More denting the backlog:
Blue Beetle: Shellshocked (Book 1): Eh. It's competently told, more or less, full of likeable characters, and over six issues doesn't manage to complete the origin. (Nor show me how he was swept off into Infinite Crisis before disappearing for a year; don't assume I read any precursor material, you assholes.) There's a failed Phantom Stranger cameo, a good Oracle/Black Canary cameo, an incomprehensible Guy Gardner cameo. The costume design is clever, what with the Kirby face marks and the scarab legs wrapping around the body, but that's all it has going for it; I don't feel any emotional connection to it because it's so dehumanizing. The primary ethical questions are all dilemmas based upon damaging relationships (Brenda: Jaime or aunt; Paco: Jaime or gang; Jaime: being the Beetle damages his family), so I'm not going to throw any parades for that, since a dilemma has no happy resolution by definition.
I'll look at Book 2, since Giffen is gone at that point.
Empowered vol 1 and 2: Is trying to be funny and sort of succeeds, and is trying to be a certain kind of sexy and sort of succeeds, and is trying to satisfy a fetish I don't have at all. The first book is quite painful up until the point when the stories stop being about just humiliating and degrading her and she gets a boyfriend and a best friend and a wacky roommate and occasionally has a good time herself. At that point, it becomes a sitcom, one of those sitcoms that tries to get its laughs from heaping disaster on the lead. Plus a lot of bondage.
Adam Warren would benefit, I think, from trying to draw faces that are recognizably human.
The first half of the first book is pretty deeply misogynistic, and I suspect that the whole thing is as well, but that depends on the interaction of fetish and feminism, which is not something I feel competent to discuss.
Hellboy: Darkness Calls: Mike Mignola is a great artist and designer. As a writer, he has certain pedestrian characteristics. In particular, most Hellboy scenes consist of evil/mysterious occult creature spouting long-winded, polysyllabic, deeply purple speeches of varying levels of inscrutability, interspersed with Hellboy responding monosyllabically, and often failing to even finish a phrase. So linguistically outmatched, Hellboy's physical prowess is a styleless rejoinder.
Duncan Fegredo, on art duties, does a flawless Mignola style.
Ms. Marvel: Brian Reed is an adequate superhero writer. There is no decompression, this is standard puncheminnaface stuff. Ms. Marvel herself is aware that in the course of the Civil War, she and her side have done some very wrong things. It's an interesting ethical situation (cue Henley again), because she's made some attempts to put right the things she herself put wrong, but she still adheres to Iron Man's side. His transgressions are, to her ethical perspective, not yet irredeemable. Compare to She-Hulk, whose proximity to Stark's monstrous betrayal of the Hulk meant that Stark was quite thoroughly irredeemable. Ms. Marvel may be thinking that by making the right ethical choices herself, she can influence the rest of SHIELD to make similarly right choices.
I am mildly disappointed that Jessica Jones (Carol Danvers' best friend) has had no appearance in the book for more than a year (in a time when she has a newborn baby). Is Jones appearing anywhere?
Aaron Lopresti does a fine job on the art, and the combination of my recent blocs of reading of this book and She-Hulk and Dave Stevens' death have pointed out to me that I'm, um, focusing perhaps most of my superhero attention on superheroines who feature good girl art. I am a sad and very, very lonely straight man, apparently.
Posted by Greg at March 12, 2008 11:52 PM
I didn't read the early (this version of the) Blue Beetle material, but I've enjoyed the last 18 months or so.
Once Rogers takes over from Giffen, Blue Beetle goes from merely good to quite exceptional. The transition is slow, but since Rogers is doing dialogue during the partnership, his strength at banter helps lift that boat pretty quickly. But he's the main reason the majority of BB issues in 2007 got "strongly recommended" from me.
I didn't mind the original 6 of Beetle, especially after I initially was avoiding it out of protest to the Kord version. I enjoyed this one. Had an Invincible vibe to it and mostly in a good way without ripping it off completely (which is, in itself, borrowing from years of teenager-becomes-superhero stories). Looking forward to the next trade.
Beetle gets a lot better once Rogers gets into his stride. The latest issue is amazing, chock full of heroic moments from both Jaime and his supporting cast, and the evolution of Jaime from scared teenager with a super-weapon to worthy successor to a legacy is naturally developed step by step instead of being rammed down our throats.
If only Kyle Rayner had been handled as well.
Blue Beetle really takes off and gets super-fun by the next trade. Rogers is humming along.
So, of course, DC yanked him off the book for an upcoming project and replaced him with Will fucking Pfiefer.
Empowered was allegedly created by Warren because he kept getting bondage commissions and got sick of it, and tried to spin it into something fun. Not once, apparently, has he breached the question that if that particular fetish bothers him so much, he could simply take the financial hit and not do those commissions.
I suppose it's not surprising, then, that no matter how good the series gets, I'm always asking the question "If superheroing makes her so miserable, why doesn't she just stop?"
I'm sure that an Evan Dorkin or Heidi MacDonald could spin an existential essay about this, that Comics Destroy You, etc., when more simply, no one put a gun to Warren's head and made him accept bondage commissions, and no one's got a gun to Empowered's head making her do a job she hates where no one likes her.
For someone who's been writing her for two years, Brian Reed doesn't like Carol Danvers very much.
The background material in Empowered vol. 1 lead me to believe that Warren started spinning stories about the character because he found the pin-up commission work boring, not bothersome. Perhaps I'm under-reading.
And it's clear--I think even in the first volume--that Empowered feels a mixture of obligation, satisfaction, and, yes, empowerment when her superheroing goes well. Don't underestimate the power of intermittent positive reinforcement.
Ditto what KJM says, both about Warren's attitude toward the series, and why Emp doesn't quit.
I'll amplify the latter a bit: Captain Rivet actually likes her (and compliments her from time to time), she did defeat her wacky roommate when everyone else had failed, and she saves people and stops bad guys from time to time, even if rarely. So she gets what she wants from superheroing, just not as often as she'd like.
Hmmm, it's just that she suffers so often I wonder what's the point, other than a meta-statement on How Horrible Comics Are, which I don't really care about.
Then again, it's clear by the second volume Warren's building to something more interesting, and I've already got the third volume pre-ordered off Amazon, so he wins.
Just finished reading the first trade of Blue Beetle. I'm not finding it as fun or interesting as others so far. I am told that it picks up, so I'll probably give the second collection a shot as well.