Screen Dumps

In which the Ocelot burbles on about telly and fillums.

The Danger Mouse Paradox

He's terrific.

And another thing, right? Danger Mouse. So we were watching a couple of episodes late last night, and DM and Penfold are hopping off and on the Orient Express and nosing around galleries in Venice. Despite being a (dangerous) mouse and a (frankly useless) hamster, they're clearly of roughly human adult size, or at worst child size.

But, but, they live in a frickin' postbox! Not crammed inside like a couple of mummies spooning in a sarcophagus, but like it's a big red penthouse! And when they fly out in their car on a mission, they leave via a secret exit in the bloody kerbstone! They are clearly actual rodent size at that point, but by the time they arrive at the mission target, they've grown by a factor of 8. What gives? I can only conclude that DM's flying car is also equipped with size-changing Pym Particles - a reference that only a small fraction of the population understands right now (until July 17th).

So assuming that DM and Penfold have access to size-changing technology en route, what does that mean for Baron Greenback, Stiletto and the rest of the villains? We never see them in the postbox, only in the outside world, where they're all human-sized too. Do they shrink and grow, or are they always big? Is Greenback sometimes toad-sized and sometimes human sized? What about Nero, whatever the Cosgrove-Hall he is?

It's this sort of shoddy writing that destroys any willing suspension of disbelief in the greatest secret agent in the world being a one-eyed mouse in a matching turtle neck (or possibly he just has a distressing band of goitres).

Also, even though the eyepatch only conceals his (presumably horrific) blind eye, there's no eyebrow above the patch. Was it burnt off in whatever traumatic incident destroyed his eyeball? Or does he simply shave it off so it doesn't get tangled up in the patch's string?

Next: Why it's always better to be in a team of two in Blockbusters.

Game of Tardisses

I understand that Ahyah Stark is guest-starring in the next series of Dr Who. 

Here's hoping for more Game of Thrones cameos. Personally I'd like to see the Hound turning up with a chainsword and going Dee-Kay, and Ser Jorah dragging along behind the Doctor, helpfully explaining the local customs of every fricking place they go to.

Han Solo Prequel

"That must be your mama's land-speeder!"

Let the crying out of millions of voices commence.

I very much hope that this Solo solo will give us an insecure teen Han, possibly with a stammer and poor blaster skills. Chewie could have lank fur hanging down over his eyes and an ironic bandolier worn backwards. Also Lando with a Kid'n'Play hi-top fade.

Let the crying out of millions of voices commence.

I've just thought - they could do the entire prequel using footage of Harrison Ford from pre-Star Wars films. All they'd have to do is crop him out of American Graffiti and stick him in a souped-up black hot-pod, hassling other drivers on a Saturday night.

SFX: Now celebrating 20 years of
a tedious SEX gag on the cover

The Bland From UNCLE

Promo shot from the new Man from UNCLE, courtesy of SFX mag.
I hate to pre-judge (who am I kidding - I love it), but don't this pair look like the blandest possible casting choice? Armie Hammer especially looks like he's been given a Fassbender-as-Prometheus-droid makeunder.
I have already recast this film in my head with Jon Hamm and Aaron Paul and find it much more to my liking.

NorrrrELLevision

Much as I find many elements of the TV adaptation of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell irritating (far too many Johns, preposterous Metaluna fairy, long-windedness, horrible orange-and-teal colour tint, Paul Kaye's off-the-peg mystic tramp, the dull, dull Stephen), I cannot get enough of fruity Mr Drawlight rolling his mouth around "Mister NorrrrELL".

I quite like Childermass too, for all his geezery scowling.

And the actual big-ass magical effects are cool, 'specially the sandhorses and the rainships. And Bigby's Giant Muddy Hand.

Oh, and "Do you wish to be shot? Then behave differently" was good too.

Pitch of the Day

Been thinking up movie titles today.

Sweet Christmas!

The best one so far is The Moomin Centipede.

I thank you.

Cage Match

I'm probably far from the first person to say it, but man, Terry Crews would have been perfect to play Luke Cage. A bit too old now, unforch.
I'm sure Mike Colter'll be alright, but Terry Crews is Cage to his toes.

Screen Cleaner and Bat's Wee

Was despatched to Tesco's last night for some - and I quote - 'cheap rum'. Was amused and disturbed in equal parts by the plain label 'Tesco Everyday Value Rum' on offer. This has the tinge of Orwell's Victory Gin to it.

No doubt the epicureans/functional alcoholics/pirates among you are well aware of the concept of 'everyday rum', but to me this feels odd. Like it's a household staple.

"Let's see now... bread, check, milk, check, toilet tissue, check, what else? Oh yes, a ration of grog made from screen cleaner and bat's wee, check. That's the basic shopping done."

Now looking out for Tesco Everyday Value Heroin. Bet you get lots of club card points for that.

My First Superhero

Another article I wrote for online magazine Journey Planet, for their superhero issue - #21 - in April 2015.

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Appearing here with Sword Girl and Bird Nose

I guess that must have been Hulk. OK, the Hulk if you want to be all formal. I suppose he counts as a superhero, since he had his own weekly Marvel comic (black and white UK reprint The Mighty World of Marvel) at the time, but then so did Dracula and Planet of the Apes. In the comics I first read, Hulk stories consisted mainly of him getting shot at by the US Army, causing innocent bystanders to flee in terror and battling equally muscle-bound monsters like Rhino, Abomination, Zzzax (I had to check the spelling) and the excellently-hatted Xemnu the Titan. Hulk didn’t go much for crime-fighting or making the world a better place.

No good reason for using this - I just love the cover

If Hulk did occasionally save the world, it was more as a by-product of him accidentally pulverizing a bad-guy’s doomsday weapon in the middle of their fight, rather than by any conscious intention to do good. This was the era of the ‘Hulk-Smash’ incarnation - a childlike titan who just wanted to be left alone, but yet was continually hunted and hounded (a term used almost every issue) by those that would seek to capture him, revenge themselves on him or simply prove that they could beat him. That latter motivation was inevitably doomed, because, as was often roared by the jade giant himself, ‘HULK IS THE STRONGEST ONE THERE IS!’. Right on, Hulk baby, as his 70s sidekick Jim Wilson might say.

Just leave him alone!

Hulk was a great character for a young reader like me. He wasn’t that complicated - a childlike loner with Unearthly Strength (‘increases to Shift X when he rages’) and not too much back story (in the days before Joe Fixit and Skaar and Doc Green). And he was easier for me to draw than, say, Spider-Man, whose webbed costume always proved to be a challenge. With Hulk, as long as you had a green and a purple crayon, you couldn’t really fail, although in one very early drawing I did of him he appeared to have the face of the late Norman Wisdom.

HULK TOO MUSCLEBOUND TO BEND LIMBS!

The best thing about Hulk was his own special Hulk-speak, which consisted of referring to himself only in the third person (a classic comic device; see also Dr Doom) and giving everyone else their own unique Hulk nickname. Thus Spider-Man was ‘BUG MAN’ or more often ‘PUNY BUG MAN’, the Thing was of course ‘ROCK MAN’ and so on. For years I thought that the superhero Valkyrie was called ‘SWORD GIRL’*.

* ‘HULK APOLOGISE FOR REDUCTIVE AND SEXIST LABELLING.’

My Favourite Female Superhero

Another article I wrote for online magazine Journey Planet, for their superhero issue - #21 - in April 2015. Prepare for role models and Dazzler confessions.

* * *

I found this a much harder question than I ought to have. By rights I should be offering up a character that I’ve followed closely over the years. Someone like Kitty Pryde, who started as a bit of an audience-identification figure in the X-Men, and very much the underdog in her early stories. She had to use every bit of ingenuity to survive encounters with Sentinels, the Hellfire Club and other-dimensional demons. Issue #165 of Uncanny X-Men, when she and her fellow mutants are facing an awful death thanks to the alien Brood eggs inside them, has a wonderful sequence of Kitty facing her impending death-by-body-horror with a very real sense of grief, outrage and finally bravery. She was also a bit of a skinny teenage geek like many of her readers, and seemed to speak for them in the moving ‘four-eyed flat-chested brat’ speech that closed New Mutants #45, following the suicide of a bullied student. Kitty was just like us in a lot of ways.

Or maybe I should say it’s a character that’s grown and matured over the years, someone who’s bucked gender stereotypes. Somebody like Susan Storm Richards, the Invisible Woman of the Fantastic Four. Originally the Invisible Girl, she was inevitably the hostage of many an early FF villain, starting with the Sub-Mariner in issue #4 and Dr Doom straight after in issue #5. But when I was regularly reading the FF in the 80s, writer-artist John Byrne saw the potential both in Sue’s powers and her strength of character. A classic story-arc from issue #279 to #284 showcases just how cool her forcefield ability is, and also marks her long overdue change of name to the Invisible Woman, no longer the token girl hostage.

Maybe I should choose a solo female character, someone who started out in their own ongoing series, rather than as ‘the girl in the team’. Someone like Dazzler - no, shut up, her early comics are actually alright, actually. There’s one where she absorbs all the energy of Black Bolt’s sonic shout and uses it to blind Galactus, I think. OK, better example then - Jessica Jones from Alias. Now there’s a complex, ‘real’ female superhero character with a great back story, cleverly inserted into existing Marvel canon retroactively by writer Brian Michael Bendis.

But you know what? None of them are my gut-reaction Favourite Female Superhero. When I thought about it, really sat down and thought about who I love the most, she wasn’t a Marvel character like the others. She wasn’t even someone that I’ve read a lot of. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that Supergirl is my favourite female superhero purely because of one single issue, and that’s not even her own comic. It’s Crisis on Infinite Earths #7, popularly known as the ‘Death of Supergirl’, in case the cover left you in any doubt.

When Superman is ambushed by the all-powerful, universe-destroying Anti-Monitor, he screams in agony. His cousin Supergirl is the only one who can hear his cry over the pitched battle, and she lays into the Anti-Monito without hesitation. She freakin’ rescues Superman. And then proceeds to mightily wail on the Anti-Monitor single handed, even though she knows it means her death. That’s a proper superhero right there, female or otherwise. And all this while carrying off a tricky headband-and-hockey-skirt costume combo. Beautifully scripted by Marv Wolfman and drawn by the legendary George Perez, I fell in love with Supergirl and then had to mourn her all in the same issue.

Superhero Movies and Me

I contributed a few articles to online magazine Journey Planet, for their superhero issue - #21 - in April 2015. Prepare for childhood nostalgia and extreme geekery.

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I was always a Marvel kid, growing up. DC comics in the 70s, with their Superman robot doubles and Bizarro Loisses and multi-coloured Kryptonites, were just a bit too old-fashioned for me. Marvel was modern and somehow more real, as far as any superhero comics could be, with their argumentative rock men, wisecracking wall-crawlers and angry adamantium-clawed mutants. They were just cooler. I remember practising folding my middle and ring fingers into my palms and making thwippy web-shooter sounds, then flipping my hands round the other way up and pretending to cast the Roving Rings of Raggador at the other kids in the school playground.

So you can imagine how excited I was when they made the first Spider-Man film in 1977. Spidey wasn’t my favourite hero - that was probably Hulk (oddly, I never felt right calling him The Hulk; I felt, like his teen sidekicks Rick Jones and Jim Wilson, that the jade giant was my friend, so just ‘Hulk’) - but I’d read enough of his adventures, reprinted in Britain in the weekly black and white comic Super Spider-Man and the Titans, to be thrilled at seeing the wall-crawler in a film.

For years, like many British comic publishers, Marvel UK had been in the habit of launching new weekly comics for the initial boom of extra sales, then later merging less successful titles into their more popular sister publications. Thus The Titans, a landscape format anthology of old Avengers, Fantastic Four and Sub-Mariner tales, was merged with the mellifluously-named Super Spider-Man with the Super-Heroes (I never quite understood why he was ‘Super’ Spider-Man) to form Super Spider-Man and the Titans. So now you know.

The Spidey stories I’d read were weird and wild 70s tales from the likes of Gerry Conway and Ross Andru, featuring ghostly gangsters, murderous spider-mobiles and my favourite tale - a locked room mystery where the killer turned out to be (spoiler alert) W.H.O, a wall-sized homicidal computer. So eight-year old me was fairly vibrating with keen when my mum took us to our local cinema - the hoary old Embassy in Waltham Cross  whose resplendent blue and purple neon frontage could be seen as far away as the Little Chef on the A10 - to see Webhead for his big screen debut.

My review? It was… OK I guess.

To be fair to the movie itself, it had been hard to get into the mood when Spider-Man was part of a mismatched double-bill, as was common in those olden days. So we first had to sit through 90 minutes of You Light Up My Life, a teary romance about a struggling singer played by Frenchie from Grease. Ironically, all these years later, I can still sing the first few bars of the title song, which is more than I can say for the bland 70s wah-wah of the Spidey movie, which sounded like the background music to every single Starsky & Hutch episode. Some bright spark at the cinema must have decided that Didi Conn singing her little heart out was the perfect aperitif to Spider-Man, them both being American films and all.

Spider-Man was… alright. It starred a grown-up Von Trapp kid from The Sound of Music, who did a decent Peter Parker. And he looked OK in the red and blue costume, apart from the peculiar mirrored eyes. But, eh, I dunno. He didn’t say much as Spidey, and certainly didn’t make jokes as he swung around mocking the baddies, like in the comics. And the baddies themselves were just ordinary crooks in bad 70s suits. Oh, and three guys in black martial arts gear who chased him around with sticks. There were no proper supervillains with metal arms and goblin gliders and funky costumes. There was a bit of wall-crawling, which was pretty good for time (i.e. better than Adam West bent double in the Batman TV show), but the webbing looked rubbish, ranging from ‘flimsy gauze’ to ‘obvious thick nylon cord from my dad’s camping gear’.

But hey, it was Spider-Man, in an actual film. I couldn’t really complain. Surely this was just the start of all my favourite comics appearing on the big screen. Except, not so much. Of course there was blockbusting Superman the Movie the following year, and on TV we had The Incredible Hulk, now remembered more for its haunting end theme ‘The Lonely Man’, than for its less than super action (reputedly, the show’s low budget decreed that Lou Ferrigno’s Hulk could only make two appearances per show, presumably due to the now-forgotten ‘green body paint’ shortage of 1978).

But that was kind of it, barring the increasingly poor Superman sequels (I never recovered from the ill-conceived casting of Richard Pryor clowning around in Superman III, though strangely the sequence of that woman getting roboticized by the maniac computer at the end still haunts me). There was the disappointing Howard the Duck (1986) of which I can only remember the embarrassing song at the end, the rubbish Captain America (1990) featuring an Italian Red Skull, and of course Batman (1989), a film series that like Superman before it seemed to peak with its sequel and then go markedly downhill from there. Apart from three so-so Hulk TV movies featuring the ageing Ferrigno and Bill Bixby, that was pretty much it for Marvel at the movies.

Meanwhile, the world of actual comics was going through a renaissance with titles like Watchmen, the Dark Knight Returns, Secret Wars, Crisis on Infinite Earths, Frank Miller’s Daredevil and Elektra Lives Again, The Phoenix Saga in X-Men, Walt Simonson’s Thor, and the classic Masters of Evil storyline in the Avengers. Did we get any of that magic replicated on the big-screen? Did we - to misquote Pete Postlethwaite - bollocks. The closest thing to a Marvel movie at the time was a stop-motion Micronauts film I made with my dad’s super-8 cine camera using my Baron Karza action figure.

Fast forward to right now. As I type this, we are but five days away from the premiere of Avengers: Age of Ultron. And as with all Marvel movies since Spider-Man back in 1977, I just can’t wait. So no change there, but the difference this time is that I can reasonably sure that a) it won’t be mildly (or desperately) disappointing and that b) the rest of the cinema-going world might just agree with me. For this is the age of the Great Marvel Movie, or more specifically to lift a term from a recent Saturday Night Live sketch, the era where Marvel Can’t Fail.

Who’da thunk there’d be a time when Guardians of the Galaxy - an obscure spacegoing team comic from 1969, would be one of the most successful movies of 2014, both commercially, and amazingly, critically? Who’da thunk that Groot (a creature of wood that feeds on wood, to quote his villainous debut in Tales To Astonish, 1960) and Rocket freakin’ Raccoon would have become household names? I am Groot t-shirts? Kids dressing up as Rocket for Hallowe’en? What strange parallel world have I stumbled into, where ordinary folks know and care about characters that were once the secret specialist subject of only the uberest of geeks? Last Christmas I was even able to buy a crocheted Baby Groot pot plant. Strange Days.

You can draw a line tracing the slow but steady rise of the Great Marvel Movie, from Blade - coyly shy of its comic origins, through X-Men and X2 (we won’t speak of The Last Stand) with its Shakespearean heavyweights playing Xavier and Magneto, to Iron Man with its game changing post-credits sequence (‘I’m here to talk to you about the Avenger Initiative’) that paved the way for the shared Marvel Cinematic Universe.

And how cool is that idea of the MCU? There’s never really been anything like it before. Linked movies, all inhabiting the same world. Not as a series of increasingly poor sequels, but a genuine shared (with the introduction of the Guardians of the Galaxy) universe with shared heroes and villains, and storylines that criss-cross from one movie to another, and even into Agents of SHIELD on TV. Imagine if United Artists back in the 60s had made a series of individual westerns starring Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson respectively, before bringing them all together in one movie called The Magnificent Seven Assemble. How cool would that have been?

What if you could travel back in time, say 20 years or more, and tell a comic fan - maybe your younger geek self - that there would come a time when there would be a movie of the Avengers and it wouldn’t suck? And they wouldn’t be fighting crooks in bad suits or ninjas with sticks, but proper supervillains and aliens and Loki and everything. And the Hulk wouldn't be throwing stuntmen into sugar glass one at a time but Punching Spaceships In The Face. And that there were plans afoot to do the Inhumans and Captain Marvel and even Iron Fist, for the love of Stan. Your younger self would think you mad.

It's funny. I sometimes feel a bit weird about comic movies being so successful, like now that everyone’s in on it, it’s not our secret guilty pleasure any more. If I can have a conversation at work with a 30-year old woman about the Kree tinkering with human DNA, then comics have most definitely gone mainstream. Which is cool, even though I do sometimes feel like Piggy in Lord of the Flies, shouting at everyone that I was here first, I was here when he found the conch (or in this case, Namor’s fabled Horn of Proteus).

Of course, like any neurotic True Believer, I worry about sequelitis and shark-jumping, with clunkers like the Fantastic Four films (Doom playing Marco Polo - ugh), Spider-Man 3 (emo-Pete’s dancing - wince), Wolverine: Origins (what they did to Deadpool - yecchh) and the duller episodes of Agents of SHIELD still fresh in comic-fans’ minds. But this is a great time to be a Marvel comics fan, when the term ‘superhero movie’ has become a genre in its own right, and shows like Daredevil and AKA Jessica Jones coming our way on TV.

I can only hope that the shark is still a way off, that there are more great movies to come (Alan Moore's Captain Britain, anyone?), and I wonder where the genre is going next. My eight-year old self and I can’t wait to see.

A Character Definition Masterclass

I won't bang on about the Avengers: Age of Ultron film overall, save to say that I enjoyed it very very much. However, I would like to examine one tiny scene quite a long way into the film, which is an excellent example of efficient storytelling.

Here's the situation: a new character is introduced a long way into the story. Said character is an artificial being in a movie awash with villainous robots bent on destruction. In fact the new character is the creation of evil 'bot Ultron himself. The themes of betrayal, suspicion and switching sides are threaded throughout the movie. The various (Avenger) protagonists have every reason to suspect this android newcomer and bog the film down in tiresome 'how can we possibly trust you?' interplay, consuming minutes of valuable screen time.

So how does the film-maker efficiently subvert that expectation and establish the character's credentials, short of a lame 'No wait, I sense his good intentions' declaration from the nearest empath?

Simple, you let the character casually pick up Thor's hammer and hand it to him.

Perfect. They've already established earlier on that only the worthy can lift the hammer, and even Cap can only shift it a smidge. So simply having the Vision pass it to Thor - without even realising the significance of his action - has this incredible effect both on the other characters and the audience (there was a ripple of collective 'whoa's when I watched the film). He Is Worthy. Now move on.

Excellent use of the existing mythology to keep the story moving forward at a pace.

Also, Paul Bettany in a cape with Thor's hammer. What's not to love.

What’s Wrong With The Avengers Comics - a review of Avengers 42

I was in Orbital Comics in central London a couple of weeks ago I prefer it to Forbidden Planet, I think. It’s nicely laid out, there’s no ridiculous post office rat-run at the tills, and the shop doesn’t coyly hide its comicky shame downstairs like a Soho bookshop.

I haven’t really been following Avengers for a few years, not since just after the Heroic Age relaunch. Mainly this was because I couldn’t commit to buying multiple Avengers series, but also because I could no longer tolerate writer Brian Michael Bendis’ overuse of ‘heroes sit round a kitchen table in their civvies and discuss who’s on child-minding duties for Jessica and Luke’s sprog’.

So I’m in the comic shop and can’t very well flick through a few titles and just leave. I have to buy something to show willing. What I end up buying are, just like when I was 12, things with catchy covers (way back when, that would have been the Thing punching out a T-Rex while Ka-Zar the savage straddles its neck delivering dialogue like ‘STRIKE GRIMM! BEFORE THE THUNDER LIZARD DOOMS US ALL!’).

I pick up an Alan Davis-covered something and an Alex Ross-covered something, and then I see this here Avengers cover.

It's all going on.

 It’s got all sorts of dudes - most of them I presume baddies, at least they’re baddies this week. There’s Gladiator giving it grrr, Annihilus (it took me years before I realised you didn’t pronounce his name ‘Annie-Hillers’), the chick from the Imperial Guard with the bunches (Astra, I think), a grumpy Skrull and a Brood or two flashing their choppers like Sram from Terrahawks. All flying straight out the page at the reader. Awesome. I presume inside there is a mega-battle between the Avengers and all these spaceborn enemies, so I buys it and reads it on the train home.

Now do a Google image search for Moid. Genuinely disturbing.

I am less than satisfied by the contents. Here’s a page-by-page breakdown of what I plonked down £2.76 of my hard-earned for…

Page 1

Previously in Avengers (I am hearing this in Clark Gregg’s voice). Lots of people standing around talking. Very few of them appear to be the Avengers.

Page 2

Headshots of 45 characters from different teams. There seem to be two teams of Avengers, some Illuminati (heroes from other teams colluding for the Greater Good), the Cabal (I dunno - some space baddies and Namor), the Guardians of the Galaxy, and some other leftover dudes who must have been sent invites to this comic by mistake.

Page 3

Title page. There is a shot of the now aged Steve Rogers looking like Gary Cooper in High Noon, and Reed Richards sporting a vast hipster beard like he’s converted to Islam or trawler fishing.

Page 4

Yellowjacket, the Beast and some dude I figure is Amadeus Cho in a spaceship above the moon. They talk a bit.

How does it work without a visor?

Page 5

The Hulk and Captain Britain in spacesuits. They talk and go EVA over the body of the Living Tribunal on the moon’s surface, which is where all self-respecting cosmic entities go to die these days.

Page 6-7

Cyclops, Sunspot and Cannonball look at some sentinels and talk. Cyclops’ new incarnation post AvX as a complete tool shows no sign of abating.

Page 8-9

Black Panther and Reed Richards With Beard stand in front of a screen and talk about something that looks like the Odyssey from Ulysses 31. Variable-age Valeria Richards eats ice-cream but still comes across as a horrific Stepford child that should have been shot into the sun years ago.

Page 10

Sunspot and Cannonball have left from Cyclops’ Brotherhood of Douchebag Mutants and in homage to Brian Michael Bendis, are in their civvies talking about a toddler. This page is the issue’s highlight for levity, characterisation and superheroics (the baby is wallcrawling on the ceiling).

Keep thinking of a brick wall, Reed.

Page 11-12

Smasher puts on her goggles, goes down on one knee and gets her marching orders from Gladiator. There is talking.

Page 13-14

Namor and some albino woman who has a daft name like White Void sit on a rock and talk.

Page 15-17

Gladiator (him again - maybe they should call this comic Gladiator and his Amazing Friends) sits on his space throne and talks to the Imperial Guard.

Page 18-19

SPLASH PAGE OF SPACE SHIPS FLYING.

Includes gummy-mouthed Acanti with a distressingly textured spacewhale tongue. This is the closest the comic gets to any action, apart from the superbaby on the ceiling.

Page 20-21

The Guardians of the Galaxy sit in their spaceship and talk. They may or may not be flying alongside all the spaceships from pages 18-19. It’s not clear. The different characters of the Guardians are clearly conveyed. Presumably because the writer has just seen the film so didn’t have to think too hard.

Page 22

Rocket talks at lots of superheroes, who may or may not constitute the Avengers. It’s hard to tell.

Page 23

Closing shot of spaceships closing in on Earth. I suppose it’s a kind of dramatic ending.

Analysis

I am genuinely at a loss to explain how this constitutes an Avengers comic. It ought to be called Stuff Happening Everywhere Involving Everyone!, including the increasingly tedious Illuminati, two flavours of Avengers, leftover baddies the Cabal and the Guardians of the Galaxy (who are rapidly approaching Wolverine levels of comic ubiquity). Oh, and Cyclops in his silly X-mask and Valeria Richards (who varies in age between 7 and 16 depending on who draws her).

I get why there are several Avengers comics out at the same time; they’re hot property, what with the films and all. But man, they should really try to feature the Avengers, rather than d100 random characters from the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe.

I think there are about 4 Avengers series out right now, but it’s bloody hard to tell. There’s Avengers, New Avengers, Avengers World, and Secret Avengers. And maybe Uncanny Avengers, Real Avengers, Original Avengers, Avengers Lite and My Big Fat Avenger Plastic Surgery Nightmares.

But they all look the same. They all have an A logo in the top left corner of the cover and a tiny ickle word bit for Secret, World etc. It’s incredibly hard to tell them apart in the shop. Rubbish. In the old days you had a big fat readable title splashed all the way across, and a groovy picture of the hero or heroes in a box top left. Ah, halcyon days.

If the upcoming Netflix shows don't have Stiletto and Discus, I shall be most put out.

But the main problem with this comic lies with its writer, Jonathan Hickman, who perpetrated the exact same approach to story-telling on Fantastic Four a few years ago. He takes a team title, expands the cast by a factor of ten and starts spinning about 5 simultaneous global/interstellar plot-plates. He totally loses any focus on the original central characters, because there are no central characters. You can tell this by page 2 of the Avengers comic - there are 45 - forty bloody five - characters listed.

Not that Hickman can actually write characters. He is plot-oriented to the nth degree - nobody has any discernible character to differentiate them from each other. Apart from a little charmless Rocket Raccoon snarking, everyone in this issue talks the same and behaves the same, to wit they like to stand around and deliver dialogue. They also don’t like to do boring old superhero things like run around and hit things.

Closing Thoughts

I am mystified as to exactly who this sort of title is aimed at. Not the casual reader - even with a Previously On page and a preposterous 45-character cast list, it’s near impossible to pick up what’s happening. And it’s not aimed at the younger reader - there’s nothing here to satisfy someone after fun, action or fights. Or indeed any sort of drama.

But if it’s endless pontificating by a bunch of characterless stuffed shirts you want, some sporting Beards Of Sombreness, then step right this way.

Secret Wars, the company-wide Marvel event is coming soon - which will apparently reboot everything and start again. I can only hope they reboot the writers as well.