Quarter Bin #36 "The Invisible Catwoman Avenger as Interpreted by Loeb, Morrison, & Johns"

CATWOMAN: WHEN IN ROME #1 (DC)
From November 2004:
Here’s Jeph Loeb & Tim Sale again, continuing what they began in THE LONG HALLOWEEN and DARK VICTORY, this time centering their story on Selina Kyle. Their storytelling is so effortless, it’s baffling that fans have found it so easy in the last half dozen years to try and erase their legacy. In a way, I’m glad that I’ve been in the position to play catch-up with their projects, as it affords me an opportunity to read it as if it’s new, so I can pretend that they’re still active. I know Loeb is still working at Marvel, but he seems to have abandoned the kind of stories he does best, which is a little incomprehensible. I assume it’s because that’s the easiest way to survive at Marvel, because character-rich stories are secondary at the House of Ideas, the exception rather than the rule, which is the opposite of the company’s public perception. But it’s the truth. WHEN IN ROME, by the way, was a six-issue mini-series, so I’ve got more to read, when I get the opportunity.

THE INVISIBLES #4 (Vertigo)
From December 1994:
An omnibus edition of the complete series is being released in August, and so that’s probably when I’m going to begin reading the whole story. Ironically, when I scoured Heroes & Dragons for back issues, I came back with an issue I’d already read in the first volume, SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION. It’s fine, because Grant Morrison is Grant Morrison, and this way I get to read a little of what he was like in the letters column, and in 1994, I guess both he and his readers felt like being cheeky, because that’s what the letters in this issue are like, reactions from the start of the series. I know at one point there was going to be a TV show, but that never happened, and reading about that was actually one of the first times I started taking Morrison’s legacy seriously. Reading comics can sometimes form a false sense of their overall worth. It’s only when you step back that you begin to appreciate them, and the several times I’ve been forced to do that has only heightened my appreciation of Morrison particularly, as can plainly be seen on this blog. THE INVISIBLES is just one of the books he did around this point in time that was as subversive as he could make it (which makes his mainstream work since all the more remarkable, the reverse Alan Moore). One has the sense that his writing will only become more lucid (as he periodically experiments with impressionist work like WE3 and JOE THE BARBARIAN), that he may very well channel his talents to stuff even his most skeptical critics will be able to appreciate. And for the rest of us, there’s stuff like this.

THE AVENGERS #s 70-71 (Marvel)
From October-November 2003:
These issues are also numbered 485 and 486, and they are written by Geoff Johns, some of the few comics he’s written outside of DC. And for me, one of them is fairly infamous. In #71, Hank Pym crawls up the chest of Janet Van Dyne, clearly wet, and the implication is obvious. Pym is Ant-Man/many-other-identities, has the ability to both grow and…shrink. (Van Dyne shrinks, too, and is better known as Wasp. They’re both founding Avengers, but are not, so far as the publicity has revealed, in the new movie.) Back in 2003, I read about this scene with disgust (yes, I was an Internet fanboy), and it colored my opinion of Geoff Johns as representative of the immature comics I kept reading about at that time. Johns broke into comics at about the same time I had to stop reading in, 1999, and so far as I knew, wasn’t a talent worth considering, and reading about this scene was the last straw. I was never going to care about this writer, this hack! Some ten years later, he’s one of my favorite writers. Actually reading his AVENGERS is one sign of this drastic transformation of opinion. To my mind, this is the way the team should be written, not as a glorified vanity project (sorry, fans of Brian Michael Bendis), full of interest in the actual characters. It’s not possible to write them like this all the time because, well, Marvel cares more about telling stories than writing about their characters, which is exactly the opposite of the DC instinct, which is why Johns writes at one company today and not the other. The first issue is the conclusion of “Red Zone,” which features Red Skull’s attempted hostile takeover of America following an elaborate ruse that put him in the president’s cabinet. Johns makes more sense of Black Panther in this one issue than I’ve been able to gleam from any other appearance or series. We’ll also note that the next issue, with its heavy spotlight on the incredible shrinking Avengers, would be impossible to publish today, unless in the pages of the little-respected Young Avengers tale of THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE. But then, how could it be any other way?