Magneto #3

Magneto is another title in the All-New Marvel NOW! series I've been gushing about this year. It has a The X-Files vibe to it, as Magneto, a.k.a. Holocaust survivor Max Eisenhardt (the character played by Michael Fassbender in the movies), drifts through a desolate America (accurately portrayed as a post-Great Recession fallout zone) ruthlessly rooting out plots to murder Mutants.

The art by Gabriel Hernandez Walta is perfect. It casts the mind's eye back to early Underground comix at the same time appearing sharp and fresh. Cullen Bunn is a journeyman writer who scripts a disciplined narrative.

What I take away from Magneto is that it is a story aimed at my generational cohort: middle-aged white men on their way to senior citizenry, alone and embittered -- that the world didn't align with the expectations of their bountiful youth. The Tea Party archetype.

I live in a neighborhood that attracts aspiring, educated young adults, the generational cohort I was a member of when I first landed here. At that time the neighborhood was more bohemian. But a steady current of gentrification razed the last Hippie house more than 15-years ago and has priced all the artsy types out as high-rise apartment buildings and condominiums have shot up along Broadway. Now, rather than the hard-partying Grunge rocker, it is the young professional with the well-scrubbed look of entitlement that populates the community.

I'm not complaining. The neighborhood is much more quiet today, despite the increased density, than it was a decade ago when Friday- and Saturday-night bacchanals were a common occurrence. I'm slightly out of place though because of my gray beard; I am something of an anachronism, like a dinosaur walking about in the age of mammals.

And that is part of the beauty that Bunn and Hernandez Walta (Javier Fernandez Barranco, who provides the art for several issues, as well) bring to Magneto -- a feeling of being out of place and out of one's time.

Below you will find scans of the cover to Magneto #3, art by Declan Shalvey, as well as ten interior pages, art by Gabriel Hernandez Walta; colors by Jordie Bellaire. Cullen Bunn has Magneto tracking down a secret government lab creating human-Sentinel cyborgs. Magneto, the Mutant master of magnetism, takes care of the deceptively attractive female scientist (who resembles the young professional women in my neighborhood) by inserting two paper clips under the skin of her arm.

The Defenders #10

Recently I read all the issues of The Defenders, Vol. 4, which kicked off at the end of 2011 and then was cancelled at the beginning of 2013 with issue #12. Matt Fraction authored the comic book throughout its run, and I'm sorry to say that for the most part -- and by this I mean something like three out of every four issues -- were tired, distracted, emotionless loops around the superhero comic carousel. Don't get me wrong. I'm a fan of Matt Fraction. I loyally read his Hawkeye, Vol. 4, a brilliant, refreshing, cutting-edge book. And I said before on this page that his Invincible Iron Man will go down in the history books as synonymous with the period of hope and change (it turned out to be delusional) that Obama's 2008 campaign and first years in the White House ushered in. But what I have also noticed is that Fraction is willing to pimp himself out to the point of overextension. His work then tends to the overly sarcastic and thin. I'm thinking here of his run on The Mighty Thor.

The Defenders when it first appeared in the early 1970s was unique in spotlighting a team of outcasts. This was Marvel's answer to the recently spawned "One Nation Underground." The social upheaval of the late 1960s might have been checkmated politically by Nixonland, the "Silent Majority," but at the end of the day in the United States you still had an enormous counter culture, a massified bohemia that had its own newspapers, grocery stores, film and music -- and those tastes were coming to dominate the mainstream majority.

Roy Thomas, like so much that he did for Marvel in the early '70s, was just being a shrewd businessman when he stuck a Greenwich Village beatnik (Doctor Strange), with a Gamma-powered Frankstein monster (Hulk), a cosmically-juiced master of the spaceways (Silver Surfer) and last but not least, Marvel's founding anti-hero, the underwater Tecumseh, Namor the Sub-Mariner. This was a group that could speak to the Hippies.

Below you'll find five scans from Fraction's The Defenders #10. The cover, by Joe Quinones, is a wonderful homage to the early Bronze Age. The four stunning interior pages are by Jamie McKelvie with Mike Norton; Jordie Bellaire provides the color. The final page pictures Red She-Hulk wiping out a crow.