.  We’ve got the answers.  But that’s not the end of the series because this series isn’t about the mystery.  It’s about the characters.  And while the questions may have been answered, the characters aren’t done dealing with it.  The mystery is solved, but their stories aren’t done. 

This is a great character issue.  It opens with Agent 355 and a scene which clearly indicates that she’s finished her mission and is ready to move on with the next stage of her life.  She buys a dress.  No more work clothes for her.  And since she doesn’t have any currency, she gives away her gun in exchange.  Yet even though the main mystery has been resolved, Vaughan knows that he has to give us a bit of tension to see us through to the end of the series.  In this case, that means we also catch a glimpse of an Israeli agent who is tailing 355.

Next up, is the title character and his long, lost love.  Yorick and Beth were reunited last issue in a scene that fans have been waiting to see for more than four years.  At first, things seem to be going well.  They’re having great sex.  But there are other, deeper issues that they haven’t addressed.  Yorick had proposed to Beth before the cataclysm and had never gotten an answer.  Beth finally answers.  She tells him, “Yes.”  However, while doing so, she also mentions that she had been planning to break up with him before the cataclysm.  Suddenly, Yorick is confronted with a truth that other people have been telling him for years: that the real Beth may not match the idealized version of Beth he’s been carrying around in her head. 

Beth was breaking up with Yorick because he was content with his life and unadventurous.  Now, with all that he’s been through in the past four years, Yorick has grown a lot.  He’s become the man that Beth always wanted him to be.  But that’s not what Yorick hears.  He hears that he wasn’t good enough when there were billions of guys to choose from, but that he’s good enough now that he’s the last man on earth.  Yorick gets dressed and storms off in anger.  It’s an incredible scene, full of emotional twists and turns.  It also demonstrates how nudity can be used to indicate emotional vulnerability instead of titillation. 

Finally, Beth has one more scene with Yorick’s sister Hero and the other Beth. She’s just revealed her secrets to Yorick and now discovers that Yorick hasn’t revealed all of his secrets to her. It’s a great conclusion, fracturing Beth’s illusions about Yorick just as she had previously shattered Yorick’s illusions about her.  Even though we know that there are Israeli agents about, the real tension that has to be resolved in the final three issues is this relationship.  Will Beth and Yorick be able to reconcile, now that their secrets are out in the open?  Or will they go their separate ways after years of searching for each other?  Sure, there are some plot points yet to go, but it’s the character questions that are really carrying us forward to the finish line. 

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