The Doomino Effect for the week of Nov 5, 2008

This week was one of my most unusual comic-buying experiences ever. Nothing that I buy on a monthly basis came out (unless you count the Final Crisis tie-in) but I still ended up with five books.

I decided to give Ultimatum #1 a try, since I’ve heard it might end up destroying the Ultimate Universe. That sounds cool to me, even though I don’t remember where I got that idea. Maybe I was just wishing for it. The fact that Jeph Loeb is writing it sure implies it could have negative implications for that universe, considering what he did to the Ultimates. By this, of course, I mean he made it terrible.

He wastes no time unleashing Ultimate Loeb destruction on this earth — he actually writes the line “You should see me in bed, Thor. Very verily.” I stopped reading his Ultimates after issue #1, but apparently Thor now talks just like mainstream Thor talks, rather than the more modernized version in the Millar Ultimates. Apparently making him speak like an educated British man from the late middle ages makes him seem more Scandinavian. He makes Hank McCoy so socially inept as to not understand idioms, since, you know, that’s how really smart people are. And he also kills millions of New Yorkers with a tidal wave that comes immediately after Kitty Pryde says “It’s not like it could get any worse, right?” It just makes me wonder — is Jeph Loeb embarrassed to be writing comics?

So the Invisible Woman uses an invisibility bubble to push all the water back, which seems really difficult to do given you can’t just push the water away with a force field without pushing the cars, buildings and bodies with it, but hey, she’s a superhero, right? But that leaves the survivors to tally the body count (assuming the bodies aren’t now out in the ocean) and receive Professor X’s message — Magneto is planning on killing everyone on Earth, apparently in retribution for the deaths of his children. He also has Thor’s hammer. No idea how that happened. If I have to read Ultimates volume 3 to find out, I’ll be perfectly content just accepting that Magneto has Thor’s hammer.

I’m not a huge David Finch fan, but he’s probably as good of a wide-screen successor to Bryan Hitch as anyone, and I thought he did a good job here. He definitely handled the scenes of destruction well. For some reason, when anticipating the destruction of the Ultimate Universe (which is an outcome that is again admittedly in my own imagination), I was thinking something more like on a Crisis level, like where the actual universe is destroyed; I didn’t really think of someone just killing everybody, because that just kills Earth. But we know it’s going to be a big deal because of the $3.99 price tag (it costs a dollar more to make a comic book 2 pages longer).

Speaking of $3.99 comics about destructive events, that leads me to Final Crisis: Resist, the latest of the one-shots that fill in the FC gaps. This one is all about a gang of heroes at an Antarctic Checkmate facility, trapped by anti-life zombies and trying to use Snapper Carr’s teleportation abilities to run resistance.

I think stories like this are really effective at conveying the hugeness of what Final Crisis is supposed to be, so it’s unfortunate that none of them are actually happening in the main title. What I hated was that the resistance missions were ruined because Snapper wanted to have sex with a giant villain cat in the middle of a mission. But the missions had to be ruined in order to get Mr. Terrific to realize he could sacrifice Sasha Bordeaux’s life in order to activate the 11.5 million dormant OMACs.

So maybe this is a part of Mr. Terrific’s personality that I was never aware of, but he is willing to sacrifice 11.5 million people in order to go out and kill people who are possessed by anti-life. While the other heroes seem to be operating from the “Those are our friends inside of those zombies — we need to reach them and save them” perspective, the visuals here show that Mr. Terrific is unleashing OMACs to go out and slaughter anti-life zombies. And since they know the world has been overrun by anti-life, there are now basically 11.5 million OMACs on a mission to kill everybody. Wow.

And the especially amazing part is that this slaughter is accompanied by Mr. Terrific speaking all heroically, saying “No more hiding … no more running … no more do we submit … now we fight back … now we make our stand … now we resist!” Maybe I’m missing something, but I’m not quite hearing the Battle Hymn of the Republic in my head when I see the massacre Mr. Terrific has orchestrated. I’m just imagining that someone at DC was like “Oh crap, Final Crisis #5 has a bunch of OMACs fighting Darkseid … do we have any explanation for that? Quick, someone get Greg Rucka on the phone…”

Speaking of making sense of another writer’s work, that leads me to Sandman: The Dream Hunters #1, a comic book adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s book by P. Craig Russell.

I was never a huge Sandman fan. I’ve found that Sandman fans are always eager to loan you their trades, and I’ve always enjoyed what I’ve read, but for some reason I’ve never been compelled to go buy anything for myself. Maybe I’ve just subconsciously figured I know enough Sandman fans.

Like everything I’ve read of Sandman before, I really liked this issue. Unlike everything I’ve read of Sandman before, I fully intend to keep buying this. It’s all about a Japanese monk who lives in solitude beneath a mountain. A badger and a fox strike a deal to try to trick the monk out of his house, but he’s too smart for them. In the process, the fox falls in love with the monk, but she later overhears some demon creatures discussing that the monk will soon die in his sleep after a sequence of dreams. So in order to save her love, she embarks on a dream mission to save him.

I loved this. The art and the story are fantastic, and both seem so timeless. I’m guessing I’ll be re-reading this many times over the next few decades. This was also 30 pages of story and no ads for $2.99. Stupid Marvel and your stupid lies.

Speaking of expensive Marvel comics, that leads me to X-Men and Spider-Man #1, which was this week’s Book of Doom. As I pointed out in the review, this book was initially solicited at $2.99, but Marvel will make a comic book $3.99 for the thinnest of reasons these days.

I actually liked it more than I thought, and I’ll probably keep reading it if it falls on slow weeks for me, but ironically I liked it for the story. Of the two other BoD panelists who liked it, both praised it for the art. Fin Fang Doom said “No one bought this for the story. This is essentially a showcase for Mario Alberti’s art, which is quite good.” Doom DeLuise said “What I probably enjoyed most about it is the art.”

In my group review, I referenced the group shot at the top of page 3. Get a load of these freaks:

But speaking of international talent in overpriced Marvel comics, that leads me to Daredevil & Captain America: Dead on Arrival by Italians Tito Faraci and Claudio Villa, a tale of two heroes teaming up to defeat the deceased time-traveler known as Death-Stalker. Apparently, Death-Stalker has gone forward in time from some point before he died to now, and S.H.I.E.L.D.’s concern is that he might die in the present, and that by dying in the present, he will cause some kind of space-time paradox that will destroy the universe.

It’s all kind of sci-fi for what ends up being a whole lot of street-level kicking and punching. Death-Stalker wants revenge against Daredevil, because he blames Daredevil for his death. So he gathers up a bunch of innocent people to a cemetery in order to lure Daredevil there, and that’s where the team-up with Captain America begins.

Villa’s art is beautiful. It’s firmly rooted in reality, but he handles the superheroics nicely. His facial expressions are fantastic, and he employs fantastic use of light and shadows.

There were some minor story problems, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some of that is due to translation and adaptation. For example, Nick Fury and Captain America are completely baffled as to how Death-Stalker could be killing again, because his lethal gloves are locked up in a S.H.I.E.L.D. facility. But then a few panels later, Fury is referencing what should be obvious — that Death-Stalker traveled through time with his gloves on.

Then there are some major story problems. The drama of this story is that Death-Stalker needs to be captured alive and returned to his original timeline or else the universe may be destroyed! So what happens? Death-Stalker uses his death gloves on himself, and Captain America and Daredevil are comforted that sometimes the scientists are wrong. Heck, I guess they are!

We also witness the moment that Death-Stalker jumped forward from the past. He’s wearing the gloves all right … but not the costume. Apparently, the costume comes with the future or something. And apparently, Death-Stalker jumped to the future only to learn that he had died prior to the moment he landed in. So the death that Death-Stalker seeks revenge for didn’t actually happen to him — he never experienced it. He just read about it in the future.

God, time travel is so stupid.

Also, this has a giant “MATURE CONTENT” label on the front, but I have no idea why. The words “bitch” and “crap” are used, but it’s not like those words aren’t commonly used in non-mature titles these days. It seems totally arbitrary.

Also, Nightwing #150 comes out tomorrow, and it’s the conclusion to his RIP storyline. I’m thinking it will end with him waking up in Arkham and saying “What a weird dream … time for me to go to work …” with “TO BE CONTINUED IN BATMAN!!”