Reviews 12 - World Comic Book Review

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 Secret Lives of Dead Men: Brubaker’s Velvet, the James Bond mythos, and the Spectre of Ian Fleming

June 26, 2015June 9, 2015 by DG Stewart

Ed Brubaker’s comic book Velvet (Image Comics, 2015) sees the writer again explore gritty realism in a strong female character, albeit this time channelling the violent charm and loose sex of Ian Fleming.

Fleming wrote a series of novels in the 1950s and 60s featuring James Bond, an English spy, world-saver, and womaniser- those priorities sometimes in jumbled order. These novels have spawned thirty-two movies, becoming one of the world’s most successful character franchises. One of the more enduring supporting members of the cast was Miss Moneypenny, the secretary to Bond’s boss, M.

In the novel Thunderball, Fleming wrote that Moneypenny “often dreamed hopelessly about Bond.” Moneypenny’s primary function is to frame Bond as an object of desire. She is less than the inevitable Bond girl, the object of desire of the audience and Bond’s inevitable conquest – Moneypenny is merely a prop. The character doesn’t have much of a purpose otherwise in the novels, and not much more than that in the movie series until the 2007 continuity reboot, the second Casino Royale.

Wired Magazine’s review of Velvet makes the fundamental error of assessing the comic as “Bond imagined as a secretary”. The concept is instead more subtle than that. Brubaker makes that clear by having a spy who vastly resembles Bond on the receiving end of a shotgun within the first three pages of the very first serialised issue.

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.”