Spider-Man, v. 1: Miles Morales

Collects: Spider-Man v. 2 #1-5 (2016)

Released: September 2016 (Marvel)

Format: 112 pages / color / $15.99 / ISBN: 9780785199618

What is this?: Miles Morales, the Spider-Man of the Ultimate Universe, has to adjust to being a Spider-Man in the regular universe with new villains — in addition to all the problems of being a normal teenage superhero.

The culprits: Writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Sara Pichelli

I’m not very familiar with writer Brian Michael Bendis’s magnum opus, Ultimate Spider-Man. I read a few of the early trades, killing time when I was bored, but I didn’t fall in love with the character or the universe.

That means I haven’t read any stories featuring the second Ultimate Spider-Man, Miles Morales. I’ve certainly heard of Miles, but other than Fox News-types screaming about “Black Spider-Man,” I didn’t have any information on him going into Spider-Man, v. 1: Miles Morales, which covers Miles’s first series in the main Marvel Universe.

Bendis throws the reader into the story immediately, starting with an in media res fight with the demon Blackheart, who has already defeated the Avengers. Before resolving that fight, Bendis then backtracks to a day in the life of Miles Morales, a high-school student who is the new Spider-Man. (He returns to the fight with Blackheart by the end of the issue.) Although the book has no lengthy infodumps, and the recap page is scanty at best, Bendis gradually introduces the information readers need to understand what is going on throughout v. 1. Occasionally, a bit of information will be shoehorned in as if Bendis couldn’t find a way to elegantly introduce it, but overall, the story flows well and didn’t leave me scratching my head.

(As a side note: As well as Bendis does this, I wonder how much my own familiarity with the Marvel Universe and how these stories are supposed to go allows me to follow along with Miles’s story so easily.)

While I am unfamiliar with Miles, I am quite familiar with Bendis. It occurs to me that Bendis is becoming the new Chris Claremont, albeit one who doesn’t let his bondage fantasies play out on comics pages. Like Claremont, Bendis has an authorial voice and narrative tics (danglers and mind control for Claremont, extreme decompression and a fondness for giving favorite — or just single — characters a push in group situations) that may drive off readers who have grown tired of them. (I dropped Powers years ago when I couldn’t take any more of Bendis’s stammered dialogue.) Fortunately, Bendis keeps those problems in check in v. 1; yes, the book sounds like Bendis, and the plot is a little slower than I would like, but the plot moves along and things happen. Bendis does, however, bring in Goldballs, a mutant character Bendis created during his X-Men work; Goldballs is inexplicably popular and immediately finds himself in the thick of the book without working for it.

As I said, v. 1 has action, but I’m not sure I buy it. It’s not the fault of artist Sara Pichelli; her fight scenes are a treat to read, clear and filled with movement. Bendis’s choices, however, don’t make for a compelling whole. The book’s big action piece is Miles’s fight against Blackheart, who has already taken out the Avengers. Without knowing anything about Blackheart, Miles battles the huge demon, even picking up Captain America’s shield during the fight. Symbolically, we know that’s supposed to be important, but Miles does almost nothing with Cap’s shield — he bops Blackheart’s face with the shield a couple of times. Blackheart, for his part, is no match for Miles; he grabs Miles once, but after Miles uses his venom blast, he never touches the teenager again.

What’s the venom blast? Well, with a touch, Miles can make humans feel like they’re having a heart attack. It has an even stronger effect on Blackheart. Miles also appears to become invisible at some point, although he never mentions the power and only uses again it to attempt to fool heat-seeking missiles. Still: Those are some impressive powers that allow Miles to defeat a near-cosmic level threat by himself.

However, Hammerhead and his goons take out Miles by firing a few missiles. Why was Hammerhead after Miles? Because the Black Cat hired him to do so. Why does she want to go after Miles, even though he’s battling Avenger-type threats rather than street-level criminals throughout this book? *shrug* After Miles has been captured, she says she has an instinctual aversion to Spider-Man, any Spider-Man, but seeking out a fight against a superhero isn’t the act of a rational crime boss, which is what Black Cat seeks to be (and is, in Silk).

And then Miles escapes from Hammer head and Black Cat by using some unspecified (and unnamed) power to shatter / repel the chains that bind him. It all feels so … arbitrary. I mean, I know all narrative fiction is arbitrary, and superhero stories even more so, but this seems even more arbitrary than usual.

Other than those unconvincing fights, the main conflicts come between Miles and his grandmother, who is convinced he is on the drugs after his grades slip, and between Miles and his best friend, Ganke, who reveals Miles’s secret identity to Goldballs, on the theory that heroes should share these things. The former is an excellent idea; family is an excellent shaft to mine for teenage hero drama, and grounding someone who can literally punch through walls is a nice irony. Miles’s grandmother toes the lines between an irritating, over-the-top, cartoonish, and out-of-touch old and amusing foil for both Miles and his parents. More often than not, she manages to stay on the right side of that line, but sometimes it’s uncomfortable. (Pichelli draws her as surprisingly young and fashionable granny — too young to have a teenage grandson, unless teen pregnancies run in the family. Which they could!)

Ganke spilling the beans to Goldball is an idiotic betrayal of Miles’s trust. Ganke rationalizes it by saying he wanted to impress a superhero he identified with (both are heavyset or overweight), but it feels contrived — and yes, arbitrary — that Ganke would immediately give up the secret. After trying and failing to connect with Goldballs? Sure, that could make sense. As an opening gambit? No. Is Bendis trying to say Ganke is a horrible friend? Nothing else suggests that. He may be trying to make a point about identity politics and representation, but if he is, it’s simultaneously ham-handed and muddled.

Those sort of representation issues are brought up more ably after Miles’s costume is torn during his fight with Blackheart, revealing that he is a person of color. A vlogger he and Ganke watch is ecstatic about learning the new Spider-Man isn’t another white guy, but Miles rejects her label of the “Black Spider-Man.” First of all, that label doesn’t match his personal identity; he’s only half African-American. Secondly, though, he wants to be known as just plain Spider-Man, which — let’s face it — is an unrealistic expectation as long as Peter Parker is walking around. Maybe there’s more to Miles’s rejection than that, as he stubbornly refuses to see the significance of a Spider-Man who is a person of color. But we don’t see any other components of his reaction in v. 1. I have to wonder, though, how differently this scene would have been written if it had been written by someone whose skin isn’t white.

Pichelli’s art is excellent, and I enjoyed reading her work. Her approach is heavy on double-paged spreads, and although she’s better at alerting the reader to continue from one side of the book to the other than most artists, it still disturbs the reading experience, especially in a book as heavy in conversation scenes as a Bendis comic. Still, Pichelli makes those conversations interesting to look at; she doesn’t reuse headshots over and over. People are moving in those scenes, and their movements feel real. Miles’s face is always in motion as well, although none of his expressions are subtle. Then again, teenagers aren’t subtle, are they?

I am really on the fence about v. 1. I have a feeling Bendis wrote this book as a continuation of his Ultimate Spider-Man book, and if I kept reading the series, then I would get into the rhythm and narrative feel of the book. But reading Bendis has made me leery of putting too much faith into him, so I’m not sure I’m going to pick up the next volume.

Rating: (3 of 5)

Guardians of the Galaxy, v. 1: Cosmic Avengers

Collects: Guardians of the Galaxy #0.1 and 1-3 and Guardians of the Galaxy: Tomorrow’s Avengers #1 (2013)

Released: April 2014 (Marvel)

Format: 144 pages / color / $19.99 / ISBN: 9780785166078

What is this?: The opening arc of Bendis’s run on Guardians of the Galaxy, in which the Guardians have to deal with aliens wanting to interfere with Earth.

The culprits: Writer Brian Michael Bendis and pencilers Steve McNiven and Sara Pichelli

I enjoyed the second volume of the Guardians of the Galaxy series, written by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, so I was worried when I heard Brian Michael Bendis was going to write the third volume.

Bendis’s style is vastly different from Abnett and Lanning’s. Abnett and Lanning rely on humor and action-filled plots, while Bendis is known for using naturalistic dialogue to fill his more leisurely paced stories. Unfortunately, Bendis’s dialogue causes many of his characters to sound alike, regardless of how they sounded before he started writing them. When Bendis writes solo titles, the singular Bendis voice is not a big problem, but it’s one of many concerns readers have raised on Bendis’s team books.

For some reason, despite no one particularly caring for Bendis’s work on team books, those books are still immensely popular. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, if anyone has the patience to unravel it.

But I kept an open mind when I read Guardians of the Galaxy, v 1: Cosmic Avengers. In Cosmic Avengers, Bendis has chosen to make the central conflict between J’Son (occasionally spelled J-Son), the ruler of the alien Spartax, and his son, Peter Quill, who leads the Guardians under the name Star-Lord. J’Son wants Quill to quit adventuring with his scruffy friends and take his place as crown prince; Quill wants J’Son to butt the hell out of his life. J’Son also maneuvers members of the Galactic Council into putting Earth into quarantine, meaning J’Son is forbidding his son to go back to his home planet. Presumably, this is meant to pressure Quill to take J’Son’s offer.

The Badoon immediately take the quarantine of Earth as an invitation to invade the planet, hoping to conquer it before the other races can react and then presenting the conquest to the others as a fait accompli. (I think; it’s never spelled out why this new galactic policy on Earth makes the planet more vulnerable. The story does not say the Galactic Council has withdrawn longstanding protection of Earth or anything similar.) The Guardians — whose lineup mirrors that of the Guardians of the Galaxy movie: Quill, Gamora, Rocket Raccoon, Groot, and Drax the Destroyer — and Iron Man react, and when the battle is over, the Guardians are the ones who are in trouble.

So Cosmic Avengers has a great deal of action, but it does not have much plot. Each of the three issues from Guardians of the Galaxy collected in the book has two threads: J’Son lecturing someone (Quill or the Galactic Council) and the Guardians fighting someone. In life as well as comics, lectures are generally boring, and Bendis’s trademark dialogue doesn’t help; the action sequences look pretty, but they are uncomplicated: the Guardians see evil, attack evil, quickly win.

Well, the art is pretty, but it’s sometimes confusing. I’m not sure Steve McNiven and Bendis were on the same wavelength at times. Iron Man is introduced in #1 floating in space, in front of a planet that looks like Mars while musing that it’s good that he decided to “go out into the universe.” Mars isn’t far out into the universe, but that’s where Iron Man must be, since he sees the Badoon show up to attack Earth. Mars isn’t always that close to Earth — 140 million miles, on average, 34 million at their closest approach, and 250 million miles away on their farthest — but perhaps it is much closer in the Marvel Universe.

The Guardians arrive soon after. How do the Guardians decide to launch a boarding raid on the Badoon ship? By floating through the vacuum. That suggests neither ship is going very fast, and it gives McNiven a chance to show off their stupid spacesuits, which consists of helmets for Quill and Gamora in addition to normal costumes. During the battle, Rocket laughs at something Groot does … but what is it? McNiven shows Groot tearing through Badoon, but that’s not remarkable. After the Badoon activiate the self-destruct button, Drax rushes back into the ship to rescue Gamora, but the next panel with the two of them show them aboard the Guardians’ ship, without even a suggestion that either was in danger. The disintegrating Badoon ship is then shown almost at Earth — which, again, isn’t that close to Mars.

(As an aside: More worrying is a scene in the next collection, Guardians of the Galaxy, v. 2: Angela. Quill refers to a distressing event that happened while the Guardians were “chasing Badoon,” a lightning-like flash that momentarily disoriented Drax but messed with Quill’s thinking. But Quill experiences nothing like that in any Guardians issue; however, Drax does seem off his game for a moment in #2 after an explosion that seems to be caused by a laser. Was this the incident Quill refers to? Quill doesn’t seem to notice the flash of light then. Or did it come in a crossover appearance?)

Bendis’s dialogue is also problematic. Iron Man, who joins up with the Guardians after the Badoon attack, sounds like a typical Bendis character, and Quill also speaks in that style. Quill is, on the face of it, someone who shouldn’t speak in a naturalistic style; as a charismatic leader of a bunch of ragtag rebels, he should be smooth and quick witted — more Indiana Jones than Woody Allen. Rocket doesn’t sound like a Bendis character, but he does try to make a truly awful catchphrase — “Blam! Murdered you!” — work, and it takes a while before his teammates object to its psychopathic tone.

Sometimes people say something completely out of character. Iron Man has no call to slag on Captain Britain, but when the Badoon attack London, Iron Man says he’s “not really” any good. If anyone should be suspicious of humanity’s potential to screw up the universe, it would be the Supreme Intelligence of the Kree, who awakened the supremely powerful “Destiny force” from Rick Jones, Captain America’s sidekick, during the Kree-Skrull War and Avengers Forever. However, the Supreme Intelligence says J’Son is “overstating [humanity’s] abilities and importance.” Another member of the Galactic Council would be a better choice to say this, unless the Supreme Intelligence is dissembling. Which he might be, although I don’t have enough faith in Bendis to believe that.

(As a second aside: The Galactic Council includes J’Son, the Supreme Intelligence, Emperor Gladiator of the Shi’ar, a Badoon, Freyja the All-Mother of Asgard, Annihilus … and the Brood. The Brood? As a galactic power? I know this lineup was set by Jonathan Hickman in Avengers, but the Marvel Universe must hold a more important race than the Brood. The remnants of the Skrulls? The Galadorians? And Rocket describes the Badoon as a “minor race” in Guardians v. 2 #7. What’s changed since then?)

However, I will say Bendis writes Groot’s dialogue properly. He and Black Bolt might be the only two characters Bendis can’t make sound like the rest of his characters. Bendis does give Groot the ridiculous regeneration ability, as he grows from a sprout to his normal, giant self over just a few pages in #3. I don’t know that it should be remarkable that Groot should return from almost complete dissolution so quickly, but it rankled.

The price of this book is outrageous. Cosmic Avengers is not worth $20. Three issues of the regular series is barely a taste of what’s to come, and the rest of the book is filler. Although it’s possible Bendis might follow up on some of the threads in the four short tales from Guardians of the Galaxy: Tomorrow’s Avengers — he did write them — I wouldn’t bet on it. Star-Lord’s origin in #0.1 is a revamped version of Marvel Preview #4 from 1976, but Bendis’s story covers far less of Quill’s life, smoothing out the improbable elements of his birth while glossing over everything between his mother’s murder and the present in a couple of speech bubbles. The new version does have coherence on its side, but other than a brief scene showing Quill defending a bullied girl, the story could have been summed up by Quill in a few lines: “A space prince knocked up my mom, then Badoon killed her ten years after I was born.”

Done. I’ll take the prorated price of the book from anyone who wants to give it to me.

Price aside, though, Cosmic Avengers is a book for die-hards — Bendis fans, or those who must know what is happening to their favorite Guardians. If you don’t fit into either category, skip this book … and the next one too, since the only important event in that book is the appearance of Angela, which is hardly a universe-shaking happening, no matter what the Watcher tries to tell us.

Rating: (1.5 of 5)

Runaways (v. 11): Homeschooling

Collects: Runaways v. 3 #11-4, What If the Runaways Became the Young Avengers? backups in five What If? stories (2009)

Released: March 2010 (Marvel)

Format: 136 pages / color / $14.99 / ISBN: 9780785140399

What is this?: The Runaways’ house is hit by a UFO, and Chase is reunited with his dead uncle.

The culprits: Kathryn Immonen (writer) and Sara Pichelli (artist) for the Runaways; C.B. Cebulski (writer) and Patrick Spaziante (penciler) for What If?

So my review of Runaways: Homeschooling was supposed to be written a few weeks ago, but writing the book took up a lot of time, and then my wife suggested we go to Harrisburg, Pa., to see Stephen Strasburg, the #1 draft pick in last year’s baseball draft, pitch for the AA Harrisburg Senators. That didn’t work out so well; rain delayed the game for two hours, and then Strasburg pitched only 2 1/3 innings before another rain delay forced him from the game. Big disappointment, and we didn’t get home until 5 in the morning.

So, as an awkward segue: Is Homeschooling, the latest volume about the team of unwilling teen superheroes, a disappointment as well?

On one hand, it would be hard to be a big a disappointment as Terry Moore and Humberto Ramos’s Dead Wrong, which left such a sour taste in my mouth that I skipped the next volume, Rock Zombies. (Thinly veiled Howard Stern with mind-control powers? Dear God no.) Writer Kathryn Immonen and artist Sara Pichelli definitely put together something better than Dead Wrong here. On the other hand, it’s definitely not up to Brian K. Vaughn’s run, but no one could expect that anyway.

Immonen seems to be able to get the characters right but not, particularly, the larger picture. The dialogue sounds right, as does the team’s floundering in a crisis situation. Molly seems to be a particular favorite for the writer, or maybe she’s just fun to write; she gets the best lines and the clearest moral sense. In particular, the dialogue between Chase and Molly about their transportation, the new Leap Frog, brought a smile to my face as well.

However, the plot takes weird turns. I don’t believe that Karolina’s grief over her lost girlfriend would cause her to a) want a prom or b) throw herself at a guy; I also don’t believe in Nico’s semi-random hookup. And the character death in the book was completely random — a unmanned drone accidentally dropping on a house will seem random no matter how well it’s set up, and this isn’t all that well set up. I’m also not sure I followed some of Nico’s spells, despite not having any trouble in previous books. (“Mood ring”? What did that do?)

On the other hand, Immonen introduces Chase’s uncle, Hunter. He’s a high-tech genius like Chase’s father, although intriguingly successful without being overtly supervilainous. And reintroducing family — especially family that Chase thinks is dead — brings up interesting character areas: do the Runaways trust Hunter because he’s family, or do they distrust him because he’s an adult? Does this alleviate any of Chase’s guilt? Is Hunter evil like Chase’s dad or relatively good-hearted like Chase? How is he still alive? Is he really Hunter, or is he an imposter, as Chase suggests at the beginning? Not all of these have to be answered, but some of them should. None are, not even partially. Instead, we get Hunter showing us how incompetent the kids are — even the tech-savvy Victor.

But like I said, it’s at least intriguing, and combined with Immonen’s command of the dialogue and characters, intriguing enough to cover for the odd twists of the plot. (Mostly.) But the story ends with a triple cliffhanger — just before the series was cancelled. The last issue came out fall 2009, and here we are in May 2010 … I understand Immonen probably had ideas of how to continue the story, but I don’t think she (or anyone else) will. Which makes Homeschooling, for plot purposes, useless.

I’m not a big fan of Pichelli’s artwork. This is personal preference, in part; the more overtly manga-influenced artists usually aren’t my cup of tea, especially when the characters seem to be embarrassed or dirty-nosed in nearly every panel. (Or perhaps careless with rouge.) In a practical sense, Pichelli seems to have made a conscious decision to make the teenagers have little personal space between them, especially Nico and Karolina. I can’t decide whether that’s a good idea; I suppose it mainly hinges on whether Karolina’s acting on her attraction to Nico. The storytelling #13 seem a bit muddled as well; from the destruction of the house and Nico’s “Abraham Lincoln” spell and the secret chambers, I had trouble telling exactly what was going on and where everything was supposed to be happening. Still, I have to reiterate: my opinion on Pichelli’s are is, even more than usual, personal preference.

What If the Runaways Became the Young Avengers? ran as a backup in several What If? issues released around the end of 2008, and I have to admit that C.B. Cebulski and Patrick Spaziante’s story doesn’t read like it had been broken up into five uneasy pieces for another “What If?” event. It also isn’t all that interesting, though; it’s mainly interesting if you had a hankering to see what Molly would look like a teenager. (Why is she a teenager? I don’t know.)

Like when Joss Whedon or Moore took over Runaways, I had high hopes for an Immonen run. There wasn’t a run, though, and this single volume isn’t really worth a look.

Rating: (1.5 of 5)