X-men: Dark Phoenix (2019)

X-Men: Dark Phoenix (2019): written and directed by Simon Kinberg; based on characters and situations created by Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Len Wein, Dave Cockrum, Chris Claremont, John Byrne, and otrhers; starring James McAvoy (Professor X), Michael Fassbender (Magneto), Jennifer Lawrence (Raven), Nicholas Hoult (Beast), Sophie Turner (Jean Grey/ Phoenix), Tye Sheridan (Cyclops), Alexandra Shipp (Storm), Evan Peters (Quicksilver), Kodi Smit-McPhee (Nightcrawler), and Jesicca Chastain (Vuk):

X-Men: Dark Phoenix wasn't terrible. Certainly not enough for all the now-cliched Internet agita about it. Spoilers ahoy!

I wonder if it suffered at the box office in part because it uses Hollywood's ubiquitous Daddy-Daughter trope in a negative sense. Young Jean "Phoenix" Grey is abandoned by her father after Jean accidentally kills her mother because she hates the music Mom is playing on the car radio. Professor X chooses not to tell Jean that her father is still alive after the accident. This seems to me to be a good idea as Jean is only 8 and is traumatized. He slips up by never telling her as a teen or adult that her father is alive, but in his defense, Professor X is a busy man!

The main problem is that once Disney's acquisition of Fox was imminent, Disney clearly told Fox to change the ending of Dark Phoenix because it was similar to the ending of Captain Marvel -- Jean Grey was supposed to destroy a giant alien spaceship that had come to try to acquire the Phoenix Force for itself, saving the Earth and (seemingly) sacrificing herself in the process. This led to reshooting the climax a year after filming had originally ended.

The film-makers changed this woman vs. spaceship battle to a battle between the aliens on one side and the X-Men and human soldiers on the other side, all on a prison train. 

Because nothing says epic sci-fi confrontation more than a battle in and around the apex of 19th-century travel technology.

Of course, this led to an interesting plot hole. Is the spaceship still in orbit? Because the answer would seem to be 'Yes,' given that we saw the aliens come to Earth in the now obligatory meteorite-like landing pods.

So it goes.

Perhaps needless to note at this point, there's no Daddy-Daughter issues in the original comic book Dark Phoenix Saga. Jean's parents are loving and accepting of her mutant powers, and when she gains the Phoenix powers, the saga plays out as a cautionary tale about absolute power corrupting absolutely, along with self-sacrifice. Realizing that the Phoenix Force could never be controlled, Jean commits suicide. Or does she? That was a story for another day!

Lightly recommended.

Action Comics: 80 Years of Superman (2018)

Action Comics: 80 Years of Superman: The Deluxe edition (2018): edited by Paul Levitz: Not Action Comics 1000 but a companion volume. With Action Comics the first mainstream American comic book to reach 1000 issues, DC released both a special anniversary issue and this thick volume of reprints, the latter containing one never-before-published story from the Shuster studio, and a new story by editor Paul Levitz and legendary artist Neal Adams.

Created by Cleveland teenagers Jerry Siegel and Canadian ex-pat Joe Shuster (cousin of Frank Shuster of Wayne and Shuster), Superman came to life in 1932 and was then met by complete indifference from the comic strip syndicates for the next 6 years. 

Finally, what would become DC Comics bought Superman from Siegel and Shuster for less than a thousand dollars in 1938. In Action Comics 1, cover-dated June 1938, Superman ignited the superhero genre. Everything with American superheroes springs from that moment, this creation of Siegel and Shuster.

Neal Adams (him again!) led the battle in the 1970's to get more compensation for Siegel and Shuster beyond that initially paltry sum. Time Warner, DC's corporate overlord, caved to a certain extent, granting the Cleveland duo a pension. More lawsuits and settlements would follow over the years.

Here we are, 80 years later. Action Comics has reached 1000 issues, though recently it wasn't always numbered that way as DC restarted the numbering in 2012 for reasons I won't bother explaining before returning to the original numbering (folding the new numbering in as well). Detective Comics should have gotten here first, but Action Comics was a weekly for a year back in the 1980's. Thanks, Action Comics Weekly!

Paul Levitz has assembled 300+ pages of stories, essays, and covers. It's solid work -- and I don't think this type of anniversary volume is easy to assemble, as Levitz had to serve history as well as artistic achievement. Thus, this isn't The Best of Superman.

For one thing, Levitz was charged with presenting the other recurring DC heroes who first appeared in the pages of Action Comics (Vigilante, Zatara the Magician, Supergirl, Human Target). For another, the book emphasizes Firsts and Anniversaries along with major stories. That still leaves lots of material.

So pretty much all the great writers and artists are here, though some are by necessity omitted. The raw power of the first two Superman adventures by Siegel and Shuster still compels, to the extent that one wishes Superman would return to his left-wing, agit-prop roots, when stopping a domestic abuser and saving a wrongly convicted woman from the electric chair were more common moments for the Man of Steel than punching it out with some angry-ass super-villain or another.

Oddly, the book doesn't present any of the two-page Superman stories from Action Comics Weekly, I assume because they presented a serialized story in emulation of the Sunday full-page comic strips.

In any case, there's a lot here to delight both a Superman aficionado and a casual reader. The reproduction of the art is generally good, not always easy when the originals don't exist (the muddiest looking reprint comes from 1978, which is a shame because the story is a humdinger of a 40th anniversary issue). A Joe Kelly-penned, many-artist-illustrated anniversary story from the oughts is excellent. A never-before-printed story from the Shuster Studio is a rare find, as is Marv Wolfman's tale of how he rescued it from the garbage. Paul Levitz pens an original story to end the volume, illustrated by comic-book-art Titan Neal Adams.

The essays are fine, too -- none match Ray Bradbury's text piece from Superman 400, but that's a pretty high standard to meet. So all in all, a satisfying volume that I'd be happy to read at twice the length. Long may the Reign of the Superman continue! Highly recommended.

Calling All Super-villains

Forever Evil: written by Geoff Johns; illustrated by David Finch and Richard Friend (2013-2014; collected 2015): I guess if you ever wanted to see Bizarro-Superman kill Otis from Superman: The Movie, then this is the Event Series for you. The Crime Syndicate of an Earth parallel to that of the Justice League figures out how to take the Justice League off the board without actually fighting them. And then they invade and conquer the Earth. But they hadn't reckoned on Lex Luthor putting together a team of super-criminals to... save the world? Yep.

David Finch's artwork is suitably gloomy for this crossover event. Writer Geoff Johns does love the ultraviolence from time to time. Moreover, the seven issues collected here seem awfully padded in the middle, a classic case of gear-grinding so as to get the maximum number of crossovers from the entire DC line (there were about 200 Forever Evil issues of other comic books in addition to the core miniseries). Competent series but not all that much fun; the Crime Syndicate was a lot more interesting when introduced in the wacky Silver Age or re-introduced by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely in a late 1990's Justice League graphic novel. Lightly recommended.

In Search of Galactus: written by Marv Wolfman; illustrated by Keith Pollard, John Byrne, Sal Buscema, Joe Sinnott, and others (1979-1980/collected 2010): From the sometimes fun, occasionally broody, and always wordy Marvel of the late 1970's (very late, given that we move into 1980 in the course of this collection) comes this collection of nearly a year's worth of Fantastic Four comics penned by Marv Wolfman.

Wolfman decided to wrap up the major plot-lines of his just-cancelled Nova series in the Fantastic Four comic, thus pairing the team with Nova and craptastic D-List superhero group New Champions for part of this adventure. The main adversary is the Sphinx, a super-powerful, immortal human with a yen to blow up the Earth. Outgunned, Reed Richards decides to find Galactus and get him to beat up the Sphinx. Why would Galactus do this? Because Reed will then waive the promise he received from Galactus to not eat the Earth. OK! This is a cunning plan.

There are also Skrulls, an aging virus that's going to kill all the members of the Fantastic Four not named the Human Torch in about three days, and a brief solo foray for the Human Torch with his buddy Spider-man at an evil college run by a forgotten FF villain from the later issues of the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby Fantastic Four. It's all enjoyably wordy, has some nice artwork -- especially from the John Byrne/Joe Sinnott team, who do a mean Galactus -- and goes down smoothly. 

Though why Galactus wants yet another Herald, given the 100% failure rate of the first three (beginning with the Silver Surfer, natch), is a great question. As we learn in this series that Galactus has a zoo on board his spaceship, perhaps his recurring need for a Herald is just an expression of his deep-seated but unacknowledged need for... a friend. Recommended.

Supes in the 90's and Bat's in the 40's.

Krisis of the Krimson Kryptonite!: written by Roger Stern, Jerry Ordway, and Dan Jurgens; illustrated by Dan Jurgens, Jerry Ordway, Curt Swan, John Byrne, Bob McLeod, Brett Breeding, Art Thibert, Dennis Janke, Dave Hoover, Kerry Gammill, and Scott Hanna (1990/ Collected 1996): An entertaining, short story arc from the various Superman titles in 1990. Why they decided to go with a title that spells out 'KKK' in acrostic is a really good question, though. 

Coming four years after John Byrne and company had rebooted Superman into a less god-like version of himself, Krisis offers us a Superman who already seems as comfortable as an old shoe. And there's nothing wrong with that. The art is also solid, workmanlike, no-fuss stuff. The three writers give us a Superman who's as noble as ever, faced with a situation in which his powers have mysteriously vanished because of Red Kryptonite.

As there is no Red Kryptonite in the rebooted world of Superman post-1986, this offers an intellectual challenge for the Man of Steel. Not only does he need to find out why he's a normal human now, he also finds himself obligated to continue fighting super-villains by whatever means necessary. My only regret is that the writers didn't figure out how to bring back the Super-mobile, a toy from the late 1970's that was forced upon the Superman creators of the time as something that just had to appear in the comic books. See also the Spider-mobile. 

The supporting cast is likeably constructed here, from the tough Lois Lane to the mostly competent Jimmy Olsen and onwards to relatively new cast addition Professor Hamilton. The main villains of the piece are Lex Luthor and Mr. Mxyzptlk. Luthor is dying of Kryptonite exposure because he's been wearing a green K ring on his hand for several years to ward off Superman. Mr. Mxyzptlk has undergone an unfortunate redesign in the post-1986 Superman universe: the skinny, almost snake-like look wouldn't survive much longer, thank Rao. 

Along the way, we do get a terrific joke that brings Superman reboot co-architect John Byrne back to the Man of Steel after a two-year absence with a funny riff on alternate universes and Byrne's work on the Fantastic Four prior to his work on the Superman comics. Recommended.

Batman: The Dark Knight Archives Volume 2: written by Bill Finger; illustrated by Bob Kane, George Roussos, Fred Ray, Jerry Robinson, and others (1941/collected 1993): Bob Kane worked out a sweet legal deal in 1939 with what would become DC Comics. It got him sole credit in perpetuity as the creator of Batman. This also screwed over writer Bill Finger, who by all accounts came up with about 90% of Batman's recognizable features. 

Kane generally got full credit on art and story for Batman stories until the 1960's. It's not entirely clear whether he actually did anything other than supervise the stories included here from 1941 issues of Batman magazine. So it goes. 

The stories collected here are interesting in a historical sense -- this is not the hyper-competent Batman who has really only existed in comic books since Frank MIller's 1985-86 miniseries The Dark Knight Returns. Instead, he's more of a costumed adventurer with an incredible propensity for getting knocked unconscious by everyone he fights. 

Seriously, post-concussion syndrome should really be the Golden Age Batman's Kryptonite. That and Robin the Boy Wonder's ability to get taken hostage at inopportune moments. They're stories for kids (as, indeed, most stories about super-heroes should be), capably illustrated by Kane (?), Jerry Robinson, George Roussos, and others. 

Bill Finger's pulpy inventiveness was already in full swing by 1941. My favourite example here involves Batman fighting a professor who's been exposed to too much radium radiation. He may be a mad, highly radioactive scientist, but his heart was in the right place: he wanted to cure disease. The Joker makes three appearances in the course of the collection (which spans one year of comic books in 1941). Yes, he was already being over-used. But while he's kooky, he's also a homicidal criminal And, as always, something of a dick. Recommended.

Needs More Quicksilver

X-Men: Days of Future Past: adapted by Simon Kinberg, Matthew Vaughn, and Jane Goldman from the comic-book story by Chris Claremont, John Byrne, and Terry Austin; directed by Bryan Singer; starring Hugh Jackman (Wolverine), James McAvoy/Patrick Stewart (Charles Xavier), Michael Fassbender/Ian McKellan (Magneto), Jennifer Lawrence (Raven/Mystique), Ellen Page (Kitty Pryde), Peter Dinklage (Trask), Shawn Ashmore (Iceman), Halle Berry (Storm), Nicholas Hoult (Beast), Omar Sy (Bishop), Evan Peters (Quicksilver), Daniel Cudmore (Colossus), Bingbing Fan (Blink), Adan Canto (Sunspot), and Booboo Stewart (Warpath) (2014):

A relatively sprawling movie adapted from a 34-page comic-book story from the early 1980's which itself took its title from a Brian Eno album, X-Men: Days of Future Past follows up the good work done by X-Men: First Class in making X-Men movies enjoyable again after the debacle that was the Brett Ratner-directed X-Men: The Last Stand and the twin thuds of the solo Wolverine movies.

Brian Singer, who directed the first two X-Men movies that really kicked off the Marvel Movie Juggernaut starting in the year 2000, returns to the series with his limited colour palette and earnest tone. Well, mostly earnest. The best scene in the movie features some very funny super-heroics set to Jim Croce's "Time in a Bottle."

It's the best scene from any Bryan Singer movie, ever, and so show-stopping that the rest of the movie seems somewhat workmanlike by comparison. If anyone had said before the movie's release that the mutant speedster Quicksilver would steal the movie in a good way, I think that person would have been committed. But he's great. The movie needs more of him. Hell, the X-Men needed more of him by the conclusion.

Time travel drives the plot here. The original comic-book story predated both Back to the Future and The Terminator movies, so save your comments on who's stealing from whom. Wolverine, everybody's favourite veiny Canadian mutant, must travel from the dystopic near-future to the early 1970's to save mutants and humanity alike from a dire fate at the hands of a bunch of levitating sand-crawlers that disgorge endless streams of killer robots. Once in the past, Wolverine teams up with the young versions of Professor X and Magneto; in the future, they stand together despite their differences in the past.

Jennifer Lawrence is given a lot to do this time, as the plot hinges on what her character. Mystique, decides about her path in life. Sometimes she's in her scaly blue body-suit and sometimes she looks like Jennifer Lawrence. So it goes. Much super-heroing and angsting ensues, all of it in the mode that Chris Claremont, John Byrne, and Dave Cockrum brought to those 1970's and early 1980's X-Men adventures.

Not everything works, and the plot could use about one fewer transAtlantic trip towards the end, but enough works to make things pretty enjoyable. Peter Dinklage is a bit wasted as a one-note villain, but he does what he can. And the design on the future Sentinels really is top-notch. They're actually scary. Recommended.

Retch-conned

Spider-man: Chapter One: written by John Byrne; illustrated by John Byrne and Al Milgrom (1998-99): Well, it's not as bad as I feared, this attempt at a retcon of Spider-man's origins that fared so poorly in the marketplace and among those who actually read it that Marvel subsequently ignored everything herein. Nonetheless, Byrne is not at the top of his writing or drawing game here. Not even close.

Basically, Byrne decided that Spider-man's first 20 appearances back in the 1960's constitute Year One. However, Marvel can't call this Spider-man: Year One because DC had already cornered that title extension. Hence Chapter One. Things are then updated so that everything occurs about eight years prior to the then-current Spider-titles, setting Spidey's origin around 1991.

Then come the changes. Stan Lee first posited in a never-produced screenplay that the same radiation experiment created Spider-man and Doctor Octopus. Byrne takes that and runs with it. He also has the radiation accident that created that little radioactive spider kill about a dozen other people and put Peter Parker in the hospital for weeks. Wow, what larks!

Then, with the benefit of hindsight that the Green Goblin was really crazy industrialist Norman Osborn, Byrne attributes the origins of many of Spidey's greatest foes to Osborn. And those he doesn't create, he enlists to attack Spider-man.

Furthermore, because Steve Ditko drew the Sandman and Osborn with similar Ditko-stylized hairstyles (hairstyles that would translate literally into the real world as some very out-of-place, out-of-time combination crew cuts and corn rows), Byrne has the Sandman and Osborn turn out to be cousins. I think. Norman thinks of the Sandman as 'cousin' in quotation marks at one point, perhaps suggesting that Osborn is lying, or perhaps suggesting that Osborn just likes making air-quotes.

Along the way, Byrne gives Electro a boring new suit, something the filmmakers of the upcoming Spider-man movie have also chosen to do. He comes up with a rationale for the burglar's murder of Spidey's Uncle Ben that is a marvel (or maybe a Marvel) of obsessive problem-solving of continuity problems that are not actually continuity problems. And he makes Peter Parker's relationship with Daily Bugle secretary Betty Brant somewhat ickier by making it clear that she's a 20-something dating a 17-year-old boy.

There are some nice moments here, especially in some of the action sequences. But throughout the book there's an obsessive tying together of threads best left untied (did every super-villain work for Norman Osborn?) and some uncharacteristically sloppy artwork from Byrne (the low-point comes late, with a panel showing a Daredevil who is apparently either a very peculiar-looking dwarf or possibly a giant, costume-wearing fetus; the Green Goblin is the worst-served throughout, possessed as he is of a gigantic, grinning, orange-on-a-toothpick head).

That Byrne periodically draws Aunt May to look exactly like his version of intermittent Fantastic-Four nanny (and practicing witch) Agatha Harkness actually confused me a couple of times. And why does Flash Thompson's hair change back and forth between blonde and red throughout this compilation? Who's checking the colours for the reprint? Lightly, lightly, lightly recommended for Spider-man completists or those curious to see why this miniseries continues to be hated by comic-book readers 16 years after it debuted.

History!

Captain America: War and Remembrance: written by Roger Stern and John Byrne; illustrated by John Byrne and Josef Rubinstein (1980; collected 2010): One of the three or four highest of the high points for the patriotic Captain America's comic-book career. Some sort of bizarre (and typical) infighting at Marvel Comics in 1980 truncated Roger Stern and John Byrne's run on Captain America at nine issues, which is a shame, though Stern would move over to a fine run on Spider-man while Byrne would soon be writing and drawing the Fantastic Four.

Standalone high points include a retelling of Cap's origin that attempts to fix some pretty odd continuity problems that had accreted over the years, problems that Stern and Byrne also address in an earlier story in the volume. They send Cap out against familiar villains (Batroc, the French mercenary), villains commonly associated with other super-heroes (the Fantastic Four's Dragon Man and Thor's Mr. Hyde), and Cap villains from long ago (Baron Blood, a World War Two vampire enemy of Cap's from the then-recently cancelled WWII supergroup book The Invaders).

Everything included here is extremely good superhero stuff, but the Baron Blood two-parter is probably the finest thing in the collection. It's also one of the finest pieces of superhero adventure Stern and Byrne ever created together or separately. Josef Rubinstein's heavier inks are perfect here for Byrne's pencils in a way that a more fan-praised Byrne inker such as Terry Austin would not have been, making thing moody and shadowy when needed. Byrne and Rubinstein manage a real sense of menace throughout the two-parter, and the whole thing is satisfyingly dense on the narrative level. I'd imagine a 2013 retelling would run about 12 issues and be about 1/12th as satisfying.

Stern and Byrne work well together -- Stern is a master of keeping readers caught up with events of previous issues without bogging the story down in exposition, and he and Byrne structure some fairly stunning action scenes here, with the best being Cap's last battle with Baron Blood. Highly recommended.

Astro City Volume 4: The Tarnished Angel: written by Kurt Busiek; illustrated by Brent Anderson, Willie Blyberg, and Alex Ross (1997-98): The fourth collection of Busiek and Anderson's great Astro City series focuses on a small-time supervillain dubbed The Steel-Jacketed Man, or Steeljack, as he gets out of prison after 20 years and tries to go straight. In a way, this is an extended homage to the Lee/Ditko Spider-man story "A Guy Named Joe," about a similar small-time hood, though Busiek's character actually craves some form of redemption for the disappointments his criminal life visited upon his now-deceased mother.

While the entire Astro City series is intensely metafictional in its characters, settings, and storylines, Busiek nonetheless frames the metafictional elements within stories of loss, discovery, redemption, and betrayal. It's a sort of metafiction of sentiment rather than commentary (ironic or otherwise) on the history of superhero comic books. Samaritan may be the Astro City analog of Superman, and his first appearance may coincide both in year and in event with John Byrne's Superman reboot at DC in 1986, but he's also his own character through whom Busiek can explore issues of character and motivation in a fantastic context.

Steeljack's story plays out as an homage to hardboiled detective fiction, but with superheroes and supervillains. Someone has been killing minor supervillains, so the residents of Kiefer Square, a slum area populated by supervillains and their families, decide to pay Steeljack to investigate the murders, hoping that his nigh-invulnerable living-steel body may keep him alive long enough to solve the mystery. A plot oriented around the killing of minor villains also riffs on the hero-killer plot of Watchmen.

The story then follows Steeljack, with the sort of copious first-person narration from his viewpoint that will be a familiar device to anyone who's seen a hardboiled detective movie or read a novel. Plagued by doubt and loss, Steeljack makes for a sympathetic protagonist even as he also functions as a fairly potent evaluation of mainstream supervillains. Why don't some of these people go legit and make money from their inventions and powers rather than endlessly robbing banks and getting caught?

Why indeed. They are trapped in a social loop of poverty and crime, as are criminals in the real world, but criminals in the real world aren't invulnerable or possessed of super-technology or super-strength. Some of Steeljack's most poignant moments come in pondering this fantastic problem: why did he allow himself to slip into the life of a sueprvillain? And is there any way out?

Brent Anderson's art is, as always, perfect for the series, fairly naturalistic (especially when compared to a lot of younger artists and artistic approaches at DC and Marvel), rooted in character and telling detail, but also quite dynamic when the story calls for it. Alex Ross's covers are their usual source of painterly goodness. Highly recommended.

Giant-Size Holiday Grab Bag

Concrete Volume 1: Depths: written and illustrated by Paul Chadwick (1986-1999; collected 2005): Concrete became a critical and commercial success in the 1980's in part because of the comic-book world's 'Black-and-White boom,' in which a rising tide of speculation floated all boats and then a declining tide nearly grounded all boats, forever. It also got the always understated Harlan Ellison to declare it the best comic book of its time.

It wasn't.

What it was, though, was a refreshing change for the superhero-dominated time: a low-key story about a guy stuck in a super-powered body and what he tries to do with that body. That the body looks like a Golem made of concrete and has an extremely limited sense of touch makes things tougher. Concrete has super-strength, but it's bear-level super-strength, not Superman-level super-strength. He can be hurt by explosive shells, long falls, or oxygen deprivation lasting more than an hour. Oh, and he has terrific eyesight, which allows Chadwick the artist to depict some pretty interesting undersea vistas during Concrete's periodic forays underwater.

Re-reading (most) of these stories 24 years later, I'm struck by how soothing the world of Concrete is. The adventures are low-key in tone even when they verge on the epic (Concrete saves miners from a collapsed mine; Concrete tries to swim the Atlantic Ocean); Chadwick's skills as both an artist and a writer lie in the depiction and accumulation of small, telling details.

Schmaltz and over-sentimentality always lurk at the threshold, but for the most part they're kept at bay with lovely little details (the look on Concrete's face when he accidentally steps on someone's foot, for example). And one of the early central conceits of the series -- that the best way to get people to stop talking about something is to over-expose it in the media -- remains fresh. Recommended.


　

Next Men: Aftermath: written and illustrated by John Byrne (2012): John Byrne's time-twisting superhero book finally comes to what may or may not be an end, 17 years after he started the project. It's been a mostly enjoyable ride.

Here, the reality-bending shenanigans come thick and fast, reminding me of one of Byrne's better efforts, the OMAC miniseries. Byrne's one of only a handful of creators of his era who seems truly comfortable with science fiction as a thought process and not as a series of symbolic markers deployed in the service of allegory.

This volume is probably a necessity if you've followed Next Men and completely pointless if you haven't. Byrne's art is very sharp, and his inking of himself has finally reached the status of some of the great inkers -- Terry Austin, Karl Kesel -- he had in the past. Recommended.



Top Ten: Beyond the Farthest Precinct: written by Paul DiFillipo; illustrated by Jerry Ordway (2005): Science-fiction writer DiFillipo and long-time DC artist Ordway do nice work picking up the story of the super-powered precinct five years after the events chronicled by creators Alan Moore, Gene Ha and Zander Cannon in the original Top Ten series from 1999-2000.

Ordway luxuriates in the chance to do hyper-detailed panels in the backgrounds of which lurk pulp and comic-book and comic-strip characters highly reminiscent of every such character ever created. The city of Neopolis houses virtually all the super-powered, supernatural, and just plain weird people of America. And Precinct Ten ('Top Ten') tries to keep the peace.

This time around, we catch up with old friends, especially Toybox, Smax, King Peacock, Peregrine, Shock-headed Peter, and Sergeant Kemlo, as they deal with an irritating new mayor, an even-more irritating new precinct Captain, and a bizarre apparition which swiftly goes from scary nuisance to potentially universe-destroying threat. The geography of Neopolis remains an odd delight and a commentary -- we again see the robot ghetto, but we're also introduced to Bugtown, in which reside insect-based characters, and insects, of all types. Don't ask me what it all means. Recommended.

The Five-Year Engagement: written by Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller; directed by Nicholas Stoller; starring Jason Segel (Tom Solomon), Emily Blunt (Violet Barnes), Chris Pratt (Alex Eilhauer), Alison Brie (Suzie Barnes-Eilhauer), David Paymer (Pete Solomon), Mimi Kennedy (Carol Solomon), Jacki Weaver (Sylvia Dickerson-Bauer), Rhys Ifans (Professor Winston Childs), and Mindy Kaling (Vaneetha) (2012): Advertised as another Judd-Apatow-produced romp, this movie is indeed that -- but also a surprisingly nuanced and accurate portrayal of life in academia. Now wonder it wasn't a hit!

The trials and tribulations of Emily Blunt's post-doctoral-fellowship-holding psychology Ph.D. and her hapless fiance Jason Segel, transplanted from his dream job as a sous-chef in San Francisco to life as the lightly regarded non-academic partner in Michigan, ring amazingly true.

Segel gradually goes crazy while Blunt putters along in her mostly laughable academic career, the romantic target of a lecherous supervisor played to unctuous, faux-sensitive perfection by Rhys Ifans. The stellar supporting cast has lots to do, with Community's Alison Brie doing a decent British accent and the Sarah Silverman Show's Brian Posein making good use of his giant beard and drunken Sasquatch charm as one of Segel's Michigan drinking buddies. And the leads are funny and charming.

This isn't a great movie -- like almost every Apatow-associated project, it's a bit too shaggy and a bit too long. But it certainly provides more laughs than almost anything else you're going to see this week. Recommended.

Still Not Avenging Anything Though

West Coast Avengers: VisionQuest: written and pencilled by John Byrne; inked by Mike Machlan (1989; collected 2005): Fun bit of revisionist Avengers history, as John Byrne tries to reconcile 20 years of inconsistencies in the story of the android superhero Vision's origin story. That origin story initially posited that the Vision was a new artificial personality implanted in the WWII Human Torch's android body.

But the established story of the Torch's construction (a quasi-biological body) never synchronized with the written and artistic depictions of the Vision's construction (a synthetic 'synthezoid' with both mechanical and quasi-biological parts). Until 1989!!! Because Byrne got bugged by stuff like that!

Along the way, we also meet a secret intelligence agency headed by a person with a surprising country of origin. The Vision gets kidnapped. Weird things happen with the children of the Vision and mutant Scarlet Witch. A mysterious enemy who would get referenced by Grant Morrison during his run on the X-Men ten years later shows up for the first time. Wonder Man sports a mullet and continues to have terrible fashion sense when it comes to superhero costumes. And Byrne's funniest superhero group, the Great Lakes Avengers, make their surprisingly effective first appearance.

Byrne's art is clean and well-laid-out, as it usually is, and his science-fictional interests really add to the story. Mike Machlan does a nice job inking Byrne, putting a nice sheen on the whole thing. Recommended.

When Super-powers Happen to Terrible People

The Boys Volume 3: Good for the Soul: written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by Darick Robertson (2008): Many terrible things happen and more terrible things are revealed about the superheroes of the world of The Boys. Pretty much all of them are corporate lackeys of Vought-American, a multi-national that's excellent at making money and terrible at making weapons that actually work.

Ennis and Robertson illustrate this with some World War Two references to profit-motivated cock-ups by arms manufacturers on the Allied side, all of which made the companies tons of money and all of which resulted in increased fatalities. Because modern warfare is all about money. The troops are essentially irrelevant except as testing units for the hardware, regardless of whether it's an improvement on the last hardware.

The super-powered Boys, funded by the CIA but running their own deeper game, once again take the piss out of some superheroes while trying to uncover the truth about 9/11 in their universe, where the Brooklyn Bridge and not the World Trade Center Towers was destroyed. A pretty searing portrait of dangerous, profit-motivated incompetence. Recommended.

The Boys Volume 6: The Self-Preservation Society: written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by Darick Robertson, John McCrea, and Carlos Ezquerra (2009-2010): Payback, Ennis's horrifying parody of Marvel's Avengers, comes after The Boys. Stormfront, Payback's thinly veiled version of Thor, is an actual Nazi used by uber-corporation Vought-American to exterminate undesireable ethnics on Third-World land they want to purchase when he's not posing for photo ops and pretending to be a German God of Thunder.

But like pretty much ever other super-powered character in Ennis's bleak vision of the world, he's never been properly trained in hand-to-hand combat because he's simply too powerful to worry about it. That's about to change. Another bracing, barbaric, ultraviolent yawp against the world's violent stupidities. Recommended.

　

John Byrne's Next Men: Scattered Part 2: written and illustrated by John Byrne (2010): Byrne's great 1990's series, once on a 15-year hiatus, draws to a (sorta) close, as one volume remains. The time-travel stuff is complicated but nicely reasoned out; the stakes are high; everything we saw long ago in the first issues moves satisfyingly towards an ending. But you'll need to read everything that came before to understand what comes now. Recommended.

Sex Change

Next Men: Scattered: written and illustrated by John Byrne (2011): 15 years after the last issue of John Byrne's Next Men ended on a cliffhanger, Byrne finally finishes the story, starting here. You'd be well advised to read IDW's two phone-book-sized collections of the original series, and more recently than I did. The first new issue does supply a fairly rapid-fire synopsis of the first run, but even then I was a bit fuzzy on what had come before.

The four issues included here launch the comic into a wild time-travel story that recalls Byrne's brilliant, under-rated OMAC miniseries of the early 1990's in its complexity. It's fascinating and fun and unresolved, partially because some of the story may be a virtual reality fantasy. Other bits may be dreams. And several of the timelines we're shown seem to contradict one another, suggesting that we're looking at multiple timelines created by different alterations in the past occuring at different times. Got all that?

Byrne's art looks sharp, and the writing is solid. Whether or not our genetically engineered superheroes can save the world from the megalomaniacal energy vampire that one of them accidentally empowered through sexual contact remains to be seen. Yes, super-powers are a sexually transmitted disease. Seems reasonable. Recommended for readers of the previous series.

Rapping with the Captain

Captain America: The Captain: written by Mark Gruenwald; illustrated by Tom Morgan, Kieron Dwyer, Al Milgrom and others (1987-88; collected 2011): Stripped of his commission as Captain America by the U.S. government, Steve Rogers strives to find his place in the world while the government trains a new Captain America -- the former Super-Patriot -- in his place. The real Cap ends up fighting crime as The Captain for a time before various developments and machinations place him and the new Captain America on a collision course.

This large collection (500 pages+) has its ups and downs, though mostly ups. The late Mark Gruenwald was one of three or four Marvel writers of the 1980's and 1990's who really seemed to "get" Captain America as both an icon and a sympathetic character (for the record, the other writers would be Roger Stern, Mark Waid, and John Byrne, with a special mention of Frank Miller's mournful take on Cap in the Daredevil: Born Again arc). The art by Kieron Dwyer and Tom Morgan is straightforward and effective.

As with DC's Superman, Captain America represents quite a challenge to a comic-book writer. Go too far one way and he's an insufferable, flag-waving goofball. Go too far the other and he's simply not recognizable as Captain America (well, except for that iconic uniform). The Captain allowed Gruenwald to address this problem in an unobtrusively meta-fictional way: Steve Rogers isn't sure what his place is in the world any more, while the new Captain America rapidly becomes a kill-crazy nutjob undone by the stresses of the job. But eventually the narrative shows that the original Captain America still has a place in a world of increasingly violent heroes and villains.

Gruenwald advances his case for a realistically idealistic, principled Captain America in a number of ways: the motley crew of D-List heroes who follow Cap around for much of the book allow for Cap's influence to be shown rather than told; the new Captain America remains fairly sympathetic even as he goes off the rails; and one group of villains actually calls on Cap for help because he's the only Marvel hero who might actually come to the rescue of one group of villains being beat on by another.

All in all, solid superhero storytelling with some nice grace notes scattered throughout. The character of 'D-Man' -- a super-powered former wrestler who fights crime as Demolition Man in what appears to be an oversized Wolverine outfit -- is the most interesting supporting character here, partially because in the Marvel Universe a guy who can deadlift 15 tons is considered puny by a lot of villains, partially because he's an oddity verging on Grant Morrison Doom Patrol territory. Recommended.

Four!

Fantastic Four Visionaries: John Byrne Volume 1, written and illustrated by John Byrne (1981; collected 2005): Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear when pretty much every superhero comic book sold over 100,000 copies a month and stories didn't drag out over a year, or even years.

Byrne, artist and co-plotter for some of the X-Men's greatest 1970's and early 1980's storylines (most notably The Death of Phoenix and Days of Future Past) had by the early 1980's got tired of working with X-Men scribe Chris Claremont. So he eventually ended up taking over The Fantastic Four as both writer and penciller, his first extended stint as a writer on any series. He'd stay on the book for about five years in what most consider to this day to be the second-best FF run after Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's original 100+ issue stint.

Byrne has never had Stan Lee's oddball flair for combining melodrama with low-brow comedy -- the only real knock on his FF run is that it's mostly humourless. But he is one of the post-1970's superhero world's great synthesizers and extrapolators. He doesn't create a lot of new heroes and villains during his FF run, but he does make really good use of the ones he has (he even managed to make Wyatt Wingfoot interesting), and his version of The Thing, personality-wise, is the best the character's ever gotten in terms of the Thing's difficult mix of pathos and two-fisted directness.

This volume mainly consists of standalone stories (remember those, kids?) that, in total, resemble mid-period Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four comics in their mix of standalone stories with one-off villains and pivotal issues featuring major characters, the most enjoyable of the latter being the 20th anniversary issue battle with Dr. Doom and the exodus of the Inhumans from their Himalayan hiding place to a less air-polluted locale. These are comics that can profitably be read by both children and adults, something of a lost art in today's shrunken superhero comics marketplace. Highly recommended.

Byrne Out

Fantastic Four Visionaries: John Byrne Volume 0, written by Marv Wolfman, Chris Claremont, Bill Mantlo and John Byrne; illustrated by John Byrne, Joe Sinnott, Pablo Marcos and Dave Hunt (1979-80; collected 2010): What do you do when you decide to collect stories preceding the stories in Volume 1 of a reprint series, but want to keep numbering in sequence without renumbering the other entries? Go with zero. Though if there are any other John Byrne Fantastic Four stories uncollected, further volumes will have to go with fractions, or maybe irrational numbers.

Before Byrne started his 50-issue run as the writer and (usually) artist of the Fantastic Four in the early 1980's, he drew and/or wrote the Fantastic Four in several other issues of their magazine and other Marvel comics. That's what's collected here. It's all pretty enjoyable, though I never thought longtime FF inker Joe Sinnott was a particularly good match for Byrne's pencils. Oh, well.

The two-parter at the end of this volume, written and illustrated by Byrne, marks the first time he did that double duty on the FF's own magazine. It certainly points ahead to Byrne's interests when he would take over the comic about a year later, or at least his science fictional interests. Those stories not written by Byrne do serve, when set beside Byrne's later efforts, to highlight the fact that Byrne was the second-best writer the Fantastic Four ever had, after Stan Lee. The other volumes in this series are far more essential, but nonetheless Recommended.