Comic Review: Hitman - A Rage in Arkham

PUBLISHER: DC (1995-1996)
WRITER: GARTH ENNIS
ARTIST: JOHN McCREA

By the mid-1990s Garth Ennis was well-in at DC and made his push for immortality by beginning Preacher for the company's Vertigo label. Preacher is fabulous of course, but as if it wasn't enough Ennis was also writing another book virtually alongside it - the tale of superpowered hitman Tommy Monaghan, a heady mix of action, comedy, friendship and commentary. Somehow a brilliant madman at editorial decided Hitman should be part of the mainstream DC universe rather than shuffled off into its' own little continuity because they could totally trust Ennis to not just take the piss and thus it became even better. The result lasted for sixty issues and a few assorted specials before the inevitable end, coincidentally (or not, I have no actual idea) around the same time Preacher finished, at which point DC decided that if the series wasn't running there was no actual need to finish of the series of TPBs. Thankfully it only took them the best part of a decade to realise how stupid this idea was and since 2009 the whole brilliant thing has been put back in print. However, it took some time for the series to really settle down and the opening trade is perhaps not the best ambassador.

Comic Review: Heroes Reborn Part 4 - Captain America #1-5

PUBLISHER: MARVEL, 1996
WRITER: JEPH LOEB
ARTIST: ROB LIEFIELD

Captain America was without doubt the most controversial and outright worst of the Heroes Reborn titles. Before the relaunch Mark Waid had been doing great things with the book, possibly the best for decades at least, so getting Loeb and Liefield in was never going to go down well. It doesn't help that the initial arc basically covers every single Liefield cliche going.  Repeatedly. To the point that you're wondering if he's doing it on purpose and then remember he's Rob Liefield and he's not up to doing anything on purpose.

The first arc sets up the retconned Heroes Reborn origin for Captain America; his origins and WW2 service are unchanged but at the end of it he challenges President Truman over the use of the A-bomb and ends up getting brainwashed by S.H.I.E.L.D. to think he's just a normal guy. The rise of a neo-Nazi group and the efforts of old comrade Abe Wilson eventually lead to his memory being restored and he's back in action. On paper it's not too bad compared to being frozen in a block of ice unnoticed but it's not great either; the logistics involved are only paid lip service, as are the psychological ramifications.

But then the script is all about lip service. Thrown into this are this universe's introduction to Nick Fury, the new Bucky in the form of a girl named Rikki Barnes whose brother joins up with the neo-Nazis and who talks exactly like Boomer out of X-Force, the origin of the Falcon (still Sam Wilson, the son of the aforementioned Abe) and the neo-Nazi movement involving the Red Skull, Master Man (looking identical to Stryfe here) and Crossbones. One of the weird things about the Heroes Reborn universe was most of the heroes were those brought over from the scrap with Onslaught but their old enemies tended to crop up naturally on the counter-Earth, which was a bit weird. You can hand-wave it by just going "Franklin" like everything else but it makes it all a bit redundant.

In theory this should make for a packed five issues but everything's just rushed through. Conflicts are set up and then rapidly resolved - Cap's pissed at Nick Fury but that rapidly dissipates; Sam wants revenge on Cap for taking over his dad's life but only needs to see him fight once to become a total fanboy; Bucky gets rescued from a missile launch, kicks her brother and lands the job of sidekick; Cap gets over fifty years of his life being lies and goes into combat within a few hours.

This idiotic pace isn't helped by the gigantic amount of splash pages Liefield and Loeb use; typically they just feature Cap posing with a few scant narration boxes scattered around. There are probably five issues of plot in the storyline but it's meted out like punctuation, a frame packed with some underwhelming conflict after ten of Cap standing there.

And while everything else is bad the whole thing is made worse by the art. It's a tired and easy thing to list Liefield's faults but it's inescapable as well. Dodgy anatomy (the small head mounted on a neck that looks like it's wearing a ruff of muscles gets a real workout here), outdated fashions (everyone has wavy eighties hair; Sharon Carter especially looks like she should be draped over a Lamborghini Countach in a Pirelli calendar), a total lack of dynamics (hands out to the side = running, the only kick is a double drop kick), simplistic backgrounds (single blocks of colour, obviously sourced clipart of the US flag) and a range of about two facial expressions - generally mouth open or mouth closed.

All in all it's an absolute shambles even on relative terms.

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Comic Review: Heroes Reborn Part 3 - Iron Man #1-5

PUBLISHER: MARVEL, 1996
STORY: SCOTT LOBDELL & JIM LEE
ART: WHILCE PORTACIO (#1-3), RYAN BENJAMIN (#4-5)

Aside from scribbling an outline Jim Lee had little input into the second title Wildstorm handled during Heroes Reborn; instead it benefited from the presence of an actual proper comic writer in the form of the underrated (and I will fight anyone who thinks otherwise) Scott Lobdell while art was handled, initially at least, by Whilce Portacio, who joined up with Image along with the others but not as a partner. Like The Avengers, Iron Man was not in a good place when it was 'cancelled'; the series had slumped into a series of regurgitated plots in the nineties, with Tony Stark becoming an alcoholic, Tony Stark faking his death, Tony Stark getting Rhodey to be Iron Man, Tony Stark turning out to be a secret villain, Tony Stark getting killed off, Tony Stark being replaced by a teenage version of himself, etc, etc and so on.

Heroes Reborn allowed something of a rollback with the same revised origin as before as cold calculating business bastard adult Tony Stark gets injured by some shrapnel to the heart and becomes Iron Man to save himself, simultaneously having something of an epiphany and deciding to be less of an arsehole. There are some interesting tweaks here, though - one of the Heroes Reborn event's neater ideas is that Tony, Reed Richards, Victor von Doom, Bruce Banner and one Rebel Reilly were college buddies, styling themselves the Knights of the Atomic Round Table before various circumstances derail them from their utopian vision. Tony's fall was largely precipitated by fall-out from the death of the aforementioned Rebel (made up for these stories) while testing the Promethium armour Stark then dons as Iron Man, which is a better explanation for the guy having a battle suit floating around than having built one in a cave.

Another fun addition is Bruce Banner as a supporting character; the Hulk split in two during the closing moments of the Onslaught event, Bruce throwing himself in after the Avengers while the Hulk was left in the main Marvel universe as a bestial nutcase without Banner's personality elements, his title continuing. The Reborn versions of Leonard Samson, Betty Ross and Thunderbolt Ross are all in the cast, along with forgotten Iron Man regulars Pepper Potts (smack bang back in the middle of the story), Happy Hogan and Jasper Sitwell are also in the mix. However, Lobdell is a master of this sort of thing and most of them get some meat on the bones. Iron Man is kept largely clear of the Avengers at this stage as well.

The primary villains are Hydra, whose assault on Stark International gives Tony his heart injury and also sees Bruce - part of SI, constantly trying to find some conscience in his old friend - seemingly sacrifice himself keeping a government-backed gamma bomb out of their hands and getting turned into the Hulk for his trouble. Additional appearances come from a guesting Fantastic Four, a victim of Stark's corporate raiding who turns himself into the new Living Laser and then dies almost immediately and Whirlwind, who Stark doesn't even bother to armour up for. If there's a weak point it's the antagonists.

Portacio's art is as highly stylised as ever, all long necks and hanging locks of hair. It's not the prettiest of styles but it's easy to follow what's going on even if the early issues feature a lot of guys with longish black hair in suits, while I've always liked the armour redesign. Ryan Benjamin follows the style more or less with maybe less overt distortion but overall it's only behind Jim Lee's work on F4. Or only ahead of Liefield's on everything else if you're half-glass full.

The first chunk of Iron Man is no classic but to be the best start to a Heroes Reborn title it doesn't have to be, really. It's an entertainingly different start to Iron Man, a decent modernisation with a lot going on, even if that means by law of averages a couple of bits are silly.

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Comic Review - Heroes Return Part 2: The Avengers #1-5

Alongside Jim Lee's Wildstorm the other Image studio to land work on Heroes Reborn was Rob Liefield's Awesome studios, who handled The Avengers and Captain America. Before the reboot The Avengers wasn't actually in particularly rude health, due to Marvel's habit for much of the nineties of spreading the big names out among their solo books more, leaving the title with a weak roster and the big guns featuring almost as guest stars. This was partly rectified in the closing issues as much to bring the characters intended to 'die' in the Onslaught event together but the last thirty of forty issues of the first volume are basically no-one's favourite run of Avengers issues.

As such the Heroes Reborn title had the advantage of unfettered access to the mainstays of the team. Liefield and Loeb came up with an interesting set-up, with the team being a SHIELD-controlled unit based on an island off Manhattan - more than a little like the later much better regarded Ultimates, which just goes to show how easy it is to make a mess of a decent concept. Captain America is head of the team, something which ties into his solo title (the events of this book taking place later than those in that book); joining him on the field roster are the Vision, the Scarlet Witch, Hawkeye, the Swordsman and Hellcat. Hank Pym meanwhile is tech support, having built the Vision and working on Ultron on the island, with wife Jan also  non-combat personnel. Thor meanwhile is found frozen in ice in the first issue (a clear flip of Cap's Silver Age introduction) while within a couple of issues Pym experiments with being Ant-Man. Iron Man is kept separate for the time being in his own title, thankfully.

It's not a roster without promise, notably the addition of the Swordsman and Hellcat - and not just as cannon fodder, though sadly they have Peak Liefield redesigns; the Swordsman has a weird bowl-cut that stops just north of his ears, a vaguely Japanese outfit and is incapable of going anywhere without 27 swords strapped to his back because obviously if you're the world's best swordsman you're going to lose swords left, right and centre and need to carry loads of spares; Hellcat on the other hand is just Feral from X-Force, all weird vertical hair and Swimsuit Illustrated poses with the underscoring feeling that Rob actually thinks the result is pretty damn hot. Sadly under Loeb & Liefield any potential is fumbled to a few broad character strokes - Cap is deeply distrustful of SHIELD; the Vision is struggling to learn about humanity like Data off Star Trek; Hawkeye is a Rebel Who Doesn't Like Orders; the Swordsman is a preening poser who is secretly unsure of what he contributes, the Scarlet Witch is inexperienced and falls in love with basically everyone male, Thor awakens with the morals of an actual Norse God. 

Some of these character sketches have potential but they're dropped into a crazy helter-skelter of a plot as Loki, the Enchantress, the Hulk and Kang are all thrown into the first five issues (The Avengers did double-time in the Industrial Revolution crossover) along with the brewing Ultron and Agatha Harkness. Unlike Loeb & Liefield's Captain America this does mean it has a bit of pace but it's too badly done to match the Fantastic Four's amiable Silver Age energy. There are still far too many splash pages and there's a weird dissonance in that the Avengers seem to be simultaneously a new and unproven team and well-known enough to attract media coverage and a key role in SHIELD. The team's relationships between each other are the same, the title acting like they've just met sometimes and have a full rundown on each other at other times. All of this is bad enough and then you've got Liefield's art, which isn't his worse but is still comfortably dreadful nonetheless.

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Comic Review: Heroes Reborn Part 1 - Fantastic Four #1-5

PUBLISHER: MARVEL, 1996
PLOT & PENCILS: JIM LEE
SCRIPT: BRANDON CHOI

In the mid-1990s Marvel had a bit of a problem; anything X-Men and Spider-Man related was selling well, anything else really wasn't. The Avengers and its' satellite titles - Captain America, Iron Man, Mighty Thor and several smaller series - weren't selling well at all and neither was the venerable Fantastic 4. Part of the problem was a sequence of ever-convoluted storylines and retcons, most notably The Crossing event which saw Tony Stark outed as a bad guy, killed off and replaced by an alternate reality teenage version - this being in the days when Marvel would actually keep stupid ideas like that it continuity rather than the current method of just pretending they didn't happen.

The solution was a pair of publicity stunts; these groups would be tied into the gigantic X-Men led Onslaught crossover and 'killed off' - and by killed off it means shunted into a pocket universe created by Franklin Richards, though this precise revelation would at least be teased out. In the meantime for part two of the event their old ongoings were cancelled (with the exception of Thor's book, which returned to the name Journey into Mystery and covered other Asgardian happenings) and the books were relaunched with a new #1, always Marvel's default idea for anything in 1996.

For further attention the books were 'outsourced' - while still actually remaining under Marvel branding the actual content was handed to former employees at Image, in the form of Jim Lee's Wildstorm and Rob Liefield's Awesome Comics, for 12 months. This was a smart idea; regardless of the merits of either both were sales gold at the time and embracing big name creators rather than losing talent was something of a new direction for Marvel, who had a rigid structure and was still overrun by long-serving staffers.

Wildstorm took over production of Fantastic Four and Iron Man and the decision was made to do a new if not fresh origin for each group. Fantastic Four benefited from the pencils of Jim Lee himself, who also laid down the framework for the altered reality. Much of the basics are the same; like the later Ultimate universe it's more of an update as once again a situation is contrived to get scientist Reed Richards, his squeeze Susan Storm (here a high ranking executive in the Storm Foundation business empire), her brother Johnny (who handles the Foundation's casino in Las Vegas) and their broken down pilot friend Ben Grimm into a spacecraft in time to get a healthy dose of cosmic radiation - thus ending up with Fantastic powers.

The leaden dropping of the word fantastic, the characters' self-selected superhero names, the ease with which they deal with their transformations, Sue creating the team logos out of electrical tape and the general lampshading of the situation makes you wonder why they bothered with an origin story instead of starting up with the Four in full flow after a brief summary or even just handle it in flashbacks and dialogue, such is the level of discomfort in meshing the Silver Age cheese and modern trappings.

Still, once that's done Lee and Choi don't hang around, rapidly introducing us to the pocket universe's versions of Mole Man the Black Panther, the Silver Surfer, Doctor Doom and the Super Skrull across six issues - not to mention Alicia Masters and Wyatt Wingfoot, plus Namor. An odd thing that would run across all four titles is that not all of these were actually swallowed up by Onslaught, which can be explained by Franklin drawing on his knowledge of the heroes to fill out the world but does also somewhat go against the spirit of things.

The flow and speed actually helps and once again harks back to the Silver Age when in the early issues Fantastic Four really was like that with a future legend debuting every issue or so. It's not a bad read, it's just not an especially good one either, with the price of the brake-neck speed being an abundance of infodump speeches and busy frames packed with narration boxes. Jim Lee's work is similarly adequate, though I've never personally considered him much more than a good superhero artist rather than a genuine great. He doesn't do a bad job or anything but there's nothing to get excited about here.

Custom DVD Cover: Bound

Subbed in one of the better US theatrical posters to replace the tabloidy UK "it's by the guys who done The Matrix and has sex in it" cover. Though if ever a more modern film deserved a forties-style painted noir poster it's this one.

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Custom DVD Cover: The Funeral

Abel Ferrara's The Funeral, another personal favourite that only seems to be largely available over here as part of a triple set with two other films. Standard stuff based around the US poster.

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Comic Review - Stormwatch Volume 2: Lightning Strikes

The second volume of Warren Ellis' excellent Stormwatch run contains arguably the weakest set of stories from the first volume. This is relative, of course, and it's still good stuff. The first three episodes focus almost entirely on single characters.

Comic Review - Stormwatch Volume 1: Force of Nature

This is really where Warren Ellis the mainstream visionary got started. While his Excalibur run undoubtedly showed his skill for humanising and revitalising characters, the freedom given by Wildstorm allowed him to remould a whole series in the space of an issue. When Ellis arrived, Stormwatch was pretty much a dying book. It was never one of Image's biggest hitters in the early days and rapidly became one of those books no-one cared about. The series was hampered by having to keep in line with the 'Images of Tomorrow' gimmick put in place early in the run, and then by a ludicrous number of new characters thrown at the book by desperate writers.