United States 74 - World Comic Book Review

Mark Waid’s Irredeemable: What Makes a Man Super?

October 21, 2016June 23, 2015 by Neil Raymundo

With Warner Bros. and its subsidiary business DC Comics getting ready to lay all of their cards on the table in the forthcoming movie entitled “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice”, Superman is once again going to be the trump card. The character has to share the space with Batman, though, and if the movie stays true to the source material, The Man of Steel is not going to be cast in the brightest of lights. But the property is still the cinematic draw, which means Superman deconstructions and pastiches are going to become, again, a popular theme in comic book writing.

Case in point is one of the most recent and effective deconstructions of the Superman mythos: Mark Waid and Boom! Studios’ Irredeemable – a 37-issue series published from April 2009 to May 2012 about a Superman analogue called the Plutonian. This character, Superman by another name, went rogue and killed a large portion of the human population, before hunting down the rest of his former teammates (who are themselves based on various DC Superheroes.)

Batman: a Study of Homages

October 21, 2016June 22, 2015 by DG Stewart and Neil Raymundo

An homage is defined as a special honour or act of respect delivered publicly. In the genre of super hero comic books, the character which is most frequently referenced by other publishers is Batman, a character property owned by DC Comics.

Mainstream superhero comics books since around the turn of the century have seemed like the ourobouros, the snake of mythology which consumes its own tail. Sometimes this has been dubbed “post-modern”, a reference to the school of fine art that questions the form through its limitations. A detached reader with an historical overview of trends in the genre might believe that the industry has instead been engaging for the past decade in a very contemporary concept, ecological recycling: no concept of value is allowed to go to landfill, and instead is put to a new use.

Part of the allure of reinvesting in a well-established concept must be the belief that the concept taps into the zeitgeist, and will have instant appeal to a pre-primed readership. Sometimes it allows a writer to creatively indulge in a character property which is owned by someone else, and to which the writer has no permission to use. Sometimes it is sheer laziness, and sometimes it is parody. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.

This essay is a survey of those homages.

Guardians of the Galaxy & The X-Men – Black Vortex Omega

October 21, 2016June 9, 2015 by Neil Raymundo

In this comic, Starlord Proposed to Kitty Pryde and she accepted.

I wanted that out of the way first. It is the big money shot of the comic. Marvel seems to think that it is kind of a big deal, and I hope to god you don’t mind it being spoiled if you agree with them.

With that out of the way, all but the first 5 pages of the Guardians of the Galaxy & The X-Men: Black Vortex Omega reads like an epilogue instead of the last part of a crossover story arc. If you’re one of the unlucky few that picked this up thinking that it is a standalone or the first in the series, the issue is going to feel thin.

The full story spans 13 chapters that starts with The Black Vortex Alpha and crosses over to key issues of All New X-Men, Guardians of the Galaxy, Legendary Starlord, and a few others (Nova, Cyclops, Captain Marvel, and Guardians Team Up.)

The Smasher of Thousands

October 21, 2016January 6, 2015 by DG Stewart

“The Dying & The Dead” 1
Image Comics, January 2015
Writer: Jonathan Hickman

Review by DG Stewart, 6 January 2015

This comic, written by Jonathan Hickman, features about a third of the way into the first issue an assembled cult of ostensible villains, shouting the words “Bah al sharur!” at their leader. According to Wikipedia, “”Sharur”, which means “smasher of thousands” is the weapon and mythic symbol of the god Ninurta. Sumerian mythic sources describe it as an enchanted talking mace. It has been suggested as a possible precursor for similar objects in other mythology such as Arthurian lore.”