AXIS #2

As far as I know AXIS is the latest, and yet to be succeeded, Marvel crossover event. It has already run its course. But I am just catching up with it. Last weekend I got as far as AXIS #2. Rick Remender, who I often rave about on this page, takes his shot at scripting the hub storyline of a crossover. Adam Kubert provides the art. The narrative, as recapitulated in the second scan, seeks to tie up the AvX crossover, which concluded with the death of Professor X and a spontaneous outbreak of new Mutants. Red Skull has pilfered the super-powerful brain from Professor's X's corpse and used it to spread hate globally with the intention of wiping out Mutantkind. In AXIS, the Red Skull is reborn as Red Onslaught, a colossal mind-controlling telepathic demon.

All the action in AXIS #1 & AXIS #2 takes place in the Mutant homeland of Genosha, an island off the coast of Africa north of Madagascar. It has the feel of the climax of a Hollywood action blockbuster where the final fight scene always seems to take place in an abandoned warehouse.

To make a long story short, AXIS is a big disappointment. Maybe it will improve. I don't know. But the first two issues are extremely weak. Adam Kubert's art is juvenile; Remender's writing, exhausted.

Marvel's crossovers seem to be multiplying and getting weaker with each new iteration. The heyday, what really drew me back to reading comic books, was the strength of Brian Michael Bendis' Secret Invasion, Dark Reign and Siege crossovers as each led organically into the next. The storytelling was inventive and impactful.

And while there were one or two nice installments in Matt Fraction's Fear Itself, it has become increasingly apparent with AvX and Age of  Ultron that a commercial format is preceding any meaningful substance. Now Marvel appears to be committed to running two crossover simultaneously -- for instance, AXIS and Original Sin --  something which I don't think can be sustained.

The executives of Marvel seem to be of the mind that they can do it all: the crafty, compelling, fresh features of All-New Marvel NOW! as well as the bloated big ticket blockbuster like AXIS. I am doubtful. Eventually the reader's allegiance will evaporate.

In the scans below from AXIS #2 Iron Man battles Sentinels he secretly designed to exterminate all his brother and sister superheroes. Red Onslaught has acquired control of the Stark Sentinels.

Black Widow #4

I hit a sweet spot last Saturday. There is one 5K that is my favorite. It takes place in a residential neighborhood at the the city's northern edge at the end of September. A guy who has some sort of association with the Catholic Church there organizes the foot race. I enjoy it so much because there aren't too many runners; there are enough so that there is plenty of good competition; everyone has enough room to maneuver and there is just the right amount of spacing that makes for optimal pacing.

I ended running a decent race. And while my time was not a personal best, or even what I would call a normal performance based on what I've done over the last several years, it was the first race I have run since I injured my foot in May where I felt like I was on my way back, that the finish line for my long convalesce is just around the bend.

The early fall weather was gorgeous and the light was perfect. I took my runner's high back to my studio apartment where I dug into Black Widow, part of All-New Marvel NOW! series of titles.

When I started reading comic books as an elementary-school kid, one of the first titles I followed was Daredevil. This was at a time, 1971 to 1975, when the blind costumed crime fighter was teamed with Natasha Romanova, the Black Widow. They lived together unmarried (though sleeping on separate floors of their apartment in order to satisfy the moral strictures of the weakened but still functioning Comics Code Authority) in the Hippie Mecca of swinging San Francisco.

The backstory is that Daredevil was going to being rolled into a comic book with another flagging Marvel superhero title, Iron Man, but Gerry Conway, who would also co-create The Punisher during the Watergate era of cultural ferment, had the idea instead to hook Matt Murdock up with Natasha Romanova and move them out of New York City to the West Coast capital of the counterculture. The idea worked and the title proved to be popular.

The Black Widow originally was a beautiful Russian spy, a run-of-the-mill mid-'60s "Bond Girl," when she appeared in the Iron Man title Tales of Suspense. 

Eventually she was clad in a costume (a fishnet leotard with a Cinderella ball mask) and teamed with former circus act Hawkeye to take on the Golden Avenger.

Then Black Widow defected, joined Nick Fury's S.H.I.E.L.D., and becomes part of the American war machine. In 1970 she assumes the look we have come to identify with the character, and the one she wears in her present title -- the long red hair and the black, form-fitting scuba-suit-like full-body unitard with a pan flute shooting out rappelling line wrapped around each wrist.

After the Inhumans proved to be more of a draw, Marvel drops Black Widow from Amazing Adventures; that is when the character begins her run in Daredevil.

As a kid I remember thinking that the Daredevil-Black Widow relationship seemed like the man-woman ideal, that which would be awaiting me when I reached adulthood: a romantic pairing of co-equals, each powerful and self-assured, assisting one another in doing good and making the world a better place.

Of course as each of us comes to find out in his or her own way, the exact opposite is usually the case. Adult couplings between the sexes are for the most part a toxic neurotic stew of co-dependency, a combat of the vicious and needy to see who can drag the other one down to the pit the quickest. Yet the duel turns out to be none too quick; it goes on for years, in some cases a lifetime. Really the war goes on forever, waged unconsciously, passed down from generation to generation in a plodding somnambulant trail of tears. The world is not made a better place. Anyhow, that's one bachelor's perspective.

What makes this latest run of Black Widow so enjoyable is that Nathan Edmondson tells a story of a woman who is singularly alone -- not paired up with Buck Barnes assuming the role of Captain American, or Daredevil, or Hawkeye. This Black Widow is a worker working jobs (assassinations, etc.) to earn money so that she might pay the families of the victims left in the wake of her prolifically violent career. Natasha Romanova keeps her distance from people as best she can. There are those she has to deal with to do the job. But her private life is kept as clear as possible of all human entanglements.

Edmondson describes the warrior's way, but I found, reclining on my mattress on the floor on a Saturday afternoon, that he was describing my life as well. Not that I leap from rooftop to rooftop to trade punches with super-powered madmen; but that I am a solitary individual who outside of work is keenly aware of the distance I keep from others; I am also like the comic-book Romanova woman in that I am constantly carrying on a conversation with myself as to the wisdom of this practice.

Below you will find seven scans, including cover page, from Black Widow #4. The art is by Phil Noto who I think does incredible work accentuating the sense of Black Widow's solitariness and isolation. There is a gauzy, spacious quality to the panels. It is like looking at a comic-book version of Antonioni's The Passenger (1975):

Secret Avengers #16

The best way to read a comic book is with lots of natural light. This makes spring and summer the best months. What I find is that a post-run endorphin high improves the experience as well. I stumbled upon this one evening after work. It was early summer. I was just back from a run in Fort Tryon Park. The light coming through my sixth floor studio apartment windows was ample and had a green-tinted aqueous quality. I dug into an Iron Man comic book. At that point I probably hadn't read a comic book in a decade. The experience was mind-blowing. Iron Man battled Mandarin and a bunch of dragons on mainland China. I was young, fit and my brain was coursing with natural opioids. I flew along with Tony Stark as he fought in mid-air with the dragons; plus, Mandarin blasting away with those damn rings of his. The green of the dragons was highlighted by the green light pouring through my open windows. From that point forward, this would have been 1991, I was convinced that comic books are much more than a juvenile, toss-off media. Now this is widely acknowledged not only by aesthetes but Wall Street as well since comic-book-derived blockbusters keep the big studios afloat.

Secret Avengers, currently in its third volume, has never been much more than mediocre. (Though that is not entirely true -- Rick Remender's volume one run was noteworthy for its exploration of artificial life.) I think Secret Avengers was designed to maintain a sinister vibe in Marvel's Avengers franchise once Dark Avengers, the seminal Marvel title during the early days of the Obama administration, was cancelled.

I must say I greatly enjoyed the last issue, Secret Avengers #16, of the second volume, seven scans from which you can inspect below. In the first four, Mockingbird fights a battle to the death with A.I.M. Scientist Supreme, Dr. Andrew Forson. It is always good to see a tertiary hero get some time in the spotlight. Artist Luke Ross outdoes himself here. He maintains Mockingbird's femininity but captures the brutality of the fight with Forson. She takes a knife to the pelvis and returns it by forcing the blade into Forson's face. Ross's use of multiple inset panels to capture the action is superb. As an example of the medium, I don't think it gets any finer.

Then, for the pièce de résistance, take a look at the last three scans of a wasted Mentallo sitting on an A.I.M. Island beach at sunset as nanobots trickle out of his ear and into the surf (capturing sort of what I felt like reading that post-work, post-run Iron Man comic book long ago). Writers Nick Spencer and Ales Kot are to be praised.

Where Monsters Dwell #26: Metallo

Where Monsters Dwell #26, which had a publication date of January 1974, reprints Tales of Suspense #16 from April 1961. It is a Lee-Kirby story, one that has the feel of being dashed off quickly. But like so many of the Lee-Kirby Silver Age monster tales, it is illuminating to read as a precursor of a Marvel superhero; in this case Iron Man, who debuts two years later in Tales of Suspense #39.

"The Thing Called Metallo!" tells the tale of a hardened convict who escapes from the penitentiary and makes his way to the metropolis hoping to blend in and disappear. Fretful that he will be discovered because of the thickness of police on the streets, he decides to volunteer to be an experimental subject. The military is researching a nuclear-blast-resistant, fully-automated lead suit. The escaped convict learns of the military's test by seeing the front page of a newspaper that a newsboy is hawking on the street. 

(The use of a newspaper headline to point the narrative action is a device frequently employed by Stan Lee. Now that no one reads newspapers anymore in public, Lee would have to have his criminal or space alien sneak a peek at someone's tablet or smart phone. Not quite the same, is it?)

The military accepts the escaped convict who assumes the alias George Brown and run him through a series of tests. First, he is placed on a tiny atoll in the middle of the ocean and a nuclear bomb is detonated. The island is completely submerged but the suit is watertight and apparently has its own oxygen supply. The escaped convict is able to fight off a giant octopus. Super-strength is included as well in the suit's features.

After the test on the atoll the military hangs the suited-up Mr. Brown from a helicopter and fires a nuclear missile at him. This is where the storytelling gets sloppy. Even a sheltered, jejune schoolboy in Jack Kennedy's America would question -- I hope -- how the helicopter, which enjoyed none of the high-tech lead shielding that swaddled the escaped convict, could withstand the blast of a nuclear missile. But it does and so does the escaped convict.

It is after the mid-air test that the escaped convict reveals his true identity to the military, adopts the name Metallo! and takes off for San Francisco by stowing away in a tractor trailer that is conveniently passing by on a New Mexico highway.

Metallo breaks into a bank vault in San Francisco by burrowing underground. He then gets the idea to put together an army of convicts by swimming out to Alcatraz and liberating the incarcerated. Once there he falls ill. It is at this point that I am thinking that Lee is going to spring lead poisoning on his readers, that the escaped convict spent too much time in the experimental lead suit and he was getting sick from exposure. But I guess lead poisoning was not as widely acknowledged in 1961 as it is today. Metallo is diagnosed as suffering from a "malignant disease" based on a verbal examination given by the medical staff at Alcatraz (see the last scan). The cure is radiation treatment. But in order to be treated the escaped convict would have to exit his suit, which would mean finishing life in prison.

Unable to decide what to do -- die in his suit or behind bars -- Metallo in the last panel of the comic book wanders off into the coastal mountains of California. An impenetrable suit of armor comes with a high price. One is never truly invulnerable.

Below are scans of the cover, the two splash pages, a couple interior pages along with individual panels that I enjoyed:

New Avengers #8

Jonathan Hickman is working on some big themes in The New Avengers, another excellent Marvel Now! title. How does multi-dimensional annihilation strike you for size? Namor, Beast, Iron Man, Reed Richards, Black Panther, Doctor Strange, Black Bolt -- big hitters one and all -- are dealing with a situation where infinite worlds from other dimensions are cued up to collapse on our own in a cosmic display of super dominoes. Extreme events call for extreme measures. So the New Avengers have created a bunch of mega-bombs to blow up the fully-populated alternate worlds in an attempt to buy themselves -- and our planet -- some time to figure a way out of total destruction.

Jonathan Hickman is a bona fide brainiac and gifted writer. Mike Deodato, who succeeds Steve Epting, provides art that is suitably grand. This is a fine comic book and I've enjoyed reading it. It taps into a sense of doom that is so prevalent today.

Below are three scans from the first few pages of The New Avengers #8. On the third page Tony Stark is addressing our current real-world situation, and not just the comic-book narrative he is appearing in:

I think everything is breaking down.

This world, this system, our galaxy ... the fundamental underpinnings of ... well, like I said ... everything.