United States 74 - World Comic Book Review

Omega Men #1 [review]: the laziest of writing and editing

October 21, 2016July 10, 2015 by DG Stewart

One assumes that DC Comics have revitalised the concept of the obscure 1980s team of aliens, first appearing in 1981 as The Omega Men, because of the success of Marvel Entertainment’s film featuring an equally obscure group of aliens, Guardians of the Galaxy.

When the concept was first published as its own title in 1983, in the days of letters pages, a reader wrote and asked why the team’s leader was called “Primus”, when alien team leaders were unlikely to have names alluding to their “primacy” by use of a word with a Graeco-Latin root, and more ludicrously, why a tiger-esque alien was called “Tigorr”.

The editor responded by noting in words to the effect that an unintelligible character names would render the characters inaccessible to readers.

Charisma, fetishism, homosexuality, and violence: Midnighter #1 [review]

October 21, 2016July 5, 2015 by DG Stewart

Midnighter # 1 (DC Comics, 2015), written by Steve Orlando and with art by Aco and Hugo Petrus, features a character who is very different from most of its superhero peers.

By way of example, Midnighter’s Grindr profile, set out on the fourth page of the first issue, is most amusing:

Name: M
Currently: Single
Looking for: Dates, friends, sparring
Interests: Violence (inventive)
Chronically new in town.
Computer in brain.
Superhumanly flexible.
Generally uses flexibility for justice.
Looking for other uses.
Have head butted an alien.
Whatever you are thinking the answer is most likely yes.
But with punching.

The American superhero scene is engorged with muscle-bound heterosexual altruists. This has been a state of affairs dating back to the late 1930s. Aside from a influx of militaristic cyborgs in the 1990s, superhero comics have generally featured straight bachelors, wearing clinging acrobat tights adorned with capes, with superpowers.

The Wicked + The Divine “The Faust Act” (or, How Kanye West became a God)

October 21, 2016June 26, 2015 by DG Stewart

Any review of The Wicked + The Divine (Image Comics, 2014) and its first collected work, entitled The Faust Act, needs to first address the influence of Jack Kirby in comics.

Jack Kirby was a masterful writer and artist responsible for the creation or co-creation of many immediately recognisable comic book properties, primarily for Marvel Comics, including the X-men, the Hulk, Captain America, and many others. In 1970 Kirby moved from Marvel Comics to its longtime rival DC Comics. During his four year stint with DC, Kirby created a pantheon of science fiction gods: cosmic beings representing various archetypes, all viewed through a decidedly 70s hallucinogenic prism. Evidence of this includes an abundance of abstract and psychedelic geometric forms in the art, together with bubbling manifestations of unearthly energy; satanic villains carved from granite with deadly, glowing crimson eyes; and the godlike but decidedly hippie Forever People with names like Mark Moonrider and Beautiful Dreamer. Contemporary flower-power influences define and guide Kirby’s creative output during this period.

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.)