marvel comics

I finally read Age of Apocalypse – Was it like a smaller Secret Wars?

June 1, 2015 by Nick Bryan

Just recently, I crossed another item off my list of stories to read on Marvel Unlimited – I rattled through the X-Men: Age of Apocalypse mini-epic. I don’t know what spurred me to go for that precise one, but after the fact, it seems topical – after all, Marvel are about to pull an Age of Apocalypse on their entire universe with the mega-massive Secret Wars event.

That’s before we get to next year’s X-Men: Apocalypse movie, which probably won’t adapt this storyline but might, and recent DC event Convergence, also an AoA-style move, albeit shorter.

So it seemed a good time to talk about it, maybe discuss how these new events are using (or abusing) the legacy of Age of Apocalypse. Spoilers follow for twenty-year-old X-Men comics!

The Age of A-WHAT-alypse?

Style icons of the Age of Apocalypse

It turns out, Xavier was crucial to everything and the causation ripples from his non-existance caused the Marvel Universe to whip from a standard modern-day setting to a hellish dystopia ruled by longstanding Survival Of The Fittest X-Tyrant Apocalypse.

I’m going to try and keep the outline brief: Age of Apocalypse began after someone went back in time and killed X-Men mentor, inspiration and Patrick Stewart lookalike Charles Xavier, long before he became a living legend.

In real-world publishing terms, this meant the seven or eight monthly X-Men comics were replaced for four months with retitled series following the AoA equivalent of their regular characters. So Wolverine became Weapon X, Generation X became Generation Next, X Factor became Factor X, Excaliber became X-Calibre (???), and, best of all, X-Force became Gambit and the X-Ternals. Because they’re external to the mainstream, or something?

Some characters investigated signs that all wasn’t right with this reality, others fought in escalating conflicts that threatened to destroy the world before the first lot could save it. And that, basically, is the premise of Age of Apocalypse.

The Knightfall of Jack Batlin

More like DARKDevil!!11!*

This is far from the only superhero comics story in the nineties where a popular property was replaced with a different (often DARKER) version. There was Batman: Knightfall, the Death of Superman, Spider-Man’s Clone Saga, new Green Lantern Kyle Rayner and, of course, the time Daredevil faked his own death, wore black armour and started calling himself Jack Batlin.

Not got time to discuss all those in depth, but the point is: many of these stories are not well-remembered. Age of Apocalypse, however, gets quite a good rap. Like: people talk about it as if it’s good and worth reading, rather than a “guilty pleasure” or a fascinating study of nineties excess.

So, what did I think when experiencing these comics?

Honestly, if I take one thing away from Age of Apocalypse, it’s a certain respect for the editorial planning and world-building. The comics consistently take place within the same world, there’s a steady rumbling story through everything despite the dozen or so writers and artists involved. There aren’t that many moments of memorable writing voice – even an early-in-career Warren Ellis on X-Calibre doesn’t impose his style on the finished product much – but everyone is clearly on the same page.

It has a lot of momentum, the characters are consistent, it’s paced at just the right length to get everything in, do its thing and end the story with a bang. The art is always strong, clear and getting the desired effect, finding time for memorable showings from Joe Madueira, Steve Skroce, Adam & Andy Kubert and Chris Bachalo, among others.

Obviously, I wasn’t involved in running the Age of Apocalypse story, for all I know it was utter bloody chaos behind the scenes. But if I had to compare it to other nineties comics events, I would say this is the USP: it feels like a story at its natural length with a pre-planned beginning and middle, then an end which brings back the status quo without feeling like a depressing reset.

Infinite Leather Jackets and the Apocalypse

90s Cyclops is 90s

Of course, I can’t pretend that Age of Apocalypse is some formal comics masterwork on a par with Watchmen. It is an event story from the nineties and comes with all the try-hard “kewl” moments you’d expect, along with over-muscled men, over-endowed women, awful haircuts, too many guns, too many pockets and infinite leather jackets. If you’ve tried nineties comics before and found all the above too much to deal with, I can’t say Age of Apocalypse will necessarily change your mind.

As a pre-2000s comic, there’s also a narration-heavy, tell-don’t-show approach to storytelling that seems clunky compared to the streamlined dialogue-driven cinematic stylings of nowadays. With a whole universe to introduce, it can’t avoid a huge amount of info-dumping in captions, not to mention characters turning up and delivering huge monologues which just happen to explain their entire motivation and history in a single text-filled page.

Of course, even if it doesn’t read silky-smoothly, it’s possible this TAKE THIS EXPOSITION AND EAT IT! approach is one reason Age of Apocalypse works. Fully dramatising all of this background material could take twice as long, and even if it would be functionally better, stretching out the story would damage momentum. Let’s face it, fun though this alternate reality replacement game is, we all know the status is gonna quo in the end. Better focus on the key moments.

Secret Wars – Secret Marvel Unlimited promotional tool?

The Many Thors of Secret Wars

Which brings us on to the happening-right-now Secret Wars, in which a Massive Cosmic Event destroys the Marvel Comics universe and all its alternates, leaving only a patchwork reality made of bits from all of them. It’s very AoA in many ways, and not just because one of the themed regions on the new “Battleworld” is Age of Apocalypse-based. In fact, this is a bit like a theme park isn’t it?

But the main thrust is that the whole of the Marvel line of comics is on hold, bar a few exceptions, leaving only comics set on the various new worlds. Some of them are ‘continuations’, others are ‘preparing to die’ stories set back in the pre-destruction universe, others just writers having fun in the weird new setting without much concern for what it all means. Those might be the ones I’m most excited by, although as a Marvel Unlimited subscriber, I get to read any I fancy without needing to make “purchasing” decision.

Which, actually, might be the best way of experiencing the event.

I don’t know whether Secret Wars will work or not – I can see how it might be annoying to followers of ongoing series which are now being heavily disrupted due to a story which doesn’t relate to them. Age of Apocalypse, at least, was shorter, more self-contained and confined to a smaller group of books which were heavily interrelated anyway, so tight continuity wasn’t a hard pill to swallow. Will Secret Wars lack the tight focus and plotting that made Age of Apocalypse work? I’ll find out in about a year when the whole thing is on Unlimited.

But even if it turns out comics companies learnt the wrong lessons from Age of Apocalypse about what they need to do to sell, the original remains a fun read. A testament to how obvious gimmickery and a bombastic nineties aesthetic don’t have to be bad if there’s a compelling story in there. Worth a look.

FOOTNOTE *: Yes, I’m aware Darkdevil is an actual character from the alternate-future MC2 continuity. He’s the son of a Spider-Man clone possessed by the spirits of both Matt Murdock (aka Daredevil) and the demon Zarathos. In many ways, this innocuous pun was a homage to him.

Avengers: Age Of Ultron and the serialisation value of superhero movies

May 10, 2015 by Nick Bryan

Avengers: Age of Ultron is out now all over the place, and I saw it on the opening Friday. The many solo film stars of the Marvel movies re-unite to take on an evil robot, ruptures form among the team and I’ll refrain from over-describing the film as some people might still be avoiding spoilers.

It was good, though – not as no-reservations excellent as the first Avengers movie, due to Ultron not being quite as memorable as Loki and the sheer volume of characters taking away from focus. Sill, among the upper echelons of Marvel movies and successfully kept me invested in the whole Marvel monolith.

Anyway, this isn’t going to be a straight review of the movie as there are plenty of those on the internet. The release of Avengers II served as a kinda peak point of a few months where I’ve been consuming a load of superhero media. Between DC’s FlArrow shows, Gotham, Agents of SHIELD, Daredevil and Agent Carter, that’s a whole lotta tights and tights-related material.

And that’s without even counting Walking Dead and Constantine.

Point being: I love serialised fiction across all mediums, but it kinda started with comics. So I’ve been thinking a lot about how this stuff translates because… much as I’ve liked many superhero movies, I feel like TV might be the ultimate medium for them.

“It matters that I matter,” said Batman, as he wept.

“I hate being a lizard! I must turn everyone else into one!”

Superhero comics, of course, are serialised within an inch of their lives. A lot of stories exist only to set up other stories, Some are massive huge important parts of the narrative, others just feature the characters going on a little fun outing or having development – point being, some issues do not feature top-level tension or mega-disasters. It’s fun seeing the characters just hanging out or taking on a slightly-less-A-list bad guy, but we rarely get that in the films.

Because movies, especially big expensive action movies, really fucking want to matter. Scale is their heroin and they demand every story seem like the most important thing in the world.

Sometimes this works – in Avengers: Age of Ultron for example. This is the climactic movie of the whole second Marvel phase and the threat is genuinely world-ending, so we are willing to grant the film the importance that it craves and needs.

This need for scale and importance, however, isn’t always so well-suited to the material – particularly pronounced in a lot of the earlier attempts at superhero movies, before sequels became inevitable. In a bid for drama and importance, a lot of those movies needed to have the villain assemble some kind of doomsday device and/or threaten mass destruction, often for little reason other than “Gosh darn it, this is a damned action movie picture and we gotta give the folk their destructo-spectacle!”

Which leads us to such odd denouements as Doctor Octopus and the Lizard building doomsday machines in Spider-Man movies despite just being a bit sad before that. Or the Scarecrow deciding to create a fear-bomb in Batman Begins, despite it feeling really at odds with the rest of the movie. Hell, even Magneto pulling a mutant-making machine out of his caped arse in X-Men seemed sudden to me.

Because in a TV show, you see, they could justify a finale where the hero just whacked the villain in the cock – ideally with complication or greater stakes, but still, a fight. But for many movies, that’s never quite enough and it has to be World In Danger.

This is particularly pronounced with characters like Batman and Spider-Man who generally work at smaller scales, so tone skews weirdly when the apocalypse is wanged in there.

“Steve, are people… invested in the Avengers?” said Iron Man, as he wept.

Plus, let’s be honest, too expensive for TV.

The other problem with forcing serialised narratives into movies, of course, is that it changes the nature of cinema to try and make it work, and not always in comfortable ways. TV shows are expected to leave a few loose ends hanging for the next episode/series/season, and even they eventually reach a grand finale where all threads are tied up.

A lot of this might be a psychological expectation – a TV show, as part of its make-up, is there to pull you through episodes. Films, because they’re sold as a singular experience, are expected to be more self-contained, and if all you get out of a cinema visit is that the studio would quite like you to see their other similar films, it’s understandable you’d be pissed off. This is one reason Guardians of the Galaxy was so good – it bent over backwards to be a standalone movie-style adventure romp, rather than an up-budget TV pilot.

If you flipped the psychology, I suppose, you could take this as incentive to be amazing – there’s no space for a filler episode here, guys – every installment has to brilliant in terms of quality as well as franchise maintenance, otherwise the whole house of cards might fall.

But, as hinted in the previous section, sometimes a quieter episode can build character and make the bigger ones work – honestly, one major problem with Age of Ultron for me? It felt like we were meant to invest in the Avengers as this big substantial organisation that had carved out a role and a dynamic. This would mean Ultron coming along to ruin it was a grand tragedy, striking at the heart of something precious.

Unfortunately, with only one previous Avengers film, it felt like the institution barely existed before it fell. The only chance the movieverse got to show us “a normal day” for the Avengers was the opening scene of the second film. It felt like a story where the main selling point was Smashing The Status Quo, except because we only get one film every three years, the Avengers don’t feel like the reassuring constant required for that to really kick us in the face.

Anyway, that’s just something I’ve been feeling about superheroes for a while, and with all this Ultronitude going down, seemed a good time to talk about this. I will, however, close out positive by saying this: Arrow, Flash, Daredevil, Agent Carter and, yes, even Agents of SHIELD lately, are doing good-to-great jobs of nailing all the stuff I’m talking about. If you like superheroes or serialised adventure in general but have been resisting the TV versions, I recommend giving one or two a chance. They won’t all be everyone’s cup of tea, but they’re all good serialised adventures in their own way.

Ultimate Spider-Man – A Potentially Pre-Emptive Eulogy

April 16, 2015 by Nick Bryan

Last week, the Ultimate Spider-Man comic seemed to come to an end. It’s hard to be certain, as Marvel Comics are being very cagey about the future of their publishing line, but based on some heartfelt words from series writer Brian Michael Bendis on his Tumblr, it looks like we’ve reached the end of that book in its current form.

The character may carry on, but sounds like either he’ll no longer be written by Bendis or the set-up will be radically changed. Either way, I was inspired to produce some words, as this was a comic that meant a lot to me over the years.

Peter The Animal-Themed Villain Slayer?

The Ultimate line from Marvel began in the early 2000s (originally under the title Ground Zero Comics, thankfully changed before 9/11), re-imagining their main characters as debuting in the present day, rather than the mid-20th century. It revised origins, streamlined continuity, tweaked premises to suit modern audiences, and was wildly successful for a while. Many Ultimate changes were adapted into the recent mega-hit Marvel movies.

However, eventually, the Ultimate line grew its own complex continuity, the regular Marvel line offered a more competitive alternative and many of the books struggled. The big exception: Ultimate Spider-Man, initially by indie crime comics writer Brian Michael Bendis and experienced superhero artist Mark Bagley.

It’s just not a great haircut.

At the heart of Ultimate Spidey, and perhaps the reason it lasted such a long time when the others lost their way, was the idea of Spider-Man as a teenage character. Peter Parker re-envisaged as a modern angry, moping nerd, cursed with a terrible floppy haircut and left forever young like Bart Simpson.

If this series had a firm influence outside old Spider-Man comics, it was teen adventure dramas like Buffy The Vampire Slayer, as Spider-Man struggled with his moral obligations, supervillain battles and web of complex teenage feelings. He swung neatly from soap to action to genuinely funny comedy sequences. There was Gwen and Mary Jane, Norman and Harry Osborn, a terrifying Doctor Octopus and even a non-alien Venom. Good times.

I Was A Late-Teen Spider-Fan

I was a late-teenage Spider-Man fan while this started coming out, so I suppose there’s an obvious appeal there. But as someone who loved the sci-fi/soap opera/jokes combo of Spider-Man more than any other superhero, I thought this really captured the spirit of the character for me, distilling it into a pure form without many distractions. After all, Spidey is the forerunner of all teen relatable superheroes, and it was weird that there hadn’t really been many comics where he lived in that genre – sneaking out of school to fight the Rhino and trying to make it back in time for his date.

I also felt the length of the run did a lot for it. Obviously, not every comic book run should go on forever. Still, the feeling of a world developing, characters coming and going, all with Bendis as a unifying creative voice even after the original artist left, gave the series a feeling of authorial ownership and consistency you don’t get from many superhero comics.

I don’t want to ignore the artists – Mark Bagley cemented himself as not just a definitive Spidey artist here, but one who can convey lengthy conversations just as well as superhero action.

The subsequent artists – primarily Stuart Immonen, David Lafuente, Sara Pichelli and David Marquez – were all top-notch too, continuing in the tradition of exciting, dynamic art that flowed through the action. They made the superhero action look like it had real weight rather than abstract gesturing, while still selling all the emotional beats.

And I haven’t even talked yet about the other major thing Ultimate Peter Parker got that the regular one probably never will: an ending.

Even-Ultimater Spider-Man

Lovely Miles Morales costume.

I cried when Ultimate Peter Parker died, I’m not ashamed to admit it. Series original artist Mark Bagley came back to draw that last storyline and gave him exactly the sacrifice you’d want. Seriously, if you’d been reading all along, it was a brutal, sad pay-off. Even though he might now be back from the dead, it doesn’t deaden the impact of that issue for me.

Plus it meant Ultimate Spider-Man could innovate yet again by giving us the all-new version: Miles Morales. An young biracial teenager inspired by Peter Parker’s death and just happening to acquire similar-but-not-identical spidery powers, Miles donned a redesigned Spider-Man costume and picked up where Parker left off.

Paving the way for many more diverse superhero replacements in recent years, Miles kept up the bold Spidey tradition of likability and humour in the face of horrible suffering. With Bendis still on-board as writer, he’s kept the tone consistent, continuing the Ultimate Spidey tradition of making old tropes seem new and exciting. The inspired part, I think, was yanking away the Parker-era safety net of recognising characters/stories from the original universe, but keeping the tone intact.

Sales of the Ultimate initiative trailed off in recent years, and we’ve finally reached the point of winding it down. Bendis and Bagley are re-teaming for a finale story called Ultimate End, which should be heartwrenching. Still, they’ve all but confirmed that Miles Morales will stay around in some form – based on some news stories, he may even join the Avengers.

Nonetheless, part of me feels an overhanging sadness. As I’ve mentioned, the glorious tapestry of the Ultimate Spider-Man universe is a big selling point. Bendis built a world populated by likable and memorable characters, all the better to make us suffer when he starts swinging the hammer into them.

If we lose that, even if Miles Morales himself survives, I will feel something has been lost. What about his friendship with Ganke, dammit?

Yes, the character and what he represents are important, but the Ultimate Spider-Man series, supporting cast and style meant something to me too, and if this is the end, I’m sorry to see them go. But I got to read over 200 issues of this thing I like, with pretty much uniformly great art, so I suppose my suffering isn’t quite the worst in the world.

BEST OF 2014 – Comics

December 30, 2014 by Nick Bryan

Originally, this summary of 2014’s comics-reading was going to share space with the books, but those damn prose-hives ended up taking up so much space that I let them have the entire post. So now, that means I could either not list my favourite comics of 2014 or give them an entire post to themselves.

I think it’s obvious which way I was going to go. If you want to know what I was reading a year ago, here’s the post for that. Now, onwards back into the comics of 2014, a year where my comic book consumption came dangerously close to being defined by a single app…

Unlimited Power!

My 30th birthday was in late March, and my main presents were a tablet and a Marvel Unlimited subscription. Marvel Unlimited, in case you missed it (as it isn’t that well promoted), is a Netflix-esque service providing infinite on-demand access to a huge range of Marvel comic books for a regular subscription fee. It’s updated every Monday with another week of books, so you do effectively get the entire line, albeit six months behind the new stuff.

It’s a great deal, especially at the current price, even if the app has some teething moments at times. I’m on iOS, so don’t know how good the Android version is. Works especially well if you, like me, are interested in a wide variety of Marvel series and more or less switched to collected editions a while back, so don’t mind being six months off the pace.

However, with this much stuff available, it is possible to get Marvel-fatigued. You read Unlimited for hours, because it’s there, and you start to wonder if there’s a world outside Spider-Hulk-X-Iron-Man. I didn’t even realise it was possible to forget Batman nowadays, but at times, I came close.

Anyway. Most of the comics I read during my inaugural nine months on Unlimited ended up being X-Men series. I’ve always stopped myself fully buying into the mutants until now – there are just so many of them and money is not abundant. Still, with a never-ending subscription, why not?

So I caught up on a few core series, using the Schism storyline as an entry point, and it was there that I discovered Jason Aaron and various artists’ Wolverine & The X-Men. Now, everyone, this comic is amazing. Fun, breezy tone, bright, clear, charming art, a light touch and an amazing ability to make you laugh, cry and even feel genuine hope. A reader who takes their mutants Deadly Seriously might find the silliness a turn-off, but as a newcomer who hasn’t read X-Men regularly since Grant Morrison left, this was absolutely the charm offensive they needed to get me back on-board.

(If you want dead serious mutants, I’m most of the way through Rick Remender’s Uncanny X-Force just now, and it’s a proper-hardcore-action-movie series. Personally, I prefer a bit more charm, but I can’t say this particular book doesn’t pull off the stern style.)

The current runs on All-New X-Men and Uncanny X-Men, by Brian Michael Bendis, are also doing good stuff. I read a lot of the Bendis Avengers run, and it too-often felt like the Avengers weren’t soapy enough for him, a whole book revolving around superhero action didn’t play to his strengths. Well, the X-Men are plenty soapy, he’s been teamed up with some excellent artists (Stuart Immonen rarely does wrong), and the result is two smooth, solid series. Not as good as his still-ongoing brilliant run on Ultimate Spider-Man, but few things are.

I also just now read the entire of Peter David’s 2000s run on X-Factor, up to the end of the Madrox series a year or two back. This was absolutely what I want from an X-Men comic (and serialised fiction in general): balancing a huge cast of clearly defined characters, giving everyone their moment without sacrificing plot movement. Suffered sometimes from inconsistent art and the occasional supernatural storylines didn’t really grab me, but still good.

Lastly in our Unlimited-X-Men section, I read X-Men: Legacy, the recent reboot by Si Spurrier, Tan Eng Huat and other artists. Starring lesser-known mutant Legion (ostracised son of Professor Xavier), Legacy takes an indepth look at both the X-Men premise (from the main character’s slightly bitter POV) and Legion’s own towering cosmic powers, combined with serious mental health issues. It’s a very odd series, I imagine it won’t be for everyone, but Spurrier, Huat and co did something really unique here, very strange, compelling and ultimately lovely. Worth a look.

Gillen Division

After that epic X-section, I hope you see what I mean about kinda being overwhelmed by Marvel comics. Marvel Unlimited – it’s a thrill, but perhaps ultimately a danger.

However, I did read some other publishers’ output this year. Most recently, I powered through all issues to date of Uber, the WW2 superpowers epic by Kieron Gillen, Caanan White and others.It would’ve been easy to collapse into sensationalism, but there’s clearly research and thought at work here, as well as ruthlessness. Gillen cleverly keeps much of the real-life horrors off-screen, reserving the nastiness for when his “tank-men” get busy.

White and the other artists are more than capable of realising both emotion during the conversations and gore when it oozes through. Highly recommended as long as you have the necessary strong stomach.

Also written by Gillen, I read Young Avengers and The Wicked & The Divine, his latest collaborations with Phonogram artist Jamie McKelvie. Both of them have been highly acclaimed from various quarters, but I must admit, Uber spoke to me a little more. Still, the craft experiments at work throughout these two series are fascinating – Gillen and McKelvie have worked together long enough to start playing around within their stories, and Young Avengers in particular features plenty of fun-gimmicks-are-fun moments that mesh beautifully with the teen aesthetic.

The Wicked & The Divine (which, disappointingly, they refuse to shorten as TWATD) perhaps speaks to a more passionate fannish persuasion than I possess – as this essay may reveal, I probably engage with creative works in a more ponderous fashion. Still, the straight-up cliffhangers, plot twists and fights are smoothly executed. TWATD may be the closest we’ve yet seen to Gillen/McKelvie doing a “mainstream” urban fantasy, albeit one tailored heavily to their interests. It has the cold open, the reveals, the shocks, and they make it all look effortless.

I’ve now written a fuckton of words and all I’ve covered are the X-Men and the work of one writer. Bloody hell. This is what happens when I hardly write any reviews all year, it just splurges.

Batman & Other Animal(man)s

Since I did a whole bit on Marvel earlier, let’s talk about DC. I re-read the Garth Ennis run on Hellblazer recently, but since I wrote a separate post on that earlier in the month, I won’t repeat myself here. It’s good, though.

Finally read the first two acts of the Grant Morrison run on Batman/Batman & Robin/Final Crisis, after a pleasingly-timed Comixology sale let me grab the whole thing. Like most Morrison comics, I finish a huge segment, stop and think “Okay, I may need to go back and read that again.” Still, this first read got me into the plot, and even with all the big stuff going on, Morrison always tells a good story with plenty of cool Batman moments to keep me invested. Looking forward to Batman Incorporated in 2015.

Also in the Morrison/DC segment, I finally read his Animal Man run, and it was great. Threaded the needle beautifully between straight superheroics and building the inevitable meta-strange breakdown at the end. Like all the best Morrison work, the series never lost its grip on human feelings throughout all that, complemented with great storytelling by Chas Troug and other artists.

We may finally be coming into the closing straight of this year’s best comics – the problem is, I almost exclusively read stuff I’ve seen emphatically recommended, so it’s all good and not much can be excluded from these lists. Here are some final bullet points:

Caught up on Chew the other morning, and bloody hell, that’s one hell of a ramp-up to the last few storylines of the series. Still great execution by Layman/Guillory, and unlike many five-year comic runs, hasn’t lost momentum.
Ms Marvel is just as likable and fun as everyone says, and it’s brilliant to have Adrian Alphona back doing regular comic art again.
From a similar generation: Loki: Agent Of Asgard is intruiging and readable, especially worth checking out if you badly miss Gillen’s Journey Into Mystery.
Trees by Warren Ellis and Jason Howard is a slow burn but hard to look away from. Between this and the fun storytelling experiments in his Moon Knight issues with Declan Shalvey, this has been a great year for Ellis, and his mostly-weekly email newsletter Orbital Operations is a good read as well.

Okay. Phew. I think I’m done with comics for 2014 at last, hopefully you found something interesting in that piece and if not, well, I still enjoyed writing it, so never mind

Coming soon: the season finale of the 2014 round-up posts… the Top Ten TV.

All You Can Eat Media – Nick vs Netflix, Man vs Marvel Unlimited

June 2, 2014 by Nick Bryan

In the last few weeks since my birthday, I’ve catapulted myself hard into the world of unlimited on-demand media. Yes, I already had things like BBC iPlayer, 4OD and American equivalents, but this was the next level: Netflix for TV and the Marvel Unlimited service for comics.

After years of only watching carefully selected shows and targeted media, going back to having a wide range of stuff I might like available and choosing from it has been a strange experience. It’s like when I was young and I used to read TV guides and consider watching new stuff.

Only with comics too, which is where the comparison breaks down.Anyway, after two months in the new world of everything-you-could-ever-want rampant consumption, here are the observations I’ve made.

Staring At The Menu

First big discovery: how long I can just gaze at the list. If all the time I’ve spent scrolling through the contents of Marvel Unlimited and Netflix was used on content consumption, I would be the GURU by now. More than once, I’ve opened up the apps because I have half an hour to kill and want to fill it with a show/comic, only to spend that entire thirty minutes just browsing the catalogue.

Marvel Unlimited is particularly good for window shopping, by the way – hours of fun tittering at silly covers and titles from the past of superhero comics. Like good old Giant Size Man-Thing, or the 1992 X-Factor cover pictured to the left – a devastating warning from history about the dangers of cybersex.

This brand of procrastination eases up after the first few weeks, but my tiny brain is always kinda paralysed by the volume of stories I could be consuming. What if I’m not watching the right ones? What if I’m missing a classic? Do I worry about stuff too much?

(The correct answer to that last question is YES.)

The “Might As Well” Generation

Honestly, I never got into channel-surfing. If I have a few minutes of free time, I generally find a book/DVD/comic from the list of Important Stuff I’ve Planned To Experience, rather than switching on the TV and seeing what’s showing.

But the discovery of already-available all-you-can-eat media deals has gifted me the opportunity to finally see a lot of shows I’d glanced at before and decided, well, I’ve already got enough to watch. It’s all there, one click away, so I can put it on in the background while I’m doing low-brain activities (like typing out and proofreading blog posts, or fiddling with Scrivener compile settings, or just surfing the internet without the slightest pretense of achievement).

Or I can sit back and read comics I’d not bought because I only quite fancied reading them, rather than desperately wanting to, and comic books are rather expensive. Or at least, they were before the advent of the Comixology sale. Digital comics saved my interest in the hobby, to be honest.

Controversially, I’ve discovered it’s fun to watch a few silly comedies or entertaining-but-not essential procedural TV shows, read well-executed-but-not-genre-redefining superhero comics. In a strange way, it helps me relax.

So, that’s my big reveal about my feelings for today. Do post about your similar feelings in the comments if you want to help me feel okay about myself.

Oh, and if you too have Marvel Unlimited and want some good reading material, I wrote a homage to Christopher Priest’s Black Panther series a few weeks back, and I stand by every word. Check it out.

This blog post was finalised whilst half-watching an early episode of Castle.

Black Panther by Christopher Priest – A Homage

April 24, 2014 by Nick Bryan

I recently subscribed to Marvel Unlimited, a Netflix-esque system that gives me all-I-can-eat Marvel comics for a fairly low price. Not bang-up-to-date ones, but I’ve not read half the comics I wanted to over the last decade due to financial concerns, so I can keep trawling for a while.

However, as well as striking out for new material, I’ve also re-read some old favourites, and I’d like to talk about one of those now: Black Panther by Christopher Priest and various artists, a series that ran from 1998 to 2003. The Black Panther character has existed since 1966, King of a fictional African nation called Wakanda, and mostly associated with standing in the backdrop of Avengers groupshots in the later decades of the twentieth century.

Attentive readers may note Priest also wrote Quantum & Woody, a series even closer to my heart than Black Panther. I started reading Panther due to following Priest over from Q&W, barely knowing who the character was, and Priest made me love it in approximately one issue. If you want a gushing tribute to Q&W, here’s one I wrote in September 2012.

But anyway. Black Panther. What was that about?

“The bathroom had no door. I still had no pants.” – Everett K. Ross wins my heart in one page.

As you may have guessed from both the name and his status as King of an African nation, the Black Panther (aka T’Challa) lives outside the standard white American superhero demographic. And yes, particularly in the old days, black superheroes did have a bad habit of having the word Black in their alias.

Characters outside the standard demo didn’t tend to hit mega-sales in the pre-2010s US mainstream Marvel/DC comic market, but Priest found ways to embrace that. First up, he introduced Everett K. Ross, T’Challa’s new state department liaison and self-proclaimed King of Useless White Boys. With Ross serving as narrator, comic relief, audience POV character and exposition monkey, Priest took a different tack with the title character.

He made Black Panther effortless, dangerous and scary, and T’Challa a ruthless, brilliant schemer with the world’s finest poker face, an enigma one step withdrawn from the reader thanks to the Ross-focused storytelling. He also dug into the real implications (or as real as you can get in a fictional superhero universe) of the politically active King of a nation choosing to wear tights and play superhero, and the international politics of the Marvel Universe. All while Everett K. Ross flippantly monologued about the oddness of superheroes and explained T’Challa’s labyrinthine plots to us.

And seriously, labyrinthine is not hyperbole. I was in my mid-to-late teens when this comic came out, and re-reading it at the ancient age of thirty, I now realise how little of it I understood, especially in the latter, really confusing storylines. The out-of-sequence storytelling in the opening two or three years didn’t help matters, nor did reading it in twenty-two page monthly chunks.

Ironically, comics have milked death beyond death

All those things probably contributed to the constantly middling sales on Black Panther, but reading back now, I’m glad Priest stuck to his guns, as it’s great. A uniquely idiosyncratic, smart take on a genre that really has been milked to death and back again. People talk about adult comics as the ones with tits and blood, but this is adult in the sense that it can be denser than a lot of political thrillers. In many ways ahead of its time, considering how much reading comics in collected edition format has exploded in the 2000s, not to mention recent industry moves to diversify a little from the white male superhero demo.

I’ve focused on the writing as that’s my area of interest, but I would be a prick not to mention the artwork – especially the gorgeous painted art by Mark Texeira and Joe Jusko in early issues and the reliably beautiful, clear, emotive work by Sal Velluto after that.

Sadly, Priest’s Black Panther had the poor fortune to be published just before collected editions of everything became standard practice, so it’s not available through many venues – except the afore-mentioned Marvel Unlimited, which has it free and easy, but for some reason it’s not on Comixology yet. Well, they have one issue, but it’s a midstoryline episode published because it crosses over with Deadpool, and would be utterly incomprehensible to a new reader.

Indeed, the series as a whole is quite dense on Marvel Universe guest stars at times. Still, considering we now live in a world where everyone in the geekosphere knows roughly who the Avengers are, it’s worth a go if you can find it and fancy a good, different superhero read.

Post-Panther Notation

Black Panther (Kasper Cole version) by Dan Fraga

The above is talking about the bulk of the Black Panther series by Priest, specifically issues #1-49. After that, other things happened…

With #50, the series underwent radical retooling – Priest stayed on as writer, but New York cop Kasper Cole took over as Black Panther after finding a costume abandoned in an alleyway. Cole’s adventures never hit the dizzy joyous heights of the best Priest/T’Challa/Ross stories, but they’re good, engaging super-crime stuff.
Alas, the Kasper Cole revamp was not enough to get sales up, and the book ended with #62. Which is about fifty more issues than a low-selling book gets nowadays.
Proving that point, Priest and artist Joe Bennett launched an ensemble book called The Crew partly spinning out of Black Panther, featuring Kasper Cole teaming up with a few other characters. It lasted seven issues, and that’s a shame, as it was excellent. Also available on Marvel Unlimited, happily.
Priest himself hasn’t done much in comics since the early 2000s, but seems to be dipping his toe back into the water at the moment, with an upcoming Quantum & Woody sequel mini-series and a short story in a recent Deadpool anthology issue. My fingers are predictably crossed that this leads to more – and not necessarily on existing superhero characters, I’d be just as up for a new property for a smaller company.
If you want more in-depth (and at times brutally honest) essays on Panther from the author himself, there’s a few on his website.

More blognotes may follow if I want to spotlight anything good on Marvel Unlimited. Or I might just plough through endless old Avengers and X-Men issues rather than taking the time to write about them. Let’s wait and see!