Well, we’re still experiencing technical difficulties over here but I managed to farce about and get something up. Some of it might even make sense. That’d be a bonus and no mistake.
Anyway, this…
AVENGERS: ENDLESS WARTIME
Illustrator: Mike McKone
Author
Writer: Warren Ellis
Colour Artist: Jason Keith with Rain Beredo
Lettering: VC’s Chris Eliopoulos
Book Design: Rian Hughes
Assistant Editor: Jake Thomas
Editors: Tom Brevoort with Lauren Sankowitch
Editor in Chief: Axel Alonso
Chief Creative Officer: Joe Quesada
Publisher: Dan Buckley
Executive Producer: Alan Fine
Marvel Worldwide Inc, £18.99, $24.99/$27.99(Can) (2013)
Captain America created by Jack Kirby & Joe Simon
Thor created by Jack Kirby & Stan Lee & Larry Lieber & The People of Norway
Iron Man created by Jack Kirby & Don Heck & Stan Lee & Larry Lieber
Hulk created by Jack Kirby & Stan Lee
Wolverine created by John Romita Snr & Len Wein
Black Widow created by Don Heck & Stan Lee & Don Rico
Hawkeye created by Don Heck & Stan Lee
Captain Marvel created by Gene Colan & Stan Lee
Captain Marvel (Carol Danvers) created by Gene Colan & Roy Thomas
Jarvis created by Don Heck & Stan Lee
This Marvel Original Graphic Novel features all your favourite Marvel movie characters teaming up in a tale best summarised as, if I may slightly amend m’learned colleague Mr. Abhay Khosla’s previous comments, “the violent relics of the
Cold War
Second World War that you forgot? Well they’re very irritable”. Yes, all your favourite Marvel characters from those dreamy movies in which Stan Lee pops up to remind us that he saves his best performances for testifying in court are here! I guess Marvel have their bleary eye on the movie audience so I don’t know why Hawkeye is still referred to as an ex-circus performer in here rather than whatever that guy with the preternaturally aged face in the movies is (isn’t he Black Ops or something or am I confusing it with The Hurt Locker? I confuse a lot of things with The Hurt Locker which can lead to embarassing moments in Tescos.) And Captain Marvel! Yes Captain Marvel is here! Carol Danvers flava! Everybody is all about the Carol Danvers Captain Marvel so allow me to
pander
join in!
Much like the imaginary movie audience turned comic reader I don’t really know much about today’s Captain Marvel. When I was little Captain Marvel was a man and Gene “The Dean!” Colan drew him with that big old Gene “The Bursar!” Colan Burt Lacastery Barrel Chest, and that GilRoy stuff was cosmic amoeba saturated awesome. Then there was Jim “Thick Thighs!” Starlin’s Captain Marvel who inhabited a world of very small panels and very big ideas and who carked it of cancer because he was always sneaking off for a crafty snout, and then coming back chewing a mint like that fooled any of his family, even though his clothes stank of smoke and, really, the only person he was fooling was himself, but it turns out mints can’t fool Death. I think I’m still talking about Captain Marvel there. Anyway, he’s the one who died in one of a series of Marvel Original Graphic Novels in the 1980s. Despite the fact that this is Marvel’s first Original Graphic novel ever, ever, ever, because they say so and we have always been at war with Oceania. Ooh, wait, there was a Non-Caucasian lady Captain Marvel who looked like Disco on legs; Monica Rambeau, I think. She rattled about for a fair while and was in that Nextwave series Warren Ellis did with Stuart Immonen; people liked that. I know because I was one of them. And then there was a nutter Captain Marvel written by Peter David, called Genesis P. Orridge or something. Oh, yes, and Carol Danvers who started off as Ms Marvel but hung in there like a good ‘un and got a promotion and is currently, in this OGN, Captain Marvel. She’s got a series out at the minute but in the preview I read within three pages she made that empty joke about “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for” which is so overused it isn’t a joke anymore, just a sign that someone’s writing on autopilot. So, I gave it a miss for that reason. That and the fact I’m a huge misogynist. Anyway Captain Marvel’s in there somewhere. I’m not too hot on the running order because, you know, I am old and thus worthless. I could have missed one but my point is that the very thought of Captain Marvel being a woman is just a bloody disgrace. They’ll be letting them drive or vote next. Mark my words; thin end of the wedge!
So, yeah, Captain Marvel is a woman. Deal with it! Well, she’s drawn as a woman but basically she’s Warren Ellis with tits. I went with tits there because the sound of the word is comically harsh. You know, better explain myself before we get complaints. So, everybody here is Warren Ellis, tits or no, because everybody talks with Warren Ellis’ voice. Or at least the voice Warren Ellis always has his characters use. That sourly anxious one-upmanship that in real life makes you ignore the speaker until they grow some manners but on the pages of comics apparently makes for stellar characterisation. So when Iron Man says “Would you like a cup of tea, girly-hair?” and Thor replies “Sure, I’ll drink your shamelessly imperialistic slurry, you cock-knocking arms manufacturing murderer for money; milky with two sugars, mayhap” it sounds totally natural and in character. It really does. And the fact that everyone talks like this all the time just makes it seem even more natural and in character. Seriously, this tireless and tiresome concern with quipping just keeps torpedoing the momentum and stalling any suspension of disbelief. It can also have unwelcome consequences; Hawkeye’s supposed to be a cheeky chappy, as scamp, a rascal, but the fact that he’s making light of his drinking escapades in the same room as a recovering alcoholic just makes him look like an insensitive prick. Christ, enough with thequips. Dial them back, comicspeople! Also, a lot of them aren’t, you know, funny which doesn’t help.
Also, in the Not Helping Department are the art, colours and lettering. All of which, in combination, are a seriously tepid concoction. Visually this book comes off as being like The George Tuska of the modern comics’ set. Not such a huge slur as George Tuska was fundamentally okay but this is 2014 now; I use George Tuska merely as an indication of how, even though you can tell what everything is, it’s all quite inert. I haven’t seen such a lack of movement since we left the guinea pig outside dring a cold snap. The art fails to convey motion to the extent that a scene of the ground collapsing just looks like a static crater. There’s no sense of the effect of a hole being created in the ground.
This proves disastrous in the action scenes in which there are things in the same panel and a lot of the time nary an indication of how they relate. When I’m reading a fight scene I shouldn’t be asking myself any of these questions: Did Thor just hit that thing? Did it just hit Thor? Is Thor struggling? How powerful was that blow? A lot of this is due to the stripped back nature of the art; there’s no SFX, no impact bursts, none of the many, many tools developed over the last umpty wootley years of comics storytelling to aid immersion. This is what is perceived as sophisticated storytelling and, on this evidence, sophisticated storytelling is dull. The more tools you take away from the artist the better that artist has to be to make up for that loss. If you leave the artist nothing but the visual image the sheer weight of information a typical comics panel should carry requires an artist of phenomenal ability. These are a rarity, I’m afraid.
But, you know, everybody looks like a person and everything looks like what it is, so it’s not bad as such just a little on the functional side. This approach carries across into the colouring which is heavily overdone (so much so that you half expect a lifted page to sag under the weight of all the inks) while rarely, if ever (I didn’t go back and check), risking anything beyond the blandly representational. Likewise the lettering is, well, there. It’s a bit too uniform and clinical for my tastes even though they change it up for Thor so you can tell he’s talking a bit different without him doing all that “Thou” and “Thee” stuff that really upsets modern readers. It isn’t outrageously terrible stuff but it isn’t anything special either. Mind you, one of the saddest realisations over the last four decades of sneering at comics is how little control the creatives (ugh!) have over the final product. So, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that the whole thing was intentionally guided down the path of least invention. New readers to comics and,well, don’t want to scare the horses and all that that. There’s no just sense of fun or frolic on these pages just a dour sense of duty. In fact the whole book seems saturated with an actual fear of fun or frolic. At several points Ellis actually has to resort to his characters describing what is happening in trad comic book terms (“Nazis and dragons, oh my” etc.) so that we can appreciate how wacky and crazy what we are reading is. But there’s a total disconnect between the outlandish and imaginative concepts and their almost beureaucratically dull presentation. Now, I’m not saying this ever happened, but if, if, someone sat next to me in a meeting, leaned in and whispered to me that he was wearing his wife’s knickers, it wouldn’t change the fact I was still in a dull meeting and whatever cut of fabric was cupping his bits had precisely zero effect on me or my life. Were they my wife’s knickers then that would be different. But they weren’t. Not that that happened. Hmmm, with the benefit of hindsight my point could have been made more clearly, I think.
The news isn’t all bad though. This is a Warren Ellis comic and so as with all Warren Ellis comics there is at least a bit of thought in there. I know I was enormously grateful that he had written something that seemed to address something in the real world; here it being drones and the, uh, endless nature of war (or warts, no it’s war). Sure, things got off to a rocky start with his humouring of that stupid Captain America/Wolverine rift which is basically fuelled by a refusal to acknowledge (on the part of either the characters, the writers or the audience) the difference between a soldier and a murderer. It’s a pretty fucking simple difference and continually writing Captain America as being too dumb to notice it gets trying after awhile. Magnanimous as ever I’m inclined to let Ellis off and assume he inherited this piece of weak thinking. Initially he also seems to be objecting to drones on the grounds that it’s bad form to kill your enemy without looking him in the eye. It’s an oddly old fashioned and Colonel Blimpy argument, weirdly luddite in one so famed for his futurist (i.e. informed guessing) abilities. It’s the kind of argument monocled men made as they watched the Polish cavalry turned to mince by German tanks. (Yes, the Polish cavalry was not, in reality, stupid enough to attack tanks but you take my point.) Come on, it’s not like anyone was ever deterred from starting a war by the hideous waste of life involved. Shit, back when we were still stabbing each other up close and personal one war went on for a hundred years. A hundred years of war there was. Imagine that; a hundred years; just year after year of war to the count of a hundred. I can’t recall its name, that war. The one that lasted a hundred years. (Actually it lasted 116 years but that wouldn’t have led to the punchline you’re supposed to provide after all that prompting. Facts; comedy kryptonite!). Anyway, the whole point of warfare now is to make it so that we don’t even know we’re at war. Unfortunately drones are going to require a better counter argument than, well, it just isn’t cricket, old bean and Ellis does in fact rush past such an argument towards the end. The issue of civilian casualties and a lack of restraint engendered by automated long distance killing is finally floated. In a rushed and undeveloped fashion, yes, but at least Ellis provides something a little more substantial than the usual bag of broken biscuits from down the market most comic writers mistake for food for thought. Basically if you like Waren Ellis you’ll like this as it’s just like any otherWarren Ellis comic except you won’t have to wait three years for him to send in the last six pages.
Now, call me awkward but with something called a graphic novel, something basically purporting to be novel in graphic form, I think you might be forgiven for expecting some approximation of the depth, scope and ambition of a , one of those things, a…no, no, it’s gone now. It’ll come back to me in a minute. With its oversize pages, slim width and stiff covers I guess this is some kind of reach for a physically prestigious product. And if all I were familiar with were the usual smaller pages, slimmer width and floppy covers of the standard North American genre monthly periodical then perhaps it might be. Here in the United kingdom, however, we have a long tradition of such physical objects which are traditionally given to children at Christmas. We call them Annuals. They have puzzles and stuff in them to pad ‘em out, wordsearches and the like. There aren’t any puzzles in A: EW but you can waste a good few hours searching for the words “created by”. Geddit! Oh wait, bit of inadvertent xenophobia there, I just recalled that physically similar to A:EW as well are the European (e.g. France, and, er, that one shaped like a boot; you know, all of them places) albums, I guess this is supposed to stack up against them. Mind you, it’s important to note that the European graphic albums are very different to the British Annuals though. You wouldn’t give a Euro-album to a kid for Christmas. Sheer madness. The things that go on in those you’d get locked up! Mark my words, little Timmy would rather have a SpongeBob Annual 2014 and his magical Dad at home for Christmas than a copy of Manara and Jodorowsky’s The Borgias, followed swiftly by weepy bus trips out to Pentonvile on Boxing Day for a period of three to five years thereafter; as novel a way to spend Christmas as that might be. NOVEL! That’s it,a NOVEL! Oh, It’s all coming back to me now; you’d think this might, being billed as a graphic novel, have innards that suggested a novel rather than just being a tall comic. That’s all it is though; a tall comic. Pricey, too. The first in a line of Original Expensive Tall Comics from Marvel! Bit of Sexy Marketing there; I can see I missed my true calling. Unlike Tru Calling which nobody misses. Oh, I’ve had enough now; I do have stuff to do so Avengers: Endless Wartime was OKAY!
Apologies for the absence I still love you all and I still love – COMICS!!!
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