As always, an event occurs within a context, and the context of Siege is Dark Reign. In short: Norman Osborn became head of his version of S.H.I.E.L.D., had his own Avengers, and almost every title in the Marvel Universe for a year was about the heroes trying to survive within the regime. Most of it was repetitive, but there were good stories. Bendis’ own Dark Avengers was remarkably not terrible. (That’s the extent of the positive words afforded to Bendis in this article.) A lot of the stories consisted of characters waiting for Osborn to lapse into the Green Goblin again, to crack, and Siege finally delivers on that. Throughout his tenure, Norman sought to solve problems like mutants, the Hulk, etc., and Siege sees him tackle Asgard, which at the time was floating above Oklahoma. There’s not so much organic buildup to this as rather randomly he decided one day to show those god pricks what’s what. To be fair, Loki has apparently been manipulating Osborn for some time with the end goal of returning Asgard to its rightful place, but it’s been inconsistent and poorly done so does it really count? I say no.

The plot, what little plot there is, can be summed up pretty succinctly: Asgard is currently violating American airspace by being above Oklahoma, and both Osborn and Loki want it back from whence it came. As stated before, Loki’s been running game on Osborn, which isn’t hard to do when it’s a guy who routinely talks to his own rubber goblin mask. Osborn fails to get President Barfsack Obungler’s approval to invade the Home-Of-The-Gods for no good reason, given the latitude with which he’s been allowed to operate thus far. Since when has a US president turned down a chance to let the military-industrial complex go hogwild? Imagine the decades we could spend pretending to build schools only for, like, Balder to fuck things up. Basically what happens next is that Norman Osborn and Loki inside jobs a casus belli for the war with Asgard. Their reasoning is literally “Hey, it worked in Civil War, so let’s run the sequence one more time and see what shakes out.” The metafiction is off the charts. If nothing else, Siege presents a sincere desire to synthesize America’s love of repetitive sequels and false-flag paranoia.

Yep, the Nazis invading Poland and a gang of costumed people fighting against space wizard people in the sky are roughly the same.

Osborn subcontracts a few D list baddies from fellow nogoodnik The Hood to provoke Volstagg (the fat guy from the Thor comics, played in the movies by the closest thing you can get to a fat guy in Hollywood, Ray Stevenson) into a fight that culminates in the destruction of a filled to capacity Soldier Field in Chicago during a Bears game. That means we can healthily estimate Norman killed, through his machinations, about 60,000 people. Stamford, the inciting incident in Civil War, killed 612. Literally a hundred times more casualties and I guess the Marvel Universe is just inured to this shit at this point? Years ago I would’ve lambasted Bendis for his incompetence, for basically forgetting about the destruction of a stadium full of people by the end of the miniseries, but he’s actually being prescient here. Remember how Sandy Hook horrified the nation? Ever since then, we’ve had scads of shootings, but none of them have hit the way Sandy Hook did. That’s what’s happening in the Marvel Universe: Stamford was Sandy Hook (it also happened at an elementary school) and every other mass murder event is a drop in the bucket. Citizens are too desensitized to do more than let out a mournful sigh and go about their business. Bendis predicted how America will metabolize trauma. The only difference is Marvel’s equivalent event did lead to sweeping legislation whereas in our shittier reality a couple politicians cried and yet more offered “thoughts and prayers”. The Marvel Universe: a fantastical world where radioactive spider bites bestow great powers and where Congress can pass bipartisanship legislation in a timely manner.

I know this may sound harsh, but as someone from Wisconsin I say: good.

The baddies invade, the good guys try to stop the bad guys from invading, yadda yadda yadda, the heroes are victorious. That’s essentially it. There are a few wrinkles which we’ll get into, but the four issue series is one piece of set up and then three dedicated to punch ups. It feels like a video game, and not a very well written one. Now, normally a writer that puts himself in the backseat and lets the likes of Olivier Coipel drive the action would be a blessing. Let the talented one do the work and coast. The problem is, the story didn’t bother to set up anything in the way of “goals” or “stakes” for anyone involved. Like, yeah, we understand Asgardians don’t want the Wrecking Crew smashing up their enchanted bidets or whatever, but do we care? Do we really? Civil War did a good job of every fight having a history and a context behind it, whereas this is just action figures smashed together, most of whom you’d have difficulty naming.

Perhaps more than any other event, Bendis focuses on the action and cashes in on Big Moments that he really had nothing to do with building up. The Big Three Avengers had been fractured, you see, by Thor’s death around the time of Avengers Disassembled, and the schism between Tony and Steve in the Civil War, and then Steve’s assassination and eventual resurrection as well as Tony’s flight from the law after Secret Invasion. As it happened, all three characters were in the middle of some of their most fertile periods in their own books. What Bendis did was to take the careful character work that Mark Millar, Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction and J. Michael Straczynski all did in their various books and mash them all together, again, like a child playing with action figures. Who cares their relationships, they’re there, they’re next to each other, once and again. He has them say cool lines and bash the villains good and at the end of the story they’re on the road to reconciliation. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; superhero comics tend to be conflict driven and action oriented, but Siege feels like the comic equivalent of Rob Schneider’s Seinfeld sidler character, showing up at the last moment to collect praise for the work other people did. I look upon Bendis’ work and feel like Peterman: “This is incoherent dribble. This is a total redo.” Another Peterman line describes Bendis’ tenure on the Avengers title: “Consider it a job…done.”

Can Luke Cage go through one fucking event with his shirt intact?

If there’s any character work Bendis can be said to have contributed to this little era within his much larger run on the book, it’s with The Sentry, Marvel’s weird post modern spin on Superman. Long story short, The Sentry was a super powerful superhero who was the greatest hero in the Marvel Universe and was best friends with everyone until they realized his arch enemy The Void was actually a manifestation of all of his darkest impulses and the only way to truly defeat him was for The Sentry to go into retirement and for everyone to forget he ever existed, even him. It was a brilliant miniseries by Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee that told a complete self contained story that didn’t need further investigation and precluded any kind of follow-up by virtue of its central paradox: you don’t get the all powerful Sentry without also getting the all powerful Void. So naturally Marvel and Bendis brought him back for Avengers and proceeded to tell a much longer story that essentially boiled down to: you don’t get the all powerful Sentry without also getting the all powerful Void.

Hey, whatever, you know?. Fucking whatever. It’s comics: “nothing ever ends”, as evidenced by the work that quote comes from receiving approximately seven spinoffs, a crossover and a commemorative toaster. Still, Bendis’ tendency to take contemporaries’ works (Echo, The Hood to name others) and “improve” them in his own inimitable way can certainly draw criticism. He has the improv skills of a David Brent; when stonewalled by a scene partner who evinces apathy, eventually he’s going to scream “there’s been a rape up there!” or something equally dumbfounding.

Marvel’s depiction of mental illness and addiction: make the mentally ill addicted subject commit sins so monstrous they can only be redeemed once put down like a dog.

In any event, Bendis doesn’t tell exactly the same story as Jenkins’ and Lee’s original; he makes a few cosmetic changes to Sentry’s origin and makes the Void some kind of ancient Old Testament Evil that possesses him instead of the more elegant explanation from the original series. But none of that has any effect on the core concept of the narrative, that you can’t have one without the other. So Sentry shows up early in the New Avengers run and hangs out in the back not doing much of anything because he’s afraid of The Void showing up until Norman takes over the Avengers (Sentry staying on because he’s emotionally disturbed and mentally ill and thus easily manipulated and a weak person in general) and starts encouraging him to be more involved in the world until he finally cuts loose during Siege at which point The Void manifests and totally corrupts him. Then Thor kills him.

To be fair, making The Sentry a metaphor for ultimate power and contrasting how responsible people use it (they don’t, sacrificing power for safety) against how irresponsible people use it (they do, and invite their own destruction) is a completely valid story to tell; and Norman’s relationship with The Sentry in Dark Avengers is the most interesting work Bendis does in the entirety of his run on the Avengers. But that’s faint praise because Bendis doesn’t so much unpack or explore those ideas so much as set them up and occasionally nod in their direction in between shitty quips, soap opera drama, and poorly thought out world building (see: every other article in this series). Bendis doesn’t seem to have much to say about the interesting ideas he presents, he just sort of lays them out there with the rest of his nonsense, suggesting he doesn’t understand the difference between a good idea and a bad one. Ideas are ideas, and he treats them all the same. Osborn and Sentry bonding over psychosis is no different from Moonstone, the team’s only woman, using her manipulation skills by fucking everything with a dick. He’s a bird that cannot discern nesting materials. Piece of string, gold medallion, it’s all the same shit to him.

This is admittedly pretty funny.

Even if he did know how to tell the difference that wouldn’t matter too much because there’s an enormous difference between an idea and a story. A story has momentum, it builds organically from moment to moment, growing different points of view and events on top of each other that shows how things change and evolve over time. Bendis has had tons of interesting ideas, what he’s never been able to successfully do is take those ideas and flesh them out into compelling thoughtful narratives. It always just reads like one fucking thing after another. Think about how House of M is literally four issues of Getting the Band Back Together and then a fight, bookended by talking. Or Secret Invasion is pretty much just the fight, and you don’t know if it takes place over an hour or a day or a week. Siege is a book in which the inciting event is literally someone deciding to cause an inciting event so there can be a fight and then a fight where the climax is revelation of a tragic paradox that everyone already knew. Thanks for coming, hope you liked the show, and if you didn’t, I already have your money so go fuck yourself.

Of course the other big change to the Marvel Universe Siege ushered in, along with the restoration of the Big Three to the Avengers Masthead and the end of the Dark Reign, was the rescinding of the superhero registration act that caused so much upheaval among the superhero community. The Superhero Registration Act, as you may recall, was a law that required all superheroes to register their identities with S.H.I.E.L.D. and get formal training before they’re allowed to go fight bad guys. It was deeply unpopular with both the hero community of the Marvel Universe and readers of Marvel Comics here in reality, and underscored the theory that deep down, comics fans are fascists who just want paranoid strongman fantasies where a righteous hero beats up a dastardly villain. We say superhero comics can be for adults and that we want oversight and accountability from powerful people vested with authority over life and death, but

So yeah, Captain America, the sentinel of liberty and protector of the integrity of the constitution is offered the job of heading S.H.I.E.L.D. and becoming America’s “Top Cop” which he accepts on the condition that the president do away with that legally passed law that he doesn’t like. Which the president does, bypassing any Congress and any debate or study. This is the law of the land and was passed with broad popular support, but you don’t like it Steve? Fuck it, it’s gone! Now please take control over this massive covert military apparatus without worrying about any kind of oversight or being held accountable for anything that happens as a result of your actions. Have fun buddy, thanks for saving America! It’s okay see, because the good guys have all the power now, so they can just go hog wild and we know it’s for the best.

But Chonnie, you’re probably saying (because you know that when we collaborate on these article Chris and Ronnie physically merge into a single being like that time Batman and Superman turned into one dude where each guy was one half), Chonnie, the fact that someone as dangerous as Norman Osborn could have access to all those identities and direct them as he saw fit is proof that it’s a bad law. It’s good that the government gave up the power to direct all those superheroes. Imagine if someone like Trump were in charge of the Marvel Universe and could tell Iron Man who to blow up, the entire cast of SNL would have been killed!

Putting aside the fact that no more SNL is probably a net positive for humanity, the fact that a law is buggy doesn’t mean you just abolish it outright, that’s a ridiculous overreaction and inherently anti-democratic. It’s a law, we have procedures for things like that. Trump is actually a pretty great explanation for why that is. Trump was elected (among other things) because of a combination of factors intrinsic to our electoral system. The fact that a guy was able to game the system doesn’t mean we abolish elections, it means we fix the problems so that thing doesn’t happen again. If you threw out a law every time someone found a way to twist or abuse it, pretty soon there wouldn’t be any laws left.

Alternate headline: DEMOCRACY HELD HOSTAGE BY RED WHITE AND BLUE ASSHOLE WITH A SHIELD

And yeah, this is all kind of literal and wonky for a Captain America Punches The Green Goblin story, but this is the Bendis introduced way back in Secret War and it’s story of the fallout from an extrajudicial overseas black ops operation and continued in his morality tale House of M and right through the war on terror metaphor Secret Invasion. This guy made his career by centering massive events around heady themes and real world analogies. He uses real world issues and “realistic” characterization and dialogue to enhance the emotional stakes for his stories so it’s only fair that what happens in those stories should be analyzed in those same veins. It’s expected but nonetheless disappointing to see Bendis take a lazy shortcut out of the culmination of his work. Although doesn’t disappointment only come out of expectation of another outcome? In that case, it’s fitting he half-asses the status quo reversion; it’s only surprising he didn’t go with “a wizard did it”.

These articles don’t delve into the artistic side of things as much because, well, look at the title of the article, and it’s not as fun to dissect the artwork as it is the writing. This is especially true because Marvel tends to pair Bendis up with only the hottest and highest quality pencilers, thus creating a chicken and the egg dilemma about whether high sales are driven by Bendis’ writing or the nice artwork that accompanies it. Anyway. The one thing I want to highlight with Siege’s art is the gooification of Ares by The Sentry, and there’s no better term for it than “gooification”. It is gross and visceral in a fashion that deaths tend not to be in non-mature readers comics. One could argue Ares is a god and so the death needs to be extra convincing. Still, it’s jarring to open up a comic meant for small children and to see a death straight out of The Authority in it. I imagine the decision rested with Bendis that Ares went out like that, and it speaks to how hollow Siege is that it has to resort to ultraviolence that ultimately accomplishes nothing. Like, it says something that we didn’t even mention Ares dies until this far into the article. That’s how much it matters.

The Sentry creates a meat accordion.

The best part of Siege is that it was the final time Marvel allowed Brian Bendis to write a linewide event. Oh wait, I forgot about Civil War II. (Can you blame me? That one’ll be in a column here [sigh] eventually…) Well, at least that was the last time Marvel let him do an event, because Event Leviathan or whatever the fuck it was was DC. In any event (see what I did there?), Siege is a perfect jumping off point to those who became interested in the larger story Marvel was telling starting with Secret War or Avengers Disassembled and exacerbated by Civil War and Secret Invasion. It begs the question: why didn’t Bendis leave on the high-ish note that is this event? Why stick around for forgettable runs on Avengers and New Avengers? Well, it’s because he doesn’t know showmanship. It’s that simple.

The column this time out is what I like to call an Adventures in Bendisshitting “single”—it’s shorter than the pieces devoted to his event stories but covers what I consider a substantial part of the Bendis canon. All-New X-Men #40 is best known as the issue where Iceman is outed. A little necessary context: when Marvel brought on Bendis to ruin the X-Men, his big idea was to bring the 60s X-Men to the present to compare and contrast. Jean was dead, Beast was a blue monster, Cyclops was a fugitive quasi-revolutionary, Angel was lobotomized, and Iceman…well, there wasn’t much difference between the two. This is part of what I think prompted Bendis to make the character gay. Sure, there’d been speculation in the fan community about Bobby’s sexuality, but it’s the fan community—they think 109% of characters are gay. You can’t listen to the disgusting masses. But let me make one thing clear: I’m not outraged that Iceman is gay. Like, whatever. He’s not a fleshed out character, none of his preexisting romances are on the level of a Reed/Sue or a Peter/MJ, Marvel has a dearth of significant queer representation. My issue is with how Bendis goes about this perfectly cromulent character alteration. This is a pattern you’ll notice in Bendis’ work: even if the idea is sound, the execution is lacking.

All-New X-Men #40 is a breather issue situated after The Black Vortex crossover event that I’ll probably write about at a later date. All you need to know is the X-Men are back from space. Iceman makes the innocuous remark that Magik is hot, which Jean doesn’t appreciate. It’s not that Bobby’s objectifying women, it’s that he’s objectifying women under false pretenses. She tells Bobby he’s gay. Jean knows this because she’s psychic and is  looking into his thoughts, which I’m imagining is just penises going into assholes while the Looney Tunes factory music is playing. They get into a quasi-philosophical chicken/egg discussion over what came first, his gay thoughts or her outing. As in, is he thinking about being gay because she brought it up, or did she bring it up because he’s thinking about being gay? It’s a real Bye Bye Man-esque conundrum, by which I mean it’s laughably terrible.

Artists like working with Bendis and I think that’s because he lets them reuse their art on the regular.

Of course, Bendis has to address what the deal with Adult Iceman is, because how can one be gay and the other not if they’re the same guy? Rather than delve into a problematic environmental explanation for homosexuality, the characters suggest Adult Iceman felt being gay and mutant was too much so he stayed in the closet. There’s a lot of references to “back where we came from” being more intolerant, but Marvel’s sliding timescale means they’re referring to, like, 2007. I get things weren’t great for the community back then, but Bendis seems to write the characters as though they’re from the 60s. (In another issue, Young Cyclops marvels at bottled water. Yes, it’s stupid.) Oh well, who cares if it makes sense or not. Bendis comics aren’t about “internal logic” or “comprehensibility”, you stupid fuck. They’re about out of place Yiddish and whiplash character decisions!

“I didn’t see any vaginas in that Looney Tunes factory montage!”

Rather than create some ongoing character conflict between the two characters, by the wrap up of this story thread Jean and Bobby are hugging, and the whole invasion of privacy is forgotten. Well, Bobby calls her a “nosy bitch” but it’s really him just using his newfound gay privileges to call straight women ‘bitch’ more than anything. The method of outing indicates Iceman already knew he was gay, so basically Jean  just bullied him into saying it out loud. Why is he thankful anyway? How are we not supposed to view Jean as a dangerous idiot at best and a malevolent force at worst? This should be a bullet point in a continuing trend of Teen Jean misusing her powers, but this is played off as a friend forcing another friend to face a hard truth. Yet it’s completely fucked up.

Literally Paul Rudd going “you know how I know you’re gay?” would be a better means of outing than this horseshit.

The outing scene constitutes six pages out of the twenty two for the issue. The rest of the book is some stupid shit about Angel having new space wings, and Angel wanting to bone X-23, and there’s a new team of mutants out to do something and frankly I glazed over all of it. Unless someone’s being informed of their own sexuality it’s not within my remit for this Single. I bring it up only to forestall any complaints that I’m shortchanging what is, gay blip aside, an excellent comic book full of rollicking adventure and thoughtful sequences of Maria Hill banging her head on a desk. It’s inessential, but to paraphrase Alan Moore (about Bendis comics instead of imaginary stories)…aren’t they ALL?

So as anyone with reading comprehension can tell, I did not appreciate this issue one bit. But maybe I’m not giving Bendis enough credit. If you take a closer look at the issue, Iceman does go through the entire Kubler-Ross cycle concerning his gayness. First he denies it. Then he lashes out at Jean for invading his mind, displaying anger. Bargaining? That’s him suggesting he could be bisexual. Depression sees him wondering what the deal with his older self is and maybe being gay and a mutant is too much. Finally, he accepts his sexuality by asking Jean to find out if Angel is gay too. See, that’s clever writing. That’s the kind of psychological depth you can come to expect from Brian Michael Bendis. But seriously, I understand it’s meant to be a metaphor for how oftentimes friends will realize shit about you that you yourself are not acknowledging, but it’s implemented so poorly and so stupidly I don’t think the Bald One deserves any credit.

“Who else is going to invade your privacy and force you to address issues you maybe don’t want to address right now which is your prerogative because you’re YOU–Beast?”

Reasonable people can disagree over whether or not increasing representation via retconning a character is a wise move or not. What I think is inarguable, however, is that Bendis didn’t handle it well. Of all the ways to impress upon the readership that Iceman is sexually attracted to men exclusively, All-New X-Men #40 is one of the dumbest possible choices, if not the dumbest.  I think it’s, then, instructive to speculate why Bendis chose to do it. One possibility is he was inspired by a Family Guy cutaway gag that states Iceman is a closeted gay man. Bendis has a history of “monkey see monkey do”; see also his execrable effort at “homaging” Dekalog in Daredevil. (I don’t recall Kieślowski having a man throw up a little man in any of those segments!) Another is that he sought to pay tribute to beloved film Hearts in Atlantis. You’ll remember in that one Anthony Hopkins uses his psychic powers to reveal a bully acted as such due to his own latent crossdressing tendencies. (Eh, Bendis probably watched the Family Guy parody “Farts in Fartlantis” now that I think about it.) The third and most likely option is that Bendis wanted to put his “stamp” on the X-Men in the easiest way possible, so rather than “write a great story” or “introduce a beloved new character” he randomly gayed up a character. Let me remind you there was no real buildup to All-New X-Men #40. So now when Bobby is seen in bed with a man, one is forced to go “well, Bendis made that happen”. That diabolical hairless genius.

It might be a stretch, but you can hardly go a day without someone or something referencing Hearts in Atlantis.

I intend to do more of these Singles, time and interest permitting, because simply dissecting Brian Michael through events is offering an incomplete picture of how much he sucks. So much of his dearth of quality comes from him losing interest in a book and phoning it in for years before he blessedly leaves. You can see it in X-Men but also in Avengers and even Ultimate Spider-Man, oft considered the crown jewel of his bibliography. X-Men was never good or inspired but it follows the same basic principle of Bendis Interest Rot. He introduces something big—time displaced X-Men—and does nothing with them, meandering through stupid crossovers with his other shitty titles until years later the characters are shunted back to their past (with Iceman shoved back into the closet for continuity purposes, hilariously) because a younger version of Cable hates them or something. What did anyone gain from any of this? Well, now Marvel has someone else besides Northstar and America Chavez to put on their Pride variant covers, that’s what!

Jean and Bobby should’ve traveled the country, finding out who’s gay via her telepathy and selling tips to the tabloids. That’s called hustling and everyone needs a hustle in the 21st century.

Iceman has remained a tertiary X-Man no more or less interesting than he was when he was straight. His major romances include one with an Inhuman named Romeo, a fling of sorts with Wolverine’s sociopathic rapist son, and he fucked a newly enlisted student because it’s never too soon to turn a gay into a predatory stereotype. Last I checked he’s now Emma Frost’s brother’s kept man. Great. He also is not living up to his potential because if he did his powers—basically control of molecules—would break the universe. He had two short lived ongoing titles, neither of which ever put out a trade collection titled Iceman: Homo Superior. For shame, Marvel. Speaking of shame, I think this set Marvel’s relationship with the gay community back 10 years provided anyone actually read this issue and not just the press release “HUMAN TORCH, MEET THE HUMAN FLAMER”. Thankfully, no one reads comics. If they did, what remains of our monoculture would violently oppose the proliferation of superhero movies and TV shows, because they give the likes of Brian Bendis royalty checks.

Imagine caring enough to read excerpts from a fake holy book of frog people from outer space.

The Skrulls were introduced in the 1960s as a race of shapeshifting aliens that represented the collectivized threat of communism. They’re also funny looking frog people whom Reed Richards once transformed into cows because he couldn’t think of a better way to get rid of them. Now they’re back and mad as hell. To Bendis’ credit, he did do some legwork on this event, foreshadowing the Secret Invasion and sowing mistrust among the heroes, having come across a Skrull posing as Elektra and having no idea what it means. In fact, early on the event looked promising. Skrulls had infiltrated every strata of society and no one knows who to trust. Of course, when it comes to the actual miniseries our esteemed bald bard blows it and everything devolves into repetitive fights and general inanity.

That’s right, Brian: black people love saying “word!”.

After all this careful infiltration, the Skrulls finally put their plan into motion in Secret Invasion #1. They send the Fantastic Four’s Baxter Building into the Negative Zone, neutralize Reed Richards and waste both teams of Avengers’ time with a ship full of supposed Skrull captives. Who’s real? Who’s not? Will the characters discuss this like adults or will they get into a big ol’ fight? Come on, you’ve read comics. The Avengers spend the majority of this miniseries stranded in the Savage Land and let me tell you, I have a low tolerance for that place at the best of times. I felt like Joel Robinson during Manos: The Hands of Fate, screaming “DO SOMETHING!” at the comic. As it was coming out, I thought “okay, this is the issue they get out of the Savage Land” and then it didn’t happen. When it finally does you’re almost numb from the inanity.

And talking about disrespect!

You’re probably thinking to yourself “well, with these Skrulls characters replacing people, there must be some pretty significant characters that got switched out”. Well, you’d be wrong. Dum Dum Dugan was never significant. Nor Jarvis the butler. The closest Secret Invasion comes to having a consequential replacement is either Yellowjacket/Hank Pym or Spider-Woman. Spider-Woman is in fact the Skrull Queen, and it’s supposed to be this whole shocking thing, but the fact of the matter is no one but Bendis wrote her and no one but Bendis really cared about her. She’s a character who exists so another comic book company wouldn’t come up with a character named “Spider-Woman”. That the character with a complex set of allegiances to SHIELD/Hydra/Avengers is in fact a quadruple agent is not the twist Bendis thinks it is. As for Hank Pym, he’s been shit upon enough that “replaced by alien frog person” is not even on the Top 10 of unfortunate events to occur to him. Hell, he was replaced by one at the climax of Civil War! That means a Skrull replaced a Skrull and it was during the climax of the last big crossover. It speaks to the risk averse nature of Marvel that the likes of Iron Man, Spider-Man et al had not been switched out. On the one hand, good on them for not reversing controversial characterization choices through this easy method. On the other, you mean to tell me the whole Marvel Universe comes crashing down because the Skrulls were able to kidnap Jarvis? Maybe if there had been a scene where the Avengers are immobilized by spiked tea the butler serves them…

Who did it better?

It’s important to stop and acknowledge that, like all Big Event Books, Secret Invasion almost certainly suffered from editorial interference. For one thing, it wasn’t even supposed to be an event, it was supposed to be an Avengers story that unfolded within the Avengers books. But like sharks and Woody Allen relationships, Marvel Events must stay in constant motion or the whole line dies. Or something. Whatever, the point is it got all inflated and extended and stretched out of shape until what was left was an interminable seven issue fight scene that could take place over a few hours or a few days. All the character, context and the majority of the actual plot mechanics were relegated to tie-ins so the actual book itself could be structured like a summer action movie, all killer no filler, blasting from thrill to thrill, each spectacular moment topping the last. But Bendis doesn’t have the skill to manage a seven month climax; that would be hard for a good writer, and Bendis is more of a bunch of tricks and gimmicks standing on top of each other in a trenchcoat and hat than an actual writer. Add to that the cheap sheen of Moral Relevance that feels tacked on at the last minute to give a little extra heft to what was presumably designed as nothing more than a big punch-em-up and justify all the attention (not to mention money) Marvel was asking its readers to dedicate to such a thin story, and you’ve actually got one of the worst events of the decade. That’s saying a lot but it’s true.

Joking about the Watcher showing up to every momentous event doesn’t make it less of a cliche when he does show up. On another note, I like how the event took great pains to establish Skrulls needed to keep the people they’re impersonating alive to impersonate them on a genetic level and it’s all so complicated but by the end it’s nonsense mashup Skrulls and Galactus Skrulls wrecking shit up. “Whatever, fuck it” is the ethos of Secret Invasion.

To be clear, none of the above excuses Secret Invasion, or suggests that in its original form it would have been any better. God knows Bendis can ruin a comic all on his own, and at the end of the day, it’s his name on the book and he’s the one getting the residuals every time some poor dope stumbles across the trade with the cool McNiven cover and fun Mars Attacks! style logo at Barnes and Noble and decides to give it a chance. Event Books are the blockbusters of the comic world: they’re high risk, high reward and they require meticulous planning and coordination between lots of different people as well as the ability to adapt to unexpected problems. Event comic writing is almost a wholly different set of skills from regular comic writing, thereby explaining why so many normally good writers flail at the prospect. It’s thinking on your feet, it’s laying the tracks in front of the train while giving the customers a smooth ride; in short, it’s very difficult to actually pull off. If Civil War is the gold standard for this kind of thing, Secret Invasion is somewhere around fools tin. Assuming that’s a thing.

Classic Bendis: fucking up Tony Stark’s fake Skrull name issue to issue.

Attuned readers can sort through what in the series is Bendis grappling with the machinery of event comics and what is pure uncut Bendis. Obviously certain scenes exist to set up tie-in comics by other creators. (They’re a mixed bag. More on that later.) But I can’t believe any higher up at Marvel asked Bendis to throw in some half-assed, perpetually confused sociopolitical commentary. While Marvel likes to have real world undertones to their material, it’s by no means a requirement. Everything eventually boils down to Thor calling lightning on people and Iron Man firing repulsor beams. Again, there’s no way whatever the fuck Bendis is going for was a mandated choice. Now, in the past, the Skrulls invaded Earth because they wanted to conquer it. Why did they want to conquer it? They’re conquerors. That won’t do for a 21st century event, though, so Bendis turns them into religious fanatics. Apparently their Skrull religion tells them that Earth is promised to them. Culture does not occur in a vacuum so it takes little deduction to see the parallels between the fundamentalist Skrulls and, say, fundamentalist Muslims against whom the United States is fighting an unending War on/of Terror. What does the religious angle add to the story? Nothing. Nothing besides the queasy feeling that Bendis is trying to say something. Given Skrulls are massacred en masse throughout the story, characters exclaiming they need to kill every last one of them, Skrulls that pose no threat are nonetheless butchered…you have to question the authorial intent.

Getting dangerously close to blood libel here…

Actually, to say the fundamentalist angle is half-assed would be a gross understatement; it wouldn’t even qualify as quarter assed. Think more somewhere in the eighth area. The Skrulls believe that Earth has been promised to them as a Promised Land by their god as recompense for Reed Richards blowing their planet up, so they infiltrated various high level positions of influence all around the world in order to make the transfer of power easier and safer and then at the last minute decided to fuck it and just start slaughtering people. If it weren’t for the fact that this story was released during multiple wars against Muslim cultures and simmering domestic panic about Muslim influence in America, Secret Invasion could pretty easily be read as trucking in some pretty ugly old conspiracies about Jews. The idea that Jews “pass” as white and pulling the strings behind the scenes in order to enrich themselves and enslave everyone else is one of the oldest, grossest anti-Semitic tropes there is. And a story about a rootless religious culture claiming a region already occupied by other people and claiming it as their religious heritage sounds a lot like the formation of Israel.

You also have Ronin here directly quoting an IDF recruitment advert.

That’s not to say that Marvel released a weakly coded anti-Semitic screed (although they’re not above that sort of thing) or was looking to make any kind of statement about the moral shakiness of Israel’s position in the world. For one thing, Brian Bendis is Jewish, and if his Spider-Man dialogue is any indication, pretty proud of it. For another, structuring a massive event that’s supposed to boost the sales of a dozen other books and usher in massive changes to the status quo around an unofficial remake of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is just bad for business. Like I said, in the first decade of the century all the money was in demonizing Muslims. It’s just interesting as an insight into how poorly thought the metaphor was and how dangerous it is to just thoughtlessly shove in some topical sounding buzzwords to make your story seem relevant. No, this book isn’t about anything, it’s just a drawn out fight written by someone who was in a house where CNN was on in the other room.

Man, remember when Colbert tweaking the electoral process was still funny and relevant instead of him crying on TV and calling Trump a homo?

And what makes it so maddening is how inessential the whole religious angle is. You don’t need a reason for Evil Green Aliens to invade the Earth, that’s what Evil Green Aliens do! That’s what they’re there for! They were specifically created to give writers bodies for their heroes to batter without any guilt or consequence. Sure, a good writer could use that cliche to say something about the way we have a habit of flattening and othering people who oppose us in order to make it easier for us to kill them, but Bendis isn’t a good writer, and he isn’t actually interested in doing any of that. The entire religious angle exists so the Skrulls have a reason to invade and them saying “he loves you” before killing people because Bendis thought it sounded cool. That’s. It. Any nuance about the efficacy of their plans or the morality of wiping out an entire civilization in order to take their land or interrogation of how Skrulls who aren’t religious feel about the invasion or even an explanation of who “He” is are sub-contracted out to other books. Let them deal with those boring details, Bendis is busy having Spidey crack wise about how Skrull-Spidey still has the webbing armpits and Hawkeye is promising to kill ‘em all!

From “Avengers don’t kill” to “whatever, try not murdering all of them, I need some prisoners to throw in Space Gitmo”

But I think my favorite bit of Bendis bullshit (Bendis Bullshit was the working title for this series of articles, by the way) is how he tries to create some ambiguity about the Skrulls in that a minority of people greet these aliens as liberators. They see the alien invasion as an incoming utopia. Look, man, this came out at the tail end of the Bush Administration and it was an understatement to say a lot of shit was fucked up, but I still don’t think alien invaders are our salvation. More importantly, who are these broadly defined hippies meant to represent? Actual hippies? The fifth column of liberals who want a Caliphate installed and for the US to have Sharia Law instituted upon it? These suckers don’t come to anything, they don’t have an impact on the story, but it nonetheless boggles the mind what Bendis was going for. A sincere version of Kent Brockman’s “HAIL ANTS”? Analyzing these comics often doesn’t bring the reader to a truth, it merely leaves them frustrated and annoyed. The most likely explanation is a dog stepped on the remote and changed the channel on that TV in the other room from CNN to Independence Day on TBS and so Bendis was inspired.

“That green ninja’s gonna have modesty, goddamnit!” – Joe Quesada

I said I’d get to my breaking point and here we are. In the first few issues the heroes are at their lowest ebb; with the Avengers trapped in the Savage Land, New York is defended by the Young Avengers and some members of the Initiative. Lo and behold, Nick Fury and his Howling Commandos show up, the payoff to Fury going underground for several years. Then a familiar crack of lightning immobilizes some Skrulls and a closeup of Captain America is seen. This is the final page of #4 and the characters are nowhere to be found in #5. Presumably it’s momentous that the new Captain America meets the resurrected Thor, yet it’s played off as something minor. Their scene basically goes “you the new Captain America? I knew the old one.” “Yeah I did too.” “Cool.” “Cool.” The two don’t change the tide of battle either. Adding more characters (Marvel Boy, eventually the Avengers) does nothing to change the substance. All Bendis is is cheap signifiers absent a meaning; scenes like Ronin picking up a bow and arrow are meant to be important but what do they matter, really? That’s the problem with the back half of the series being one big battle in Central Park that doesn’t have any ebb or flow. It’s just an excuse for Lenuil Yu to draw the worst double splashes of his career, as fans try to figure out what all the Skrulls are supposed to be impersonating. That’s fun, right?

Pot calling the kettle black, Brian.

Like House of M before it, Secret Invasion really pretty much ends in its seventh issue, as evidenced by the fact that the final issue places the rest of the Secret Invasion as a flashback. In a last ditch “fuck you” to the heroes, Skrull Yellowjacket activated a bomb inside the Wasp that causes her to something something glow purple. It’s up to Thor to mercy kill her. But the death of a founding Avenger—the only female founding Avenger—is glossed over. It’s not that important compared to Norman Osborn shooting Spider-Woman in the head with a BFG. Doing this on national television secures Osborn’s spot as the head of national security, because Barack Obama is an idiot who forgot the guy used to carry around a purse of pumpkin bombs and Marvel writers really want to stick it to the Bush Administration in 2009. Kinda fucked up the status quo for Marvel Comics upon our first black president’s inauguration is called “Dark Reign”, but that’s just me. Anyway, Osborn is in charge and the comic ends on him entering a room containing Dr. Doom, Emma Frost, Namor, Loki and the Hood. That’s how I want event comics to end, with meetings.

I can’t wait to see a motion get tabled!

Here’s the thing, though: Secret Invasion didn’t have to be terrible the way, say, Civil War 2 did. There’s not an inherent flaw underpinning the premise in that respect. Secret Invasion was a carefully built storyline that was grown organically over a period of years and suggested many interesting storytelling avenues. Just off the top of my head there’s covert infiltrations of the highest levels of power, paranoid conspiracies intervening with reality until no one can trust what’s real and what’s madness, friendships shattering, morally grey characters binding together with good guys to fight a common enemy–ethically ambiguous villains with genuine, earned hatred for the protagonists– and invading soldiers who begin to doubt their mission. These are all themes that Secret Invasion touch on, and then drop in favor of extended fights and unearned Dramatic Moments. All the interesting stuff in Secret Invasion is in the tie-ins.

Kinda late in the game to be doing “Not All Skrulls”, isn’t it? Besides, what the fuck does the Skrull Empire stand for? It’s been a baddie in most stories it’s in except occasionally when the Kree are worse baddies. This shit is like when the Lincoln Project talks about the noble legacy of the Republican Party. At least the Skrulls don’t shield as many child predators.

The most interesting story by far is in Avengers: The Initiative, the comic created in the aftermath of Civil War about the various SHIELD funded hero training programs and superteams created as a federalization of the superhero community. The Initiative is run by Hank “I’m a Skrull Now” Pym and becomes the hub of the Skrull forces on Earth, much to the confusion and rage of the human student heroes under his command (some of the kids, of course, are revealed as Skrull invaders themselves). A small group of heroes-in-training manage to form a resistance against the overwhelming Skrull presence, but they’re just kids against trained adults; think Red Dawn but with superheroes. Add to that the revelation that one of the kids, a series regular called Crusader, is a Skrull passing for a human. Crusader is supposed to be a member of the invading force, but when the moment comes, he finds that he actually likes Earth and its culture and has no desire to turn on the friends he’s made during his time there. Crusader decides to pitch in with the Earth resistance but is constantly afraid that he’ll be revealed as a Skrull, either by Earth technology or by a fellow Skrull who recognizes him. There’s a nice moment when he initially makes Hank Pym for one of his kind because he orders a certain food in the cafeteria known for being a facsimile of a Skrull food.

Was originally going to do this scene with Linda Sansour but it was considered too obvious.

The whole thing is intertwined with a B story about a couple of Initiative kids who manage to escape and hook up with members of the Skrull Kill Krew, a motley bunch of outlaws who hunt and eat Skrulls. I don’t remember why they eat the Skrulls, maybe something about it maybe giving them the ability to detect them when they’re hidden, but it means we get to see a guy just toss a Skrull head onto a barbecue, and that’s pretty great. The Avengers: The Initiative stories are pulpy and weird and genuinely tense because the characters involved are obscure/new enough that it’s really possible that any of them could die. With Crusader it takes an established character and gives him a real dramatic arc. It’s what these kinds of pulp stories should be, never too serious, but also with a few ideas strung together to make some kind of point about something. You know, like in a story.

Missed opportunity for her to say “he loves me not” as she dies. By the way, if Wolverine succeeded in stabbing her, would Obama let Logan run our national security apparatus? He’s Canadian, sure, but so is David Frum and look at how he got to go hog wild.

Beyond that, most of the tie-in comics (all 79 of them) boil down to “heroes fight Skrulls for enough pages until the Skrulls die”, though some actually cover shit that should be in the main comic. Incredible Hercules tackles the “he loves you” Skrull god refrain that stinks up the Bendis written event, and it seems to me the religious angle ought not to be shunted off to a minor (albeit entertaining) title such as that. Nevertheless, these ancillary issues are almost always superior to the main event because Bendis can’t write fight scenes or intrigue or anything like that. Compare Jason Aaron’s Black Panther arc to the interminable slog of the Savage Land and you’ll see what I mean. I mentioned before these are the worst splashes of Lenuil Yu’s life and while this column is intent on critiquing Bendis primarily, it should be mentioned the artist is by no means Yu’s best. The action scenes specifically devolve into an orgy of stupid ass Skrull designs. Why the hell is there a Galactus Skrull? One, you can’t replicate his powers. Two, Galactus destroyed the Skrull homeworld so that’s like going to Passover dressed up like Hitler.

There’s a lot of “they took the baby!” in Avengers comics subsequent to this event. Also, I know his schtick is unbreakable skin, but it’s pretty funny and undignified for Luke Cage to never be wearing a fucking shirt. I mean, his pants aren’t unbreakable either, so shouldn’t he be hanging dong all over the place?

Speaking of Hitler, handing the keys to America to him might make more sense than giving them to the Green Goblin. If Marvel wanted to make a point about how institutions are only as good as who controls them they could’ve used someone besides the cackling ninny who threw a chick off a bridge. But that’s a sidebar for another time. Let’s get down to brass tacks: Secret Invasion. It’s a failure all right, one indicative of Bendis’ flaws. He can goose you into believing he’s going somewhere with something, that this buildup isn’t just jerking off, but when it comes time to deliver a payoff he flails into whatever the fuck this is supposed to be. I remember when this was coming out the common question was “are they out of the Savage Land yet?”. It’s possible that, had Civil War never happened and Secret Invasion had come out when Bendis originally intended, things would have been different. Maybe he wouldn’t have felt compelled to make the book topical and shoe-horned in a bunch of half-assed “real world analogies” to feel like a piece with that earlier work. And maybe what was intended wouldn’t have felt so stale because it would have been released during the administration it was (you know, possibly) intended to critique. Or maybe none of that would have been included and it would have been a fun, slam-bang action thriller, devoid of any depth or subtext; a lot of the time that’s all you need from a comic. But it wasn’t any of those things, it was what it was. Monthly superhero comics have always been about improvisation, figuring shit out on the fly, and laying the tracks as fast as you can under the shadow of an already moving train. If whatever you had in mind no longer jibes with what’s actually happening in the moment, you have to ditch it and come up with something else that does. It may suck to have to do it, but that’s been the gig since before any of us were even born. Superhero comics, to co-opt an old saying, are like sharks, they have to keep moving or they die. And, as is so often the case with Bendis events, in Secret Invasion, all we’re left with is a dead shark.

Why are Cyclops and Elektra there?

It’s actually a perfect encapsulation of the Bendis Experience because it’s an incredibly ambitious concept with an intriguing hook and an A list collaborator that’s undermined by, well, it’s undermined by the fact that that’s all there is. There’s no actual story or insight or character or anything beyond what the concept, hook, and collaborator. It’s an empty suit, all hat and no cattle, a comic about nothing. But it feels like it must be about something, because it’s so good looking and everyone in the story is acting like what’s happening is very important, there’s lots of dialogue like:

Character A: My god.

Character B: I know, right?

Character A: The scope of it, I had no idea.

Character B: Take your time, it’s a lot to process.

Character A: How could he? How could he?

Character B: Don’t know. But it ends now.

Character A: Let’s go to work.

Pretty cool, right? Everyone’s all worked up! Must be important! See how character A is all disoriented and enraged while Character B is equally upset but in a cool, calm and collected way? That demonstrates that the Big Thing That Happened is bad no matter how you look at it! These characters sure are upset about what’s happened, as demonstrated by their terse, fractured conversation. See how they’re comfortable enough together to build off each other’s short statements? How the dialogue bounces back and forth in a comfortable, knowing shorthand? That’s because these characters have known each other a long time and have gone through a lot together. Though maybe nothing quite so Big and Scary as this time!

He sits backwards on the chair and has a fast food takeout bag on his head because, uh, well, that’s what urban people do. That’s what they wear. Bendis knows this. He’s down.

Bendis likes these conversations. He likes them a lot. You can tell because he writes it about twenty times (not a comical exaggeration) over the course of House of M, between about thirty different characters. Sometimes the nervous Character A from one instance is the more stoic Character B in the next in a fun mix and match style. A lesser writer would have written it once or twice and let the reader assume it kept happening in the background while the story continued to move forward to other plot points, but not Bendis! He knows that, like that guitar crunch in Creep, you gotta hit that same note over and over until everyone just wishes you were dead. Otherwise you’d have to think of something else to happen.

Bendis didn’t even consult The Chris Claremont Book of Bad Accents before writing this, did he? “Boyo” is for bad Irish, not bad French. COME ON.

The Big Thing That Happens in House of M is that Wanda rewrites all of reality to make mutants the dominant species on Earth and to Give Everyone What They’ve Always Wanted. Presumably at Magento’s bidding. See, the Avengers and X-Men are debating whether or not to kill Wanda on account of her being an all powerful crazy killer, and she decides to simplify everything by making everyone happy so they stop fighting. It’s a confusing concept because presumably most people on Earth wouldn’t want to be an endangered species facing extinction, so how the Mutants Rule part of the new reality jibes with the Wish Fulfillment part is never really explained. Maybe she just fulfilled the wishes of her friends, the one’s trying to decide whether or not to execute her, but none of them have ever wanted humanity to be on the edge of extinction either, except her dad did. In 1963. That hasn’t really been his thing since the Carter administration and has nothing to do with the specific threat facing him at that moment either.

So yeah, it’s a real head scratcher.

Anyway.

The important thing is, everything is different now! Mostly! Mutants are everywhere! Cap never went into the ice! Spider-Man is a famous hero/celebrity who’s married to Gwen and Uncle Ben is still alive! Cyclops is married to Emma Frost and still needs his special glasses to hold back his deadly optic blasts! Wait! Pete gets Gwen but Scott doesn’t really want Jean to still be alive and for the two of them to be together? And he doesn’t want to be able to control his power? The thing that he’s always complaining that keeps him from being able to ever let his guard down for a single second? Guess not! Moving on!

The Sentinels with Magneto helmets are pretty cool looking, admittedly.

You might think that the altered reality offers a canvas with which Bendis can examine a number of issues and conflicts, but that again asks too much of him. Instead Wolverine–whose seeming lifelong dream was to remember everything–remembers the old reality and he goes around trying to remind people that they used to live in a different shitty unequal society. Like half the series is him and Layla Miller reminding people of who they used to be. You’re probably asking Who is Layla Miller? Is this some Marvel character I should know about because we collectively decided at some point that the MCU is the most important thing in the world and while I may not know what’s going on at the border or when I’m getting my Covid vaccination, by God I know that Rocket Raccoon only acts tough to cover his hurt over what society did to him!

First of all, calm down. The border is still a shit show and there were just openings for the shots at the clinic up the street from you, but the spots all filled up while you were reading the last paragraph. Better luck next time, stupid! Second of all, Layla Miller is a plot device character who shows up with no real explanation or back-story with an ambiguous power set that’s extremely specifically useful and then is never used again because how often do you need to be able to make people aware that they’re living in an alternate reality? It’s fine, Peter David reinvents the character in X-Factor to the point that her appearance in House of M is an interesting-ish footnote. At the climax of the series Dr. Strange says that Wanda created Layla because subconsciously she knew rewriting reality was wrong so she inserted Layla to undo everything. That’s an idea that’s not terrible, but by making her identity a mystery that’s revealed at the end of the story the reader is saddled with a confusing, random character for five issues as opposed to a literal representation of Wanda’s warring nature.

Luke Cage’s dream in life was to have cornrows and to be a gang leader. Good to know.

Who’s this kid people ask Logan, dunno, he says, some kid. Doesn’t matter. Look into her eyes. And then we get that scene where one character is emotionally upset and another is cooly upset. Again and again and again. Wolverine keeps on collecting characters for his “kill Wanda and also maybe Magneto and fuck, at that point Pietro is a witness soooo” posse. And then at the climax, Strange’s head pops into a frame and says oh by the way, Wanda made Layla because she was always conflicted about creating House of M and so she built a back-door, TTFN! There’s no detective work to uncover her identity or discussion about it, it’s just a piece of information that’s shoved in when everything is wrapping up to make sure the t’s are crossed and i’s are dotted. Throw it on the pile of shit introduced in House of M that doesn’t go anywhere.

“Let’s see what you got here… PIETRO BEER? Fuck this reality, bub.”

You might think that there’d be some sort of conflict about undoing a reality that, while not the true one, is certainly more advantageous for mutants. On the contrary: giving characters conflict, opposing agendas, is too much work, so the alternative Bendis presents is Kitty Pryde wondering whether they’re meant to undo it while Spider-Woman calls it a “wash” because sure, humans are oppressed, but Carol Danvers got to be a big celebrity and Luke Cage gets cornrows. She even claims this might be “natural selection”, akin to a meteor hitting the Earth, suggesting the gaps in Bendis’ knowledge includes natural selection, meteors and their relationship to Earth. Anyway, this all occurs in two pages and never comes up again as Cyclops gathers together teams of splash page participants to take the fight to Magneto. “You…are going to have to fight without any restraint”, he says. Oh goody, finally, I get to see a Spider-Man ready to punch holes in people’s heads, that’s what I’ve always wanted. At another point a character yells “we can’t lose this”, presumably to distinguish this particular adventure from all the previous, much more loseable, adventures.

Marvel Studios has also made this wish in recent years.

I want to take a moment and applaud Bendis for masterful use of the anti-climax in a few cases. A runner for the first several issues of the mini was the characters just need to find Xavier and everything will be all right. One issue ends on Magneto in Genosha going to the Xavier Memorial Park. Now, why do none of these people with their fake reality memories know that Xavier is dead in the House of M? They fucking named a park after him, his demise is not some secret! Another occurs when they’re going around “awakening” the likes of Daredevil and She-Hulk: they spot Captain America across the street…but he’s 100 years old. That makes him fit for a high position in Democratic leadership, not for being a part of the “Kill Magneto” posse. It’s just really funny to me that they basically decide since he’s too old to do anything of consequence they may as well let the Sentinel of Liberty stay ignorant indefinitely. I’m surprised no one snarked “the revelations might give the geezer a heart attack”. If Bendis isn’t going to be any good at reveals (the infamous “break the Internet in half” moment in House of M is that Hawkeye is alive), he may as well trade in deflating reveals.

Don’t worry, this recurring imagery doesn’t mean anything or go anywhere.

Speaking of deflating reveals, the climax of House of M points the finger at Quicksilver, not Magneto, for suggesting to the mentally ill woman she reshape reality. Does it matter? Not really. Magneto yells at Pietro a bit but that’s about it. It doesn’t reshape the story or anything, it’s not a satisfying twist. Bendis smartly gets out of the way for the battle scenes so Coipel can do his thing, but even then it’s broken up by tedious conversations and flashbacks. Again, what difference does it make that Quicksilver cajoled Wanda into remaking the world? The climax devolves into a clusterfuck of yelling and Wanda deciding there can’t be mutants because her father was shitty towards her. Nevermind the fact that she found out Magneto was her dad as an adult and had a whole childhood being raised by the Maximoffs and I guess a cow person (look comics are REALLY REALLY STUPID). Fuck it, Avengers Disassembled had baby craziness, why not throw some daddy issues into the mix! She says “no more mutants” and everything changes, except for most things.

In an alternate reality, someone who is supposed to be dead is not dead? Stop the fucking presses!

Contrary to the declaration, mutants don’t cease to be. All the popular ones remain, but everyone else gets depowered. “No More Mutants”, like Spider-Man losing his marriage, was one of the ‘genies’ Joe Quesada wanted to bottle during his tenure as EIC. His perception was that mutants had become too populous a minority and had to shrink in size to about 200. Given the paucity of named characters losing their powers (and of those that did, nearly all regained them within a year or two), this basically meant the nameless background extras were gone, so artists had to populate crowd scenes with the likes of Toad and Mondo instead of some nondescript funky skinned dude. It seems to escape Quesada that 200 people is not a minority that can be a metaphor for anything in the real world, and preventing future births made the X-Men an endlessly depressing story of a genetic cul de sac. I think history has vindicated those who decried the stunt as a stupid move given how creatively suspect the X-books were for years afterwards. I myself have an obscene amount of not-very-good comics from that time. Remember when the Sentinels guarded the X-Mansion? It was like having a giant Eichmann robot on Israel’s border. This is relevant because House of M doesn’t end with a climax; that’s the seventh issue. The eighth is all about setting up for what happens next, an irritating trait Marvel events would display for years to come.

Replace “more” with “unpopular” and it’s much more accurate.

Like, the first handful of pages of House of M #8 depict characters waking up, from Layla Miller to Spider-Man to Emma Frost (who hilariously wakes up on the Xavier mansion lawn for some reason). I’m not a big shot comic book writer, but I like to think I’d come up with a more kinetic finale than “people get up in the morning to discuss the events of the last several issues”. Moreover, I like to think I’d write better banter than Bendis’. The X-Men find a good number of their students depowered, Spider-Man wants Dr. Strange to erase his memories of his alternate wife and son (Strange can’t, though years later he can mindwipe the entire world of Spider-Man’s secret identity), and Wolverine can remember everything, including that time he didn’t have a nose because of evolution or something. Other characters experience changes from the event: Hawkeye has defaced the Avengers Mansion ruins with his own costume and a newspaper clipping about his death, proving he went to the lengths of clipping out a newspaper article before doing all this; Iceman lost his powers so he should really be called Hotman; Magneto can’t move a fork anymore; and Scarlet Witch has fulfilled her dream of being a sexy Little Red Riding Hood in a nondescript Eastern European village. I mean, sure, these are all great ideas depicted by Bendis and Coipel. But where’s the House of M in House of M? There’s maybe 5 issues of story in here, tops. Not exactly a new complaint when it comes to a Bendis comic, but still.

“If you made it with your mind, why is it so basic?” Also I like how Wanda can create a whole new reality but can’t make children who aren’t soulless abominations.

The fatal flaw to this thing–as opposed to all the fun flaws that give Bendis stories their character–is that it’s more of an editorial edict stuffed into a standard dystopia plot than something of its own. It’s as though they came up with the decimation of mutants first and then reverse engineered everything from there. That the alternate reality is one in which mutants oppress humans with Magneto as the ruler is irrelevant; it could’ve been anything that caused Scarlet Witch to scream “no more mutants” and rewrite reality. There isn’t even really a reason why she says that other than she’s mentally unwell. “Because crazy” does a lot of heavy lifting in the miniseries. The plot of this is the same as Chicken Little: both consist of a group venturing to a location, adding more to the party as it goes on. There’s a similar level of entertainment too, the difference being Chicken Little at least concedes it’s for children.

“Although you had no role in House of M and were as much a victim of Wanda’s mentally ill reality warping as anyone else, we’re gonna let Wolverine almost murder you and then pass judgment on you. Fuck off, old man.”

In someone else’s hands, this could be something. The design of the world itself and Coipel’s art are both top notch, and a number of the redesigned characters have intriguing possibilities, some of which are explored in the tie-in issues. The Mark Waid written Spider-Man is a particular stand-out. Others fare less well, like Colossus’s wish to be a tractor. What the fuck is there to say about that? The fact that Marvel has pumped out several miniseries set in the House of M reality after the fact suggests there’s still fertile ground for storytelling, for exploring this conceit. But in House of M itself it’s instead nothing, a premise in search of a plot, and the fault has to lie with Bendis, he’s the guy who’s supposed to come up with a compelling story to take us through this world, and he just whiffs it. Even if House of M was just an excuse to get rid of important mutants like Marrow and Chamber, it doesn’t mean the dystopian alternate reality had to be so dramatically inert or the plot so flat.

The point of blind items is they don’t have names in them, you idiots.

Next time: we skip past a few non-Bendis written events onto Secret Invasion, about a secret cabal of non-human elites who seek to subvert our will for their own purposes. No, it’s not about the Israel lobby, it’s about Skrulls, and it’s soon to be a Disney+ show you’ll ultimately consider “pretty good” and never think about again after seeing it. I hope they take a page out of Avengers: Age of Ultron’s book and not resemble the source material at all. That’s all I hope it takes from that…

Wanda moves to the village from Beauty and the Beast.

You kids may not know this, but the Avengers were not always the crown jewel of the Marvel Universe. They used to be downright B-list. While Kurt Busiek and George Perez’s run was critically acclaimed, well regarded, it lacked the “it” factor that prompted a flurry of discussion and speculation. As evidence of how far the series had fallen after Busiek and Perez decamped and before Bendis took over, Chuck Austen was writing it. You don’t give Chuck Austen books you care about. In came Bendis. The bald one would go on to “revolutionize” the Avengers concept by adding Spider-Man and Wolverine to the lineup. Sure, technically Mark Millar came up with the idea and Millar’s Ultimates run reinvigorated interest in the set of characters associated with the Avengers, but on the other hand, Bendis sure did shove Spider-Woman down people’s throats. But before any of that could happen, he needed to tear down the old. Disassembled is as artful as a Law & Order character departure and about as well written. Hell, if Hawkeye had exited the book by asking Cap “is this because I’m a lesbian?”–better comic. (Of course, if that happened, readers would be wondering why Greg Rucka was writing under Bendis’ name.) Avengers Disassembled is poorly paced, full of characters saying and doing stupid shit, and it sacrifices characterization for plot expediency. In other words: a Bendis comic.

Hank Pym: “Oh but when SHE does it it’s okay???”

The story begins, as most do, with the Avengers discussing which villains they’d like to fuck. This is the down to earth characterization Bendis brings to the table: Hawkeye admitting he wants to bone Madame Hydra. This may surprise you, but Bendis was hailed for his realistic dialogue during his rise to prominence. It’s realistic only if you believe people are imbeciles who spew torrents of sewage out of their mouths. Then yeah, Bendis writes realistic dialogue. The other line of praise is that he writes distinctive dialogue, which is also false. Most of his characters sound alike. This isn’t a problem in and of itself; most characters sound similar unless you go the Claremont route and give half the cast offensive “accents”. But with the exception of his “urban” characters, Bendis can do basically two voices: neurotic Jewish person and David Mamet character with a head injury. The separation between the two is thin and blurry. It’s the reason I’m afraid to reread his Daredevil run; I might not like what I see. But that’s neither here nor there. Before the conversation can end of its own volition, a priority alert goes off: it’s Jack of Hearts, recently killed during Geoff Johns’ run. The Avengers run out to see what’s up with him, he explodes, Ant-Man is killed. The artist goes so far as to depict a tiny skeletal hand, which I appreciated.

Bendis saw the Seinfeld about George’s girlfriend saying “happy, pappy?” and felt attacked.

That’s not all. A Quinjet comes flying in and the Vision pukes up some silver balls containing Ultrons. In my Secret War review I brought up the post-9/11 environment that comic existed in and Disassembled is no different. One can’t help but think of that day when a Quinjet slams into Avengers Mansion. I’m not sure how much of this is pop culture reflecting that grim cataclysm and how much is a fixation on Bendis’ part, though I think one could argue that Bendis event comics are oriented around disproportionate responses to trauma-inducing events. Anyway, She-Hulk loses it and rips Vision in half. There was a prior scene in which Tony Stark, then-Secretary of Defense for the Bush administration, threatens to murder the Latverian ambassador at the UN. He’s accused of being drunk, because drinking and homicide go hand in hand. Also hand in hand with being drunk, apparently: calling people “rat fink”. And “pally”. Bendis has never had a Duff in his life. Let me tell you, if alcohol made you talk like a James Cagney character, I never would’ve stopped.

Literal transcript of John Bolton’s comments about Iran. Bendis packs each issue with deft political allegory.

The Avengers are in disarray, all the while two lower faces are talking to each other about whether or not to kill them. “And what would that prove? It has no meaning that way. You’re so stupid.” Wasp is in hospital, Captain Britain (the female one Chuck Austen created) is in hospital, She-Hulk is in SHIELD custody, meaning all the female characters are conveniently comatose. The second issue doesn’t move the plot along so much as it centers a long discussion between Avengers (only the fellas!) that is so inane and pointless it may make Avengers #501 the single worst issue of the story arc. Hawkeye puts forth the argument the Avengers deserved it, citing the work of Ward Churchill and indicting individual team members as stewards of the radical rapacious capitalism that has destabilized the Third World. No, not really, it’s some other garbage, but wouldn’t it be cool if Clint Barton called Captain America “a little Eichmann”? Yellowjacket accuses Iron Man of being drunk, he denies, Hawkeye goes into a dumb tangent about his drunk father and admits Tony is “kind of wobbly now. I thought it was from all the drama [multiple teammates dying, several others injured…you know, DRAMA], but–” and the accused takes off. Bendis gives all the dumbest asshole lines to Hawkeye and it’s actually clever foreshadowing for when he is stupidly killed off in the next issue. That’s good writing: make the readers hate somebody to the extent that reaction to his death is muted. “Good riddance, dipshit!”

Another subtle political allusion that transcends time and space: here She-Hulk is mimicking the “whywhywhywhy” Biden video.

Ah, but is #501 the worst when #502 opens with all the reserve Avengers assembled in front of the mansion’s gates, with Nick Fury and Reed Richards arguing over whether or not they should be there? Fury contends it’s a “live crime scene” and “any one of you could be emitting toxins or radiations” that would disrupt field readings. Classic Bendis: offer a patina of realism that never comes to anything. The story will never hinge on field readings. This discussion is moot because not only is it interrupted with news that the UN was dropping the Avengers like they were accused of abusing Evan Rachel Wood but also another attack, this time by Kree ships. It’s at this point I realized the reserve Avengers splash pages were so David Finch could draw Spider-Man and sell some pencils. None of these characters play a significant role in the issue or the next one. They’re background fodder, no more. I don’t consider Spider-Man doing valet jokes essential to the narrative. The cover to #502 depicts Wasp, Yellowjacket, Hawkeye and Scarlet Witch and claims one of them will die. Well, Wasp is in hospital, Yellowjacket is at her side and Scarlet Witch has been conspicuously absent for almost the entire story. So yeah, Hawkeye dies and you won’t believe how stupid it is.

Oh, so Marvel won’t let Fury or Wolverine smoke but don’t worry about children emulating Hawkeye’s suicide bombing?

For one thing, he calls the Kree “ya l’il pishers” and “blue !@#$%”, establishing Bendis dialogue can reach new depths all the time. Hawkeye’s quiver catches fire and rather than take it off, which a non-idiot would do, he grabs a Kree soldier and flies them both into a ship while screaming “NOT LIKE THIS!”. The implication is he doesn’t want to die from his backpack being on fire, he wants his death to mean something, like if he 9/11s into a Kree ship. It doesn’t stop the attack; the Kree teleport away on their own irrespective of Hawkeye’s dumbass sacrifice. If Bendis wanted an anticlimactic, moronic exit for a classic character he couldn’t have done it better. The assembled heroes check out the downed ship and realize it’s not made of paper. OR metal. Well, those are the two common spaceship construction materials, paper and metal. Dr. Strange’s appearance renders the mystery moot and the reader remembers the story is titled “Chaos” and Scarlet Witch, who has been absent for multiple issues now, uses chaos magic. Do you GET IT yet, you fucking idiot? Avengers Disassembled does a poor job disproving comics are for dumb babies.

Gonna hop on Twitter and cancel Spider-Man’s robophobic ass

Don’t worry, we’re in the home stretch. Only two more issues to go, and one of them is an epilogue jam issue that I’m only covering out of a sense of completism. Immediately the issue places blame on a woman’s breakdown: another woman! See, Wasp and Scarlet Witch are poolside in a flashback, and Wasp casually drops that she had a pregnancy scare from her dalliances with Hawkeye (a plot point emerging from the ever loathsome Chuck Austen run, naturally). She mentions Wanda tried having two kids, confusing her, because Wanda doesn’t remember her children. Wasp makes an excuse about needing to piss and having too much to drink and leaves. See, no, this is clever, because it’s an allusion to original sin. Just like with original sin, the sin here is committed by a woman and is responsible for the downfall of the Avengers. Bendis packs his writing with meaning. There’s a reason Joe Quesada tried to call him “Marvel’s Joyce” before the marketing department intervened.

It’s impossible to discern what the worst part of this panel is. Try it. You can’t do it!

Dr. Strange shows up in his astral form to explain that chaos magic doesn’t exist and Wanda is dangerously unhinged from reality. He knows this and yet he has to ask around for what happened to her children. So much of the issue is Dr. Strange manufacturing consent for “Scarlet Witch is evil now” while members of the assembled crowd go “no! She wouldn’t!”. Keep in mind previous comics resolved the Wanda and her kids saga, to the point that she remembers what happened to them, but why let continuity ruin a story that derives its emotional heft from that same continuity? Research is for squares. There’s like six pages of Strange going through laborious motions to explain the premise of the story, yet he (Strange and Bendis) never succeeds at demonstrating Scarlet Witch is an actual character with agency. The doctor has the pretty fucked up line “she played mommy to make herself feel like someone she thinks is normal” (emphasis Bendis). Anyway, the big fight between the Avengers and the constructs created by Scarlet Witch is really an excuse for David Finch to go hog wild because it doesn’t matter narratively. Wanda is instead defeated by a battle of gibberish words with Dr. Strange. It takes a skilled writer to get me to invest in magic battles, and Bendis is not up to the task. I don’t know what the stakes are or if there are any stakes. At best I can glean that the Sorceror Supreme outwords the crazy lady. He is the master of saying nonsense in a weird different font, after all.

There Scarlet Witch goes, uttering her famous catchphrase.

My favorite part of Avengers Disassembled comes in the final pages. Strange has rendered Wanda comatose; she’s alive but nobody’s home. Before there can be a discussion of what to do with this braindead mass murderer, Magneto swoops in and asks for his then-daughter. (As of now Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver are not Magneto’s children as a result of an editorial move to disassociate them because of film rights issues. Of course, now they’re all under the Disney roof so we’ll see how long it takes for that retcon to itself be retconned. Boy, aren’t comics fucking STUPID?) Rather than say something like “no, you’re a supervillain, fuck off”, the Avengers give in pretty much because it’s been a long day. Keep in mind, this isn’t dad coming to the party after Wanda got too drunk, threw up on someone’s bed and gave Black Knight a handjob in full view of everyone. Magneto has no rehabilitation skills; at best his positives are he’s angry and can fuck up VCR settings with the wave of a hand.

I feel like once you let the terrorist take the woman you relinquish the right to ask questions about it.

Yet off he absconds with his wayward daughter, not before muttering that Xavier was right, suggesting there’s some broader awareness of these events in the universe. So Xavier saw Ant-Man was dead and thought “the lady crazy about babies is to blame!”. Why the fuck didn’t he help out? See, that’s why you don’t bring them up. Also, if you’re wondering why Nick Fury is in this comic when he went underground at the end of the last series I covered, well, the answer is that was massively delayed, this came out in the interim and there’s no real way to square the two so just shut the hell up. The comic ends with a reprint of pages from an early Avengers comic to create a contrast between the innocent days of the Silver Age to the fucked up early 2000s when it was Iraq War this and letting Michael Rapaport having a sitcom that. It’s a cheap way at achieving gravitas, creating this dichotomy that the Silver Age was for stupid babies but now comics are for MEN and women who will be accused of not actually liking comics so often you wonder why they bother. DC did the a lot of the same thing around this time, most notably Identity Crisis, and it was irritating there too.

“Dashing”? I don’t care for that kind of editorializing from my newspaper. I will be the judge of who and who is not dashing!!

Since I like to waste my time I thought I’d cover Avengers Finale for this article despite it technically not being part of “Chaos”. You know it’s “good” when Yellowjacket and Wasp are visiting the grounds of the destroyed Avengers Mansion and Wasp asks “what are you thinking, Dr. Pym?” “I don’t want to say” he responds as they share knowing looks. The way this plays out and due to a lack of a better explanation, I’m forced to assume Pym is broaching the prospect of fucking at the ruins of the mansion, suggesting he’s like a character in David Cronenberg’s Crash and can only get hard at tragedies. Zoom in on Amazing Spider-Man #122 and he’s jerking off in the background of the Gwen Stacy crime scene. Mutant Massacre? More like Hank Pym Massacring His Meat. Look, as a Hank Pym fan, if this takes heat off the domestic abuse angle I’m okay with it. The remaining major Avengers have gathered to pay tribute to their fallen and to think about happier times. Iron Man loudly proclaims the upside to multiple comrades dead and another a lobotimized mass murderer is his secret identity is back. “Most people believe that Tony Stark and Iron Man are now two completely different people.” Bitch, you were wearing Iron Man armor at the fucking United Nations!

“The last time I articulated what I was thinking everyone got really mad at us!”

If current events have taught us anything, 10% of the nation believes Tony Stark is a reptilian child trafficker, to say nothing of the Iron Man issue. I guess if a billionaire former Secretary of Defense promises he’s no longer wearing the armored costume he lied about not wearing for 40 years we’re to take him at his word. Tony goes on a spiel about not being able to fund the team anymore and the static reaction shot of the Avengers is golden. Member by member everyone gives a reason for why they can’t be an Avenger anymore, from Captain Britain fucking off to TERF Island and not even staying for the rest of the remembrance to the Pyms also going there for Hank’s fellowship at Oxford. The final segment of the issue consists of double splash pages, many from Bendis buds such as Michael Oeming and David Mack. It’s framed around “your favorite memory as an Avenger” but eventually becomes “Steve McNiven wanted to draw a guy wailing on Ultron so that’s yours, Falcon”. Finally, I cackle as the assembled toast to their fallen, which balloons to all of them, as in Gilgamesh and Thunderstrike get namechecks. Gilgamesh!

Avengers Disassembled Bendis must be pissed Avengers Finale Bendis is poking so many holes in the event. Either that or we have the first case of a fictional character literally being smarter than its writer.

The final spread says it all for me. The Avengers leave the guts of the mansion for outdoors and are met with a crowd of people with signs affirming their love for the team and it’s all very 9/11-y. There are multiple “Never Forgets” in the crowd. “Always Our Heroes”…isn’t this just smuggling in sentiment for first responders after a terrorist attack and using it to prop up weird people in spandex? I’m not saying you can’t mingle the real world with the fictional, but you have to be more thoughtful than Bendis is. What Disassembled amounts to is this: 9/11 happened to the Avengers and now they have all sorts of sympathy. I’m pretty sure the public doesn’t know Scarlet Witch is responsible, which means Bendis fumbled an awesome opportunity for the MU public to eventually figure out Avengers 9/11 was, in fact, an inside job. J. Jonah Jameson narrating Loose Quiver is something I never knew I needed until now.

See, they’re evil cause they’re gingers.

Of course it’d be negligent on my part if I didn’t discuss the art. While this may be Adventures in Bendisshitting, the artwork is a necessary complement to his writing. David Finch is an artist whose work adorns comics that I enjoy in spite of him, not because of him. He’s fine, all right? But he definitely distinguishes himself as a Wildstorm/Top Cow kind of guy and Bendis’ dialogue heavy work does not mesh with that style. Imagine an Aaron Sorkin script directed by the Beyond the Black Rainbow guy and you have an idea of the tonal clash the two create. (Actually now I want to see Panos Cosmatos try his best at salvaging one of the many unfilmed Studio 60 scripts Sorkin no doubt has lying around.) That said, the best moments of the series are undoubtedly the ones Finch is responsible. There’s a lovely double page spread in which the Avengers fight apparitions of their greatest foes. So Ms. Marvel fights Rogue, Spider-Man fights clones of himself, Jocasta fights Ultron…and then Stingray fights Tigra. What? They’re the only Avengers to fight each other. That interests me. I want to know why they’re opposing. Is it as simple as cats hate water? There are a slew of Avengers Disassembled tie-in comics, most of them lousy. I think Avengers Disassembled: Stingray vs. Tigra would be a welcome miniseries that traces the origin of their enmity. Be better than the rest of this shit.

Master of the written word, Brian Michael Bendis

As a shakeup of the Avengers franchise, Dissassembled is undoubtedly a success. It puts the characters in a position that allows for New Avengers to occur. That doesn’t make a good story, however, or a necessary one. Any number of reasons could be found for the breakdown of the traditional team apparatus and it wouldn’t require killing off multiple characters for shock value and turning another into a delusional baby crazy psychotic. Roster shakeups have happened before with less. Bendis illustrates no understanding of characters, which can be considered nitpicking, but it also can’t be that hard to find a scribe who doesn’t write characters with decades of history as though they grew up in lead paint households. I could also go into the gender politics in this comic a little more, but this article is running long; suffice it to say they’re not on. None of [gestures] is on. New Avengers is a marginally better series but it still leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth the stupid route taken to get there. Again, “Captain America and Iron Man start a new team that’s in a tower instead of a mansion” is not a radical paradigm shift.

My favorite sign: either Hawkeye Forever or the one that’s just Wonder Man’s logo. Imagine the kind of loser you’d have to be to be repping Wonder Man.

Final thing: Someone left a comment on the Secret War review, suggesting I only complain about Bendis because I have no talent and accused me of being a Rob Liefeld fan. Well, sir, I may have no talent, but I am no Liefeld fan. Moreover, I’ll always have one thing in abundance that Brian Michael Bendis lacks: hair. Take that, you bald asshole!

This is just the argument Bill Willingham and Judd Winick had while writing the comic.

DCU: Decisions begins with Superman and Batman yelling at a robot for letting people die. Specifically, Robot-Man of the Doom Patrol failed to save everyone at a political rally for Condoleezza Rice stand-in Kate McClellan. I always like these scenes where the World’s Finest act like disapproving parents, it really helps make them relatable and not at all irritating fusspots. Having found evidence the assassin plans to kill every presidential candidate, Superman and Batman dispatch the Justice League to work overtly or covertly with the four candidates left. Green Arrow raises a question: how about we protect the candidate we like? Hal Jordan asks “are you saying you wouldn’t protect someone whose politics you disagree with”. Now, GA should say “yes”, but this is a bullshit centrist comic so he denies that. Of course, a reporter later goads him into admitting he supports Davis Brewster, the leftist candidate in this mess. The admission triggers a calamitous amount of chatter among superheroes regarding endorsements; Superman says he “needs to stay above such things” and “Clark Kent seems to be keeping mum on his politics as all objective journalists should”. Lois Lane, however, is staunchly a Republican. “What can I say? I’m a product of my upbringing. I’m proudly for a strong military, small government, low taxes, and maximum individual freedom.” I’d be upset if this wasn’t like 4 Lois Lanes ago. The Republican one got wiped away in some Crisis somewhere, I just know it.

“Lois, your 12 part investigation into the supposed Michelle Obama “whitey” tape is just not acceptable for the Daily Planet.”

A Republican Lois Lane does have promise, I must admit. So what if it goes against her traditional characterization as a staunch feminist, a believer in the power and freedom of the press, a decent human being and an opponent of her xenophobic nutbar military general father (who, might I add, has tried to kill her husband innumerable times)? Imagine a scene of her asking Clark “how do you spell ‘Kenyan Marxist’?”. Imagine her in the voting booth, saying of Lex Luthor “I don’t agree with his ‘kill Superman’ policy, but I do agree with his ‘move the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem’ policy”. Pity DCU: Decisions doesn’t run with this absurd political orientation reveal or any of them, for that matter. I want to see Jay Garrick claim the real rogues are the shit stirrers at ANTIFA; I want to see Dr. Light (the non-rapist one) guest on an episode of Chapo Trap House and not get any of Felix’s Rich Piana jokes. Alas, DCU: Decisions is content to run with the political assassination plot and give short shrift to the “piss off a good portion of the readership by revealing their favorite B-lister probably thought we’d be greeted as liberators by the Iraqi people” even though it’s the only reason anyone bothered to read this. No one thought “I want to see Parallax View but with Parallax the Fear Bug!”

Lady Blackhawk: the original Bernie Bro

Really, the only reason to read this misbegotten series is to find out the political ideology of heroes that aren’t at the forefront of your mind but are nonetheless recognizable enough. (You’re not finding out who Martian Manhunter voted for so stop fucking speculating.) The plot is pretty straightforward, with a stupid conclusion I’ll get to soon enough. So here we are. As far as I can tell, the four candidates map as follows: Kate McClellan is Condi Rice. Davis Brewster seems to be a Dennis Kucinich/Howard Dean hybrid (I say Kucinich because Green Arrow supports him and it stands to reason then that Brewster is the left-most candidate…and I say Dean cause he kinda looks like him). Bob Ridgeway represents a fusion of John McCain and Rudy Giuliani (McCain for the military fetishizing, Giuliani because only assholes like him). Martin Suarez is Barack Obama due to racial minority status but also has some international diplomacy background and I’m not sure who in the 2008 Dem milieu fits that bill. But it’s stated he’s moderate in comparison to Brewster. Enough preamble. Here’s who supports whom:

• Kate McClellan (Republican): Vixen, Plastic Man (because he wants to fuck her), Jay Garrick, Huntress
• Bob Ridgeway (Republican): Lois Lane (implied), Green Lantern Guy Gardner, Power Girl, Wildcat, Hawkman, Wonder Woman
• Davis Brewster (Democrat): Green Arrow, Dr. Light, Thunder, Lady Blackhawk
• Martin Suarez (Democrat): Beast Boy, Firestorm, Bruce Wayne (but it’s only a beard for his real agenda–young men in tights, I mean investigating the assassination attempts), Blue Beetle
• The Mad Bomber: Wally West  (sadly, he says it as a joke… a “smash the state” Wally would be better than whatever the hell happened to him in Heroes in Crisis)

As you can see, there’s some definitely suspect choices (an African woman voting Republican?), but most of them do make a certain amount of sense. Ridgeway, the far-right extremist in the race, mostly receives support from the JSA, aka old farts who want the government’s hands off their Medicare. The Obama stand-in is championed by dumbass kids whereas the true left counts among its constituents an aging hippie and characters you have to strain to remember. Outside of the aforementioned Lois Lane, almost all of the character choices elicit a “yeah, that makes sense”. Notice how the comic doesn’t define the politics of any major character, though. Absent from the list are Hal Jordan (we know he’d vote for whichever Republican hated age of consent laws most but just go with me here), Batman, Superman, John Stewart, all thirty seven Robins, Oracle, most of the Teen Titans, etc. They went with safe choices. No one reading JSA month to month will go “pah, I came to this for social democratic beliefs espoused against a canvas of punching Ultra-Humanite in the face!”.

This is a ripoff of a Seinfeld bit so I’m assuming this particular bit of misogyny comes from Judd Winick. That’s not to say Willingham is a stranger to misogyny.

Some of the motivations do seem suspect under closer scrutiny, like multiple heroines supporting McClellan because she’s a woman. 2008 did not see a significant enough to remark upon feminist outpouring for Sarah Palin because she was still a fucking Republican, who are to women what Gargamel is to the Smurfs. Power Girl endorses Ridgeway because he’ll “keep us safe”. Aren’t, you know, you supposed to keep us safe? When did she become such a fucking nationalist? I want to see a comic about Power Girl having to sweat her way through a 6 hour flight where she has to sit next to a Sikh she incorrectly thinks is a Muslim. Shit, her name is Karen, it would certainly fit. Wonder Woman’s choice makes sense because as we all know William Moulton Marston’s strain of feminism squares well with “a right-wing extremist”, but I want to highlight the moment anyway because it gives Willingham like an entire page to vomit conservative talking points that will remind one of those times Fables stopped dead to remind the reader the importance of Israel.

“Remember when Curveball tricked Themyscria into invading Syria, Princess?”

You see that? You see that shit? It’s egregious, preposterous, outrageous. “Hesitant to go to war”? We’re bombing like seven different countries and have been in Afghanistan longer than the Soviets. “Compassionate to those we defeat”… Iraq says hello. From this, one gets the sense that Bill Willingham was much more prone to espousing his poltical beliefs through the text than Winick. Wonder Woman never rebuts this stupid garbage, nor does anyone else. It plays like a damn campaign ad for someone who doesn’t even exist. The division of labor between the two seems to be the political material goes to Willingham whereas Winick handles the lousy characterization, an arrangement that benefits no one. Winick’s dialogue can be cloying and cutesy and it should go without saying Willingham’s politics are stinky garbage.

Mento is my new favorite character. He’s named after a candy and his costume consists of a construction helmet and safety goggles. Fucking brilliant.

In the end, resolved in a dumbass sequence that requires Hal Jordan to break his special sunglasses and get possessed, the culprit inhabiting people’s bodies and forcing them to try to kill presidential candidates is none other than the Teen Titan Jericho, who is evil for reasons that exist in Judd Winick comics no one should ever read. Seriously, we’re delving into some deep cut Titans East territory here. But the actual plot of this comic is such a fucking afterthought even the work itself seems to acknowledge that. Jericho, you might remember, has traditionally been depicted as a good guy, so why the bad turn? Well, Character Find of 2020 Mento explains possessing people has resulted in those people’s personalities meshing with Jericho’s, and since Jericho has jumped into some pretty unsavory characters those have come to the forefront. They want “to kill and to do it better than anyone else has ever before”. You’re gonna have to get pretty fucking early in the morning to kill better than the CIA, buddy. The motivation is yet another cop out because it sidesteps the political issue entirely. This guy has no political motivation to kill political targets; he just wants to take the Stanley Cup of murder away from, I dunno, Dexter Morgan. Given the mini is all about pissing people off, why not make Jericho’s bad personalities a smash the state anarchist? Garfield the shit out of this bitch.

Fucking Democrats probably want chimps to vote. But seriously, Detective Chimp is canonically a Republican, probably because he flings his own shit and rips people’s faces off, both things Stephen Miller has done.

In a sense, everything has been building towards Superman’s final speech in DCU: Decisions #4. If this miniseries has been about anything, it’s about the role public figures play in civic participation. Should they keep their mouths shut or should they use their notoriety and the platform that affords them to voice support for causes and people they believe in. The old “shut up and sing” dilemma. Well, DCU: Decisions comes down on the side of “shut up and sing”. Superman attracts some cameras and gives a long four page speech about how heroes’ job is to protect and serve, not voice opinions or sway the electorate. Asshole, don’t you think that maybe if you said “this Luthor guy…he’s not on” that he wouldn’t have become president and Jeph Loeb’s Superman/Batman wouldn’t have happened? The thing, and I think the last four years have borne this out, not taking a political position is itself a political position. Can you imagine if Superman had espoused the same beliefs about social movements like #MeToo or Black Lives Matter? He’d be eaten alive. “We answer to no one… we do not govern” sez Superman. That doesn’t make a lick of sense, unless you perceive superheroes as a layer of society that exists solely to pull cats out of trees, with no relationship to any other layer. Let me tell you, the police most definitely take political stances. The series ends with Clark Kent filling in his ballot and still refusing to tell his wife who he voted for, in what I’d characterize as a running gag were it the least bit funny. What would be funny is if the last page did a closeup of Clark’s ballot and showed he drew penises on the write-in line for every office. It’d force message board losers to try to crack the meaning of it. “Maybe the penis represents a cigar… or maybe he’s writing in Herr Starr from Preacher? Does this make Preacher part of DC continuity???”

Doesn’t exist. Like, we have stadiums and convention centers, you don’t have to make one up! The fucking DNC (sorta) happened in Milwaukee this year!

The comic ends with an exhortation to vote on November 4^th, which I don’t suggest you do this year because that’d be Wednesday. The “vote, guys!” message is the shitty cherry atop the shit cake. I’m not against electoralism; people can and have made persuasive cases for voting as harm reduction technique. But I cannot stand the simple-minded, nuance free “vote!” bullshit. No, voting in and of itself is not a good. Voting if you vote for hate, for disenfranchisement, for cruelty, is not good, and frankly it’s what half the country chooses every single fucking time. Voting when you don’t know shit about shit doesn’t help either. Moreover, voting in the grand scheme of things pales in impact compared to other means of political participation, from donating money to donating time to lobbying elected officials to protesting. If you’re going to have me spend over 10 bucks on some crap, have a more substantive message than “voting is swell”. At least put some “oomph” in it, like “vote or we’ll kill Jason Todd again” or in my case “vote or we won’t kill Jason Todd again”.

What kind of Aaron Sorkin boomer bullshit is this

While the comic itself doesn’t resolve the weird four candidates from two parties general election, DC would. Canon would go on to establish that Suarez won both the Democratic primary and the election, and he was eventually succeeded by the beloved comic book character Barack Obama. That Suarez was used again surprised me in that I was surprised DCU: Decisions would have any repercussions. I figure it’d be forgotten about as soon as it finished, much like most pop culture material meant to capitalize on the 2008 election. (There was a Sarah Palin of Scott Pilgrim you would not BELIEVE.) Nonetheless, the DC Universe had a Hispanic president, because I guess having a white person in while Obama was POTUS would be seen as making the wrong kind of statement. Does Suarez’s success mean they were spared Beto O’Rourke’s and Pete Buttigieg’s tortuous uses of Spanish to endear themselves to voters? Who knows.

“So shut the fuck up, Shailene Woodley! Let the people decide if Standing Rock is good or not!”

Like a lot of DC Comics around this era, the art is competent and unremarkable. This came out biweekly and it shows. But I feel like there’s a missed opportunity. Unless Rick Leonardi (or Howard Porter, who takes over for the second and fourth issues) has some wild views I don’t know about, I think it would’ve been interesting to have teamed up two artists of differing ideologies too. Have a real jam between that cryptofascist Ethan Van Sciver and, I dunno, everyone looks like a flaming lefty when compared to that toilet flush of a man. Ooh! Ardian Syaf, the guy who got busted for putting Islamist/anti-Semitic easter eggs in X-Men comics. That’d be the perfect odd couple. They could even have a competition for who hides the most anti-Semitic messages in their art.

Ethan Van Sciver thinks comics are too political and has been boycotting them ever since Superman came out in support of World War II and wanted us to buy those bullshit war bonds.

This is such an inessential, moronic, pointless comic DC didn’t even see fit to collect it in trade paperback, and they pretty much collect everything in trade paperback. I have The Rise of Arsenal at the foot of my bed right now. Really, though, I get it. The comic had a shelf life of about a month and like mentioned before, it aged like Dorian Grey seeing his portrait. Who the fuck would buy a trade of this beyond irony poisoned weirdoes who rediscovered it multiple election cycles later and wanted to laugh at its quaintness? No one. Countdown to Final Crisis, a comic everybody hated that didn’t even count down to Final Crisis correctly, looks like a masterpiece compared to the inanity of DCU: Decisions. That said, I do wish a trade existed, complete with writer’s notes in which Willingham and Winick had to explain themselves. Unfortunately, Newsarama’s 2008 Dan Didio interview is dead so I don’t have primary sources to contend with that might have given me an inkling of what the fuck the point this was.

I leave you with this one message in this tumultuous time of ours: don’t vote. Because if your choice to vote hinges on what an article talking about an obscure 2008 DC Comics miniseries tells you, you’re clearly not mentally there enough to make an informed choice.

King apparently thought Harley Quinn wasn’t obnoxious enough so she does this sing songy nursery rhyme shit for no apparent reason.

Heroes in Crisis (or HiC for short, because you’d have to be stinking drunk to think this is any good) amplifies all of King’s problems and adds new ones to create a potent brew of bathos (not pathos!), trauma porn and general obnoxious incompetence. To his credit, King creates an intriguing concept for the DC Universe: Sanctuary, a mental health treatment center for superheroes. Of course, he immediately has a massacre of patients occur that renders the place unusable. That’s the premise of Heroes of Crisis when you strip away the bullshit (and there is a lot of bullshit): who killed a boatload of DC D-listers? The series is first and foremost a murder mystery, which is a problem because Tom King cannot write mysteries. That doesn’t stop him from trying, though. It begins with Booster Gold and Harley Quinn each accusing the other of the massacre in a protracted scene that involves a Nebraska diner and Harley ironically claiming she hates pudding. Sure. Fuck it.

I’ll have you know some people pay damn good money to live out that fetish!

Why are Harley and Booster the main characters? You know… reasons. Flashpoint starred the Flash because the story involved time travel and alternate realities, two staples of the Flash’s domain. Civil War was a story about a fracture within the superhero community so Cap and Iron Man, the two most prestigious members of the most prestigious team in the Marvel Universe, were logical focal points for the rift. Booster and Harley are kind of scruffy and unreliable, so that’s something, but neither character is really in the mass-murder-milieu so the book has to work overtime to justify their inclusion at all. Booster, generally characterized as a cheerful loser/hustler continues to act like the manic nutjob that King inexplicably decided he was back in his Batman run. And Harley has to shed the “What If Deadpool Was a Pretty Lady and Shopped At Hot Topic” persona that made her such a hit and embrace the “Broken Victim of Domestic Abuse” that might be more realistic but moves fewer Daddy’s Lil Monster t-shirts. They spend most of the series unhappy and confused, which makes them easy to relate to (maybe they’re the protagonists because they mirror the experience of reading HiC) but not a lot of fun to be around.

Tom King recycles from his spec script for the short-lived Cavemen TV show.

Oh, if you’re wondering why Harley Quinn, a character who was until very recently a violent criminal, would be allowed in what must be an extremely high security area where vulnerable people are processing their trauma, don’t worry, because she wasn’t supposed to be. It seems that Poison Ivy sneaked her in because it was obvious she needed counseling. Why Ivy, also a convicted felon, had access to Sanctuary and how they were able to circumvent security designed by Batman and enforced by Kryptonian technology is never explained. But who cares, right? What matters is that Harley can use the same gripe that Dante does in the face of all the shenanigans that went down at the Quick Stop. Supposedly King pitched Heroes in Crisis with no characters specified and DC picked them for him; if so, that makes sense because nearly everyone is out of character in service of a story that doesn’t justify the work. I’m not one of those people who rages that “in Batman #365 Bruce Wayne said he was allergic to oysters yet in Detective Comics #829 he eats them without issue” but if the characters aren’t going to even be approximations of what they’ve been in the past, why use them at all? Why not create PTSD Guy, Abuse Girl and Captain Breakdown?

I always thought peekaboo needed a gritty reboot.

So anyway, yeah, a bunch of characters no one cared about (or even heard of) are found dead at the beginning of the story; also Wally West, Poison Ivy and Roy Harper. Harley thinks Booster did it because she saw him do it, and Booster thinks Harley did it because he saw her do it, immediately underscoring that neither of them could have actually done it and thereby draining the central drama of any real mystery or tension. Instead the audience has to wade through seven issues of waiting for the characters in the story to reach that same conclusion and the real killer reveals himself, not because of any detective work or train of deductive reasoning, but because King has the guilty party step forward to explain what happened and why. Beats working.

“Sure, they all come back, but do you know how much sidekick-sized coffins cost?”

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Harley and Booster are on the run, from each other and the superhero community at large. Harley is confronted by Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman and manages to best them all in combat and escape because nothing means anything anymore and teams up with Batgirl (Batgirl? Really? Yeah, okay, whatever) to find Booster and bring him to justice. Booster gains the trust of his old buddy and fellow dirtbag hero Blue Beetle by going for a fist bump and saying “bros before heroes” because I guess the fact that they used to run together is more important than the possibility that Booster might have committed mass murder.

“I couldn’t even give those savages in the Middle East democracy!”

Meanwhile, a mysterious party emails all the supposedly destroyed and completely confidential recordings of all the superhero therapy sessions to ace girl-reporter Lois Lane. Tangential to the plot but perhaps the centerpiece of Heroes in Crisis are these interview/confessional segments. King drops these in three or four per issue to showcase the anxieties faced by the superheroes. Characters as notable as Batman and as obscure as Blue Jay populate the moments. Here, here is what Sanctuary was intended to do, King is saying. These scenes also happen to be riotously funny in the course of trying to inject some pathos into these long underwater pieces of intellectual property. Cry for Justice’s beautifully rendered gorilla crying has nothing on this. It took an exhaustive effort but we managed to narrow down the ten funniest confessionals, listed below:

1. Hal Jordan doesn’t know what will is.
2. Roy Harper makes a finger gun to signify “two things” while discussing his addiction to painkillers and eventually heroin.
3. Batgirl devotes her confessional to showing the bullet entry and exit wound from The Killing Joke. The artist, of course, depicts this as tastelessly as possible.
4. Will Magnus admits he’s in love with one of the Metal Men.
5. Protector, the anti-drug superhero, reveals he was on drugs THE WHOLE TIME.
6. Catwoman’s consists of her saying “meow”, you know, like a cat.
7. Doctor Light (the Asian woman one) complains about her name’s association with the villain, meaning Tom King casually brought Identity Crisis into DC canon for some reason.
8. Firestorm’s head is on fire. Sometimes King tries for comedy and shows resolutely he is no king of comedy.
9. Wally West thinks therapy can be done in three weeks or less.
10. The final, and best, one can only be seen to be believed.

“Well, I hope you’re happy, Spectre. Thanks to you, God is at home crying like a little girl!”

There are two kinds of comedy in Heroes in Crisis: intentional and unintentional. The intentional stuff doesn’t work not at all; the unintentional, however, succeeds famously. Booster has the nervous flop sweat of a comedian bombing on Leno while Harley Quinn is rife with stupid rhymes and the kinda adorable homicidal tendencies that alternative girls wore on t-shirts in 2005. Like a cute bunny rabbit accompanied by some pithy remark about the voices inside their head. Half of the interview segments go for laughs. None of it works and clashes with the otherwise dour and maudlin tone of Heroes in Crisis. Look, I never served, and I’m sure that soldiers have mourning rituals that seem peculiar to outsiders and it’s important to respect those rituals. Further, I’m sure that King, who never gets tired of reminding us that he joined the CIA after 9/11 and was sent to the Middle East (because we still think that’s somehow unambiguously heroic in 2020? Or something?), knew people who died in terrible, tragic ways and that those losses weigh on him. That said, the sight of Green Arrow solemnly bow shooting his former sidekick Roy Harper’s red trucker cap off a cliff and into the ocean during magic hour is fucking ridiculous. The man’s wearing a green unitard and has a Van Dyke for God’s sake. Superheroes are operatic and ridiculous by their nature, and exploring real human emotion through them is a tightrope. King absolutely teeters off that tightrope and the result is utter nonsense.

Everything you need to know about Tom King in one image.

Back to the “plot”. I wonder how seriously we are meant to consider the possibility of either Booster or Harley as the culprit. With Booster it would gel with Tom King’s previous characterization of him as “weird incompetent idiot who might be on some spectrum” in his thankfully truncated Batman run. It’s plausible insofar as I could see DC character assassinating him; he’s got no movies or TV shows coming out and there still seem to be elements in the company that despise everything associated with the Bwa-Ha-Ha era Justice League. The idea that Harley might snap and take her rage out on the heroes who pledge to save people but didn’t help her has merit, but HiC isn’t really interested in what motivates violence; if it did, the explanation for the murders would be the beginning of the story, not the ending. Then there’s the fact that by sheer force of marketing alone has made Quinn into an anti-hero at the very least. They’ve walked back most of her despicable deeds and now she’s the BPD girl who’s fun at parties of the superhero community. Attaching a murder beef to her doesn’t fit with company policy.

No it’s absolutely cool to use domestic abuse as a cheap cliffhanger. Honest!

It’s hard to tell if I’m describing the plot well enough because the plot is simultaneously threadbare and a tarpit. Just when I think it’s over, shit, I’m still only in Saigon. Blue Beetle and Batgirl receive substantial roles as the support staff for Booster Gold and Harley Quinn. Blue Beetle, the white one, makes sense, whereas Barbara Gordon comes off as ill-advised corporate synergy. Yes, they’re both victims of the Joker, but beyond that the (condescending) female solidarity between a superhero and a mass murderer’s willing co-conspirator seems a stretch at best. There’s a particularly awful sequence where Batgirl tries to help Harley, making the claim that Batman and men as a whole see them both as “broken” and will make assumptions. I don’t even know if she’s supposed to think Harley committed the murders or not. It culminates in this emotional hug between them and it’s got me incensed like I’m a fucking Republican. “You’re hugging a criminal, you damn bleeding heart!” Things don’t improve as the series marches on as Batgirl’s role consists of reminding Harley not to kill people. Haha, it’s so WACKY. She’s created orphans, either directly or by proxy, but fuck it, she looks like a Suicide Girl, that’s cool and alternative because we still live in 2005. I notice we’ve not mentioned that Poison Ivy dies and is resurrected over the course of the series yet. Maybe that’s because it doesn’t fucking matter and affects nothing. It gives reason for Harley to be mad, as if “being framed for murder” wasn’t enough.

If you don’t look sexy while you’re reborn, why bother being reborn at all?

Booster makes the observation that Wally West’s corpse is older than it should be (corpse age determination is one of Booster’s special skills), so something is afoot. Yep, turns out Wally is the culprit and he brought himself from the future to throw everyone off his scent. He also quickly reprogrammed the Sanctuary holodecks so Booster and Harley would see each other committing the murders. Now the all-important question: why? Well, King immediately tries to divest responsibility from West by making the massacre an accident, the result of him losing control of the Speed Force. What, the Speed Force doesn’t do that? How does this square with Lagoon Boy being stabbed with a spear? Fuck you, that’s why. (On Twitter Tom King chalked up the continuity violating discrepancy to bad writing, to which we say: isn’t it all bad writing, Tom?) While Heroes in Crisis doesn’t couch it in such crass terms, those expecting a satisfying explanation will be left out in the cold. The end result sees Wally behind bars (surely he’d have to reveal his identity, which then would unravel the identities of half the superhero community) and Sanctuary reopened. You know, usually facilities at which everyone dies and everyone’s privileged information is released to the press don’t bounce back that well.

How dare Batgirl steal Joey Tribbiani’s classic catchphrase!!

Identity Crisis was famously a DC event mystery that was impossible to solve and that was written by an honest to god author, so with King at the wheel the attempt becomes even more muddled and confusing. There’s simply no way to solve Heroes in Crisis with the information the series presents.  Even if you’re charitable, you have to make several assumptions, such as “time travel is involved” and “everyone grew up in households with high concentrations of lead paint”. Wally freaked out, the Speed Force electrocuted everyone to death, he used superspeed to program the computer so Booster would see Harley commit the massacre and vice versa, and he did this to fool Lloyd Braun–I mean he did this (including faking his own death via time travel duplicate) to buy some time to also doxx all the heroes’ therapy tapes and come up with his confession. If you were able to work that out from the clues presented in the previous issues, you deserve to have every ear necklace Tom King accrued in his foreign sojourns.

Look, you know how it is. You check into a mental health facility, everything’s going great, you’re on the holodeck in the middle of Nebraska, and then somebody kills you with magic speed lightning.

Tom King wants to have his cake and eat it too: Wally killed all those people, but not really because he actually lost control of the Speed Force and it went and killed everybody. So what if the Speed Force isn’t some destructive entity that you have to keep in control at all times, who gives a shit about “continuity” and “precedent”. The Speed Force is now a dead man’s switch, get over it. So the heroes aren’t that mad about it, because he didn’t mean to kill everybody. Sure, Wally has to go to jail, but “bros before heroes”, as Booster Gold points out. The resolution to the series takes on a chilling dimension if you subscribe to the theory that all of this is about PTSD from Middle Eastern Misadventures. It’s not hard to read Wally as a soldier who committed a horrible crime and his compatriots excusing it because, shit, he was under a lot of stress and the normals can’t fucking comprehend what WE go through. I’m not saying Tom King killed 30 Iraqis while he worked for the CIA, but I’m not not saying it.

Hey, look on the bright side: if Trump pardoned Eddie Gallagher of all people, Wally’s got a good shot.

We would be remiss if we didn’t at least mention that this comic allegedly went through severe rewrites. The finished product lends weight to that; it would explain why some plot elements, such as the nature of Sanctuary itself, figure prominently in the beginning but play little to no role by the end. Things like Lagoon Boy’s shifting cause of death make sense if there was behind the scenes turmoil. Apparently the original conception of the story had Wally West going on a super speed killing spree, with guns no less. If the Flash snapping and going Parkland on the likes of the Tattooed Man and Solstice makes you giggle, well, you’re not the only one. Perhaps someone at DC realized having a character who is literally featured on children’s underwear gun down a dozen fellow heroes was in poor taste or “stupid as shit” and thus the recalibrated tale depicts the deaths as accidental and fantastical. Maybe Poison Ivy was also meant to die for real; that would explain the half-assed “she’s reborn from a flower bud” rebirth she receives late in the series. The only other aspect of the original iteration we know is that Wally would’ve joined the Suicide Squad. A once beloved hero having to work with the shitbags he helped lock up is a germ of an interesting idea, so it makes sense DC botched it, created an incomprehensible muddle that still left an entire generation’s Flash a radioactive property.

I may be giving King too much credit, but I believe this to be an homage to the classic headline of

On the one hand HiC wants to be a sober meditation on the cost of repeatedly putting yourself in harm’s way in service of maintaining peace, and on the other it wants to be a juicy, exciting whodunit where the heroes of the DCU race against the clock to solve a terrible crime. Yet the foundational notion of Sanctuary is too dour to let the series be any fun, and the mystery is too damn silly to ever allow any notion of thoughtfulness or seriousness to ever take root (not that King is a particularly thoughtful or serious writer anyway; more on that later). It might be possible to do a comic where Green Arrow’s sidekick explains his slow decline into heroin addiction and Harley Quinn beats Wonder Woman and Batman in a fist fight, but this ain’t it. HiC is long, it’s tedious, confusing, ponderous and really dumb all while seemingly being under the impression that it’s really saying something. It’s a remarkable self-own by a man on his way to being comics royalty. That explains its appeal as a trainwreck. A lot of bad comics are just lazy crap meant to fill out the schedule; this was made with PURPOSE. Blood, sweat and tears went into this very dumb debacle.

I can’t NOT think of Donny’s ashes blowing in The Dude’s face with this scene. “Roy died–he died as so many young men of his generation, before his time. In your wisdom Lord you took him. As you took so many bright flowering young men, at Khe San and Lan Doc…”

This brings us back to the scene with Green Arrow chucking Roy’s hat into the ocean. King clearly wants us to recognize the profound grief that comes with losing such a close friend, but he either doesn’t have faith in himself as a writer or his audience as readers because he soaks us with sentiment when only a drop is required. Maybe if Ollie had been in his civilian clothes, and it hadn’t been sunset or if he hadn’t been standing on a cliff or if he hadn’t stuck a trucker cap onto the end of an arrow like an asshole, the scene would have worked. But King wants to make sure we understand how serious and sad this all is so he loads up on the imagery and the moment plunges into farce like a fat guy crashing through a rickety bridge into a rushing river.

“I also got a mosquito bite right between my breasts, you want me to show that too?”

HiC is rife with those kinds of scenes, moments that are clearly supposed to make you think, but instead they make you wonder what the creators were thinking. Why are robots the therapists at Sanctuary and not, you know, trained professionals? Why does therapy seem to often consist of forcing the patient to relive traumatic events over and over again? That’s probably the kind of thing a human mental health provider would know is a terrible idea. Why is Sanctuary overall sterile and alienating when it’s supposedly created using the best aspects of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman? Why do the patients at Sanctuary maintain their anonymity from one another by wearing a terrifying robe and mask combination that makes them look like they were preparing for an Eyes Wide Shut orgy? Why is there an obsession with anonymity at all? I thought all the superheroes knew each other these days, or couldn’t they just keep their everyday masks on? And if they’re all dressed in those weird robes and masks, why isolate them from one another? Isn’t group therapy a really useful tool in helping folks cope with PTSD? There were like five plotlines in that Punisher show that argued it was. Why the fuck did Superman create robotic versions of his parents to serve as helpers there? Why go to the trouble of recording those sessions if they’re just going to be destroyed immediately and how then how does one use the Speed Force to go about reconstructing those recordings? Why do Superman and Lois collude to release the confidential files of the therapy sessions of their colleagues and why is it presented as a triumph of journalistic integrity and not a horrible moral, ethical, and legal breach?

“Tom, why don’t we take the phrase ‘Superman kicking in a skull’, and we tweak it, you know, just a hair, to something like, what, like ‘Superman strolling through a dewy meadow’.”

All of these strange and inexplicable decisions drive HiC farther and farther away from any kind of recognizable reality that a reader could draw some sort of useful allegorical moral from and into Tommy Wiseau territory. If you want to be taken seriously as a writer you have to, you know, think about things and put them in an order that makes sense while discarding ideas that you may like but that distract from the overall point you’re trying to make. King never takes the time to take all these fragments of real world things he wants to address and cool comic book shit he’d like to see and weave them into some kind of story with a momentum and internal logic of its own, instead he just jams it all in and hops from moment to moment while also trying to weight each individual moment with so much pathos and significance that you hopefully never notice that nothing actually fits with anything else.

Here King engages in a bit of wish fulfillment by offing a guy who does nothing but bleat on about philosophy. Wish King was around for a couple of my college courses…

Here’s the thing: we’re at a particular moment right now where we’re using superheroes to talk about anything and everything under the sun, and it makes sense why. This is a time when it’s really hard to have faith in any authority figure: soldiers, police officers, politicians, clergy, lawyers, doctors, teachers, parents, everyone we traditionally think of as servants of the culture all seem creepy, suspicious, fatally flawed. Superheroes are perfect because they don’t actually exist, so they’re incorruptible, they can never let us down because they never actually do anything at all. We’re a generation of adult children of divorce figuring out the world with the toys that kept us company as lonely latch key kids. I get it, but maybe there are just some things that superheroes can’t explore. Superheroes die in comics all the time, and then they come back, that’s part of the deal, I mean, Green Arrow himself died during Crisis on the Infinite Earths back in 1985, and then again 1995. It’s hard to take his mourning Roy that seriously when his resurrection at some point in the near future is virtually assured. King actually resurrected some characters (or brought them into current continuity, whichever) just to kill them again. If that doesn’t show you the weightlessness of death in superhero comics, I don’t know what does.

Imagine how alarming it’d be if actual journalists were saying this.

At their core, superhero comics are reassuring power fantasies for children (or the child within, whatever); everything, from the codenames to the bright costumes and weird powers and colorful villains are designed to function as simple morality tales and modern mythology. They can certainly be stretched to examine more adult concepts, and they have been used to great effect to explore our adult attachment to such childish creations, but using them to tackle a heavy concept like PTSD in such a literal way is kind of like dressing Scooby-Doo up like Lincoln and having him deliver the Gettysburg Address. You think it’s elevating Scooby but really it’s cheapening Lincoln.

The hug, also known as Stage 1 of Roy Harper’s Plan To Bum $20.

The art is fine in comparison to the writing, not worth the 37 paragraphs we heaped on the writing, yet that doesn’t necessarily make it good. Clay Mann is talented, yes, but is he suited to the material? Well, the material calls for a sensitivity that Mann either lacks or doesn’t bother with in the art. The problem comes down to the fact that he goes the cheesecake (read: mildly sexist at best, fucking gross at worst) route more often than not. By and large, conventional wisdom is that you don’t try to make dead bodies look sexy, but that’s what he does with Poison Ivy. Speaking of Ivy, DC actually pulled an issue’s cover (at Tom King’s request, displaying a sense of restraint he lacked when dealing with the goddamn hadjis) because it depicted her dead, dead eyed with her ass up as though Mann traced the image from a gentleman’s spank rag. Things have to be pretty fucking bad if a cover for a superhero comic is pulped for being too horny. The less said about Batgirl’s confessional by way of baring the flesh that has her bullet wound the better. Mann dedicates a splash page to the image of Lois Lane in nothing but a Superman t-shirt and panties. What in the fuck does that add to the story? It’s almost as if Mann was mistakenly told he was to work on the office-only porn parody Heroes in Cris-tits.

See, it’s like a mystery you also want to fuck… A fuckstery!

Who the hell knows what the “lesson” of Heroes in Crisis is; it’s buried under a pile of gaffes and bad puns. After some deliberation the best I could come up with is “that [Wally killing all the heroes] is why pencils come with erasers”. King clearly wants to make some point about trauma and mental health but does so with the nuance and subtlety of Brian Wood at a female artist’s convention table. No matter what, know this: Heroes in Crisis is a bad comic. Reading it is like getting teeth pulled without the luxury of painkillers. As a story, it’s convoluted and stupid. As an event, it lends little to nothing to the grander tapestry of the DC Universe. As a meditation on trauma and the sacrifices that come with being a damn hero, it suggests therapy will either kill you or depersonalize you enough to become a mass murderer. Scientology couldn’t come up with a better anti-shrink tract. It’s telling that Heroes in Crisis has had no real ramifications for DC. (Wally West started a redemption quest in some presumably terrible comics by definitely terrible Scott Lobdell, but #MeToo finally took down Ol’ Lobstrosity so now it’s a part of Scott Snyder’s eternal quest to clean up everyone else’s messes in whatever corner of Death Metal can accommodate that storyline.) It’s as though this comic is an Afghan male taken to a CIA black site: doesn’t exist and never did exist.

It’s impossible to overestimate how stupid this all is. As many Punisher comics do, this one begins with Castle mowing down a group of Italian stereotypes. They’re clearly modeled after The Sopranos; there’s a Tony and a Paulie for fuck’s sake. The Tony says something that sticks with Frank: “Capone himself would’a gave this the green light [referring to a proposed gang war with expected collateral damage]”. Al Capone, he thinks. Al Capone is the Adam of organized crime! Rather than let that fairly trite observation lie, he goes to his buddy Nick Fury and the next thing you know the fucking Punisher is in the Baxter Building, getting ready to travel back in time to 1920s Chicago so he can assassinate Al fucking Capone. What?!

“I’ll be the Paul Rudd to your Judd Apatow, Frank.”

For reasons that will become apparent at the end of the comic, Fury’s and Reed’s motivations are irrelevant but still worth exploring within the context they’re presented. Fury goes along with it because Castle asks for a favor, “and by doing it I’ll do you one. A big one”. Note: Fury doesn’t fight organized crime, he fights superspy organizations like Hydra, unless they too can be traced back to Capone’s malign influence. Reed’s involvement doesn’t even receive an explanation. It’s dark and edgy and cool to make Mr. Fantastic ethically and morally compromised, but this still doesn’t make any sense. Why would he blithely let a mass murderer muck about in the timestream? You have to assume everyone’s on a daily supply of stupid pills. The way this comic goes Zimmerman may as well have had Punisher drink from a carton of time juice like in that episode of Get A Life.

Castle arrives in 1929, as evidenced by the newspaper headline “STOCK CRASHED!!” and Louie Armstrong music omnipresent in the background. He hails a cab to Cicero where he plans on getting close to Capone by working for him. His resume consists of beating up a who’s who of Capone cronies in front of the big man and, for good measure, tossing a mook’s arm on the table. Admittedly, chopping off a guy’s arm and using it as evidence of your prowess is pretty cool. Capone tasks Frank with killing Hymie Weiss and Bugs Moran, two real historical figures. He does so with ease; a lot of the comic is wordless panels of Punisher mowing down people. Someone describes Frank using a “jujitsu chop”; was that common vocabulary in 1929? I don’t think so, but that’s neither the first nor the last anachronism in the comic. Capone invites Frank and all his other underlings to a dinner which he uses as cover to gather all the skimmers and cheaters in the organization in one place.

“Trust me, if I kill you now, Tom Hardy won’t star in a movie about your syphilis years!”

Naturally, Frank escapes his restraints and rips open his suit to reveal his skull chest emblem. Zimmerman tries to deepen the relationship between the two characters but it’s still ham-fisted and ridiculous. “Because of you, my family is dead. Everything you are is what killed them and made me.” No one more than the Punisher knows that crime has no root and that his war will never end, so him thinking that wiping out ONE mob boss in the late 1920s will suddenly prevent the prominence of organized crime in subsequent decades is moronic. A fight ensues, Castle tries to trigger the time machine but isn’t able to quantum leap into the time hole, Capone’s boys end up shooting the both of them. Both bleeding out, Frank takes a razor and finishes the job. “I did it, honey” he says with his last breath. But if he prevents all mafia executions and saves his family, he renders null his reason for going back in time in the first pla–no, I’m not going that road. I’m not watching Primer again, and not just because the director turned out to be a shitbag abuser!

Here’s the kicker: none of it happened. The final page shows Frank’s alarm clock buzzing, him ruminating that for once he got a peaceful night of sleep. Okay, so already the story is terrible, but making it a fucking dream is the cherry on top. Why even publish it? As an exercise it provides no entertainment or insight and making it a dream is one final “screw you” to the reader. I didn’t expect Castle to kill Al Capone and that being the status quo of the Marvel Universe, but “it was all a dream” is a cop-out that is rarely, if ever, satisfying. It adds no insight to the character. Wow, the Punisher dreams of killing? No shit. It’d be surprising if he didn’t dream murder and instead was, like, a struggling sous chef or something. The comic would still suck because it’s written by Ron Zimmerman, but at least it would be a change of pace.

Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers?!

Now, you’ll remember from my dissection of his Spider-Man meets Jay Leno “comic” that the telltale sign of a Zimmerman is idiotic and obtrusive pop culture references. You might think to yourself “but this comic takes place in Depression-era Chicago, that ought to preclude his usual shenanigans”. Well, you’re wrong. There’s plenty of namedropping, not just the Sopranos “homages” I brought up earlier. Frank takes a cab to Cicero and the cabbie talks about how hot Joan Crawford and Billie Holiday are. Then the guy talks about women getting the right to vote as though it’s suddenly happened as opposed to something that occurred a decade ago. Much of this makes sense only if you accept Ron Zimmerman’s research consisted of falling asleep during The Untouchables. The whopper comes before the time travel dream when the following exchange occurs between Nick Fury and Reed Richards.

Marvel of this era was obsessed with Smallville. To wit: the head of the company once published a half-assed parody of it titled Marville. (Stay tuned for a column on THAT.) I’m surprised Zimmerman didn’t sneak in a dig at “AOL Comics”, a moniker for DC now rendered ironic considering Marvel’s current ownership. …Also, just let it marinate that the smartest man in the Marvel Universe watched Smallville. I would pay cash money for Reed Richards’ reviews of the Amy Adam fat vampire episode or the one where the dad from Wonder Years is a firepowered coach.

Another failure with the comic is the inability to make Al Capone stand out as a character. Seeing as how creating an indelible portrait of the mobster would require “research” and “thought” and shit, it’s no surprise he comes off as a generic organized crime figure, no different than any other the Punisher mows down in his monthly jaunts. Capone also lacks in presence and menace. A better writer might make that the point of the issue, demythologizing Al Capone and showing him to be just another thug, but Zimmerman’s obviously not that. So what the fuck is the point? Give opportunity for the artist to draw the Punisher with a tommy gun, I suppose. Even then the results are less than stellar, a few nondescript pages in a montage at best.

The saving grace, if there is one to this mess, is that the art isn’t bad. Mike Lilly on pencils and Rodney Ramos on inks do an adequate job illustrating something that never should’ve been illustrated. The issue often uses shadow to obscure part or all of the Punisher’s face; the result is he looks otherworldly, almost demonic. It’s a nice touch when it occurs. There’s one panel that’s a Nighthawks homage for some reason. Make no mistake, the artwork isn’t excellent; it’s about what you can expect from a journeyman artist tasked with a dumbass assignment. I just want to emphasize the problems are on the scripting level.

Do Franks Dream Of Slaughtered Sheep?

In the 15 some years since its publication Punisher #8 has rightly fallen into obscurity. Yet in all their infinite wisdom, Marvel recently collected this issue along with likewise forgettable fill-in arc “Taxi Wars” because I guess everything needs to be reprinted eventually. This is how a new generation of aging fanboys will get to read this shit, unfortunately. I’m a Punisher superfan and despite that I won’t put this collection in mine. (Other exclusions include Nathan Edmondson’s racist as shit run–yes, racist even by Punisher standards.) Punisher #8 isn’t worth it even for trainwreck value. Yes, it sucks, but it does so in a “why did anyone see fit to publish this?” way, not a “you gotta fucking see it to believe it” way. I’ll be charitable in saying the premise isn’t irredeemable as long as one took a gonzo approach to it. Inglorious Basterds would be a good example. Zimmerman doesn’t and the result is stupid dreck.

Before we get into this shitshow, I want to try to explain Ron Zimmerman’s meteoric rise and fall. A writer for The Howard Stern Show, it seems Zimmerman received multiple comics writing jobs off the back of being then-Editor in Chief Joe Quesada’s buddy. Nepotism and patronage is nothing new in the comics industry, but this is a particularly galling example of it because Zimmerman is a witless hack. Far be it for me to impugn the tight scripting required for Howard Stern mentioning his tiny penis or Artie Lange describing his latest failed attempt at sobriety, but the overlap between that skill set and writing costumed adventurer stories for an aging fanbase of bitter pricks is infinitesimal. I know reading bad Wolverine comics suggests anyone can write these things, but that’s just not true, as Spider-Man/Jay Leno: You Hear About This, You See This, Spider-Man’s Got More Dead Girlfriends Than Monica Has Stains On Her Dress aptly demonstrates.

Here we are. Peter Parker is explaining to Aunt May he won’t be “home” for dinner, establishing this version of Peter is a loser who still lives with his fossil of an aunt, when his boss J. Jonah Jameson unloads an unusual request on him: ensure Spider-Man makes an appearance at a General Motors commercial shoot Jay Leno is doing, because apparently the funnyman has requested the wallcrawler do the commercial with him. Jameson doesn’t want “Leno using me or my paper for his monologue jokes from now til Christmas!” Yep, that’s the prime target of Leno’s LA-based program: New York media personalities. This made me imagine that Trump would absolutely hate Jonah. “Jameson’s failing Daily Bugle is a joke. The Scorpion is a LOSER. Can’t beat Spider-Man!!”

I want to know about the adventures of Jay Leno’s New York pals

In the most inauthentic scene in history, because it posits Leno has friends he has beers with, Jay explains he demanded Spider-Man so the crew could get a day off. More than likely the crew will have to “waste the entire day” waiting for someone who isn’t going to show up to show up, but what do I know. Meanwhile, Spider-Man busts up a mugging and discusses how NYPD Blue just isn’t the same without Jimmy Smits. “It’s not that the show is bad, I just loved that big lug.” “On the other hand,” he tells the crooks, “you guys should try to become fans of Oz. I think you’ll find it more relatable viewing.” Just be glad there’s not a prison rape joke. See, this scene is Ron Zimmerman’s bread and butter, the kind of material one only can generate if they’re a Hollywood insider like he is. Dammit, NYPD Blue is a TV show! Jimmy Smits did star on it! Since comics is filled with people so out of touch and deluded that they think kids still read this shit, these facile references to then-popular entertainment was considered a breath of fresh air, an interesting novelty. Well, until the lumbering giant that is fandom mobilized and drove him out of the industry at least.

2002’s hot commodity, Michelle Pfeiffer. I think the original reference was Farrah Fawcett but the editor (Axel Alonso of Preacher, 100 Bullets and Jay Leno & Spider-Man: One Night Only) made him change it.

To Jay’s consternation, Spider-Man appears and commercial producer/director/whatever who cares Dylan is ecstatic. To shorthand that he’s a douchebag Zimmerman has him call Jay “Jay-O”, the least convincing nickname for Leno ever. Try something like “Chin” or “Cool Ranch” or “Your Career Hinges On Hugh Grant Picking Up A Prostitute”. This being a GM commercial, the setup has the two sitting on the hood of a car. It’s at this juncture I ought to mention that the story was serialized in three parts and as such features cliffhangers. The one for part one is a stage light falls, smashing up the car and presumably killing our heroes. A running feature to this 15 page blowjob is that Leno is a regular dude who will, say, decide to help clear the debris from the car until informed it’s a “union thing” and the producer could be fired if Leno provides aid. Spider-Man thinks the stage light falling was someone trying to kill them, but Jay brushes it off as paranoia. One thing I grudgingly admit Zimmerman does well is writing Leno’s dialogue in that true to life, Zimmerman’s Leno is completely unfunny and more than a little problematic. Check it:

“I’m telling you, if Emmett Till could whistle like Banshee I’d support beating him to death!”

Guaranteed Leno has a lot of Legacy Virus monologue jokes he doesn’t want anybody dredging up. Just sayin’. Men in the audience start shooting at the pair, and Spider-Man conveniently is out of web fluid, so Jay declares “this looks like a job for a professional stand-up comedian” and that’s how you get the indelible image of the Amazing Spider-Man hanging on for dear life to Jay Fucking Leno’s motorcycle. We’re still only 66% of the way through. In the blessedly final five pager, they fight off goons while bantering about a multtitude of topics, like how nice is LA, who it is that’s being targeted for assassination, and whether or not Spider-Man could guest on The Tonight Show. It really makes you nostalgic for the patter between Jay and Pat Morita in Collision Course. Y’know, I’m surprised that’s not referenced. “Hey, this isn’t the first time I’ve traded lame barbs while pretending to be an action star!” To the surprise of no one unless you’re a stupid baby, Dylan the commercial producer hired the assassins, doing so in order to produce footage for a reality pitch he calls Surviving the Marvels. The premise seems to be every week a superhero is paired up with a celebrity and the show tries to murder them. Fine, who cares, there’s no stakes here, you might as well pull off a mask and it’s an old man achieving a real estate scheme. The “punchline” to the whole endeavor is Jay indeed invites Spider-Man on The Tonight Show and true to his prediction, Spidey freezes up. He was doing fucking talk shows as a teenager before Uncle Ben got shot, don’t give me this shit.

To my surprise, Greg Capullo provides the artwork for this mess. I think around the time this was published he was drawing Spawn, but now he’s best known for his collaborations with Scott Snyder, on Batman and the Dark Knights events. He does a thoroughly competent job (the real litmus test is if The Chin juts out enough), but it’s amusing to contemplate that one of the biggest artists in the industry once had to draw a fucking Jay Leno comic to pay the bills. I mean, it is what it is. I’m not going to begrudge a guy for taking a gig that increases exposure and gets a foot in the door at Marvel Comics, even if the project itself is embarrassing garbage. There are even some nice flourishes Capullo accomplishes, like creating a reflection in one of Spidey’s eye pieces. He also succeeds at creating a variable grotesque chin on Leno, so that the characters runs the gamut from “man with sore jaw” to “authentically Jay Leno” to “Robert Z’Dar”. When the content on the page is so inane, you’ve got to create your own entertainment and “find the most fucked up chin” is simply that.

Imagine drawing that and being able to look yourself in the mirror afterwards. It’s impossible.

The great thing about this debacle is that somewhere, deep down, Marvel knew they couldn’t actually sell a Spider-Man/Jay Leno comic. This was serialized in three parts across a number of the monthly offerings, as if to say “you want to read Priest’s Black Panther? Well fuck you, here’s some JAY LENO in the back! And you’re gonna pay for it!” They literally had to give this away and to chop it into portions such that it’s incomprehensible to anyone who doesn’t invest in at least three comics over three months. That shows a serious amount of faith in the material. I have no insider information on why the material was commissioned, but given Zimmerman’s work at Marvel reeks of “starfuckery” I imagine it was a case of “I got Jay Leno to accidentally sign a piece of paper that lets Marvel use his likeness in a piece of shit comic”.

Ron Zimmerman’s reign of terror at Marvel ended as quickly as it began. Once he made his mark with Get Kraven, Rawhide Kid: Slap Leather (the joke is he’s a gay) and Ultimate Adventures, he faded into obscurity, his only credit past 2003 being an unwanted sequel to his gay joke miniseries. OR SO I BELIEVED UNTIL I RESEARCHED FOR THIS PIECE. To my chagrin, people do not simply cease to exist when you stop thinking of them. Zimmerman is still out there, o the margins of Hollywood, picking up the scraps: he worked on a season of professional pedophile grooming program/Disney sitcom Shake It Up! and even wrote an episode of The Simpsons that I recall was pretty good. He also has a graveyard of a Twitter account that features such embarrassing occurrences such as these:

Well, he’s not a Trump supporter. There’s that at least…

Why yes, he does wear a cowboy hat.

But what can I say. I haven’t written an episode of The Simpsons. (May I mention that with Leno’s direct participation The Simpsons created a funnier and less flattering product, “The Last Temptation of Krust” from Season 9, than this garbage.) Zimmerman knows this puts him a station above so that writing credit is his Twitter banner. So yes, in that respect I am jealous of him. Not for this comic, though, which I found unreadable and a shameless ploy to ingratiate with one of the more irritating personalities to then grace our television landscape. As a Leno connoisseur I must also judge it to be poor, not as good as genuine curios like his feature film, that time he was in a John Waters picture, or the speculative fiction novel Jay Renal, which imagines a world in which everything was the same but Jay Leno was dying of renal failure. (Preorders are going fast!) There’s no reason to give this any thought because I just did all the thinking for you. You’re welcome.

Elsa Bloodstone, minor Marvel character best known for being part of Warren Ellis’ Nextwave, is scouting something in China. That something is a statue of Fin Fang Foom, apparently on behalf of a Las Vegas casino. (Hence the miniseries title.) Tony Stark happens to be in Las Vegas for rest and relaxation, plus a hotrod show. Unfortunately, a multitude of lizards collecting at the Fin Fang Foom statue prevents Tony from having a threesome with two tattooed women. The lizards are dealt with offscreen and Bloodstone seeks out Tony for help finding out who hired her to scope out the Fin Fang Foom statue, which I guess is also just Fin Fang Foom. They read an inscription, he comes to life, a couple pages of action and then cliffhanger…that is never resolved. Well worth the $8, right?

Optimistic!

I’m not sure what version of Iron Man this is supposed to be. Jon Favreau’s presence suggests the movie version but that is not the case as Tony Stark and Iron Man are repeatedly referred to as two separate entities. Tony has a mustache, not a goatee, and still orders booze. Essentially the comic stars a version of Iron Man not dissimilar to his Silver Age counterpart, sans the elaborate chestplate he must plug into the wall every now and again to prevent his heart from exploding or whatever. I can see why Marvel didn’t want to be locked in (hahahaha) to continuity that could limit the possible choices for Iron Man 2, but this alternate Tony Stark is truly weird. Who exactly wants to go back to the “Iron Man is my bodyguard, honest!” days? It was always a questionable conceit and grew more ridiculous as time marched on. This is a Marvel Knights title, therefore out of continuity, but certainly Favreau could’ve chosen better given the limitless possibilities. His Tony could’ve been black, or a squid, or Portuguese.

Usually if you want to improve upon a classic Jack Kirby design you should, uh, try to improve upon it?

You may be wondering at this juncture why I chose specifically to write about a mediocre unfinished Iron Man miniseries. Well, there’s a scene in the first issue that has nothing to do with the actual plot of the miniseries and yet it’s the reason I chose to write about this junk. Tony is on one of his company’s planes, chilling out, when suddenly a terrorist bomber makes his presence known. He suits up, takes the terrorist into the sky and lets him blow up, the armor protecting him from any harm. You’d think the passengers would be grateful that Iron Man saved them from harm, but no. Instead they complain that he didn’t negotiate with the guy, as he was willing to, and generally decry the barbarity of letting a man explode himself in midair. The punchline? These are European passengers. Did Chuck Dixon ghostwrite this comic? The xenophobic culture war nonsense comes out of left field and is, at best, an excuse for Adi Granov to draw an action sequence in an issue that is otherwise all talking and table setting. The (generically brown) terrorist doesn’t even issue any demands. I could’ve used a “Great Satan” or a “decadent West”.

And with that, Tony Stark accepts the offer of a fellowship at Prager U.

Whenever a celebrity or “celebrity” (comics’ definition has a very low floor; I’ve seen “writer on the Howard Stern Show” be described as such) deigns to write comics there’s a question of how well they adapt to the form. Even acclaimed writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates have had trouble transitioning from prose. Favreau commits the cardinal sin of not trusting the artist enough to detail and propel the narrative. As such, there’s plenty of tiresome exposition in the dialogue; lots of people telling other people about who that other person is. The first few pages of the first issue have the man accompanying her tell us all we need to know about Elsa Bloodstone. Characterization doesn’t fare well either because Stark is purely one-dimensional, all of the playboy with none of the self-reflection that kept Iron Man from being one note. Barring Pepper (because she’s his mother figure), he tries to fuck every woman in this series, even when it’s obvious they’re evil. I mean, hello, women with tattoos? By Marvel’s conservative sexuality standards that spells bad news.

The dialogue is overall pretty poor. “No one comes into my house and pushes me around!” says Iron Man to Fin Fang Foom, as though he bears any significant attachment to Las Vegas. It’s as laughable as Hillary Clinton claiming she’d always been a New York Yankees fan. Pages earlier he lets loose a painfully unfunny one-liner mimicking an announcement about keeping one’s hands inside the car and holding onto one’s belongings. Maybe all of the good lines in Iron Man were improvised by Robert Downey Jr because Favreau’s Tony Stark is a one-dimensional sexual predator. Marvel Knights is free from the constraints of Marvel’s ratings system so they really take the opportunity to make Tony a pussy hound in this. In many respects Iron Man is the American James Bond because all he does is murder people, crack jokes and fuck women with or without affirmative consent; one gets the sense without lizards encroaching on the natural habitat of gambling addicts and sex workers the miniseries would be Tony getting it wet while whetting his whistle. Imagine My Dinner with Andre with more handjobs.

A better comic would consist of Iron Man repulsor blasting little lizards every page and getting in hot water with animal rights groups.

Adi Granov has particular strengths and weaknesses in drawing comics, and Viva Las Vegas caters almost exclusively to the latter. I like Granov, but there’s a reason he does mostly covers. Striking images he succeeds at; things like dialogue scenes, fluid action, drawing more than one woman, not so much. When characters are talking it looks like they’re frozen computer models. Unfortunate that the miniseries is mainly composed of this, with the action sequences intruding halfway through the first issue and at the endof the second. The stiffness of Granov’s humans – let it be said he is a lot better at drawing armor and robots and robot dragons and shit – leads to a number of occasions for unintentional humor, when rictus grins betray the script. He’s like Greg Land without the pornographic influence.

I’ve seen Sims with more dynamic expressions.

When one reads this miniseries there’s the question of “why?”. Why this story. Frankly, it could be any number of forgettable Iron Man minis that came out to capitalize on the character’s fame from the movies. If not for the creative team. That’s what this is: an A-list creative team on a C-list filler series that no one will remember sixth months from now, much less two years. Usually Marvel puts big talent on more substantial books, ones that will have an evergreen appeal. Who in particular wants to read Iron Man vs. Fin Fang Foom for the 20^th time, although now he’s a statue robot whatever? It’d be different were this in movie continuity, then you’d have Robert Downey Jr going up against a big dragon. You can sell that shit to idiots. Even a retelling of his first encounter with the character would work. But this? Nobody cares.

It’s possible that the less than promising first two issues would have been followed by a rising tide in quality, just as it’s possible that the Wizard of Oz will grant Donald Trump a brain that allows him to master the isosceles triangle. The possibility has been closed off, of course, as there’s no desire on anyone’s part to conclude this miniseries, even with a hasty “Iron Man, Fin Fang Foom, Elsa Bloodstone and those ungrateful Europeans all died on the way to their home planet” final page placed at the end of a thinner than usual trade paperback. Joe Quesada flat out admitted Viva Las Vegas was dead in the water, which is unusual because Marvel never wants to give closure to anything. You ask them about Daredevil: The Target and they’ll still go “maaaaaaybe”. But this? Dead. It could be the parrot in a Monty Python sketch. It’s not a big loss. None of the possible directions Viva Las Vegas could go in are especially compelling; the reason it’s worth mentioning at all is it’s one of the rare instances of Adi Granov doing interior art. In the twelve years since, he has done a story in Dark Reign: The Cabal and a Captain America miniseries with Andy Diggle. So I imagine anyone dredging up Viva Las Vegas will do so looking for further Adi Granov pencils. They’ll start reading: “why didn’t they finish this?” and then go “…oh” by the time they get to the end of #2.

Issues 3 and 4 never happened because Favreau and Vince Vaughn had a dispute over how many days you wait before calling Marvel with the rest of the scripts.

Fortunately, Marvel learned the important lesson of never letting celebrity dictate their shipping schedule again and also the lesson that comics designed to capitalize on movie releases don’t sell.