Category: Graphic Novels

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Superior Spider-Man volume 4: Necessary Evil


By Dan Slott, Ryan Stegman, Giuseppe Camuncoli, Livesay & John Dell (Marvel/Panini UK)
ISBN: 978-1-84653-581-9

Amazing Spider-Man #700 began one of the most impressive reboots of the Spider-Man mythology and was certainly the most striking and compelling character shake-up of all the MarvelNOW! relaunches.

In that issue, all that was Peter Parker apparently died when Doctor Otto Octavius took over his body. The hero’s mind had been transferred and trapped in the dying body of the super-villain where, despite his every desperate effort, in the end Peter perished with and within that decrepit, expiring frame, arguably becoming a wholly Superior Spider-Man.

Now the coldly calculating Octopus is permanently installed in the Wondrous Wallcrawler’s body and successfully living Peter’s life, albeit with a few minor but necessary alterations, upgrades and improvements…

At first the situation did not seem completely hopeless. At the moment of the monster’s greatest triumph Parker inflicted his full unvarnished memories on the psychic invader, forcing Octavius to experience every ghastly moment of tragedy and sacrifice which combined to make Spider-Man the compulsive do-gooder that he was.

From that enforced emotional turmoil came a bitter understanding. Otto had a change of heart and swore to live the rest of his stolen life in tribute to his greatest enemy; earnestly endeavouring to carry on Spider-Man’s self-imposed mission, guided by Peter’s abiding principle: “with great power comes great responsibility”…

However Octavius’ ingrained monomania proved hard to suppress and the usurped web-spinner constantly toiled to prove himself the better man: augmenting Parker’s paltry gadgets and methodology with millions of spy robots to patrol the entire city at once, constantly adding advanced tech and refining new weaponry to the suit and even acting pre-emptively rather than merely reacting to crises as the original had…

Otto went back to college because he arrogantly refused to live life without a doctorate and even briefly tried to rekindle his new body’s old relationship with Mary Jane Watson.

The new, ultra-efficient Spider-Man became New York’s darling and even Mayor J. Jonah Jameson embraced the Web-spinner; all but adopting the Arachnid as his deputy – to the utter incredulity of an imperceptible psychic shard of Peter which still screamed in frustration within the deepest recesses of the hero’s overwritten consciousness…

The helpless ghost was an unwilling passenger, unsuspected by Octavius yet increasingly privy to the villain’s own barely-suppressed memories. Moreover, more and more of Parker’s oldest friends began to suspect something amiss…

Police CSI Officer and ex-girlfriend Carlie Cooper knew Peter’s secret identity and recalled the last time Spidey fought Doc Ock, when the killer broke her arm. He claimed then that he was Peter trapped in the villain’s body…

The public seems happy with how Spider-Man has changed. Not only is he exceedingly more efficient, but far more brutal too: practically crippling bad guys like Boomerang, Vulture and Scorpion. This new hard-line attitude actually increased the webslinger’s approval rating and, after a hostage siege, his status peaked after he executed the psychotic perpetrator Massacre…

Eventually Octavius realised there was a noble passenger in his head and eradicated the last vestiges of his enemy’s presence – at the cost of many of Parker’s later memories and fully liberated extended his campaign of modernised crime-fighting.

Helping Jameson after the Spider-Slayer and other super-felons broke loose on The Raft penitentiary, Spider-Man then blackmailed the Mayor into donating the now empty edifice for a base. The Superior wallcrawler designed a new costume, built giant war-tanks and even hired henchmen to help him clean up the city for the decent, law-abiding citizens.

“Parker’s” personal life is all but over and he’s constantly harassed for a lack of productivity by employer Max Modell at technological think-tank Horizon Labs. He still wants that elusive doctorate, however, and is prepared to put up with lots of grief from his lecturer Dr. Lamaze – even though the oaf is a bumbling fool even more stupid than when he was Otto Octavius’ college lab partner. At least Parker’s blossoming romance with brilliant Anna Maria Marconi is still progressing satisfactorily…

From his transformed citadel on the now-renamed Spider Island II, Spider-Man watches over his city through the electronic eyes of thousands of tiny Spider-bots…

There’s still lots he doesn’t see though: resurgent and hidden criminal mastermind Goblin King (former Green Goblin Norman Osborn) is successfully completing his own campaign to take over the underworld with his Goblin Army Cult.

To that end he has transformed young Phil Urich – latest iteration of The Hobgoblin – into his latest living weapon: a Goblin Knight to lead his armies to inevitable victory…

Meanwhile, Carlie Cooper has shared her suspicions about Spider-Man with her friend and Captain Yuri Watanabe (who secretly moonlights as costumed vigilante The Wraith). Together the women have been gathering definitive proofs of their suspicions regarding the Wallcrawler; and now with an Island fortress and a mercenary gang to pay for they have a money trail to follow…

Most dangerous of all, disgraced former Horizon employee Ty Stone is still free: a malevolent genius and subtle manipulator with a deadly agenda all his own slowly building his own powerbase…

This latest collection ties in to the various time travel stories and stems from the after-effects generated by the disruptions in the (Marvel) universes caused by the Avengers unmaking the Age of Ultron, but don’t fret as the stories work well enough on their own…

Illustrated by Ryan Stegman & John Livesay, the 3-part story-arc Necessary Evil begins with ‘Let’s Do the Time Warp Again’ and a glimpse at Nueva York in 2099, where Miguel O’Hara is knee-deep in a chronal crisis. His entire world is unravelling, with dinosaurs and other time-lost threats materialising even as his archenemy (and biological father) Tyler Stone of world-owning corporation Alchemax is gradually disappearing thanks to some threat to an ancestor in 2013…

A Word to the Wise: At a time when Marvel’s product quality was at an all time low, and following a purported last minute dispute between the company and prodigal son John Byrne (who had re-invented himself by re-inventing Superman), the House of Ideas launched a whole new continuity strand with all-new heroes (and franchise extensions) set more than a century into the future.

The world was a corporate dystopia, the scenarios were fantastical and the initial character-pool was predictable if not actually uninspired. A lot of the early material was by any critical yardstick sub-par. But there was also Spider-Man 2099.

Some analogue of the wall-crawler is always going to happen in any Marvel imprint (anybody remember Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham?), and in those insane days of speculator-led markets (where greedy kids – and adults – dreamed of cornering the market in “Hot Issues” and becoming instant squillionaires) the future wallcrawler was a spectacular example of quality creators producing superior work (don’t take my word for it, just check out Spider-Man 2099: Genesis)…

In 2099 world governments were openly in the capacious pockets of huge multi-national corporations which controlled every aspect of society. All superheroes had been gone for decades, although their legends still comforted the underclass living at the fringes – and below the feet – of the favoured ones who could survive in a society based on unchecked, rampant free-marker capitalism.

Miguel O’Hara was a brilliant young geneticist fast-tracked and swiftly rising through the ranks of Alchemax. He enjoyed the privileges that his work (creating super-soldiers for the company) won him. He loved solving problems and despite interference from salary-men and corporate drudges he made a major breakthrough: a technique to alter genetic make-up and combine it with DNA from other organisms…

Following a demonstration which went grotesquely awry the arrogant scientist made a big mistake and threatened to quit. Unwilling to lose such a valuable asset CEO Tyler Stone poisoned O’Hara with the most addictive drug in existence – one only available from Alchemax – to keep him loyal.

The boy wonder was then forced to use his genetic modifier, resetting his physiology to purge the addiction from his cells. However one of the lab assistants he used to bully saw a chance for some payback and sabotaged the attempt, adding spider DNA to the matrix…

Miguel became the ultimate rebel in his time and was at the cutting edge of a new “Age of Heroes” fighting Stone and Alchemax as well as many other menaces. He eventually discovered the other reason for his privileged fast tracking: his mother’s long-ago affair which had resulted in a son…

Now O’Hara had to ally with Stone and stop the temporal threat in 2013 – to save his world and his own life…

In New York, Horizon labs are under threat: a corporate takeover by Allan Chemical (owned by Parker’s old school flame Liz Allan-Osborn) but orchestrated by the conniving Ty Stone, who had been sabotaging the Think-Tank’s experiments and stock price for months.

The geniuses there use experimental time-tech to record Stones perfidious deeds, but when they first turn on the machine Spider-Man 2099 explodes out of it, desperate to stop the chronal anomaly before his future dies. Before too long however he is confronted by this era’s wondrous webslinger.

O’Hara’s not worried: after all he and his predecessor have met before and fought as allies. Unfortunately that adventure is not one that remained in his memory after Ock removed the last vestiges of Peter’s consciousness…

Because of this, ‘Smack to the Future’ finds the Spider-Men in savage combat, leaving Ty Stone to continue his machinations unobstructed: absorbing Horizon and taking over the company that results from the hostile takeover.

He’s thinking perhaps… Al-Chem-Max?

With the future rapidly unravelling, the scene changes to the Caribbean where Yuri and Carlie are chasing down the final piece in their detective jigsaw puzzle in the concluding chapter ‘Event Horizon’, where a last minute save sees the Superior Spider-Man and his notional legatee vanish into an explosive time glitch. Only one reappears when the crisis is over and Parker/Octavius has no memory of what has happened…

And in 2099, Tyler Stone gloats; his world is safe and, by destroying Alchemax’ time tech, he has stranded “his” Spider-Man where nobody can save him…

It’s back to business with artists Giuseppe Camuncoli & John Dell as ‘Still Standing’ takes a look back to just after Octavius triumphed in stealing Spider-Man’s body and life. Following that cataclysmic clash a John and Jane Doe were admitted to hospital. She was considerably disturbed by hallucinations in which she saw the “Great Web coming undone” and “all the Spiders dying” whilst he kept deliriously demanding where Otto Octavius was…

Retuning to the present day, the ever-efficient Spider-Man encounters super-thief and some-time adventure Black Cat. As a former lover, the feline felon expects her former beau to go easy on her as usual, but is astonished at his new attitude and the savage beating she receives before he leaves her to the cops…

In the meantime the hospitalised John Doe is released, intent on some secret task to perform, as the increasingly acerbic and domineering Peter Parker wheedles money from his Aunt May and her husband to start his new tech company – backing up that investment with the last of Dr. Octopus’ off-shore hidden funds.

Carlie is tracking those accounts and sets off to give her findings to the Avengers but she doesn’t make it…

And at his Doctoral Board meeting the exultant Parker gets a stunning shock after his successful presentation is ruined by Lamaze who accuses the candidate of plagiarising the work of another scientist: his old college chum Otto Octavius…

This portentous package concludes with ‘Lethal Ladies’ as Doc Ock’s old girlfriend Stunner goes on a rampage, tearing up the town in her solid hologram form, forcing the Superior Spider-Man into a battle he just doesn’t want to fight.

As Carlie discovers that there’s no corpse in the tentacled super-villain’s grave, only to be abducted, Spider-Man uses Stunner’s equipment to solve his Doctoral problem with Don Lamaze, utterly unaware that the Goblin Army Cult now possesses Carlie’s proof of who’s really living in Peter Parker’s skull…

To Be Continued…

Scripted as ever by Dan Slott, Necessary Evil collects issues #17-21 of the fortnightly Superior Spider-Man (4th September-13th November 2013), ramping up the tension in advance of truly shocking revelations to come, and this titanic time-busting tome includes a covers-&-variants gallery by Stegman, Camuncoli, Humberto Ramos, Mike McKone, J.G. Jones, Olivier Coipel, Leonel Castellani, J. Scott Campbell & Adi Granov

This up-to-the minute tech-heavy reinvention is naturally accompanied with some AR icon sections – Marvel Augmented Reality App pages which provide access to story bonuses and content on your smart-phone or Android-enabled tablet.

Spider-Man has been reinvented so often it’s almost become commonplace, but this iteration – for however long it lasts – is one no lover of high-octane adventure should miss: smart, shocking and incredibly addictive.
™ & © 2013 and 2014 Marvel & Subs. Licensed by Marvel Characters B.V. through Panini S.p.A. Italy. All rights reserved. A British Edition published by Panini Publishing, a division of Panini UK, Ltd.

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JLA Classified: New Maps of Hell

New, revised review

By Warren Ellis & Jackson Guice (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-4012-0944-5

It’s been quite a while since we covered a good old-fashioned straightforward and no-strings-attached superhero blockbuster: one which any old punter can pick up with no worry over continuity or identification and where good guys and bad guys are clearly defined.

That’s due in large part to the fact that nobody makes many of those anymore, but at least it gives me the opportunity to take another look a tale I didn’t much like when it first came out in 2006, but which has definitely grown on me after a recent re-read.

Produced at a time when the Justice League of America was enjoying immense popularity and benefiting from a major reboot courtesy of Grant Morrison, the end-of-the-world epic – starring Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, Oracle and Martian Manhunter – originally ran in issues #10-15 of ancillary spin-off title JLA Classified (September 2005-February 2006) with gritty futurist super-scribe Warren Ellis upping the angst-quotient on a hoary old plot whilst hyper-realist illustrator Jackson Guice adds a terrifying veracity to events.

The drama begins as Clark Kent and wife Lois Lane stumble onto a dirty little secret. Assorted, and presumably unconnected, scientists and bean-counters at President Luthor‘s Lexcorp conglomerate have committed suicide in large numbers and the intrepid reporters suspect something very nasty is going on…

In Gotham City Batman learns the police have been turned away from an extremely unconventional crime-scene by Feds and a private security company, and he too begins to dig…

In the Bermuda triangle, a group of researchers are invited to the Amazon’s ancient library of knowledge only to die when the sky-floating island explodes in a horrendous detonation.

Wally West has terrible dreams of his beloved predecessor Barry Allen which lead him to a similar catastrophic conflagration, whilst Green Lantern Kyle Rayner ruminates on a primordial legend of the Corps’ origins until a wave of explosions rouses him to action.

In the ruins of each disaster the scattered, hard-pressed heroes find an ancient parchment of alien hieroglyphs and, when Superman recovers another page of the same from the shredded remnants of a plummeting space station, the call goes out to activate the League…

Tasking cyber-savant Oracle and aged Martian sole survivor J’onn J’onzz with digging up information, the team learn of an antediluvian scourge which wracked the red planet million’s of years past. A God/Devil which tested species’ right to survive and heralded its coming through a written code…

Luthor’s scientist’s had found such writings in remnants of ancient Sumeria and begun deciphering the text…

Mobilising to stop the summoning, the heroes confront Luthor in the White House but are too late. In Las Vegas the bowels of Hell vomit horrors into the streets and as the frantic team rushes to battle they are snatched up separated by the malign entity which has spent eons traversing the universe testing the worth of intelligent races and individually putting them to their sorest tests.

However the monstrous terror has never faced beings like the JLA before, or a mind like Batman’s, and soon its own darkest secret is exposed and its fatal weakness exploited to devastating effect…

With a painted cover gallery by Michael Stribling, this book offers simple, solid Fights ‘n’ Tights fun gilded with a sly and cynical post-modern edge: a sound example of contemporary action blockbuster comics at their best.
© 2005, 2006 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

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X-Men Noir: the Mark of Cain


By Fred Van Lente & Dennis Calero (Marvel)
ISBN: 978-0-7851-4437-3

When fictional heroes and villains become really popular – to the point where fans celebrate their births and deaths and dress up like them at the slightest opportunity or provocation – eventually a tendency develops to explore other potential character facets that the regular, cash-cow continuity might normally prohibit.

DC invented a whole company sub-strand of “Imaginary Stories” and Marvel asked “What If…?” sharing glimpses of alternate realities. Even television series got into the act with shows like Star Trek, Roswell and Stargate SG-1 offering coolly jarring, different takes on their established stars and scenarios.

The little dark gem of alternate continuity on offer today comes from an intriguing experiment in 2009 wherein Marvel took many of their biggest stars and reconfigured them for a universe drenched in the tone, lore and ephemera of pulp fiction and Film Noir: a dark land where shiny gleaming super-powered heroes were replaced by bleakly paranoid, deeply flawed and self-serving individuals just trying to get by as best they could…

X-Men Noir: the Mark of Cain is actually a sequel to the initial foray and benefits from not having to explain or differentiate the so-similar seeming stars from the bastions of the regular continuity. It ran as a 4-issue miniseries from February-May 2010 offering a moody glimpse of a world with no heroes, only shades of villainy. Nevertheless it still provides a satisfying slice of suspenseful entertainment for Fights ‘n’ Tights fans in search of something genuinely edgier than their regular fare. After all, the big draw for the jaded is that these folks might actually die and stay that way…

What You Need to Know: situated in the 1930s, these X-Men are not mutants with incredible, science-defying powers but rather a gang of mentally disturbed juvenile delinquents. They had been lab rats for rogue psychiatrist Charles Xavier in his School for Gifted Youngsters, where he strove to exacerbate rather than cure their various anti-social behaviours.

The batty boffin believed that sociopathy was the next stage in human behavioural development and spent his days training and refining the criminal talents and tendencies of his disturbed charges – until he was exposed and thrown in jail on Riker’s Island Prison.

The truth came out after the body of one of his “students” was washed up on the shore, covered in odd, three bladed knife slashes…

There is one costumed mystery man on the scene during these parlous times. Nosy, troublesome reporter Tom Halloway is not-so-secretly also a violent vigilante dubbed The Angel and the hunt for him preoccupied many familiarly different characters such as corrupt Chief of Detectives Eric “Magnus” Magnisky, his troubled children Peter and Wanda, casino owner Remy LeBeau, mobster Unus the Untouchable and drug runner Sean Cassidy…

This sequel volume opens with a public scandal as the government’s secret prison camp at Genosha Bay is exposed. Charges of torture and Applied Eugenics are levelled against the operators but despite rising protests the prison still carries on its inhumane treatments on the legion of sociopaths held there without Due Process or Representation.

In other news: due to lack of evidence, “Professor of Crime” Xavier is freed from Riker’s, arrogantly swearing to track down the killer of his recently assassinate “friend” Magnus…

A continent and ocean away, some of his former successes are cutting their way through the jungles of Madripoor and hordes of berserk headhunters as they try to find the lost temple of Cyttorak and retrieve a fabulous gem.

Sharpshooter Scott “Cyclops” Summers and unpredictable seagoing brawler Captain Logan are temporarily with the Angel, following a map provided by bootlegger and mercenary Cain Marko. They don’t give much credence to the native legends of vengeance inflicted on transgressors by Cyttorak’s “Juggernaut” but that soon changes when Marko is found in the no-man’s land around GenoshaBay, crushed to pulp. Of the enormous jewel there is no trace…

Peppered with evocative flashbacks, the story and trail leads Angel – who learned most of his nasty bag of tricks from Cain – to the USA’s extraterritorial prison and the shocking revelation that Xavier is secretly in charge…

Despite being captured and subjected to the Professor X’s methods of persuasion – administered by the warped woman Warden Frost – Halloway soon breaks free and begins pursuing the how and the who of Marko’s murder.

Fighting his way past the Professor of Crime’s newest protégés, a big burly Russian and an exotic black woman with a white Mohawk haircut, he is recaptured before he can reach Logan’s boat and sometime allies Cyclops and Eugene “Puck” Judd.

Undergoing more of Xavier’s “treatments”, the Angel is then confronted with the scientist’s secret weapon: his own thoroughly crazy – sociopathic – twin brother Robert Halloway…

The period drama and sinister suspense kick into compelling overdrive as the various parties hunting the Gem clash when the action shifts from noir detective to pulp sci-fi and the Professor’s true plan emerges. With the government’s covert connections exposed, and all surviving participants trapped aboard a huge flying battleship, the real value of the Gem of Cyttorak is revealed and, amidst flying fists, double- and triple-crosses abound.

As the agendas of all interested parties crash together thousands of feet above Manhattan, only antisocial violence works and at last a kind of justice is won…

Bleak, cynical and trenchantly effective, this excellent thriller by scripter Fred Van Lente and illustrator Dennis Calero provides a huge helping of thrills and chills that would work equally well even if you had never heard of Marvel’s mighty mutants.

This pocketbook sized collection also includes a covers and variants gallery by Calero as well as a dozen original art pages shot prior to the digital colouring stage.
© 2009, 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Love and Rockets: New Stories volume 6


By The Hernandez Brothers (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-679-9

It’s nearly Christmas again so it must be year since the last annual instalment of Love and Rockets: New Stories. Yep, there it is and about time too…

With this volume the most iconic, transcendent and formative force of the American independent comics movement enters its 40th year of publication. Love and Rockets was an anthology magazine featuring the slick, intriguing, sci-fi-tinged hi-jinx of punky young things Maggie and Hopey – las Locas – and heart-warming, gut-wrenching soap-opera epics set in a rural Central American paradise called Palomar.

The Hernandez Boys (three guys from Oxnard, California: Jaime, Gilberto and Mario), gifted synthesists all, captivated the comics cognoscenti with incredible stories sampling and referencing a host of influences – everything from Comics, TV cartoons, masked wrestlers and the exotica of American Hispanic pop culture to German Expressionism.

There was also a perpetual backdrop displaying the holy trinity of youth: Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll – also alternative music, hip hop and punk.

The result was dynamite then and the guys have only got better with the passing years. Mario only officially contributed on rare occasions, but Jaime’s slick, enticing visual forays explored friendship and modern love by destroying stereotypes of feminine attraction through his fetching coterie of Gals Gone Wild, whilst Gilberto created a hyper-real landscape and playground of wit and passion created for his extended generational saga Heartbreak Soup: a quicksilver chimera of breadline Latin-American village life with a vibrant, funny and fantastically quotidian cast.

The shadows cast by Palomar still define and inform his latest tales both directly and as imaginative spurs for ostensibly unaffiliated stories.

This masterful anthology of wonders simultaneously runs a string of contiguous story strands, opening with Jaime’s evocative ‘Fuck Summer’ wherein young Tonta Agajanian is losing her battle with boredom. The older, cooler kids don’t want to hang with her or her charming associate Gomez, and for some reason Coach Rivera is chasing her all over town, cutting into her precious vacation time and pushing her to join the swim team…

With no other resort they head to the swimming hole where wild girl Gretchen keeps finding “presents” from a forest spirit.

Gilbert then offers ‘Song of Our Sad Girl’ as Doralis “Killer” Rivera apparently quits her cinema career before heading back to Palomar to visit her distanced family. With flashbacks inter-cutting to the grandmother she’s playing in her new movie Maria M, the story primarily focuses on the starlet’s latest crisis.

She’s fleeing rumours that she’s pregnant and just wants some peace and a normal life. At least that’s what she’s telling herself…

‘Wrench World’ (Jaime again) finds Tonta the recipient of some shocking news: her step-father has been shot and her far-from-normal mother is the prime suspect. Even her older brothers and sisters believe the old bitch did it…

Killer’s star shines in ‘Willow, Weep No More’ (by Beto) as her quest for understanding the family – and especially her grandmother – turns up an old tape of shocking content…

Jaime then begins a series of revelatory vignettes filling in detail and character on Tonta’s extended, unconventional family of half-siblings in ‘Crimen Uno’ before the surly girl and BFF Gomez stalk Coach Rivera to some quirkily engaging ‘Tarzana Adventures’.

Thereafter Tonta’s little sisters need some surly-styled comforting in ‘Urchins’ whilst ‘Crimen Dos’ covers the elders’ discussion of their mother’s other (alleged) victims.

Gilbert’s firm grasp of the Hollywood rumour mill is shown in ‘…Killer’s Dad – Grampa Hector?’ and ‘Killer in the Mix’ sees the busty phenomenon head back to the USA in time for the release of the Directors Cut of Maria M, garnering grief from her friends about keeping the (alleged) baby she may or may not be carrying…

‘Crimen Tres’ continues with Tonta’s family simultaneously reminiscing and planning to get rid of their embarrassing surviving parent, whilst in ‘Pack Mules’ our girl and Gomez steal a car and head off to finally uncover Coach’s big secret…

It’s a doozy – seen in ‘Crestfallen Angel’ – but does break the ice, and, after ‘Crimen Cuatro’, Tonta at last begins to change her opinions…

An incongruous and lewdly fantastic untitled monster yarn from Gilberto segues into Jaime’s ‘Familylimaf’ wherein Tonta’s older sisters invade gym class and expose an unsuspected – an immensely humiliating – connection to Rivera after which ‘Crimen Cinco’ delivers one more shock to the girl and her constantly expanding family, before a reconciliation of sorts materialises in ‘Dogs Follow Dogs’…

There are further familial secrets disclosed and generational ties uncovered for Killer in ‘Willow, Weep No More 2’ and ‘Willow, Weep No More 3’ after which Jaime hits the home stretch with ‘Crimen Seis’ – wherein the progeny get a good telling off – and Tonta gives in and joins the swimming squad in ‘Go! Go! Go!’ before ‘Crimen Final’ resolves the courtroom dilemma.

Gilbert ends his stint with a ghostly visitation in ‘And Palomar Again’ and Jaime takes us back to the beginning as Tonta heads back, back, back  to the swimming hole for more telling glimpses of her compelling family life in ‘Rrrregresamos’…

Warm-hearted, deceptively heart-wrenching, subtly shocking, challenging, charming and irresistibly addictive, Love and Rockets: New Stories is a grown up comics fan’s dream come true and remains as valid and groundbreaking as its earlier incarnations – the diamond point of the cutting edge of American graphic narrative.
© 2013 Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez. This edition © 2013 Fantagraphics Books. All rights reserved.

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Maria M. Book One


By Gilbert Hernandez (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-719-2

In addition to being part of the graphic/literary revolution of Love and Rockets (where his astonishingly addictive tales of rural Palomar first garnered overwhelming critical acclaim), Gilbert Hernandez has produced stand-alone books such as Sloth, Birdland, Grip and Girl Crazy, all marked by his bold, compellingly simplified artwork and inspired adaptation of literary techniques used by Magical Realist writers such as Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez: techniques which he has amplified and, visually at least, made his own.

Hernandez also frequently acknowledges such outré mainstream influences as filmmakers Roger Corman and John Cassavetes, and crime writers Elmore Leonard and Jim Thompson as he entered new territories and reforms the cultural influences which shaped all us baby-boomers.

In Luba we glimpsed the troubled life of the lead character’s half-sister Rosalba “Fritzi” Martinez: a brilliant, troubled woman, speech-impaired psychotherapist, sex-worker, belly-dancer and “B-movie” starlet of such faux screen gems as We Love Alone, Seven Bullets to Hell, Chest Fever, Blood is the Drug and Lie Down in the Dark.

Although Fritzi only had a bit part in it, Hernandez “adapted” one of those trashy movies into a graphic novel (Chance in Hell, 2007) and repeated the story-within-a-story- within-a-story gimmick in 2009 with The Troublemakers – a frantic, hell-bent pulp fiction crime thriller which was part of the screen queen’s canon – and did it again in 2011 with Love From the Shadows.

Now he’s turned up the tension and doubled down on the plundering of his own mythologies. Maria M delves even deeper into the labyrinthine coils and onion-skin layers of meta-reality as the filmic biography of Fritzi’s long-absconded grandmother becomes a revelatory expose of the turbulent life of a beautiful, competent immigrant fugitive; carving out her own slice of the American Dream after escaping the rustic drudgery of Palomar.

Deftly mimicking a compelling-but-trashy post-Noir gangster thriller and sordid Fifties B-Picture melodrama, this first volume of Maria M sees a lovely Amazonian Latin beauty hit Everytown, USA in 1957, promptly befriended and taken in by couple of sympathetic working girls…

It’s all a huge mistake. Maria is actually the girlfriend of a mobster who has expedited her passage into the country. Unfortunately, by the time the mix-up is sorted and she finds his place, the poor guy is staring down the barrel of a rival’s gun.

Witness to murder and with no other place to go, the pneumatic stranger heads back to Trixie and Pam and begins her career in the men’s entertainment industry: “hostessing”, photo-shoots and – inevitably for someone with her looks – stag films…

Every attempt to go legit is frustrated by lustful men wanting her, and inevitably she settles for her new life. She still sees people from the Old Country, but they’re usually gangsters, hoodlums or worse…

She makes some friends along the way: other girls in the shady world of men’s movies, film critic Clyde and even bought cop Valdez, but her life only really turns around when she catches the eye of gang boss Luis Cienfuegos. The older man is so smitten with his sex kitten that he marries her…

His sons – both older than Maria – are dutiful and pay her every respect, but whereas taciturn, brutal Gorgo is clearly fascinated with his new stepmother, slick, businesslike, modern Herman makes no effort to conceal his distaste.

It’s a time of great turmoil for the Latino gangs in the USA. Tenuous alliances and collaborations are commonplace, but the assorted leaders have very different views on the rise of Communism in their homelands: beliefs which will inevitably lead to disagreements and bloodshed. And of course everybody plans on eventually being the only game in town…

Maria keeps herself insulated from her husband’s business, but does develop a passionate affinity for guns. It’s just as well. Over the next few years Luis barely survives numerous assassination attempts.

…And always silent, staring Gorgo waits in the background, watching her as his father’s employees, allies and enemies circle, drawn to her voluptuous beauty like moths to a flame…

In such a murky, dangerous world it’s impossible for Maria to keep completely apart from her husband’s affairs and when she is abducted by supposed allies Gorgo allows his true feelings to show in a savagely horrific manner, after which she divorces her man for the best possible motives…

Dark, evocative and astoundingly compelling, this perfect pastiche of a beloved genre and fabled time-period is a stunning graphic rollercoaster ride of sex, violence, greed, obsession and outlaw antiheroes: a mesmerising read jam-packed with Hernandez’s coolly understated narrative suspense, intoxicating illustration, brutally raw tension and sly elements of filmic surrealism which carry the reader through to the low-key cliffhanger ending in classic style.

And please, don’t get too het up over the convolutions and continuity provenances that resulted in this book. If you need to see the “True Story” of Maria, just check out the story ‘Poison River’ in the Heartbreak Soup collection Beyond Palomar, but otherwise why not just revel in a grim and gripping, saga of love and hope and inescapable doom…

Every adult lover of top-notch drama should snap up Maria M immediately to revel in the sheer brilliance of a master storyteller at the peak of his prowess, and open-minded comics fans should be advised to step beyond the costumes and chains of continuity to take a heady shot of pure imagination at work.
© 2013 Gilbert Hernandez. This edition © 2013 Fantagraphics Books, Inc. All rights reserved.

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X-Men: Primer


By Brian Wood, Olivier Coipel, David Lopez, with Chris Claremont, Marc Silvestri & various (Marvel/Panini UK)
ISBN: 978-1-84653-553-6

At the dawn of the Marvel Age, some very special kids were chosen by wheelchair-bound telepath Charles Xavier. Gloomy Scott Summers, ebullient Bobby Drake, trust fund brat Warren Worthington III, insular Jean Grey and simian genius Henry McCoy were gathered up by the enigmatic Professor X – a man dedicated to brokering peace and achieving integration between massed humanity and an emergent off-shoot race of mutants, no matter what the cost.

To achieve his dream he educated and trained the youngsters – codenamed Cyclops, Iceman, Angel, Marvel Girl and The Beast – for unique roles as heroes, ambassadors and symbols in an effort to counter the growing tide of human prejudice and fear. The dream was worth fighting for, and over the years a small army of mutants battled under the X-banner, but the struggle to integrate mutants into society resulted in constant conflict, compromise and tragedy.

These included Jean’s death (twice), Warren’s mutilation (and murder), Hank’s uncontrollable progressive mutations and eventually Cyclops’ radicalisation following his possession by the cosmic entity known as the Phoenix force.

During the cataclysmic events of Avengers versus X-Men the formerly idealistic, steadfast and trustworthy team-leader Cyclops killed Xavier before eventually joining with old comrade Magik and former foes Magneto and Emma Frost in a hard-line alliance devoted to preserving mutant lives at the cost, if necessary, of human ones.

Those tales were detailed in a number of titles which sprang out of the MarvelNOW! publishing event: a jumping-on point which reshaped the whole company continuity, taking various X-iterations in truly bizarre new directions.

This particular chronicle collects issues #1-4 of the fourth volume of the adjectiveless X-Men (from May to August 2013) and also includes a pertinent classic yarn from Uncanny X-Men volume 1 #244 circa May 1989.

Over the decades the many and various X- titles have been notable for the number of strong female characters created, and this new iteration from scripter Brian Wood & artist Olivier Coipel finally takes the logical step of drafting an all-girl squad to save the world from an appalling primal threat…

Inked by Mark Morales, the action begins with a little backstory and reveals how, when the world was still brand new, a pair of siblings manifested. They were immensely powerful and hated each other from the start. They fought and the male kicked his defeated sister loose into the cosmos while he stayed on Earth and developed…

Billions of years later, former X-Man Jubilation Lee takes a commercial flight out of Bulgaria, looking for help from her old friends. She’s inherited a baby with a few problems and is being followed by possibly the most dangerous man on Earth…

At the Jean Grey School for Higher Learning, tutors Storm, Kitty Pryde, Rogue, Psylocke and Rachel Grey (the alternate Earth daughter of Cyclops and Jean Grey dubbed Marvel Girl) are having trouble getting through to some of the more intransigent mutant students. When they get a call from Jubilee, the X-Men drop everything and dash off to intercept her as she heads for the only home and family she has ever really known…

When the man on her trail is revealed to be John Sublime – current body of an ancient sentient bacterial life form which has lived on Earth since life began and no friend to the subspecies Homo Superior – the X-Men expect the worst, but are astounded when he comes to the School and promptly surrenders without a fight…

Sublime survives by possessing organisms and he’s come to warn the heroes that his sister – who performs the same trick with technology – has returned to the planet, looking for revenge on him and control of everything else in existence…

Meanwhile, escorting Jubilee and her baby, Storm, Rogue and Kitty get first-hand experience of the threat as the train they’re on is derailed by an unknown force. Barely escaping, they unwittingly bring the menace into the school where Arkea slips into the dormant form of Karima Shapandar: a human friend infected with Omega Sentinel systems and designed to be the ultimate mutant eradicator…

All they want to do is share old stories and coo over Jubilee’s baby, but with Arkea in control and determined to supersede life on Earth, the girls are drawn into a terrifying war on two fronts. The sinister sister takes control of the Danger Room and locks down the entire school before transmitting herself to Budapest where Jubilee first acquired the mysterious baby she’s named Shogo…

Leaving Kitty and the students to save the school and themselves from a deadly time-bomb, Storm, Psylocke, Marvel Girl, Rogue and Jubilee head for Eastern Europe and track Arkea to a medical complex where humans augmented with medical implants and technology provide Arkea with hundreds of suitable meat-vehicles. As the final battles surges to a crescendo, the warrior women are terrified that the only way to stop the cyber-parasite is to kill her numerous hosts…

When that conundrum is satisfactorily solved, David Lopez, Cam Smith & Norman Lee step in to illustrate an epilogue chapter guest-starring Wolverine who recaps old times with Jubilee as the female X-team sort out their agendas and chain of command whilst trying to stop a passenger jet crashing to destruction…

To supplement the advent of this new grouping, this all-action outing also includes the comedic adventure ‘Ladies Night’ by Chris Claremont, Marc Silvestri & Dan Green (from Uncanny X-Men volume 1 #244 May 1989) which saw the first appearance of Jubilee.

When off-duty X-gals Storm, Rogue, Psylocke and Dazzler head for an undercover dose of downtime they encounter a streetwise, “Mall Rat” runaway with mutant powers, just as the emporium’s management hire a hapless squad of mutant hunters to clear up their Homo Superior problem…

Fast-paced, whimsical and owing a huge debt to the movie Ghostbusters, the riotous romp closes this Fights ‘n’ Tights fest on a rare and welcome light note, but of course there’s still more bang for your buck…

X-Men: Primer also includes a vast and beautiful cover-and-variants gallery by Coipel, Amanda Connor, Terry & Rachel Dodson, Silvestri & Green, Joe Madureira, Mark Brooks, J. Scott Campbell, Arthur Suydam, Mike Deodato Jr., Milo Manara, Ed McGuiness, Humberto Ramos, Kevin Wada, Skottie Young, Kris Anka & Sara Pichelli plus the now standard 21st century add-on of AR icon sections (Marvel Augmented Reality App) which give access to many story bonuses providing you download the free code from marvel.com onto your smart-phone or Android-enabled tablet.
™ & © 2013 Marvel & Subs. Licensed by Marvel Characters B.V. through Panini S.p.A. All rights reserved. A British Edition published by Panini Publishing, a division of Panini UK, Ltd.

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Iron Man: The Secret Origin of Tony Stark Part 2


By Kieron Gillen, Greg Land, Dale Eaglesham, Carlo Pagulayan, Jay Leisten & Scott Hanna (Marvel/Panini UK)
ISBN: 978-1-84653-563-5

Supreme survivor Tony Stark has changed his profile many times since his 1963 debut in Tales of Suspense #39 when, as a VIP visitor in Vietnam observing the efficacy of weaponry he had designed, the arch-technocrat wunderkind was critically wounded and captured by a Communist warlord.

Put to work inventing for the Red Menace with the spurious promise of medical assistance upon completion, Stark instead built a prototype Iron Man suit to keep his heart beating and deliver him from his oppressors. From there it was a small jump into a second career as a high-tech Knight in Shining Armour…

Ever since then the former armaments manufacturer has been a liberal capitalist, eco-warrior, space pioneer, affirmed Futurist, civil servant, Statesman, and even spy-chief: Director of the world’s most scientifically advanced spy agency, the Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage Logistics Directorate.

Of course, he was also a found member of the world’s most prominent superhero assemblage, the Mighty Avengers…

For a popular character/concept weighed down with a fifty-year pedigree, radical reboots are a painful periodic necessity. To stay fresh and contemporary, Stark’s origin and Iron Man’s continuity have been radically revised every so often, but never so drastically as with the upgrade featured in this saga (originally seen as issues #12-17 of the post-MarvelNOW! relaunched Iron Man volume 5, September-August 2013) by scripter Kieron Gillen which concludes, with plenty of action and even a few twisty surprises, ‘The Secret Origin of Tony Stark’…

It Happened Like This: desperate for a change in his too-hectic life, Iron Man opted to explore the cosmos and linked up with self-appointed universal police force the Guardians of the Galaxy. After driving off star pirates he availed himself of the luxurious hospitality of the effete, aristocratic and decadently beautiful Voldi Tear.

One of the most ancient races in the cosmos, the Voldi had long mastered the art of living graciously off the kindness of strangers with all their needs met by a sacred artefact – the Heart of the Voldi – which drew infinite power from numerous cosmic entities.

The party-animal Voldi had an open-door policy for most races and beings – even welcoming 30-foot tall robotic killers such as Freelance Peacekeeping Agent Death’s Head (never, ever call him a bounty hunter!) – but Stark suddenly found every hand against him when he was accused of Deicide.

Apparently the Voldi worshipped the Phoenix Force which Stark and his allies did indeed destroy the last time it attacked Earth (as seen in Avengers vs. X-Men)…

Stuck in a cell, Stark was rescued by a Rigellian Recorder – one of millions of sentient automatons programmed to travel the universe acquiring knowledge. Recorder 451 however, had developed a programming flaw and struck out on its own.

Surprisingly sympathetic to Stark’s plight, the mechanoid suggested a way out of the mandatory death sentence but used the distraction to steal the immensely powerful Heart.

The mechanoid had been furthering his own centuries-old secret agenda all along and deemed the subsequent cosmic cataclysm which eradicated the Voldi as a “necessary evil”.

However 451 hadn’t finished with Stark yet, saving him even as the benighted party-aliens expired in an apocalyptic attack from the cosmic Celestial they had exploited for eons.

Furious and disgusted, Stark swore vengeance on the murderous mechanoid and, after checking in with the Guardians of the Galaxy and exhausting all his own leads, hired Death’s Head (the greatest tracker in all time and space) to ferret out 451.

Their mission proved successful, but probably because the Freelance Peacekeeper was working for 451 all along. The Rigellian renegade then revealed how he had been watching over the Earthly inventor since before he was born, and indeed had worked with his parents Howard and Maria Stark to genetically alter their unborn child and make it a technological super-warrior capable of defending Earth from the exponentially increasing alien attacks that were to come as the universe responded to the deadly potential of Mankind…

451 had worked with the Starks in a complex scheme on Earth in the era before superheroes returned, battling infiltrating aliens beside such Marvel stalwarts as Lieutenant “Thunderbolt” Ross, special agents Jimmy Woo and “Dum Dum” Dugan and others.

Illustrated by Dale Eaglesham, Carlo Pagulayan, Scott Hanna & Jay Leisten, this titanic extraterrestrial tome opens with the third chapter of the revelatory epic and ‘The Best Offense’ finds the appalled inventor apparently helpless, in dire straits and lost in the uncharted depths of the universe, as he hears how his father and his stalwart crew cleaned up a pack of insidious Grey ETs secretly running Las Vegas. What neither Tony nor 451 knew however was that Howard Stark was deeply suspicious and, after decoding the genetic alterations the Recorder had installed in the foetus, tampered with some of them…

Here and now in deep space, 451 reveals how Tony has been designed to pilot an apocalyptic doomsday weapon left behind from the beginnings of creation when the Celestial Space Gods were in a deadly war with a rival force for control of everything…

Stark’s inventiveness, aggression and fascination with exo-skeletons were all expressions of his ultimate purpose: to pilot the world-shattering, five-mile high suit of combat armour dubbed The Godkiller… and there’s nothing he can do to escape his awful destiny…

With the Heart of the Voldi powering the immense doom weapon, 451 explains how Stark will defend Earth from all threats by eradicating whoever the Recorder tells him to, even as, on the world of Hope’s Pustule, Death’s Head discovers the provenance of his robotic former employer and just how large is the price on his shiny head. Unsurprisingly, he decides to look him up again…

Stark, after refusing to comply with 451, is struggling to regain control of his cyber-hacked Iron Man gear deep in the guts of the Godkiller when Death’s Head appears, but rather than an ally the Peace Keeper soon becomes another deadly foe as 451 takes control of him too…

Determined to bend Stark to his will, the Recorder also starts up the antediluvian super-suit. Although Stark was built to meld with it, 451 can exert enough control to make it destroy a planet and aims it at Hope’s Pustule…

Beaten, the human inventor surrenders and puts on the enslaving control helmet, only to have the ancient war-armour reject him…

The Recorder doesn’t believe Starks protestations, however, and after the Godkiller wipes out its objective in a single pass, 451 programs it with a new target… Earth.

With no other option, Stark dives headlong into final battle with the now clearly deranged robot Rigellian and once again saves the day and – almost too late – the Earth, in a spectacular showdown within the planet-smashing menace.

But even with humanity saved and the hero back in the bosom of his human friends there’s still a mystery to solved as ‘The Secret Origin of Tony Stark: Conclusion’ brilliantly ties all the plot strands and clues together as the Armoured Avenger delves into his family’s shady history and makes an astonishing, life-altering discovery kept hidden for years by his brilliantly paranoid father…

Blockbusting, rocket-paced and cleverly drawing together fringe continuity events to make a new cohesive whole, this frantically furious romp offers a brand new take on the Golden Avenger and this epochal volume also includes an Afterword from Gillen, a cover-and-variants gallery by Land, Paul Renaud & Leonel Castellani plus even more digital extras via the AR icon sections (Marvel Augmented Reality App) which give access to story bonuses once you download the code – for free – from marvel.com onto your smart-phone or Android-enabled tablet.
™ & © 2013 Marvel & Subs. Licensed by Marvel Characters B.V. through Panini S.p.A. All rights reserved. A British Edition published by Panini Publishing, a division of Panini UK, Ltd.

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Uncanny X-Men volume 2: Broken


By Brian Michael Bendis, Chris Bachalo, Fraser Irving, Kris Anka, Tim Townsend, Jaime Mendoza, Mark Irwin & various (Marvel/Panini UK)
ISBN: 978-1-84653-555-0

Following many poor choices and horrendous paths taken by assorted mutant heroes over the last few years, and spinning off from the events of Avengers versus X-Men, the MarvelNOW! event reshaped the entire continuity, pushing the various factors of X-iterations in truly innovative directions.

At the dawn of the Marvel Age, a very special bunch of kids were singled out by wheelchair-bound telepath Charles Xavier. Insular Scott Summers, ebullient Bobby Drake, wealthy Adonis Warren Worthington III, insecure Jean Grey and bookish anthropoidal Henry McCoy were gathered up by the enigmatic Professor X – a driven man dedicated to brokering peace and achieving integration between massed humanity and an emergent off-shoot race of mutants, ominously dubbed Homo Superior.

To achieve his dream he educated and trained the youngsters – dubbed Cyclops, Iceman, Angel, Marvel Girl and The Beast – as heroes, ambassadors and living symbols in an effort to counter the growing tide of human prejudice and fear.

Over years the struggle to integrate mutants into society resulted in constant conflict, compromise and tragedy, including Jean’s death, Warren’s mutilation and murder, Hank’s further mutation and eventually Cyclops’ radicalisation.

The formerly idealistic, steadfast and trustworthy team-leader eventually killed Xavier before eventually joining with old (demon-possessed) ally Magik and former foes Magneto and White Queen Emma Frost in a hard-line alliance devoted to preserving the mutant race at the cost, if necessary, of the human one.

Abandoning Scott, his surviving team-mates and newer X-Men such as Wolverine, Storm and Kitty Pryde stayed true to Xavier’s dream, opting to protect and train the coming X-generation of mutant kids at the Jean Grey School for Higher Learning…

Furthermore when McCoy discovered he was dying, he became obsessed with the idea that the naive First Class of X-Men might be able to sway Mutant Enemy terrorist No. 1 back from his current path of doctrinaire madness and ideological race war insanity.

To that end Beast used time-travel tech in his last-ditch attempt to prevent a species war: risking the entire space/time continuum by bringing the five youngsters back to the future to reason with the debased, potentially deranged Cyclops.

The gamble paid off in all the wrong ways. Rather than restoring Scott’s to his senses, the confrontation simply hardened his renegade heart and strengthened his warped resolve.

Moreover, after the boy McCoy impossibly cured his older self, young Henry and the rest of the X-Kids refused to go home until “bad” Cyclops was stopped…

All that occurred in All-New X-Men: Here Comes Yesterday but there was a flipside and that story was told in Uncanny X-Men: Revolution.

This slim second chronicle, collecting Uncanny X-Men volume 3, #6-11, (July-October 2013) and again scripted by Brian Michael Bendis furthers the counter-argument as the outlaw mutants continue their struggle to save their endangered species.

Cyclops and his Extinction Team face many problems. Magneto is playing a double (or is it a treble?) game; betraying the terrorists to S.H.I.E.L.D. Director Maria Hill, but also telling Cyclops at least some of what he’s doing for her. Moreover as they travel the world gathering up freshly activated Homo Superior kids, the Extinction-ers have been targeted by a new mysterious next generation of robotic hunter/killer Sentinels.

Most worryingly of all , since their possession by the Phoenix Force (Avengers versus X-Men) the natural gifts of Summers, ex-lover Frost, Magik and Magneto are no longer reliable, flaring from overload to ineffectuality, leaving the mutant leaders “Broken” in both powers and spirit…

On the other hand, however, new mutants are appearing in increasing numbers all over, with more impressive talents than ever before and, by carefully avoiding unprovoked acts of violence, Cyclops’ crew are winning the media war: gaining the trust and respect of many oppressed sectors of humanity: the poor, the disenfranchised and rebellious, the young…

The terrorists have begun training youngsters in their alternative institution – the Charles Xavier School for Mutants – and even poached some kids from the Jean Grey School. Raw recruits Eva “Tempus” Bell, shape-shifting Benjamin Deeds, healer Christopher Muse – AKA Triage – and the golden sphere-projecting Fabio Medina – have been joined by the psychically conjoined, socially-challenged Stepford Sisters Celeste, Mindee & Phoebe as well as the time-displaced teenager Warren “The Angel” Worthington…

Fraser Irving illustrates the first story arc here as demon-tainted llyana Nikolievna Rasputina – better known as Magik – resumes her struggle against dark god Dread Dormammu. That malign tyrant had been absorbing the hellish realm of Limbo which she rules as The Darkchylde and which fuels her mutant teleporting power…

In Atlanta another young man finds his mutant power activating, just as Dormammu shanghais Cyclops’ entire team. Trapped in hell, teachers and students alike are thrown into soul-rending, life-or-death combat with one of the vilest monsters in creation.

At the same time, Mara Hill, acknowledging S.H.I.E.L.D. is losing the PR battle, recruits former X-Man Alison Blair – Dazzler – to be the Government’s public face on Mutant Affairs…

Ilyana’s powers encompass both time and space and she now adroitly uses the faculty to become a student of magician Doctor Strange in the past, allowing her to learn what she needs to frustrate Dormammu, but in the subsequent clash Cyclops becomes painfully aware of how much he and his adult comrades have lost in terms of their vital powers and abilities…

With Chris Bachalo & Tim Townsend assuming the art chores, the saga resumes in more prosaic territory. Although surviving the harrowing confrontation unscathed, Fabio is so freaked out that he quits school. Frantic to regain some sense, safety and normality in his life he asks to be taken home to his parents. Unfortunately, when the completely understanding Extinction Squad take him back to San Diego, S.H.I.E.L.D. is watching and waiting. No sooner have the mutants blinked out than the spooks move in…

In AtlantaDavid Bond is innocently testing his new power when police arrive and shoot him. They barely escape with their own lives after an Extinction team led by Emma arrives. Young Celeste is especially keen on making the trigger-happy humans suffer for their prejudice…

Triage has promptly healed David and the new guy’s awesome ability to telekinetically move and interface with machinery impresses everybody – even though Cyclops and Magneto are clearly distracted. The mutant figureheads are increasingly combative regarding their powers crisis situation, but remain united in the conviction of coming mutant extinction at human hands.

Their differences on how to head off the encroaching holocaust are shelved once they learn of Dazzler’s attempt to take Fabio in for “questioning” which had resulted in a very public escalation in tension and a superpower firefight…

The Extinction team move to rescue Fabio from custody aboard the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier and depart with a minimum of fuss, utterly unaware that the Alison they verbally sparred with is in fact a deadly shape-shifting infiltrator with an agenda all her own…

Irving returns to illustrate issues #10-11 (with additional art by Kris Anka) as the kids’ training reveals a new aspect to Eva’s time-powers. Maria Hill in the interim has demanded Magneto capture and hand over Cyclops…

The team leader is currently preoccupied by a human protest march in Michigan, where college students have come together en masse in support of Mutant Rights.

Sadly, when he decides the team should join the campus event, it offers a perfect opportunity for a new super-Sentinel determined to kill mutants no matter how many innocent humans get in the way…

Dark, cynically astute and utterly compelling, this alternative X-outing mixes staggering action, paranoiac suspense and slowly-mounting tension with the signature themes of alienation and personal freedom to deliver a marvellously enjoyable continuation of the nihilistic end of the once directionless mutant franchise.

Even so, there’s still room for some effectively trenchant humour and this series offers a perfect jumping-on point for new and retired fans alike – as long as you also read the companion All-New X-Men volumes…

Broken includes a beautiful cover-and-variants gallery by Irving, Bachalo Ronnie Del Carmen, J. Scott Campbell & Neal Adams and the now standard 21st century add-on of AR icon sections (Marvel Augmented Reality App) giving access to story bonuses once you download the code – gratis – from marvel.com onto your smart-phone or Android-enabled tablet.
™ & © 2013 Marvel & Subs. Licensed by Marvel Characters B.V. through Panini S.p.A. All rights reserved. A British Edition published by Panini Publishing, a division of Panini UK, Ltd.

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Superior Spider-Man volume 3: No Escape


By Dan Slott, Christos N. Gage, Giuseppe Camuncoli, Humberto Ramos, John Dell, Terry Pallot & Victor Olazaba (Marvel/Panini UK)
ISBN: 978-1-84653-556-7

Over the years the Wondrous Wallcrawler has undergone a plethora of radical evolutions, refits and even backsliding revisions, but his latest evolution – springing out of the landmark Amazing Spider-Man #700 – was certainly the most striking and compelling character carve-up of all the MarvelNOW! relaunches.

In that issue, the personality of Peter Parker seemingly died when Doctor Otto Octavius took over his body, arguably becoming a wholly Superior Spider-Man.

Parker’s mind had been transferred and trapped in the rapidly failing body of the fading super-villain where, despite his every desperate effort, in the end Peter perished with and within that decrepit, expiring frame.

Now the coldly calculating Octopus is permanently installed in the Wondrous Wallcrawler’s body and successfully living Peter’s life, albeit with a few minor but necessary alterations, upgrades and improvements…

The situation is not completely hopeless. At the moment of the monster’s greatest triumph Parker made Octavius relive and experience every ghastly moment of tragedy and sacrifice which combined to make Spider-Man the compulsive do-gooder that he was.

From that enforced emotional turmoil came understanding. Otto had a change of heart, and swore to live the rest of his stolen life in tribute to his enemy; honestly endeavouring to carry on Spider-Man’s self-imposed mission and equally guided by the abiding principle “with great power comes great responsibility”…

However the ingrained monomania within proved hard to suppress and the usurped web-spinner incessantly worked to prove himself a better man: augmenting Parker’s gadgets and methodology with millions of spy robots to patrol the entire city at once, constantly adding advanced tech and refining new weaponry to the suit and even acting pre-emptively rather than merely reacting to crises as the original had…

Otto went back to college because he was appalled Parker had no doctorate and even tried to rekindle his new body’s old relationship with Mary Jane Watson.

The new, ultra-efficient Spider-Man became New York’s darling and even Mayor J. Jonah Jameson embraced the Web-spinner; all but appropriating the Arachnid as a deputy – to the utter incredulity of an imperceptible psychic shard of Peter Parker which lurked within the deepest recesses of the hero’s overwritten mind…

The helpless ghost was an unwilling passenger, unsuspected by Octavius yet increasingly privy to the villain’s own barely-suppressed memories. Moreover, some of Parker’s oldest friends began to suspect something was amiss…

Police CSI Officer and ex-girlfriend Carlie Cooper knew Peter’s secret identity and recalled the last time Spidey fought Doc Ock, when the killer broke her arm. He claimed then that he was Peter trapped in the villain’s body…

Everybody accepts Spider-Man has changed. Not only is he exceedingly more efficient these days, but far more brutal too: practically crippling bad-guys Boomerang, Vulture and Scorpion. This new hard-line attitude actually increased his public approval rating and, after a deadly hostage siege, the hero’s status peaked after the webslinger executed the psychotic perpetrator Massacre…

Once more scripted by Dan Slott (with Christos N. Gage), No Escape collects issues #11-16 of the fortnightly Superior Spider-Man (August-October 2013) and details the shocking events following the denouement of the previous volume.

In that stunning game-changer Octavius, having finally detected the niggling ghost of Parker’s sentience inside their head, performed cyber-psychic surgery to exorcise the fragmented remnants of his hated nemesis and now gloatingly basks in the triumph of a super-powerful body and life all his own…

A nasty new day dawns with ‘A Lock for Every Key’ – illustrated by Giuseppe Camuncoli & John Dell – as Jameson “invites” Spider-Man to accompany him on a trip to soon-to-closed super-penitentiary The Raft. The discredited prison is almost empty now and one of the last official functions will be the execution of Alistaire Smythe, the cyborg Spider-Slayer who slaughtered Jameson’s wife Marla…

The Mayor is dead-set on watching the killer die and expects the tough new Spider-Man to ensure nothing interrupts proceedings. “Parker’s” civilian life is again spiralling downward: sitting through college classes taught by morons simply to gain a doctorate is excruciating, he’s shunning all Peter’s old friends, and is being harassed for lack of productivity by employer Max Modell at technological think-tank Horizon Labs.

At least his blossoming romance with brilliant Anna Maria Marconi is still progressing satisfactorily…

When the skeleton security staff on the Raft are unable to cope with Smythe’s startling escape bid, Spider-Man is smugly convinced he has covered all the bases, but even Otto was unprepared for Spider-Slayer upgrading three villains on life-support and, as the Wallcrawler clashes with Smythe, technologically augmented Scorpion, Vulture and Boomerang are unleashed to kill all the people trapped on the island.

Worst yet, uncontrollable, voracious man-eating monster The Lizard is also loosed to stalk the jail’s darkened corridors…

The drama escalates in ‘Lockdown’ (with additional inks by Terry Pallot) as the vengeful Jameson grabs a gun and goes after Smythe himself. When he meets Spider-Man the Mayor orders the Arachnid Avenger to kill Spider-Slayer at any cost, much to the delight of the ruthless new landlord in Peter Parker’s skull…

Unleashed at last, Octavius soon cleans house and brilliantly, mercilessly ends the affair in ‘The Slayers and the Slain’. Better yet, because he recorded a certain conversation, he now has enough dirt on the Mayor to force Jameson to hand over The Raft…

Humberto Ramos & Victor Olazaba return to render ‘A Blind Eye’ as the new owner of “Spider Island” designs a new costume, builds giant war-tanks and hires a gang of arachnid henchmen to help him clean the city for the decent, law-abiding citizens.

First target is the embarrassingly public Shadowland: unassailable citadel of Wilson Fisk, Kingpin of Crime. Always logical but supremely innovative, the Superior Spider-Man and his army assault the Kingpin’s Keep head-on in full view of the astounded citizenry of Hell’s Kitchen…

Forcing Jameson to back his plan post-hoc, Octavius and his Spider-gang raze the fortress to the ground, apparently killing Fisk in the process and driving his chief enforcer Hobgoblin into hiding… and all to great public acclaim…

Unfortunately this just clears the way for covert mastermind Goblin King (a former Green Goblin) to accelerate his own plans to take over the underworld with his Goblin Army Cult…

The 2-part ‘Run Goblin, Run’ concludes this chilling compilation as ‘The Tinkerer’s Apprentice’ sees young Phil Urich, latest iteration of Hobgoblin, frantically trying to recoup his losses after the fall of Shadowland only to become the patsy for malevolent underworld armourer Ty Stone, a subtle manipulator with a deadly agenda all his own…

Forced to rob banks for ready cash, Urich becomes a priority on Spider-Man’s To-Do list and is forced to take hostages at the Daily Bugle when the web-spinner “outs” him on live TV…

Meanwhile, Carlie Cooper has shared her suspicions about Spider-Man with her Captain Yuri Watanabe (who secretly moonlights as vengeful costumed vigilante The Wraith). Together the women begin gathering definitive proof of their suspicions regarding the wallcrawler…

The convoluted machinations culminate in a bombastic battle as ‘Goblin Season’ finds Phil Urich soundly defeated only to be liberated by The Goblin King’s forces and co-opted as the crime-lord’s latest living weapon: a Goblin Knight to lead his armies to inevitable victory…

To Be Continued…

This up-to-the minute tech-heavy reinvention of course comes with 21st century AR icon sections. These Marvel Augmented Reality App pages offer access to story bonuses once you download the little dickens – free from marvel.com – onto your smart-phone or Android-enabled tablet.

Spider-Man has been reinvented so often it’s almost become commonplace, but this iteration – for however long it lasts – is one no lover of high-octane adventure should miss: smart, shocking and incredibly addictive.
™ & © 2013 Marvel & Subs. Licensed by Marvel Characters B.V. through Panini S.p.A. Italy. All rights reserved. A British Edition published by Panini Publishing, a division of Panini UK, Ltd.

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WIN FREE STUFF SPECIAL OFFER! Solve your Christmas Present Woes Here!

Thanks to the generosity of those fine people at Titan Comics we have a spiffy, brand, spanking new copy of Steed and Mrs Peel to give away so it’s time to show your True Brit Grit by answering three little questions – they be waiting for you at the end of this review…