Batman/Superman: World's Finest, Vol. 1: The Devil Nezha

Read this at the Clapp Memorial Library in Belchertown MA USA. Nice selection of graphic novels there, considering it's a small library.

Title: Batman/Superman: World's Finest: The Devil Nezha
Issue: Volume 1
Date: January, 2024
Publisher: DC Comics
Writer: Mark Waid
Artist: Dan Mora
Colorist: Tamra Bonvillain
Letterer: Aditya Bidikar
Editor: Paul Kaminski

Reprinting the first four issues of the latest World's Finest reboot. Poison Ivy attacks the Daily Planet, and finds herself up against the Batman, Robin, and Superman. But before the heroes can defeat her, Metallo shows up, adding a whole new level of threat when he injects Superman with red kryptonite.

As it turns out, this is just the beginning, as an ancient demonic figure named Nezha takes control of villains, and then heroes to set them against Superman and the Batman.

This turned complicated quickly, with a time-travel subplot, and continuously-escalating threats as Nexha takes control of more and more powerful metahumans to try to wipe out all potential resistance to his conquest of Earth and beyond.

The character work and action in this story are solid, especially the little insights into the relationship between Clark and Bruce and how they look out for each other.

The weak point is the villain, who's a mess of inconsistent powers, unclear motivation, and bland generic-villain personality.

There was enough of interest here that I'd be willing to check out more of the series once it moves past Nezha.

Rating: 5/10

Salem: Queen of Thorns: Free Comic Book Day Edition

From the random pile of unread comics, here's another Free Comic Book Day offering.

Title: Salem: Queen of Thorns: Free Comic Book Day Edition
Date: May, 2008
Publisher: Boom! Studios
Writer: Chris Morgan, Kevin Walsh
Artist: Wilfredo Torres
Colorist: Andrew Dalhouse
Letterer: Marshall Dillon
Cover: Wilfredo Torres
Editor: Mark Waid

The setting is Salem, Massachusetts, in 1673, a setting that is more about flavor than historical accuracy. There's an attack by a demon on a family before we meet our (anti- ?) hero, wandering demon-slayer Elias Hooke.

After a bit of demon-slaying, we move to the human villains, standard overzealous inquisitor-types, in the process of trying to extract a confession from a woman accused of witchcraft (her actual issue appears to be atheism). As one of the clergymen begins to have second thoughts, there is Elias Hooke to break up the proceedings.

We end up with the good deacon, the accused witch, and Hooke in the woods, with supernatural forces closing in.

The best thing about this was Hooke himself, who's in interesting mix of trickery, supernatural lore, and a silent loner attitude. The supporting characters had potential, although the villains felt very generic.

As a Massachusetts boy, I was underwhelmed with this version of Salem, which felt a lot more like a fantasy setting than a historical (or even historical fantasy) one.

Rating: 5.5/10

Free Comic Book Day 2015 (Avengers) #1

When we moved to Vietnam, one thing that I figured I'd be giving up was Free Comic Book Day, which has been a fun event for me, whether setting up a table for my own comics, or just rushing around visiting a bunch of geeky stores.

So when I caught wind of a FCBD event here in Saigon, I was pretty excited. The Amazing Comics is just starting out as a dealer/distributor of American comics, toys, and gaming products, and they don't have a storefront yet, but they rented space for a day and pulled off an excellent Free Comic Book Day party a week after the official date in the US. We picked up three of this year's official freebies, and I also bought a couple of Marvel comics for the Kiddo, who the previous day went to see Avengers: Age of Ultron for the second time.

I have a small set of pictures from the event here.

And now, on to the first review!

Title: Free Comic Book Day 2015 (Avengers)
Issue:1
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Date: June, 2015
Writer: Mark Waid, Charles Soule, James Patterson, Marguerite Bennett
Artist: Mahmud Asrar, Brandon Peterson, Alex Sanchez, Stephanie Hans
Colorist: Frank Martin, Justin Ponsor
Letterer: VC's Joe Sabino, VC's Clayton Cowles
Cover: Jerome Opena, Frank Martin, Nick Bradshaw, Richard Isanove
Editor: Tom Brevoort, Will Moss, Jon Moisan, Charles Beacham, Nick Lowe

Not technically a flip-book, but it does have a fully-illustrated back cover featuring the Inhumans in addition to the Avengers front cover.

There are actually three stories. First up is the Avengers, which features the latest team lineup: Iron Man, (female) Thor, Vision, (Sam Wilson) Captain America, plus three younger members, Spider-Man, Nova, and Ms. Marvel, all depicted as teenagers.

This is something of a tryout for the new team members, and their first battle as Avengers against the Radioactive Man does not go well. Still, they pull together and learn a bit about the real meaning of what the Avengers are all about. Including a discussion of how "The Avengers" is actually not exactly a perfect name for the team.

This was goofy fun for the most part, although it had a couple of surprisingly grim moments considering the overall tone.

Second story was Inhumans, which features the creation of a couple of new Inhumans as a cloud of terrigen has apparently been wandering around the world, causing Inhumans to manifest their powers and abilities. There are also some Hydra agents, who are intent on collecting up and enslaving those new Inhumans in the hopes of using them as pawns in their usualy Hydra-ish schemes. Or something.

The beginning of this story features a lot of clunky dialogue as characters are forced to over-explain everything just to set the scenario up for the reader. It gets a lot better when Medusa and some of the Inhumans team (minus Black Bolt, but plus Human Torch, go figure). Medusa is great here, largely because of the thorough trouncing she lays down on the over-explainy Hydra leader. One of the new characters introduced, an engineer whose hands become weird energy-projecting coils, also shows a lot of potential, and there's some good dialogue between Medusa and Johnny Storm at the end.

The third story is a quicky: A four-page preview of Marvel's adaptation of James Patterson's Max Ride. It's effective and visually interesting. I haven't read the prose novel, but this was at least enough to pique my interest, which is about what Marvel was hoping for with four pages to work with.

Nothing here is stand-out great, but each of the three stories had their moments.

Rating: 6.5/10

Steed And Mrs. Peel #0

Title: Steed And Mrs. Peel
Issue: 0
Date: August 2012
Publisher: Boom! Studios
Writer: Mark Waid
Artist: Steve Bryant
Colorist: Ron Riley
Letterer: Steve Wands
Cover: Joshua Covey, Blond
Editor: Matt Gagnon, Chris Rosa

The A-word is nowhere to be found in this book, but this is a new adventure featuring characters from a certain classic British TV show that happens to share its title with a certain Marvel Comics property.

Personally, I'm a huge fan of the show, which makes this one of the very, very few times that I will say that about a TV adaptation. So I went into this with a lot of trepidation, and the cover did not help. Absolutely awful (apparently, there are actually 8 variant covers, this was version B; I haven't seen any of the others, but they would have a hard time being much worse).

Fortunately, the book itself proved to be pretty good.

The interplay between Patrick MacNee and Diana Rigg on the show was consistently brilliant, and definitely a challenge to translate into the comic medium. Writer Mark Waid did about as good a job as could be done, with several scenes that were absolutely spot-on. He also got a lot of the show's style right. The situations are quirky. The villains are not always entirely competent, but their schemes are convoluted to near-ridiculousness.

Steve Bryant's interior art was good. He doesn't always capture Emma's easy grace, but that's more a function of the difficulty of using images of real actors.

Fight scenes are handled nicely with good attention to the details of the show's choreography. Loved the bit where a villain is dispatched by a combination of (judo!) chop from Emma and being tripped up by the handle of Steed's umbrella. Classic. Emma overpowering and swapping clothes with a henchwoman was pretty much pure fanservice. That is not a bad thing.

The story stands alone, but ends with a brief lead-in to the ongoing series.

About as good as I could have hoped for. Mr. Steed and Mrs. Peel, you were most definitely needed.

Rating: 8.5

Irredeemable / Incorruptible Free Comic Book Day Edition

I've had trouble finding time to do reviews this week. Hope you've been enjoying the 30 Day meme. Here's a 2010 FCBD item that I picked up at this year's FCBD.

Title: Irredeemable / Incorruptible Free Comic Book Day Edition
Date: May 2010
Publisher: Boom! Studios
Writer: Mark Waid
Artist: Peter Krause, Jean Diaz, Belardino Brabo
Colorist: Andrew Dalhouse
Letterer: Ed Dukshire
Cover: John Cassaday, Laura Martin
Editor: Matt Gagnon

Reprints the first issues of the two interconnected series Irredeemable and Incorruptible, both written by Mark Waid.

The essential story here is Superman (going by the name The Plutonian, but essentially Superman) gone bad. Plutonian kills off the masked vigilante known as the Hornet in the opening scene, along with Hornet's wife and children. From there the surviving members of the Paradigm (the superhero team that the Plutonian was a member of) are frantically scrambling to find any bit of information that might give them a chance against the seemingly unstoppable Plutonian. Waid does a pretty good job of ratcheting up the emotions and laying out the basic scenario here.

Incorruptible is the mirror-image of Irredeemable, the story of a super-villain who decided to go straight. The two stories share a setting, and the change of heart that the former villain Max Damage undergoes comes as a result of the destruction caused by the Plutonian's rampage. I liked the character of Max Damage, but the attempts at humor in the book fell flat (possibly because of the grim nature of the world and the companion book) and Damage's sidekick, the aptly name Jailbait, is a pretty good summation of everything that is bad in the treatment of female characters in mainstream comics these days. I suppose it's possible that she's been set up as a stereotype for the purpose of breaking that stereotype down later, but I was pretty unimpressed with what I saw in the character so far: dump, only interested in sex and money, and drawn in typical barely dressed comic book heroine style. Waid is trying to write a very serious deconstruction of the superhero genre here. I was hoping for better than this in such an effort.

Rating: 6/10

Irredeemable Volume 4

Here's another find from the going-out-of-business sale at my local Borders.

Title: Irredeemable
Issue: Volume 4
Date: September 2010
Publisher: Boom! Studios
Writer: Mark Waid
Artist: Diego Barreto, Paul Azaceta, Emma Rios, Howard Chaykin
Colorist: Andrew Dalhouse, Matthew Wilson, Alfred Rockefeller
Letterer: Ed Dukeshire
Cover: Chriscross

This is a trade paperback collection that includes issues 13-15 of the comic series, plus the Irredeemable Special. The basic premise is that Superman (represented here by a character called the Plutonian, who is for all intents and purposes Superman) has "snapped" and gone very very bad. Bad as in entire cities destroyed, populations wiped out, and brutal murders of his fellow superbeings (who were never really in the Plutonian's league power-wise).

Alan Moore did this same story much better in Miracleman.

There. Now that I've gotten that off my chest, I did find Irredeemable to be fairly entertaining. There are some likable characters, and not all of them are used as cannon fodder (some are, though). There is a pretty complex set of subplots, which serve to add a nice level of suspense to the storyline, even though they also mire the story in the cliches of the genre that it is attempting to rise above.

Thanks to the presence of the Irredeemable Special in this volume, I got a nice recap of the story, as well as some background on characters that appear in the regular issues, which helped make it easier to jump right in with Volume 4.

The artwork is generally quite good. There are a few moments of unnecessary gore (well, I'm sure they were seen as necessary to remind the reader that this is a superhero story for grownups), and there were some fight scenes where it was a bit hard to tell what was going on, but the artistic handling of a very tricky climactic sequence involving a bullet and a teleportation effect was brilliant work.

I wasn't too impressed when I first heard the premise of this, so I would have to say I was pleasantly surprised by the degree to which I found it entertaining.

Rating: 6.5/10