KICK or KISS? – comics bought from week of 3rd April 08
April 7th, 2008
Kick-Ass #2
The last comics I bought by Mark Millar were the quietly-released final issues of The Unfunnies. It ends **SPOILER** with an evil comic book creator literally writing himself into his own strip, free to rape and murder his characters as he sees fit, a life of fictive freedom being preferable to a life of reality on death row. It was an amusingly nasty take on Grant Morrison’s fond old hyperfictionsuit riff, but not one that added much to the idea. Or at least it didn’t until Kick-Ass 2, where it is revealed that at some point in the recent past Mark Millar evidently wrote himself into the Marvel universe, for real. As in, that’s where he actually lives now. How else to explain the contents of this issue, where realism apparently reigns supreme, but comes in the form of circumstances and psychologies that could only ever seem plausible to someone who really lives in funnybook land?
The plot goes: our teeny protagonist recovers from his injuries last issue, then gets right back out there and starts hitting baddies with his sticks again, only this time he wins! He wins because apparently lying on the floor still gives you leverage enough to land a heavy blow on a felon’s face! Because being battered by three adult men twice your size doesn’t really stop you in your tracks – not if you’re a weird mental in a wetsuit! And then, the whole scrap gets internetted on this U-Choob thing that everyone’s talking about!
Relevant! REALISTIC!
It’s just silly rubbish really. That itself wouldn’t be quite so irritating if not for Millar’s hype – there’s a thing with promotion about the dangers of disconnect between expectation and delivery – if you tell everyone this is the ultimate in realist comics, then turn in another bag of macho-ironic bollocks, with ludicrous motivations and reactions and impossible twisteroos, people are going to be much more down on it than if your pre-marketing said ‘average fighty nonsense with some nicely chunky but mismatched art’. That’s the last of these I’ll buy – so I will have to give Kick-Ass #2 a long KICK off a short pier.
Secret Invasion #1
So second book out the bag and we’re already pretty down on Mark Millar. After that over-familiar bundle of tics and quirks, a few stock Bendis-isms comes as blessed relief. Though equally foregrounded, The Bendice’s writerly signatures aren’t as irritating as Millar’s, and generally he’s less of the enthusiastic amateur than Greg Pak, so with just this one book out Secret Invasion is already the best of Marvel’s recent crossover efforts. It’s got paranoia, unsubtly-foreshadowed doppelgangers, a space armada, lots and lots of brightly coloured spandex, and a creepy morgue shot of Skrullektra with a disturbingly vaginal surgical incision in her chest. (Or was it just me who thought that bit looked all wrong? Look again, I bet it’s not just me.)
El Bendo has been putting quite a few feet wrong lately, with the subtextual sexism in his books, so I’ll keep a close eye on how icky this book might get in later issues, but so far I’m willing to give it a polite welcoming KISS on just one cheek.
Casanova #13
This issue makes two-in-a-row. The most annoyingly-smug but erratically-brilliant book on the market has just done two excellent issues on the bounce, so maybe we’ve passed some kind of water mark and this title will now start being as good as everyone says it is. I was sure this issue would give us a disembodied-head Nick Fury (I can never remember the characters’ proper names in this book – I think it’s a little too much to ask really, when the links and associations with their obvious forerunners are so flagrantly, and fragrantly, waved in your face the whole time), barking orders from a fishtank, in a kind of Doom Patrol/Cold Lazarus/Futurama thing, but Fraction was obviously happy just going for the straightforward LMD get-out. So he’s nicking from forty year-old antecedents rather than fifteen year-old ones – who cares, he does it with some style. The ‘one-unique-soul’ debates in this issue are a little conservative for my tastes, but the flashbacks are so well handled that I’ll forgive it just about anything. A big wet KISS on the lips, no tongues though.
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