X-Men Legacy issue 226
Carey, Weaver, Tadeo, Reber
You know those people who read just the words in comics and kind of ignore the art? Yeah, I’m the opposite. I like the pretty pictures and often ignore the words.
So I’d been wanting to read some American comics and I circled my options at the Borders. I wanted superheroes (including female superheroes), some action, not too much gore and no zombies. This episode looked promising: Rogue on the cover, decent art, explosions in the background. Neat!
I picked it up and read it over coffee at the Squid Cafe, and I was….disappointed. First of all, this sucker cost me four bucks. It’s full of ads for cheesecake statues and Spiderman toothbrush holders. There’s a large excerpt in the back for some other comic. All of which is fine, except–there’s only twenty two pages of comic. For four dollars! That’s seventeen cents per page.
Well, it seemed a bit steep to me, considering I can get nearly two hundred pages of manga for 8.95 (or 5.37 if I have my Borders coupon).
Regardless, I persevered and read the art. The story isn’t that complicated. There’s this sort of riot on Castro Street (no, I don’t know why it’s there–go with it), and Rogue and company are trying to stop it from being bad.
Some of the art is really fun. Check out this page below. The colors shift from earthy and dark to this sexy, girly pink. The woman’s pose is tough, hot, and feminine. Those earrings! That attitude! I wanted to know more about her right away.
Unfortunately, most of the pages are just not this good. And she’s not in the rest of this issue.
So we switch to another scene, where Rogue is supposed to battle the big female baddie. This should be a fun scene–the big payoff for the issue. Rogue gets to strut her stuff, the baddie gets to be tough, and….
It’s weird, is what. I wanted to mail the artists a copy of a simple anatomy book. Take a look at this page:
In the top right panel, the torsion is just wrong. Completely and utterly wrong. Yes, she’s moving through her body, but the arms and body don’t add up properly. Then there’s the competing speed lines in the next section. Speedlines go one direction from the punch–Rogue is thrown. And then we have speedlines from the opposite direction with a couple of sexy boots stepping into them like they’re supposed to indicate a slipstream. What?
The leg in the second to the bottom was it for me. The force lines go up (near the foot), the baddie is kicking up, not out. But Rogue is moving to the right. What?
Wrong. All wrong.
So they battle, Rogue gets in some hits, baddie gets in some hits, Rogue goes crashing through a window and then we get this:
Keeping it classy, I see. Thanks Marvel. Cause showing a woman’s bra when she’s been in a fight and lost is what cheesecake is all about! Frankly, I took one look at this and thought about mailing Rogue a nice brochure for Enell.
So at this point I’m kind of two minds: the Rogue bits were meh, but the Lady in Pink is hawt. The colors are gorgeous, but the drawing is irritating. (Also, whoever does the inks for the eyebrows keeps leaving out a chunk of Rogue’s left eyebrow. Weird.)
Then we come to this, the US Bank portion of the issue. We’re tooling along, having a massive street showdown with lots of yummy explosions and baddie fights on Castro street and we come to this page:
At first, I thought Well, the artist traced some photo of Castro and just included a building logo in the prime center top position for verisimilitude. And then, when the logo appears right next to the baddie’s head, I thought Huh, that’s odd. And then we get to the next page.
And my eyes rolled forever.
I slapped the poor issue shut and ordered myself a consolatory cappuccino. Fortunately, I wandered into a local small comic shop and they hooked me up with a much more promising title. Batwoman! Lesbian socialite by day and crime fighter at night. Sounds good to me.
I wouldn't get your hopes up about the Batwoman. It's by Greg Rucka and…well, just don't get your hopes up.
"… a much more promising title. Batwoman!"
Seriously? The stuff I saw with her looked pretty bad, though this was before she got her own series.
Detective Comics with Batwoman has a paint-by-numbers plot by Rucka, but the art by J.H. Williams III is like nothing else in mainstream comics.
If you care more about the art than the words, it's worth checking out.
Noah: Rats! I don't know enough about American comics to be wary of certain writers. I was suckered in by the concept. Also, I also bought all three issues because I am impulsive like that.
Tom: I haven't read it yet, but I shall Report Back. Here's hoping that the art makes it worthwhile. Maybe you could recommend other current running comics with awesome art, women, and better stories? I was a bit at a loss in the store.
Richard: Thanks for the tip! I adore the art in comics, so maybe this will work for me, even if Rucker isn't much. I haven't checked if Williams did this art or not, but if not, I'm going to seek out the Detective Comics run.
"Maybe you could recommend other current running comics with awesome art, women, and better stories?"
I just don't keep up. For example, the Batwoman stuff I saw was from her intro (in 52, I guess), plus a really awful short in some kind of anthology of holiday stories. She had the one about Hanukah.
If you haven't read Bendis's Alias, then that would be a pick. But otherwise …
The new Power Girl series from DC is pretty decent, especially #1 (try to get the version with the Amanda Conner cover, not the tongue-in-cheek-but-embarrassing-anyway "bodacious babe rips shirt off in Times Square" variant by Adam Hughes) and #4 (the most recent issue). Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray aren't my favorite writers, but their work tends to be a lot more interesting when the artist they're collaborating with is Amanda Conner, who happens to be Palmiotti's wife. Conner's art is slightly cartoony in an engaging way, and she often visually pokes fun at the sillier conventions of superhero/pulp fiction.
These are useful attributes to have when dealing with a paradoxical character like Power Girl. PG is probably the most notoriously busty heroine in the DC universe, and she usually wears an otherwise relatively modest long-sleeved white costume whose chest cut-out superfluously draws attention to her cleavage. Yet she's been pretty consistently depicted as a no-nonsense feminist who doesn't suffer fools gladly, and most of the more recent portrayals of her actually manage to make this work fairly convincingly. Original She-Hulk Jennifer Walters (not the so-called Savage She-Hulk whose four-issue miniseries has just ended) is a somewhat analogous, but more self-consciously tongue-in-cheek–on the character's part, not just the writers'–heroine who had her own series off and on for quite a while at Marvel. (Look for trade paperbacks of the story arcs written by Dan Slott and, after Slott left, Peter David.)
You might also want to check out Manhunter, a/k/a prosecuting attorney-turned-costumed vigilante Kate Spencer. Kate's own self-titled series didn't sell very well, but she had enough of a cult following to get her own back-up feature in the new Bat-title "Streets of Gotham," which is also unfortunately four dollars. (Kate is originally from L.A., but was recently appointed Gotham City District Attorney.) I believe the back-ups are being drawn by Michael Lark, whose art tends to be a lot more felicitously subtle and understated than the average superhero artist's. So it's worth glancing at on visual grounds as well as for the scripts by Marc Andreyko, who writes Kate as a slightly Katharine Hepburnish tough broad who's more focused on her career–both legal and superheroic–than her love life. When she had her own full-length series Kate was sometimes distractingly surrounded by interesting supporting characters, two of whom were gay men (not counting the end-of-series flashforward story arc in which Kate's now-grown-up son also turns out to be gay). However, with the change of venue the sometimes-cluttered supporting cast has been pared down considerably. Anyway, you can get a pretty good idea of whether you like the character or not by reading the nine-page back-up stories in "Streets of Gotham," though if this relatively limited sample is to your taste I'd recommend seeking out the four (I think) trade paperbacks of Kate's previous full-length adventures.
I'd recommend Empowered (the Adam Warren series I burbled about a couple of times.) Better art and story than you're likely to find in the mainstream, I think.
I'd be curious what you think of the current (Gail Simone penned) Wonder Woman run….
Tom: It's safe to assume I haven't read anything but manga in the last ten years. I'll check out the Alias!
Margaret: Wow! Thank you so much! I'm going to pop by the comic store today. They've got some trade paperbacks on sale for 50% off, so maybe I'll get lucky. The Streets of Gotham one especially sounds good. I adore Katherine Hepburn style heroines.
Noah: Oh, I've got Empowered on my to read list! I loved that write up, and then kinukitty pimped it, too, and I was sunk. Besides, I have to love that art.
For some reason, I feel like I should try to find some mainstream comics to like. I do not know why I feel this way, but I do not want to judge them too harshly without giving them a fair trial. Or something. Sometimes my cheerful optimism gets me into trouble.
I have been pondering the Wonder Woman they've got going now. I saw it at the Borders the other day. Maybe it'll have kangaroos!! No, probably not. I swear, if they don't bring back the kangaroo jousts, I'm going to have to draw the damn things myself.
Yes, no kangaroos. But gorillas fighting Nazis. Which isn't as good as it sounds, actually. But it's okay.
The first thing I noticed in the second page you posted was the legs. These women have freakishly long thighs. A strange place to start objecting, maybe, but I just stared, and not in a good way. Also, nice bra recommendation; a large-breasted woman running around like that in skin-tight spandex needs an adequate foundation garment.
You might enjoy George Perez's Wonder Woman. It's about 20 years old now, but the first few dozen issues of the series are available in (color) newsprint paperbacks. The composition, anatomy, dynamism, and storytelling (both picture and prose) is outstanding. My parents – comic readers as kids, but not as adults – bought it for my older sister when I was little, but ended up eager for each new issue themselves.
I thought this comic (X-Men Legacy #226) was only $2.99. You might want to check the price tag on the cover again…
Kinukitty: Oh my god, yes. The legs are just weird and totally off. Poor things.
Anon: I'll give that a looksee. I've been reading the first run of WW and really loving it. I'm probably going to keep going.
Steve: I'm sure it's 3.99. I've got it in front of me.
It's 2.99 in comic book shops. Marvel inflates the price of periodical issues by a dollar for Borders, so it'd be 3.99 there.
WHAT?!?!
That is totally outrageous!
It's not like they even let me use my coupons, either.
Does Marvel WANT people to buy their stuff or are they on a campaign to tick off every potential customer until they've dug themselves into the ground or what?
It's because Borders buys them on a returnable basis and comic book shops do not.