Third Party View

It’s time for another big Marvel crossover story. Man, these things seem to just be flying at us, don’t they? First came Civil War followed and I think a little overlapped by World War Hulk and now we have Secret Invasion.

Secret Invasion has been building for a while in the Avengers books. The gist of it is that the shape-shifting aliens known as the Skrulls have been mad at Earth’s heroes for some time and want to take over the planet. They’ve mastered genetic engineering to the point that they can give one of their own any powers of any superhuman on Earth, or any combination of powers. It’s like the Super Skrull, who had the powers of all four of the Fantastic Four, but times about a thousand or so.

So not only can they look like anyone and use any superpowers, but they’ve also made it so their real identities are undetectable. Genetic tests, mind reading, their scent, nothing gives them away.

Picking back up with the story, the Avengers (well, the upstart New Avengers, technically) discovered that Elektra was a Skrull when she was killed (again). Researching the Skrull body, they figured out all this undetectable stuff and figured out that anybody could be a Skrull and nobody would know, fostering all kinds of dissent and mistrust. We just found out that Spider-Woman is the big bad queen Skrull, which maybe helps explain why she’s been crossing and double-crossing and triple-crossing everyone.

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If you’re reading this then you’ve probably fantasized, at some point in your life, about putting on a costume and fighting crime.  That’s what this book is about, and it’s brilliant.

Dave Lizewski is a normal kid in a normal world.  In his words, he’s not the class jock but he’s not the class loser either.  He’s just a regular high school kid.  He’s me and you and he has conversations with his friends that you’ve had with your friends.  Dave doesn’t have super powers or some advanced technology.  He doesn’t have a tragic or miraculous back story.  He’s just a kid who loves comic books and wants to help people out for a living.  That’s what’s so great about this book- from the first-person narrative style penned by Mark Millar to the simple yet powerful pencils by Jon Romita, Jr., everything about this book is geared towards understated reality.

When I started reading comic books, really getting into them, I read mostly X-Men and Spider-Man with a few other titles smattered in here and there.  A few years later I read V for Vendetta, Miracle Man and Watchmen.  Alan Moore wrecked my view on the standard superhero fare, but he also opened me up to a whole new world of comic book appreciation.  Since reading those classics, the comics I’ve enjoyed reading more than others are the ones that take some convention or another of comics and put some spin on it, and of those, the ones I’ve enjoyed the most are the ones that are based as much as possible in the real world.  That’s what was great about the first two installments of The Ultimates and that’s what was great about Supreme Power.  (Speaking of, when did the last issue of Squadron Supreme come out?)

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This is, what, the third X-Force #1? It’s at least the second one. There was a period of time when I was too poor to buy comics and during that time X-Force became some sort of bizarre satire comic or something and I don’t know if that restarted at a #1 or just continued from where it was. I hear it was pretty good. I don’t know.

So, the X-Men have had a rough go of it lately, at least since M-Day, when the vast majority of the world’s mutants suddenly stopped being mutants. Some of them died as a result (imagine flying over the city when all of the sudden you can’t fly anymore: uh oh!) and some were killed afterwards due to violent anti-mutant sentiment, but by and large they just ceased to have mutant powers anymore. Surprisingly, this didn’t apply to a lot of key X-Men characters. Oh yeah, and Professor Xavier was shot and killed. Again.

In the most recent Marvel Mega Mutant X-Over, Messiah Complex, all the mutants have begun giving up hope that their species would continue when lo and behold, a mutant baby is born and a number of factions go after the baby for their own purposes. That’s mostly here nor there, but the important thing is that one of the factions is The Purifiers, a groups of religious zealots who believe mutants come from Satan. As it’s pointed out in this issue of X-Force, The Purifiers killed more X-Men (students) in one day than there had ever been X-Men killed before. (I was wondering if that included the ones that came back from the dead or not.) So these guys are dangerous nutjobs, these Purifiers.

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When The Boys was first released it was under DC’s Wildstorm imprint (which they got along with Image Comics when they took that over) it was everything you could ask for in a superhero series penned by Garth Ennis. Drugs, sex, violence, a topsy-turvy view of a world living with superheroes and that certain Garth Ennis je ne sais quoi that lets you laugh at some lowbrow and gross-out humor and still feel like you’re getting an intellectual read. It got a little too… edgy so it was shelved by DC until it was picked up by Dynamite.

And it was good. I’m a fan of comics that take an established comic theme and give it a real-world spin, which is why I haven’t been able to enjoy reading mainstream comics quite as much since I first checked out Watchmen and Miracle Man. In the world of The Boys, super heroes are rock stars gone wild. They indulge their every whim and vice knowing that nobody is going to do anything about it, and if something does go wrong their corporate sponsor’s PR person will handle it.

We were introduced to this world through Wee Hughie (obviously modeled after Simon Pegg), a Scott who lost the love of his life one day when a super-speedster ran into (or, more appropriately, through) her. Hughie was crushed and let his life go down the crapper until he was approached by Billy Butcher, leader of The Boys. The Boys is a covert group of people given a dose of Compound V, the source of super powers, whose mission is to keep the spoiled and corrupt super heroes in line. They do their job well. And violently. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll admit that when I read that Marvel Comics was going to change The Incredible Hulk into The Incredible Herc starting with issue #112, I was pretty skeptical. I mean, on one hand you’ve got the Hulk, a comic book character popular enough to be a household name right up there with Batman or Spider-Man, and on the other you’ve got a b-list Avenger based on a Greek demigod. Who cares about Hercules? I’ve been reading comics for a decade and a half (that’s half my life as of March 4, so contact me for instructions on sending birthday contributions) and I’ve never once cared about Hercules. Don’t get me wrong- I’ve read and really enjoyed a lot of mythology, but Marvel’s Hercules has never been anything but muscles and ego.

So why did I pick this book up? Let’s go back a few months.

I’ve never been much of one to follow the Hulk, but when I heard there was a story arc where he was made to play the role of a gladiatorial slave I thought that might be pretty cool and worth checking out. The Hulk gets to cut loose and smash up a bunch of aliens? Sounds good to me. I was pretty happy with the Planet Hulk storyline so I kept reading after the world the Hulk just took over blew up and made him very, very angry. This lead to World War Hulk, where the Hulk declared war on the superheroes who sent him off into space. (The fight with Iron Man was particularly good.)

During World War Hulk, a few superheroes banded together to support their big green buddy. Two of the people in this group were Hercules and Amadeus Cho, the seventh smartest person in the world. (Thanks for reinforcing the stereotype that Asian kids are smart, Marvel.) The Hulk was taken away at the end of World War Hulk and the book was changed to The Incredible Hercules.

So what’s happening now? Read the rest of this entry »