So what's going on at Marvel NOW?

That's a Marvel NOW! joke, that is. Though, I think, the answer is actually All-New All-Different Marvel NOW! Which like, guys, get it together. I guess they can't all be as to-the-point as "the heroic age," but they sure can be as meaningless.

Well geez, it certainly sounds like maybe I'm not super high on Marvel these days, HMM? Jury's still out. That's not entirely fair to say. I WILL say that spending a few years thinking critically about every single thing a company publishes and several of their business moves probably will highlight some cracks for any company. That said, Marvel, for a publisher whose goal was once, roughly stated, "everything should feel like change and then be reset," is doing a pretty good job shifting its focuses. I will give credit forever and ever to their attempts at diversifying their books? Has it come slower and later than it probably should have? Of course, but where hasn't that been true? That said, just a few years from Marvel having, for example, no women-led books among its releases, Marvel now boasts a catalog that seems pretty evenly split between male and female solo titles. They've also more readily introduced non-white, non-straight characters at a relatively good clip (granted, the "relatively" there is relative to the seventy years that preceded the last few). These are all excellent steps. And, perhaps more importantly, they've largely been successful because of the quality of the books, not just the enormity of the statement. Books like MS. MARVEL and SPIDER-GWEN are among the best books the company has right now and, for all my equivocating, it still means something to be on the top of the pile at Marvel.

So Marvel has made a lot of good strides in a pretty short time (again, short meaning "within the last few years, primarily"). It's a little hard to look back objectively to the end of 2012, when I started this blog. I was a huge Marvel fan (still am, despite all this back-and-forth) and I was reading every book still, but I could feel that we were on the precipice of something big. Talent and ideas were clearly in the right place and the slew of books on the horizon seemed very exciting to me. I was right. Got a nose for it, I guess. I should also say, as I warn in just so many of my posts (and feel implicitly warn in the whole idea of this dang ol' blog), I was right for me. For me, these were really great books. SPIDER-MAN was doing something really interesting, the whole AVENGERS/NEW AVENGERS franchise felt like a true powerhouse, Gillen and McKelvie got their hands on the perfect Marvel property in YOUNG AVENGERS, and solo titles, which had been sort of floundering a bit for a few years, had found an incredible groove with HAWKEYE, CAPTAIN MARVEL, DAREDEVIL and X-MEN LEGACY, to name just a few favorites. Sure, Bendis had taken his typical annoy-Tim-as-much-as-possible writing style over to the X-MEN corner of the Marvel Universe, but I could swap that for the interesting Fraction FANTASTIC FOUR/FF run we got in return.

So what happened? Calling out events is probably the hip (and accurate) thing to do and I'm quite hip, you see. The best and worst thing about these massive events is that they envelop everything they touch. For these universe-spanning stories to actually feel big enough, they have to...well, span the universe, I suppose. So books that have their own good thing going have to hit the pause button on that momentum and throw in a couple of issues to aid the event. Best case scenario (and, ultimately, Marvel does get this scenario a fair amount), the series produces a pretty good issue and doesn't stray too far from where it was before the event knocked on its door. Worst case: a series loses all the velocity it had (and maybe a series artist in the process) and can't ever really regain it.

The other thing, though, is that creators are people too. People get tired of the sandbox they're in and want to play in another one for a while. Or, in the case of artists especially, deadlines force series artists to hand the reins to guest artists on occasion (for one or multiple issues) or to simply take a book off their plate entirely. I don't want to point any blame at momentum loss on guest artists or anything like that; they're typically very good artists as well. The best books have a complete feel to them, though, and the artist is every bit as responsible for that feel as the writer (and the colorist, for that matter). Losing a series artist partway through a run can change the entire feel of that run, regardless of how good the replacement is.

So events can disrupt good books and those pesky human creators can just straight up leave good books and then Marvel is left scrambling to put something new and fresh out there. Probably every Renaissance has some sort of cool-down period right after, as the next wave of creators begins to get comfortable.

And here's the thing: I wasn't super jazzed about much of what 2015 (and maybe 2014, even, I don't super remember, you guys) had to offer, but now we're coming to that point again, where people and ideas are in place once more. I don't think the last couple years have been bad for Marvel, necessarily, just slower than the years immediately before that. I'll make a post soon about what I think some of the highlights of Marvel are right now, but I can give you a spoiler: they're mostly solo books these days. And a lot of them are really very good.


Sorry if this came off as weirdly condescending to the creators of the last couple years. For real, I think there are a lot of really talented creators and a lot of great books that have been carrying on the last few years, I just think things were running a little slow in general (maybe we can also attribute that to Marvel proper essentially shutting down for SECRET WARS most of last year).

Marvel's 2015-2016 in movies

I missed ALL OF THESE! Let's talk just a little about the Marvel releases since this blog went underwater (that's what happens when anything on the internet goes away. So many Angelfire Atlantises).

Avengers: Age of Ultron

This one suffered amongst fans and critics alike for, I guess, not being The Avengers. That said, I liked it rather a lot. It felt like a movie that knew its characters very well and created an interesting situation for said characters to deal with. It certainly wasn't perfect; Age of Ultron drags a bit in the middle and, likely thanks to the studio, ties its hands a little by cementing its place as a building block in the Marvel Cinematic Universe rather than its own removed entity, but that's to be expected with such a huge franchise (especially given that the Avengers films will likely always be very concerned with building towards the next big thing). That aside, we got good characters in Pietro and Wanda Maximoff (whose introduction felt fitting for comics fans without being a carbon copy of the source material) and in Paul Bettany's Vision. Some good jokes, some decidedly fun action, and plenty of character development for a movie that would surely have survived on action and brand recognition alone (*cough* Batman vs. Superman *cough*) make AoU a very nice addition to the MCU. It seems like the movie's biggest crime was that it wasn't as big of a surprise as its predecessor, which is like saying that Aristotle was a real let-down when compared to Plato. I'm sure Marvel's happy to have both in its stable.

Ant-Man

It goes without saying that nobody likes Ant-Man. Like, it's Ant-Man. Don't give me any "oh, sure, Hank Pym is real plain toast and one time hit his wife, but he's not so bad" or any "Eric O'Grady sure is an interesting character!" Like, sure, Scott Lang is your best option; a good guy thief, jailed for trying to save the life of his daughter (the way more fun Cassie Lang who, truth told, is probably only in our hearts because of her ties to the Young Avengers), but saying Catdog is the best cartoon starring a cat/dog creature doesn't really scream praise for Catdog now does it? Anyway, all this to say that the movie was fun. Yup, that was a real turn, right? I have some complicated feelings towards this movie. I like Paul Rudd and I like his inclusion in this universe (after Civil War, I'm pretty sure we're just slowly morphing him into Bobby Newport, which is the best of all possible MCUs) and I thought the movie, while probably the most paint-by-numbers Marvel has yet been (which is probably saying something in its own right), was more than entertaining enough to merit a favorable review, it's hard not to see a better movie creeping in at the seams. That's right, this mini-review, which started with a rant about Ant-Man turned into a positive review about Ant-Man and is now turning into a glowing review about a movie that was never made: Edgar Wright's Ant-Man. Wright, as we probably all now know, was literal years deep into his Ant-Man movie when he abruptly was removed from/left the picture. Rumors have it down to Marvel's insistence that the movie tie in to the greater universe vs. Wright's control freak director personality, which has yielded unbelievably good movie after unbelievably good movie. Marvel's done well for itself since it hired Wright (allegedly) to work on an Ant-Man movie, so I can't really fault them for wanting to continue to build and to change their original promise to Wright (a hypothetical promise; it makes sense to me that they'd have offered Wright full control over the title before they really knew how big they'd get), but Wright is an excellent filmmaker and was a perfect choice for this project. Let him do what he does and get out of his way. You can still see very Wright-esque shots in this perfectly acceptable version of the movie, but those shots only let you see just how delightfully quick Ant-Man could have been.

Captain America: Civil War

Why even mess around? This is quite possibly the best movie Marvel has put out yet and it has absolutely no right to be. This many characters, both new and old, appearing in a film (some for only ten or so minutes) is a recipe for disaster, as so many examples have shown (WHAT UP, SPIDER-MAN 3 AND X-MEN 3?). The Russo brothers, though, have a story they want to tell and set to work expertly telling it and bringing in all the pieces they need to tell it most effectively and efficiently. The movie moves exceedingly well for it's two and a half hour runtime and every character gets at least a few good moments throughout. Special mentions to their treatment of Spider-Man (and the performance of young Tom Holland), which really defines just how the next wave of Spidey movies could turn out, and to both their treatment of Black Panther and Chadwick Boseman's stellar performance as the Wakandan royal. Excellent character work throughout with a few killer action sequences (Marvel has, very intelligently, made every single one of their characters' fight styles distinctive so it's easy to watch a longer fight sequence and still lose yourself in it) and a really tight, exciting, and, most important of all, different story launches this entry right up to the top of Marvel's best.


BONUS ROUND:
X-Men: Age of Apocalypse

I walked out of this movie saying to my fiancee, "boy, Bryan Singer sure knows how to make a competent movie." I like the way this X-Men film series is going, but none of the movies its spawned strike me as particularly great movies. They are, however, eminently watchable. There aren't ever particularly exciting ideas (though one could make an argument that placing these movies smack dab in the middle of real world events like the Cold War and the JFK assassination and, just, the '80s, I guess is a decidedly compelling idea) or particularly outstanding writing. The characters who always seem to be the most focused-upon and, perhaps therefore, interesting are Professor X and Magneto, which isn't exactly a bold new direction for the X-Men franchise as a whole. This movie, for example, introduced Jean Grey, Cyclops, Nightcrawler, Storm, Psylocke, and Angel, to name a few, and yet I walked away feeling like only Professor X and Magneto had really developed as characters (maybe Jean a little bit, but that's starting from zero, where development should be easy). Granted, I really only find three of the characters I mentioned in that "just introduced" group genuinely interesting in X-Men lore (HINT: none of my picks are original X-Men), but still there should be more there. Obviously they're intending to build on those characters specifically as we move forward (well, maybe not Angel, there aren't many places for him to go post-Apocalypse. Frankly, I'd be a little surprised if they go back to Psylocke, which is a dang shame, but then again, she wasn't even British in the movie, come on), but this was the chance to lay a foundation and, instead, we got another movie about Magneto, Professor X, and boring ol' Mystique. Still, I'll put on FXX when this one is on, won't I? Just like with First Class and Days of Future Past (for what it's worth, Iron Man 3 and Thor: The Dark World don't get that kind of treatment).

Real late SECRET WARS thoughts

...that would have been more effective if these blog posts stacked the other way.


The last real post I made here was skepticism about Marvel's 2015 summer event SECRET WARS. With the benefit of hindsight, was that skepticism well-founded? I would answer "YUP."

Here's the thing: I actually rather liked SECRET WARS. The architect of the entire event was Jonathan Hickman, a writer I've come to really love. On top of writing Marvel standouts like FANTASTIC FOUR, SECRET WARRIORS, AVENGERS, and NEW AVENGERS, Hickman has also written a number of outstanding creator-owned books, like THE DYING AND THE DEAD, THE MANHATTAN PROJECTS, and, my personal favorite (like, maybe ever), EAST OF WEST. Hickman had previously helmed the Marvel crossover event INFINITY, back from the days when I was still writing on this thing. I quite liked INFINITY, actually; it was a very bold crossover, one that felt like it really did require a crossover to complete, and it was appropriately massive. I reiterate all that now because SECRET WARS was very much in this camp.

Hickman's run on AVENGERS and NEW AVENGERS set things up for INFINITY just fine, but NEW AVENGERS in particular had been building to SECRET WARS since the first issue back in 2013 (which was also an excellent comic). It was a Claremontian set-up on an even larger scale, and one that promised to have repercussions well beyond the event.

And it was good! Again, I liked SECRET WARS. The main story was compelling and many of the tie-ins (the entire Marvel line shut down for SECRET WARS, opting to end every ongoing book in favor of limited series tie-ins that took place in various locations throughout the SECRET WARS Battleworld map) were equally interesting. The biggest issue with the whole thing is that it pressed on way longer than it should have or, indeed, was scheduled to (seemingly from a delay on the creative team's end). If your whole line is reliant on a very specific schedule, you better make sure you keep to that schedule. Marvel couldn't here (as they probably should have predicted), and therefore ended up needing to start their brand new line of comics before we'd learned the fate of the old one. In some cases, this was kind of interesting; the Fantastic Four were entirely off the map and only mentioned in oddly cryptic tones. In others, it was a little deflating; Miles Morales was suddenly in the Marvel Universe proper, and Doctor Strange was starring in his own book, decidedly not dead (okay, it was obviously exciting he wasn't dead, but still, he died in SECRET WARS and was back in his own book before SECRET WARS had ended). There were, sadly, far more cases of the latter than the former (including the very simple fact that there was a Marvel Universe and that many of the characters had survived, a spoiler in itself, albeit one we probably could have predicted).

It all comes back to the same problem events seem to always have: a good idea was presented in an imperfect fashion, which made everything tied to it weaker. There's also the increasing event fatigue that is tied to every event now, which is compounded by the far more dangerous problem Marvel keeps walking right into: if every book has to go on hold (or be cancelled) for every event, and you're going to have a new massive event every half-year or year, you'll never be able to establish a really strong character/team/story. We're mid-way through 2016 now and some books are still just barely starting up (notable entries include BLACK PANTHER, MOON KNIGHT, and BLACK WIDOW, which are all still on their third or so issue) and this summer's massive event CIVIL WAR II has just started up as of this week. Even if CIVIL WAR II is a massive success (I have my doubts), it will have slowed other books' growth. It's very possible that by the time those books find their grooves, they'll be absorbed into the next event, or the creative team that got them that far will be moving on. How can we embrace new characters or give another chance to some old ones if writers and artists are given a proper chance to establish them?

So SECRET WARS was a good event, but it was an event all the same. A lot of worthwhile stories and issues and characters made their respective ways out of it, but I think the line is weaker as a whole for it. Stay tuned for CIVIL WAR II, I guess?

Welcome to 2016

If you want to be pedantic and start arguing over when a "welcome to 2016" sort of post should have come, maybe you're better off looking elsewhere.

Here's the thing: from 2013 to now, I've written just under 900 blog posts for this site. And I took 2015 almost entirely off. So even with that, my output is still about a post every day and a half. That's a lot of content. It's also a lot of comics read. Kind of makes you resent comics? Yeah, I suppose that, and the fact I didn't really love what Marvel was putting out in 2015 and beyond (with notable exceptions) kind of kept me out of this blog.

But guess what? I've still been reading all the dang comics and I still like reviewing things so the doors are OPEN ONCE MORE.

I don't know how frequently I'll post; I guess we'll figure that out as we go. It also won't necessarily be straight reviews. It'll probably be a mix of reviews, opinion pieces, stray thoughts, and shouts. Internet shouts. Okay, that's maybe not as enticing. I'm not sure if any of this ever was. But I'm back, and that's what matters now, innit?

So let's kick this thing off...