Digitally Speaking...53 "Impulse, etc."

This column covers material read digitally, oddly enough, from my comiXology account...And this particular edition covers: Impulse #1, The Infidel #1, Inhuman #1, Injustice: Gods Among Us: Year Three #1, The Mire #1, and Invincible #s 1 & 118...

Impulse #1 (DC)
From 1995.

This is not the first time I've read it.  Back in the '90s I was as big a fan of Mark Waid as you could find, and especially of his Flash comics.  And then he launched Impulse and I found something I loved even more.

Going back to this issue is something like rediscovering it.  In the early going it reads very much like Edward Furlong in Terminator 2, and even the great Humberto Ramos, in these pages, looks like that's exactly what he's evoking in the art.  It's not until Bart Allen is in the same room as Max Mercury that the issue truly becomes alive.  Now, Max was always my favorite.  From his introduction in the seminal "Return of Barry Allen" arc, Max was a brand-new character, a mentor who wasn't really a mentor at all, more like a reluctant observer/guardian, especially once given responsibility for the ADHD poster child Bart, Waid's vision of video game corruption as feared for years by excitable parents and social watchdogs everywhere.  Reading Max now is like discovering that he could easily be Arnold Schwarzenegger as seen in Maggie, that hulking figure who seems completely incongruous in the given situation but otherwise tries to make the best of it...

And Bart?  Never mind that Ramos finally becomes recognizable as Bart and Max interact, Bart suddenly seems like an emissary from the future.  No, not the fictional one from his origin, but from Pixar, from films like Frozen.  Yes, a full twenty years ahead of his time, instead of a teenager culled from a movie four years in the past.

Needless to say, but Bart didn't stay like that for long.  Even before Geoff Johns revamped the character in the pages of Teen Titans, Bart had become a victim of his own quirks, bereft of the innocent charm Waid and Ramos gave him and made into a cartoon of a cartoon.  And I liked that version.  But it wasn't Bart at his best.  That was always Waid's Bart.  And Humberto Ramos on art.  Ramos has actually aged the best out of all three.  He later graduated to another youthful character, Spider-Man, and seemed perfectly at home from the start.  More people know this work than ever cared about Bart and Max.  This is okay, because it's a rare second act in comics that builds on the first effortlessly.  Usually when a given act is transplanted, something is definitely lost in translation.

But this is to say, there's a good deal to rediscover.  With DC delving into its past so gleefully these days, now might be a good time to dig up this version of Bart Allen.  Something tells me that at the very least, a really good movie could be made out of it.

The Infidel, featuring Pigman #1 (Bosch)
From 2011.

For people who want a sanitized version of Frank Miller's Holy Terror.  The cover image even seems to evoke it.

Inhuman #1 (Marvel)
From 2014.

Hmm.  So, maybe the Inhumans are not completely pointless after all.  You'll forgive me for believing that all this time, because as far as I could tell previously, even with potential they had been completely pointless for, oh, fifty years.  They were an attempt to duplicate the idea of mutants but in a different context.  Handled better they could very easily be the best thing Marvel has ever done.  Well, imagine that.

This isn't the first step in making them relevant, but it's a neat little package and it's written by Charles Soule, signer of that infernal exclusive deal with Marvel that took him away from a lot of good DC work.  I can't ascribe all of this new potential to Soule, but as far as I'm concerned...why not?  Because there's the hallmark of work I am familiar with from the pages of Red Lanterns, blown up to epic proportions.  The Inhumans are the product of genetic engineering from an ancient Kree visit to Earth, and a society that until recently was pretty exclusive and self-contained.  Except now things have gone all to hell.  The Terrigen Mist was released as Inhumans are popping up left and right.  It's kind of like what Marvel tried doing with mutants once it had done a complete hash job of keeping them relevant, but done...better.  Possibly because this is a story that's building rather than attempting to continue.

And this may be one of the many reasons I finally give up on Ms. Marvel, because technically its premise is entirely predicated on this bold new Inhumans arc but without any real understanding as to its potential.

Here, as in something Brian Michael Bendis was the last X-Men writer I've seen trying to salvage the mutant version therein from the early issues of All-New X-Men, new Inhumans are being inducted to the ongoing war of ideology among this clan.  And I use clan because the full potential of all this could very much be a Game of Thrones situation, completely subverting the biggest weakness that had previously plagued the Inhumans in that they used to be just another superhero team with a quasi-gimmick to try and set them apart (which didn't work or didn't seem interesting, and so this long fallow publishing history).  Soule did some of that in Red Lanterns, and even Swamp Thing was ultimately about this very concept.

If he and/or other writers actually pull it off, the Inhumans really could be the next big thing.  As represented in this particular issue, it really could be.  If he's built on this foundation profitably in the meantime, that time could actually be now.  (Marvel Now!  Heh.)

I'll have to have a look around...

Injustice: Gods Among Us: Year Three #1 (DC)
From 2014.

Based on a video game...and wouldn't you know, that is not all you need to know!  Like Inhuman above, this is a pleasant surprise.  As the somewhat laborious title suggests, this has been going on for some time already.  This particular debut issue drops the reader in the middle of the action with minimal context (basically, key good guys are kind of key bad guys, leaving some of the more unconventional good guys to do the good guy bit), starring John Constantine (late of his own TV show these days) as he attempts to protect his daughter from things that go bump in the night.  Along the way we also come across Zatanna (along with Black Canary, perennially doing what she can to keep the spirit of fishnets alive!) and Dr. Fate (Constantine has a good quip against him).  And finally, Detective Chimp.  A veteran reader of Shadowpact, I know how awesome Detective Chimp is.  I'm curious what other readers (and/or game players?) think when they see him dropped into the story, with such an auspicious introduction.  I've heard that the Injustice comics were good, but I'd avoided them because, y'know, based on a video game.  But seriously, DC takes this stuff seriously.  You could very easily read this exclusively and get a very healthy DC fix.  The writer on record is Tom Taylor, who also helped out Earth 2 for a while.  But I think he's since slipped away from DC.  Either way, the dude's got talent.

The Mire #1 (Ink & Thunder)
From 2012.

...This is the kind of comiXology session you always hope for...Which is to say, I keep finding stuff that's fantastic today.  This was listed under Ink & Thunder, and so I listed that here as publisher.  But it's self-published by Becky Cloonan, a name I keep coming across, apparently because she's been around DC and/or Vertigo for a while now.  And suddenly she's another thing I want to further investigate.  Because The Mire is kind of that version of Lord of the Rings without all the quasi-epic history involved, just the intimate, character-centric kind you always suspected Tolkien could have focused on and made his work better, which is the thing Peter Jackson did that was absolutely the best part of his films (and so yes, when he went back with the Hobbit trilogy, you know exactly what I think he did best there)...And I guess this was pretty much a standalone tale, but I absolutely loved it.  Good stuff, Cloonan.

Invincible #1 (Image)
From 2003.

Launched before Walking Dead, this is Robert Kirkman's original breakout series, one of those this-is-a-self-contained-superhero-comic-that's-not-even-published-by-DC-or-Marvel efforts that attempts to give readers a new venue with which to explore the genre.  And it's probably a good way to know where Kirkman eventually takes Walking Dead, because unlike that series, he's already pushed Invincible to at least one climax (it's an Image thing; over in Spawn and Savage Dragon, the other long-lived superhero comics published by Image, definitive arcs have come and gone, and for some reason they keep getting published until the creators come up with, I don't know, another).  Launched a few years after Brian Michael Bendis' Ultimate Spider-Man, it's kind of the same experience as that, too.  And for some reason, even though Walking Dead has since gone onto massive crossover success, Invincible is still sitting there pretty much ignored but still in publication.  Probably because, Robert Kirkman, I guess.  The beginning is all sweet and innocent, actually not so different from the Impulse experience.  As a massive spoiler alert from the past, things become much, much more complicated.  And anyway, as I said, if you don't want to wait decades (or however long Kirkman can actually draw it out), you probably can find out Walking Dead's future, because really, the two comics aren't really that different thematically.  This is not a knock on Kirkman.  Good writers have resonant themes in their work.  This is the first time I realized Kirkman was probably doing that, too.

Invincible #118 (Image)
From 2015.

And...as it happens, the future is now.  I had an issue from this year waiting for me, too.  It's an isue designed to be a jumping-on point.  Or at least intended to be.  There's a massive recap of the series to date to start things off...and then we're dumped into the middle of the next arc just as if everything that follows makes perfect sense.  Just 'cause!  As I...may have suggested...I'm not really sure why Kirkman is still writing Incincible other than that it's a steady gig, and people...like steady gigs.  It gives them stability.  Life rarely comes prepackaged with that.  But this issue makes the whole series, everything that's recapped, seem like just another series of stories, and that's kind of wrong for a series that seems predicated on breaking the mold, making it okay to delve into a superhero's life, because this is one creator's vision, everything means something, and the future isn't something that's as fictional as the character himself.  Except...one-hundred and seventeen issues later, the lead character is still incredibly youthful, plopped into the middle of what comic books inevitably think growing up means, wife and one kid (see: Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows), trying desperately to figure out of that's a mistake or not.  Comic book creators are amazingly bad at making sense of such developments.  This issue also deals with the less-publicized notion of male rape victim, another thing comics inordinately fixate on (Dick Grayson was infamously such a victim, which fans reacted to as if this ruined the character, somewhat the obverse of the point I'm trying to make, and also a black stain on readers instead of just creators).  Not something I'm taking lightly, but...well, maybe victims of either gender will benefit from it being explored regardless.  Anyway, the greater point (that makes it sound like I'm sweeping aside the issue...) being, it doesn't paint the series in the best light, any of this.  Even Bendis eventually moved on to a different Ultimate Spider-Man.  Maybe Kirkman should do that?

Too bad I'm ending on a bad note, because most of this stuff really was good.  In the random way I tend to collect comiXology material, that is never a given.  So it really is good when it happens.