Yes, this is not this past week. That’s coming up!
Absolute Martian Manhunter #1 by Deniz Camp, Javier Rodriguez, and Hassan Otsman-Elhaou. $4.99, 26 pgs.
Camp, who wrote the absolutely terrific 20th Century Men, has been working on the Ultimates book for Marvel (which my retailer says is not very good) and getting some pub doing that, so now he’s onto an Absolute book. Huzzah! Wisely, DC poached Rodriguez from Marvel and put him on a high-profile book, because this thing is gorgeous. Rodriguez does some very simple things, like use a four-panel grid on one page that shows our hero, John Jones of the FBI, head-on from the top of his chest up, in different situations as he recovers from being caught in a suicide bombing, and then the fourth panel is … something similar but far weirder. Later, he does a six-panel grid in similar fashion, with John standing on the left side of each panel, but the locations rotating as he investigates the bombing. As John’s world starts to break apart and reality gets more and more screwed up, Rodriguez’s lines become even more loopy and fluid, and he goes crazy with the rainbow palette of the cover, turning John’s world into a beautifully multi-colored horror show. The transition from everyone smoking cigarettes early in the issue, with the gray smoke floating into a subdued world, to smoke actually emanating from people in several different hues is nicely done, as is Rodriguez’s use of brightly-lit circles (usually yellow) early on in the issue, which feed the transition from mundane real world to hallucinogenic alien world. The end of the issue is a bit gimmicky, but still fun. If you’re going to get a mindfuck of an issue, you get someone like Rodriguez to draw it, and he does a marvelous job.
Camp’s story is pretty keen, too. It has a weird 1950s, Twilight Zone sci-fi vibe with plenty of modern sensibilities (the suicide bomber, for one thing), and while DC is doing these Absolute books as separate from the regular DCU, I’m still interested if all of the Absolute books take place in the same universe or their own individual ones (I can’t remember if Darkseid told us back in the ALL IN Special, and I can’t be bothered to look). Because if it’s the same universe, it’s going to be a bit weird when the other heroes show up. I imagine they’re all in different ones, which is cool until DC decides that they should all meet, because that will suuuuuuuucccccckkkkkk. Anyway, John Jones is in a coffee shop when a dude decides to blow himself up, and not only does John survive, he’s not really injured much at all. His wife (Bridget, a name I love) and his boss aren’t sure he’s ready to go back to work, but he insists, and even though his boss tells him not to investigate the suicide bomber, nobody who’s ever read cop fiction thinks he’s going to stand down. Of course, as he investigates, weird things start to happen, and the voice in his head that he’s heard since the beginning of the issue gets louder and more insistent and it appears he’s seeing everyone’s thoughts. Camp does a nice job showing how John goes from not really understanding his telepathy (he knows what the doctor who sees him after the bombing is thinking, but he’s not really sure how he came by the knowledge) to not understanding it but not being able to avoid it. Camp does a good job taking this emotionally unavailable person (Bridget begs him to take time off, but he just doesn’t want to) whose son knows something is strange about him and breaking him down, until we come to the end, where he realizes he’s not exactly like everyone else. The cool thing about this comic is that you don’t need to know that John is a Martian – if you come into this cold (although who’s doing that, plus the title of the series kind of gives it away), the build-up to the reveal at the end is weird and intriguing, while if you know that John is a Martian (and, let’s be honest, that’s 99.9% of the readership), it’s keen seeing all the ways Camp is dropping hints.
This is the best “Absolute” #1 issue so far, because it doesn’t rely on ridiculous gimmickry (AbsBats), a kind of dull origin story (AbsWoW), a stupid Kryptonian backstory (AbsSupes), or a clichéd father-son relationship (AbsFlash). Perhaps the fact that John Jones hasn’t been a thing in the DCU in so long and never really was a big thing anyway means Camp can build this without relying on our previous knowledge of the character, which all of the Absolute books have done so far (AbsBats was neat, for instance, because in the back of our minds, we were comparing Bruce the Poor with Bruce the Wealthy). Here, it’s just a weird, paranoid, sci-fi thriller, and it works really well. It doesn’t hurt that Rodriguez is really good. I was looking forward to this book, and it doesn’t disappoint at all. I’m definitely ALL IN with AbsMars!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆
Batman #923 (“Hush Two Chapter One: The Pawn”) by Jeph Loeb, Jim Lee, Scott Williams, Alex Sinclair, Richard Starkings, and editors James Reid (assistant editor), Jessica Berbey (associate editor), and Rob Levin (editor). That’s right, this book is so awesome it needs THREE editors!!!! $4.99, 22 pgs.
You better believe I am ALL THE FUCKING WAY IN with “Hush Two” and its glorious garbage!!!!! I bought the original “Hush” back in the day, and it’s terrible, but I kind of expected it, just like I expect this thing to suck (the first chapter does not disappoint in that regard). But it’s Jim Lee, and I loves me some Jim Lee. I can’t help it, people! Asian Assassin Psylocke? Yes, please. Rogue in a torn bikini-esque uniform in the Savage Land? Hells yeah! Wolverine, Captain America, Black Widow, Psylocke, and Jubilee fighting two generations of Struckers? Inject that shit straight into my cerebrum!!!!! Jim Lee doing that watercolor, uninked stuff that he did in Flinch and in the flashback scenes from the first “Hush”? Yeeee-haw! I can’t help it, I just dig Lee’s art, and the idea of 12 more issues of Lee doing Batman going through Loeb’s ridiculous nonsense is too much to resist!!!! His work isn’t as good as it used to be – he and Williams are using heavier lines these days, possibly to overcome the digital coloring that so wrecked old-school artists’ work back in the early 2000s, but these days, digital coloring is a lot better, so the thicker lines just seem to make the images a bit less fluid than Lee’s art used to be. This probably would have worked better in 2008 or so, when Frank Martin and his unholy imitators were drenching the line work of very good artists in too-soft hues and just destroying any subtlety in the artwork. These days, it’s a bit unnecessary. Perhaps this is just how Lee draws these days, and so be it. I still like it – the man knows how to put together a page, and his characters always move well – but it appears his and Williams’s over-hatching has come home to roost a bit. Back in the day, old-school coloring fit fairly well with a lot of hatching, while the early digital coloring might have worked well with this because it couldn’t overwhelm it. Now, with digital coloring having come a long way and the palette far more refined, so much hatching feels excessive. But that’s what you get with Lee and Williams! That’s not to say there’s not nice work here. The torture of the Joker is well done, as Lee gets into the details of what’s happening very well. The page showing Barbara’s … I want to say “lair,” but we generally associate that word with an evil dude, but that’s what springs to mind! … lair is stunning, as Lee and Williams make it both modern and archaic, thanks to it being in a clock tower but filled with fancy tech. There’s a lot to like about the art, but it does feel a bit heavy-handed at times.
Loeb is not a good writer, so it’s not surprising that this is a silly story, but he never tries too hard to be fancy, so his stories end up being just mediocre rather than truly god-awful. He’s writing a big-budget action movie, in other words, and as long as you stick to the well-established script, it shouldn’t be too terrible. He has the Joker re-enact his first crime (not his actual first crime of stealing the Claridge diamond, as that’s too mundane for the new, hard-core Joker, but the one Frank Miller shoehorned into continuity in Batman #407, where the Clown Prince of Crime is going to poison the reservoir, which has become canon because the Joker has to be a mass-murdering fool from the beginning these days and no I’m still not over it), but Bats knows there’s something weird about it because the Joker doesn’t repeat his crimes. Despite this, the Joker still gets the drop on him (because in comics, the heroes are always stupid until, suddenly, they’re not) and knocks him into the reservoir, which is filled with Jokerized piranha, and then Batman … tries to take his own cowl off? Why? According to him, if someone takes it off against his will, it zaps them with electricity, which is what happens to him because someone tampered with the equipment, but why take it off anyway? It’s just one of the many things that make no sense. He’s unconscious, and the Joker gets captured by a large Samoan-looking dude with weird electric-looking veins all over his face and upper chest. This dude – Silence – works for … you guessed it, Tommy Elliot, who lures Bats (who gets rescued from the reservoir by Talia, of all people, and at least our hero is puzzled by that) to the amusement park where, I assume, the Joker tried to break Jim Gordon back in The Killing Joke (because Bat-writers always have to reference the absolute worst Bat-stories – they couldn’t include Joe Potato in a Batman comic, could they?), where his little game begins!!!!
Ok, it’s not the worst Batman story, but it’s still stupid. Why does the Joker commit the crime? Did he know he was a pawn of Tommy Elliot? Why does Batman try to remove his cowl? Why is Talia there (which, again, seems to befuddle Batman, so I imagine Loeb will, at least, address this)? Why is Barbara Gordon’s system so easy to hack? Why does Batman always jump into things without a plan? It’s very frustrating, but it’s par for the course for Loeb (and, to be fair, a lot of writers). It’s dumb, but easy to digest, and we get to see Lee’s art. I’ll take it!
I liked how, back in the day, DC put the first “Hush” in the regular Batman comic, and now, with Batman #158 (which I will insist on calling by its “legacy” number that DC so helpfully provides), we get it again, and I am totes ALL IN with it. It’s a glorious, dumb mess, but sometimes, you just have to go with it. I can pretend everything in my adolescence was great even though it wasn’t as much as the next person!
Rating: CRITIC-PROOF!!!!!
I know I ranted a lot about Batman, but here’s the takeaway from this week: Absolute Martian Manhunter is really, really good. It’s just science!
