I’m spending too much on comics while the time I have to devote to them is dwindling, and it’s time to thin the herd. So, in case there are other equally cash-strapped family men out there reading this blog, I’ll take you through my reasoning for either dropping or keeping the titles currently on my pull list.
Let’s start with what’s sticking around:
In my last post, I confessed my unconditional love for the characters I grew up watching on Saturday morning cartoons. That means Uncanny X-Men, Amazing Spider-Man and Batman are pretty much safe no matter what. Marvel could publish a book composed entirely of vulgar insults about my mom, and I’d buy it as long as it said “Uncanny X-Men” on the cover. I know, I’m a pawn. If you don’t like it, you can get bent.
Luckily, Uncanny X-Men, Amazing Spider-Man and Batman are firing on all cylinders right now with top-notch talent, so I don’t mind paying for them. Well, except when Greg Land is doing the art on Uncanny. I would prefer literally any other artist currently employed by Marvel or DC to draw the book, but Land is thankfully only doing every other story arc.
Add to those three titles Jason Aaron’s Wolverine and the X-Men. I’ve long-admired Mr. Aaron’s work on Wolverine’s solo title, and I thought he mostly pulled off “Schism,” which was the big X-crossover from last year. With “Wolverine and the X-Men,” he seems to have taken some notes on Grant Morrison’s characteristic style of cramming every issue full of absurd ideas yet somehow pulling it off with a (usually) straight face. The book’s first eight issues draw on a number of familiar Morrison elements, like the school setting and characters like Quentin Quire, but it doesn’t suffer from any of the crap that often bothers me about Morrison (like all the pretentious metafictional storytelling and frequent nosedives into incoherence). The first couple story arcs in Wolverine and the X-Men have been a breath of fresh air for the X-line, and I hope that the title doesn’t lose its momentum by getting bogged down in the Avengers Vs X-Men crossover this summer.
So those are the four titles I know I’m keeping: Batman, Amazing Spider-Man, Uncanny X-Men and Wolverine and the X-Men. What’s on the chopping block? I’ll take each title one at a time and explain why I can’t justify spending any more money on them. First the DC titles I’m dropping.
Justice League – The first story arc was a total misfire. Geoff Johns is obviously having fun letting these larger-than-life characters bounce off of one another and giving Jim Lee plenty of opportunities to draw widescreen action pieces. But where are the ideas? Where’s the emotion? Most importantly, where is the plot?
There were some fun moments early on as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Aquaman and Cycborg Guy (not sure about that one) meet and learn to trust one another. At one point in the first issue, Batman indicates to Green Lantern that he doesn’t have any superpowers, prompting Green Lantern to exclaim something along the lines of, “Wait, you’re not just some guy in a bat costume, are you?” But the thrill died quickly when Darkseid was introduced as the main villain but never given a clear motivation for why he wants to destroy Earth.
Even weirder, our heroes never seem all that concerned about Darkseid’s motives either. There’s a quick story beat where the villain mentions something about his daughter, but it’s brushed aside quickly and none of the characters go back to it. The book stars all of DC’s biggest names. It’s got a ton of action, a few nice character interactions, and Lee’s art is shiny and neat. But it has neither a brain nor a heart. Maybe that sells to kids who are new to the medium, but it’s not enough to keep me around. Next.
Action Comics – I swear there are two Grant Morrisons walking around. There’s the one who wrote New X-Men, All Star Superman and Batman RIP (which are all brilliant stories brimming with fresh twists on old characters). Then there’s the one who wrote Final Crisis and, unfortunately, Action Comics.
I was completely on board for the first two issues of Action. I love the idea of a populist Superman who wears jeans and work boots and who takes on the robber barons on Wall Street who are out to exploit the common man. I also love the idea of Clark Kent as a struggling young journalist trying to speak truth to power but has trouble making rent. For obvious reasons, it’s topical and resonant, and the first two issues looked like this was going to be another instance of Morrison taking an old character and spinning him in a new direction that’s at once revolutionary and completely true to the character’s essence.
But, like Final Crisis, I’ve spent most of the last several issues without much of a clue what’s going on. For one thing, he totally abandoned the blue-jeans-and-boots Superman mid-storyline to focus a couple issues on a seemingly unrelated team-up with the Legion of Superheroes and Superman’s origin. Maybe Morrison is going to tie everything together next issue, but the change in focus was too jarring. On top of that, Morrison’s treatment of Superman’s origin here is far more convoluted than his masterful telling of the origin story in All-Star Superman. Sorry, Grant, but I’m too frustrated to stick around.
So, with two of my three DC books now gone, I’ll switch over the Marvel books I’m dropping.
Wolverine – As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been a huge admirer of Jason Aaron’s work on Wolverine’s solo title. But with issue 304, Aaron’s run on the book is coming to an end. Maybe the next creative team will pick up the torch and run with it. If that’s the case, I might be convinced to pick up the book again. Until then, however, the end of Aaron’s run is the perfect jumping-off point for a guy trying to cut back on his comics budget.
Generation Hope – This book got canceled, so I guess it doesn’t really count as a drop. But I probably would have dropped it had it continued beyond issue 18. It would have been a really tough decision, though. This is the best “mutant kids” book the X-line has had since the original “New Mutants.” Sorry to see it go. Maybe I’ll devote an entire post sometime to give it a proper eulogy.
Uncanny X-Force – I’ve saved the most unkindest cut of all for last. What made this one so frustrating was how consistently strong the book had been up until the most recent story arc, which took a breathtaking plummet into the garbage dump.
Over the past two years or so, this has been hailed consistently as the best book in Marvel’s X-stable, and I’d be hard-pressed to argue with that. Rick Remender put together a compelling team of characters, gave each member a moment to shine, put them through a gut-wrenching emotional wringer, and produced one of the most shockingly powerful twists the X-books had seen in years (I won’t spoil it here, but you really should read the first four issues of the series).
The ‘Dark Angel Saga,’ which capped Remender’s first “season” on the book, was too long for its own good, but it provided satisfying closure to all the plot threads to that point while boasting some fantastic art along the way. All in all, the first 19 issues of this series have a lot going for them.
But this most recent arc – four interminable issues that take our heroes to the fantastical setting of Otherworld – marked such a mystifying tonal shift for the book that I was left wondering what the hell Mr. Remender could possibly have been thinking. I suppose he wanted a change of pace before diving back into the grim-and-gritty storytelling that characterized the book’s beginnings, but I literally had no clue what was going on 85 percent of the time here. Here are the lowlights: a magical goat-monk threatens to take over all realities, a seemingly unrelated plot point in which a heretofore unmentioned nemesis from Fantomex’s past makes an unexplained appearance, a heavy dose of Braddock family politics, and a poorly developed twist-ending that comes out of nowhere.
Honestly, I probably got some of those details wrong because I was so confused by the art, which was sketchy, poorly colored and apparently couldn’t be bothered to tell a clear story.
I’m sure Remender will bounce back in the next story arc, but this one was unforgivable. I’m done.
