Reading Comics 167 "Comic Bento"

Last week somewhat atypically I didn't have any new comics to pick up, so instead I bought Green Lantern Vol. 2 The Revenge of Black Hand, the second of three New 52 era Geoff Johns collections, and I enjoyed reading that material again a great deal.  I don't have all of the Johns Green Lantern collections (not even close), but now I have all three New 52 volumes.

So, as long as we're on the subject of collected editions, let's talk Comic Bento.  This is one of those subscription services that sends you a bunch of stuff in a box every month.  I figured I'd give it a shot.  May was my first month, and by now I've read June's material as well (boxes ship at the end of the month).

As far as May's shipment goes, here's what I got and what I thought (anyone unfortunate enough to follow me on Goodreads already knows):

1) Marvel's The Avengers: Black Widow Strikes (Marvel) - just an absolute train wreck of a mess that completely wasted an opportunity to do something useful with the one cinematic Avenger everyone wishes would get a little more decent material.  The most disappointing part for me is that the writer is Fred Van Lente, whom I first discovered through Action Philosophers, Comic Book Comics, and Incredible Hercules (alongside Greg Pak), all of which was exceptional material.

2) Green Hornet Volumes 1 & 2 (Dynamite) - an adaption of Kevin Smith's lost movie; not nearly as embarrassing as Black Widow Strikes, and technically, the best stuff in an otherwise mediocre at best selection for the month.  But it's still disappointing both from a guy who's watched Kevin Smith movies and read Kevin Smith comics.

3) Predator: Prey to the Heavens (Dark Horse) - total waste of space.

4) Star Trek: Countdown to Darkness (IDW) - This was by far the biggest disappointment of the two shipments to date.  The original Star Trek Countdown was a terrific selling point both for the 2009 movie and IDW's Star Trek comics in general.  Apparently time has not been kind, because neither is true of Countdown to Darkness.  I mean, I know that IDW's Star Trek efforts have considerably lapsed in recent years (the ongoing Abrams-continuity series I haven't really made an effort to read, but I have read good material within it; John Byrne's New Visions photo comics are easily the best thing the company has done, however, and are the strongest argument against what I'm saying), but this is still shocking.  It wastes time on an irrelevant and terrible Robert April tangent and barely features "the Mudd incident" at all, and by the time it features "John Harriman," it's the end of the story.  I mean, really?  (If Pat makes a comment, he will reiterate that he hates the Abrams era on general principle, so there's that.)

June's shipment was better, with caveats:

1) Captain America: Winter Soldier Ultimate Collection (Marvel) - Features the contents of the first two volumes from the Ed Brubaker era.  A decade ago I would have been very happy to be reading this, because I was in fact convinced to join the bandwagon early on and loved what I found, to a point.  But then it degenerated when it became clear that beyond the return of Bucky, and the complicated way it came about (ably represented in the Captain America: Winter Soldier movie), Brubaker really had no idea what he was doing.  He's just not a superhero guy, and I think he realized that (thank goodness), but only after driving his creative legacy into the ground for anyone worth their critical muster.  Still, I'm happy to have this material in my collection again, if only to commemorate it at its peak.

2) Captain Midnight Volume 1: On the Run (Dark Horse) - Between this and the Predator volume, I don't know if it's Comic Bento or Dark Horse itself that wants to make Dark Horse look terrible in these boxes.  I could've sworn that writer Joshua Williamson responded here when I last wrote about Captain Midnight trying to offer a defense of my calling the character what I will now call a blatant knockoff of Captain America, maybe the comment was deleted at some point (I had Google+ comments for a while).  Either way I'm no longer taking either one seriously.  You don't get a free pass unless your bad material is atypical, like Van Lente's Black Widow Strikes.  (But seriously, Fred Van Lente, what the heck?)

3) Terminator: Revolution (Dynamite) - Strippers have been inserted.  For some reason.

4) The Valiant (Valiant) - Easily, easily, easily the best thing from two months of Comic Bento and kind of making up for the quality of everything else, and perhaps not coincidentally the most recently published material; in fact three of the four issues was originally released this year.  I've become a real fan of Valiant's comics, whether from The Death-Defying Doctor Mirage or Divinity.  When it was originally launched, the most prominent comic in the schedule was Robert Venditti's X-O Manowar, which I finally had a look at when Venditti replaced Johns in Green Lantern.  And at the time, I dismissed Valiant on what I thought was pretty mediocre material.  But apparently that was premature.  Jeff Lemire (Descender) and Matt Kindt (MIND MGMT) wrote The Valiant.  After a slow start they really nailed it, and convinced me that I absolutely have to check out Lemire's Bloodshot: Reborn, because Bloodshot is easily the breakout star of the story, which is bold enough to introduce a dramatic game-changer in his adventures.  Over at Goodreads I compared The Valiant to the next logical progression from Marvel's Ultimate comics, with all necessary freedom to do the best possible comics.  And it looks like Valiant really is.

On the whole, I'm not overly impressed with Comic Bento's quality control.  In an effort to be everything to everyone, it's going for the lowest common denominator.  I guess it's unfair to criticize the approach, and in some ways the company hobbles itself by trying to bring together a theme for each box (May's was movies, obviously, while June's was time travel; July's is supposed to be "the little guy").  The hook, and the argument against hasty judgment, is that every box is a complete surprise, and there's always going to be an appeal to that, because (hope against hope!) there's always the chance that The Valiant will find its way into the assortment, and not just terrible stuff like the Predator and Terminator collections.  And really, seeing something like the Captain America volume is a good sign, regardless of how I feel about Brubaker now, because there was a time when I would have been perfectly happy to come across something like that randomly, just like Countdown to Darkness.  I figure three boxes is a good representation of Comic Bento's overall worth, so I'll give this trial run one more box.

We'll see.

Quarter Bin #41 "Gotham Central and For Tomorrow"

GOTHAM CENTRAL #16 (DC)

From April 2004

GOTHAM CENTRAL #22 (DC)

From October 2004:

Harking to another Comic Book Resources article, I found myself finally reading some issues of GOTHAM CENTRAL, a Batman family comic that centered on the regular police presence in the Dark Knight’s home turf, written during its run by Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker, two creators who have made names for themselves by mostly staying within a more realistic interpretation of superheroes.  Rucka has stuck mostly to crime comics, though he remains one of the best Wonder Woman writers of the modern era, while Brubaker, who has done his share of similar comics, has in the meantime made his name most familiar with a sustained run with Captain America, in which he totally transformed the franchise (and influenced the coming movie sequel by introducing the concept that Bucky Barnes managed to survive WWII by unwittingly becoming a Russian agent codenamed the Winter Soldier).  These particular issues of GOTHAM CENTRAL were written by Brubaker.  I was persuaded to read these because of the covers.  The first features a misleading reference to the Joker, who I was assured had been handled brilliantly in the series, though he is not in this issue, which rather features fairly routine police work from pretty much everyone in the book who didn’t actually become name characters (those survivors would be Crispus Allen, who would go on to be the new host of the Spectre; Jim Corrigan, who I assume was used as a red herring, because he shared the name of Spectre’s original host; and Renee Montoya, whose profile was subsequently elevated when she became the new Question in the pages of 52).  The effect of this is that GOTHAM CENTRAL reads like a comic book adaptation of any TV procedural drama you can name, and is not an impressive demonstration of the quality I’ve heard about.  The second issue has Harvey Bullock on the cover, with a reference to the Penguin (which is either ironic, given what Geoff Johns did with BATMAN: EARTH ONE, or a story he was actually referencing, and the reason I got this one), which actually pans out in the story.  This one was worth reading, not just because I knew and therefore cared about the characters, but because it made sense as a standalone read.  Coming out of the experience, I’m not sure I would personally recommend GOTHAM CENTRAL, at least not if you’re willing to make a bigger commitment than a few sample issues.  Following the perspective of the regular law enforcement of Gotham City is a worthy subject, but I’m not sure it’s a good idea to ignore Batman when you’re doing so.  Any issue should reference him a little more prominently than was evidenced by these issues, not because it’s relevant, but because it’s conceptual necessary.

SUPERMAN #215 (DC)

From May 2005:

This was the conclusion to Brian Azzarello and Jim Lee’s “For Tomorrow” arc, a sort of culmination to everything DC had been trying to do during the first decade of the millennium prior to INFINITE CRISIS, or in other words five years of desperately attempting to make Superman cool and relevant to readers.  Since that time the company has cooled its jets a little, trusted its creators a little more, and even gotten some of them to embrace writing the character for the character’s own sake.  “For Tomorrow” features a continuity that no longer exists, another of those interpretations of General Zod that I personally consider to be instantly irrelevant after Geoff Johns’ ACTION COMICS run (and subsequent New Krypton adventures).  Yet it makes an interesting point, and one I suspect was Azzarello’s intention, that for a guy whose origins are defined by great loss, Superman has made a life out of preventing bad things from happening to anyone else, kind of overlooking that good can sometimes come from tragedy.  I would use that as an argument to get Azzarello writing more Superman, see what else he can say about that.  The artwork from Jim Lee, meanwhile, looks more like his Image material than his current JUSTICE LEAGUE work (or either of his Batman projects), and is a little more distracting than it is a draw, and I think that’s another reason why “For Tomorrow” has fallen between the cracks since it was originally presented, harking back to an era that not only no longer exists, and isn’t something anyone besides Kurt Busiek is interested in revisiting, other than in the pages of the late SUPERMAN/BATMAN, which itself became increasingly irrelevant before disappearing at the dawn of the New 52.