Welcome to another Weekly Emanata, the MEGATONik review of comics, back after some extended MEGADOWNtime on the site and some sort of terrible old man disease in my limbs. As these are a combination of readerly reaction and critical examination, expect spoilers. I’m going to write as if you, the reader, has some passing knowledge of comics, but feel free to post questions in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer.

Agents of Atlas #1
written by Jeff Parker
art by Carlos Pagulayan
This book is, for me, a long-awaited return. The Agents of Atlas miniseries that ran from October 2006 to March 2007 united six characters that had originally debuted when Marvel Comics was called Atlas in the 1950s. The single issues snuck under my radar but I picked up the collected edition and got a huge kick out of it. It’s the perfect pulp team-up: the secret agent, the spaceman, the goddess, the silent robot, the talking gorilla, and the merwoman join forces to fight communist-era threats in the fifties and then again in the modern day. The mini was full of action I can only describe as “rollicking,” entertaining dialogue, and engaging character interaction. A return was always hinted at but, up until a few months ago, was never in sight.

Luckily, the return is, so far, running on the same rails as the last go. Agent Jimmy Woo is now head of the world-spanning Atlas Organization, trying to change the world with a network of spies, assassins, mad scientists, and general villains. Pagulayan is a reliable replacement for Leonard Kirk, the first series’ artist, and the coloring by Jana Schirer made it even better. I usually don’t talk about colorists in the Emanata because, like letterers, readers barely notice their work if they’re doing it right; it just becomes a seamless part of the whole. Schirer, however, makes the art pop off the page. The best colors in comics are usually flat ones; since the advent of Photoshop, colorists seem to be filter-happy maniacs, loading the art down with unreasonable blurs and excessive lens flares. Schirer’s great at modelling and gradation, sneaking in the computer effects without letting them overtake Pagulayan’s pencils underneath. This is her first coloring job as far as I can tell, but I’m looking forward to more.

Batman: The Brave and the Bold #1
written by Matt Wayne
pencilled by Andy Suriano
I am generally a fan of kids’ comics. When done right, they tell short yet engaging stories with some sort of graceful twist or nice character moment. Someone, in an introduction of the first Green Lantern Archives (I forget who and I don’t have the book anymore), compared John Broome and Gil Kane’s stories to a perfectly executed jitterbug, a simple thing but done so well that one can’t help but respect it.

This is not what Batman: The Brave and the Bold is. Offered to coincide with the new Batman cartoon, the issue definitely started out strong. The first two pages begin in medias res and offer the conclusion of a Batman/Aquaman team-up that offers one of the best interpretations of Aquaman since Kurt Busiek’s run on the title was cut short a couple years back, with Aquaman as some sort of underwater Nancy Drew constantly referring to his previous cases as stories he’s written (i.e. The Tale of the High Seas Heist).

From here, Batman engages in a team-up with Power Girl that is utterly forgettable. I think it’s supposed to show that brains are just as important as brawn and that Power Girl has both, but it just feels like Wayne (the writer, not the Batman) is stumbling through a polka. Suriano definitely delivers on the Dick Sprang-ish art that has become a trademark of both the TV show and the comic, but it’s not good enough to keep me coming back. If only the story inside were as good as the James Tucker cover on the outside.

Short tangent: Do we really need a return to the Dick Sprang/camp era of Batman? Does he need to be bright and goofy again? I’m not really a fan of the Nolan movies, but neither am I fan of the Adam West era.

House of Mystery #10
written by Matthew Struges
art by Luca Rossi & Kyle Baker
I’ve been drifting away from this series for months and this issue failed to throw me a lifesaver. Plot elements are connected in ways resembling a normal story arc but with no real explanation. Cutesy dialogue stands in for real characterization.

But ohhhh, the backup story is so cool. Sure, it suffers from some of the same problems as the main story (making me think the problem lies in the writer, not the artist), but this issue offers up the esteemed Kyel Baker, giving me a glimpse of the new art style he’s been cooking up from some upcoming Hawkman project. Still, is eight pages worth three dollars?

Madman #13
by Mike Allred
The first Madman series was a playground where anything could show up and get woven in to the oddpop tapestry Allred was constructing. With the start of the most recent Image iteration of the book, Allred used the stories as a playground for his artistic and storytelling development, devoting entire issues to experimental layout forms and plot devices.

The creative tradition is dropped this issue in favor of a somewhat trite happy ending. In his afterward in the backmatter, Allred says that many fans were worried that the protagonist, Madman, and his long-term crush, would not get a happy ending and so he closed this issue with everyone getting what they wanted and going for a picnic on a beach. To make this happen in a single issue, the good guys summarily deal with the villain that has been around for years, dissolving him with a plot device that wasn’t foreshadowed in any real way and getting on with the old-fashioned sci-fi that restored everything back to status quo. It was disappointing, to say the least, and felt tacked on or heavily revised.

Even a lot of the art seems hasty. There are a few double-page spreads where the characters look pasted over the background scenery like those old static sticker playsets you could use to build your own scenes. Allred is apparently retooling the series to be comprised of entire stories told in each issue, bringing in guest artists and writers to do backup features. I wouldn’t be surprised if the story from last issue was supposed to end in a different way until Allred decided upon this change of direction.

The Mighty #1
written by Peter Tomasi & Keith Champagne
art by Peter Snejbjerg
This is a strange and rare book. The Mighty is a superhero story published by DC that isn’t part of any of its established universes, floating off on its own. Usually, this is grounds for a very short-running comic. However, this book is helmed by a trio of very capable people. Tomasi is a longtime editor and has recently found some acclaim writing in the Green Lantern and Batman franchises; similarly, Champagne was mostly known as an inker until short stints on Flash and Green Lantern books; lastly, Snejbjerg is a very well-regarded artist, maybe best known by mainstream superhero fans for his work on the latter of Starman with James Robinson.

So what does this outlandish alignment bring to the table? The Mighty starts out in a way that has become old hat: a single superhero exists in an otherwise realistic world and is therefore coupled with some sort of oversight. “Realistic” superheroes have been the cool thing to do for over twenty years, ever since forerunners of the subgenre such as Watchmen, Elementals, and Squadron Supreme saw varying levels of success in the eighties. More recently, people like Warren Ellis and Mark Millar have refined the ideas (in ways both good and bad) to the point where I feel like something has to be really original to have any weight in this sort of story.

The team constructs a reasonably interesting first issue. The characters have unique voices and seem three-dimensional except for the token hero, who barely gets any time on panel and doesn’t say much when he does. This is what makes me hold out hope for the rest of the series, the fact that it seems to be a character drama rather than an exploration of how the “real” world would react to people with superpowers. By the end of the first issue, it seems that the requisite superman is not going to be the book’s protagonist. Instead, readers are offered what seems to be a regular guy (but with secrets!) who has been unexpectedly promoted to head of the team that assists the superman. The Mighty looks to be a story about how he deals with a job that the stress of which has driven most of his predecessors to one form of ruin or another. Is this the first office drama comic book?

Categories: Comics, Reviews