The Answer’s 42

So, the “day unlike any other” came along, and The Avengers were born, or at least the film franchise was. This film has been in the offing for years, since the easter egg at the end of 2008′s Iron Man featured Nick Fury telling Tony Stark that he lived in a bigger world than he realized (and, er… which I spoiled for someone… sorry again, C.!). We’ve had Agent Coulson and Nick Fury turning up in each film since then, creating a common thread between Thor, Captain America and The Incredible Hulk (actually, that was Robert Downey Jr…) that let us know that we’d one day see all the heroes of those films would “find themselves united against a common threat, to face the foes that no super hero could face alone!” (to quote the comic book), and was eagerly awaited by just about everyone who was a Marvel fan or just walked in and thought “hey, this is kind of cool!”.

For anyone who isn’t familiar with the premise of the Avengers comics, it’s this: you’ve got your individual superhero comics about Spider-Man, Captain America, Iron Man, etc. and then you’ve also got the Avengers comics where you see all of them facing bigger, grander threats than they might face alone: e.g. Spider-Man spends most of his time trying to save New York from things, but when he’s with the Avengers he could end up on a time-travelling quest to save reality. Basically, this is what you get here although the tone is somewhat more like the yearly Marvel epic crossover events such as Siege or Avengers vs. X-Men as sometimes issues of the Avengers can feature half an issue of Captain America and co. worrying about rent cheques (no lie).

So the film features Iron Man, Thor, Black Widow, Captain America, the Hulk and Hawkeye (introduced in a shadowy cameo in Thor, the guy with the crossbow) brought together by Nick Fury to foil the plans of the evil Loki, who steals the Tesseract and threatens to cause a much bigger crisis. I’m just going to stop there as otherwise I’ll spoil the film, but there are a few things I’d like to discuss still without going too specific.

One issue here might have been that you could have ended up with Iron Man and his Amazing Friends, where the film essentially becomes Iron Man 3 with appearances from all of the others in bit-parts, but no – they all get their time in the sun and get given something to do. This is mainly down to the fact that the movie’s writer/director, Joss Whedon is an old pro when it comes to things like this from his Buffy days. That show had a main cast of interesting characters, all of whom deserved the spotlight but ended up bouncing off each other in a way that simply worked like magic. Here it’s the same – no-one is neglected and Iron Man, Thor and co. spark off each other in ways both spectacular and hilarious. Also, if you’re a Joss Whedon fan there’s plenty of his trademark “Whedonisms” in there – Robert Downey Jr. has an especially good time with them…

The other is the that the problem that other Marvel films have suffered from somewhat – the building up of a huge threat for the finale, only for it to be more of a fart than an explosion – isn’t present here. Normally, you’d have a strong opening, some character development and then a final showdown that feels a bit lacking compared to some of the spectacular set-pieces earlier in the film. Well, in Avengers you get one spectacular set piece, another that in a lesser film might have been saved for the end, and then the final act goes a hell of a lot bigger and for the first time watching a Marvel film you feel completely satisfied. The final confrontation is indeed everything it’s been built up to be, and if you are or were once an Avengers fan it pretty much gives you what you were always hoping for – the comic leaping right off the screen.

It works as a satisfying conclusion to the long running saga that’s been building since 2008 and does a good job of showing us the “wider world” that’s been hinted at all along. One thing I had wondered about upon hearing the Avengers was being adapted to the big screen was whether they might water it down a tad as I thought some of the threats the Avengers face in the comics might appear pretty outlandish on screen, but after seeing this done so well I’m confident that if they take the franchise in the more fantasy-like directions it goes in the comics they’ll pull it off.

I saw it in both 3d and 2d (I was kind of like that kid who goes on an amazing rollercoaster, I had to go around again when the opportunity presented itself) and I can say that the 3d doesn’t add too much to it. It is a quality conversion from 2d to 3d, and it avoids the Ivor the Engine-like paper cut-out look that’s typical of piss-poor conversions like Clash of the Titans. There was one bit with a giant flying thing that I thought “wow” at, but you can go see it in 2d confident in the knowledge that you’re not missing much.

tl;dr: go see it. It’s easily the best film of the summer so far, and The Dark Knight Rises now has a hell of a job to do if it wants the title of “best comics-related film ever” people were preparing for it because The Avengers is a very, very strong contender for it. And no, I’m not calling it Avengers Assemble – that sounds like a shit 90s kids show…

Posted in Comic book geekery, movie magic, Uncategorized
Tags: avengers, black widow, captain america, hulk, iron man, joss whedon, marvel, thor

and I feel fine. Really, I do… well, it’s the end of the world of the traditional media industry as we know it, and I feel just peachy about it. Why is this? Well, several things: one was this thoughtful article by the Pirate Party on modern copyright issues in the time of the internet which states a staggeringly obvious conclusion: popular culture has survived in an age of massive digital filesharing, and also the fact that the internet is finally giving people what they want, rather than what one particular group of people thinks another wants.

I’m not really going to talk too much about internet file-sharing, suffice it to say my attitudes are pretty much that trying to profit from selling on someone’s copyrighted work is wrong but sharing something you think is cool for free so that others may see it (no profit involved) is for purposes altruistic rather than selfish so it’s a whole different kettle of fish. I’ve also seen that people are more than willing to pay for things if offered a fair price and treated with respect, and so I think I’m correct in thinking more liberal attitudes towards copyright in general pay off.

What I actually find much more interesting is how the internet is going to change the way we consume popular culture. This is the real reason why we see SOPA and PIPA and all manner of other stupidly named legislation that is trying to hurriedly stuff the genie back in the bottle – we have a lot of scared middlemen who are hurriedly trying to protect their jobs because it’s going to render them worthless. I think a lot of corporations are worried that really in the world of the internet they’re going to lose out and so they back efforts to try and put it under their control, but they don’t seem to really get that in the “new world” there’s still a place for them.

I’ll still go see Battleship, for instance. Even though the story is codswallop I found it entertaining, and so I will pay for the privilege of sitting in a big room for two hours watching a big budget fireworks display interspersed with hilarious attempts at “acting”. I’ll buy Marvel comics, owned by Disney, because I enjoy reading about the characters and the world and again I feel that the owners of that property should be compensated for providing me with those stories. Nothing will change my propensity to go to the cinema or buy physical comics.

At the same time, I’ve seen how the big budget culture can squeeze all the life out of something. I read The Art of Drew Struzan recently, and most of the stories about his work are how a bunch of fuckwit marketing execs and Photoshop whizzkids who thought that clicking a mouse was “talent” basically hounded him out of the poster industry by trying to impose a “vision” based on spurious market research that would guarantee success. The same kind of thing has been happening to quirky games, films and TV – you have something beautiful and clever that gets killed off by a dull-minded fuck who waves a piece of idiotic research saying “the market doesn’t like it” even though there could easily be enough interest in it to finance it but not churn out massive profits (step forward, works of Joss Whedon).

That’s why I’m happy to see that the internet is now turning to make said media execs redundant. It’s cutting them out and allowing creators to get in touch with their audience directly and well, I think it’s going to turn out to make the world a much better place to live in culturally than the one we did previously. Several of my favourite shows are not, in fact, network shows. The Guild, The Angry Video Game Nerd and The Nostalgia Critic are all internet-based and are owned by their creators, rather than being part of “an IP portfolio” sloshed around by execs. I’m sure there are execs involved, but they seem to mostly keep schtum and let the creative staff of each of the shows do what they want.

To give you an example: if you’re on the internet now and haven’t heard of Felicia Day, even just a whisper, then you’ve been living under a rock. Well, actually now you have so I can’t say you haven’t so you’re not living under a rock… uh, anyway I digress. She’s an actress whose work is enjoyed by millions and whose fanbase could easily rival many A-list actors starring in traditional Hollywood films, but instead that audience is going to the internet to see it rather than a cinema.

The Guild, her show, is one of the funniest and most relevant shows on the net at the moment. Its humor is based around things I find culturally relevant, and every time there’s a new season out I eagerly await the next episode. Why? It feels a hell of a lot more natural than many sitcoms currently put out by the studios. I sit and watch a traditional studio sitcom and watch someone crack jokes about an internet meme that became old a while ago. I sit and watch The Guild and I see humor that feels relevant and I identify with. I don’t watch the studio sitcom, I watch the internet show religiously as it’s better written and Day hasn’t had some exec who thinks he’s “with it” breathing down her neck sending her notes all the time to maximize appeal to “key markets”.

Another example is Kickstarter. Kickstarter is a funding platform for creative projects, as the site plainly says, and again it kicks the marketing execs and lets the creators directly talk to the viewer and say to them: do you want to see this? For years, we’ve had studio execs sitting there and listening to these pitches and deciding on our behalf if we want to see it or not. A lot of shit has gotten funded, and some beautiful stuff falls by the wayside simply because an exec “didn’t get it”. Well, now someone with an idea can talk to us and ask if we want to see it.

This doesn’t guarantee success for things I think are cool: I’ve seen several shows that appealed to me go unfunded and just collapse (and I got my money back) but it occurs to me that quite a lot more stuff I like will get funding and will be there for me to see in some way, shape or form. I have seen stuff I’ve liked the look of, and contributed something like $5 toward it and some of it has been successful. I’ve liked the look of things that have already closed, as well, and I will buy the DVD. 

I find all of this tremendously exciting. It offers hypotheticals like this: Joss Whedon gets the rights to Firefly back from Fox and comes to Kickstarter seeking funding to make a 13-episode webseries of it. He’d get more than enough money to make it, and the sales of DVDs and associated Firefly stuff would make him a handsome profit. I’d be happy, because rather than lining the pockets of a big studio that didn’t get what he was trying to do with the series the money went straight to him, because he deserves it.

Hollywood promised us in films that the future would be a brighter, fairer place but it didn’t turn out that way, yet. Ironically, Hollywood appears to be actually afraid of that happening but somehow I don’t think it’ll succeed. It might take a while, but I think eventually the internet will help us build a popular culture that reflects what the people really want, rather than what someone thinks they want. Of course, this does give us things like Justin Bieber (thank you, Youtube) but hey – you can’t change the world of popular culture without making a few Biebers along the way… 

Posted in Uncategorized
Tags: copyright reform, creator owned shows, felicia day, joss whedon, kickstarter, SOPA

This blockbuster season, I’ve seen a few films that I felt that critics were rather unkind to. First there was John Carter, where various online critics piled on and called it “the next big flop”, possibly ensuring their predictions would fulfill themselves, and now there’s Lockout, an action film written by Luc Besson of Transporter and Nikita fame, starring Guy Pearce and Maggie Grace.

I’ve read reviews of it calling it “cinematic sludge”, “derivative” and urging cinemagoers “not to waste their money”. Well, I didn’t do that and today I went to see Lockout because it looked a lot of fun in its trailer:

and my suspicions were correct. It was.

The premise: Guy Pearce plays Snow, an ex-CIA agent convicted of a crime he didn’t commit who is sent into an orbital prison where a gang of criminals lead by brothers Alex (Vincent Regan) and Hydell (Misfits’ Joseph Gilgun) have broken out of their stasis cells and taken over the prison, unfortunately at the same time as the President’s daughter Emilie (Maggie Grace) has been conducting a humanitarian visit to the prison as she’s concerned about the prisoners’ conditions. If Snow rescues her, he gets to go free with a clean record. So far, so very Escape from New York.

One thing about the film is that yes, it does inevitably use a lot of action movie tropes and it is possible to spot movie tropes on loan from films as diverse as Fortress with the automated, seemingly inescapable prison to Snow’s gruff attitude and disrespect for authority figures which just screams Snake Plissken. The thing is though that I wouldn’t call Fortress or Escape from New York flawless classics but films that were good, cheesy fun. Lockout is in exactly the same mould as those two films, and it delivers the same thing that they do: good, cheesy fun. I’m not looking for breathtaking originality or deep meditation on the meaning of life when I go into a film like that: I just want to be entertained.

And with those expectations, the film does just that. Guy Pearce as Snow is an entertaining protagonist and one who virtually winks at the screen as he goes through the prison, often commenting on the characters and events he encounters with some downright funny quips. He’s clearly having a blast in the role, and he’s immensely fun to watch. Maggie Grace as the President’s daughter Emilie isn’t given too much to do as she’s been lumbered with the role of Action Movie Girlfriend (namely, get captured a lot and look traumatized by events) but one thing that is quite good is her and Snow’s chemistry and it is quite entertaining to watch their relationship go from antagonisitc to barbed flirting and it’s good for several laughs (one of which is shown in the trailer above).

The film was shot on a budget of $30 million, which is quite small for an action film these days, but the effects are good enough to be entertaining and overall if you want an unchallenging, fun ride it pretty much delivers. I think the critics have been pretty unfair to it, really and those who described it as “cinematic sludge” are wrong - Lockout is cheesy, undemanding popcorn movie fun at its best.

Posted in movie magic
Tags: guy pearce, lockout, luc besson, maggie grace

As good as Avengers, X-Men et al really are, there’s always certain restrictions that have to be followed it seems. If it’s Earth-616 Spider-Man who’s being written, we can’t kill him off and follow the adventures of a new Spider-Man like in the Ultimate Universe, or if you do that there will eventually be a “Return of Spider-Man” event and pretty much all of the character development that occurred in that arc will be undone or altered because for the mainstream Marvel Universe Peter Parker will always and forever be Spider-Man. That doesn’t stop great stories being written with Earth-616 Spider-Man – the Spider Island event by Dan Slott was one of my favourite arcs of recent years and I enjoy the Avengers and X-Men lines as well because even if they are written with the need to maintain a certain status quo great stories can still be told with these characters.

However, when writers own the characters themselves and can do what they want to do without thinking “Will those who take over when I finish hit me on the head for writing Carrot-Man in a particular way?” I think it can make for a better story and so creator-owned books can often outshine those owned by Marvel and DC in terms of character development and what they can do. Spider-Man can’t say fuck, for instance, only $%^* and has to live up to high moral standards whereas an original character invented by someone independent can go on journeys that a Marvel-owned character really cannot. I can’t really see Millar’s Wanted taking place within the Marvel Universe, for instance…

So, one thing I’ve been reading recently is Bendis and Bagley’s Brilliant, a creator-owned series that focuses around a set of, uh, “brilliant” college students who happen to have cracked the secret to unlocking superpowers within human beings.

The world it takes place in is largely like our own as there’s no SHIELD or anything walking around to deal with outbreaks of superpowered incidents and so rather than having the rather blasé attitude you might expect from the authorities, they’re pretty worried and even skeptical of such events and to me that makes things very, very interesting. I’m not really going to launch into a review here as such because I’m thinking that there’s already more than enough of those out there and also I’m rather late to the game – we’re three issues in now and the story is beginning to really shift into high-gear but there are a few themes here that kind of match up with things that I’ve always been interested in so I guess I should sort of give a summary of what this thing’s actually about…

Brilliant takes place at the fictitious Seattle Tech, following students Amadeus, Albert, Kindred, Izzy and Marie, who have through the mastery of biophysics managed to create a way of granting people superpowers. Amadeus has tested their method on himself, giving himself superpowers and has gone on to use them to rob a bank and fix casino games in order to get money. Whether the others know of this, according to the recaps at the beginning of each issue, is currently ambiguous…

I kind of went with this one for two reasons: one, I love Bendis and Bagley’s work on Ultimate Spider-Man and two, it sort of covers some ground that’s always interested me – what if superpowers found their way into the real world? Okay, I suppose that sounds like a typical comic-book nerd’s fantasy but I think the idea does have some legs to it. Physics basically tells us “no” to many things that take place in comics – the amount of energy released by Cyclops’ energy blasts, for instance, would consume his body in seconds and the heat and light stored up behind his visor when he’s not using them would destroy him anyway but within the logic of the Marvel Universe is perfectly acceptable… but not in the real world. Here life is pretty mundane powers-wise, mutations are most definitely undesirable and crippling and if anyone wants to bring the world to its knees all they have to do is sell it a load of dodgy financial products rather than launch a scheme involving a giant nuclear-powered satellite.

But I’ve always been fascinated by the what-if of if you did actually bring comic-style powers into the world. What would it actually do to it? Heroes tried to explore that idea too, but I felt that basically they got a bit too traditional with how they did it because we ended up with what was basically an extended homage to the Days of Future Past storyline and a subsequent predilection for plots involving time travel to prevent various dark futures. While I enjoyed it, I wanted something that was initially a bit smaller – for instance how would just say one small group of people react to one of them getting superpowers as to me that’s much more interesting. Bendis takes quite a bit of time to explore that idea and it appears that Albert will emerge as the sort of moral center of the group, whereas Amadeus appears to be heading down the road of villain but we’re not dealing with “saving the world” here, at least not yet but rather how the appearance of superpowers affects the relationship between the friends.

Another strand it picks up is how the authorities might react to such events. In the Marvel Universe if some guy with zappy-telekinetic-mind control powers robbed a bank no-one would bat an eyelid as that kind of thing happens all the time. In Brilliant, however, the FBI have no clue whatsoever as to what’s happening with agents wondering what the hell to make of all this and several calling bullshit on the whole thing and I find that somewhat refreshing for a book involving superpowers. Indeed, it rings quite true for real life as it seems that the emergence of social media and the resulting proliferation of internet-based movements throughout the world has caught the powers-that-be offguard, leaving them trying to regulate and/or simply ban facets of it because it scares them so much.

If a superpowered throw-down did occur in a city (not that physics allows for such a thing) I wonder how’d they react? There’s no SHIELD or anything to call in, and it’s nice to see a bit of time given over just to exploring the reactions of different people and groups reacting to the emergence of the “impossible” into a mostly “real world” setting. The last panel of issue #3 appears to set the stage for the world to find out about the discovery of superpowers and they’ve taken the time to set up the players for what should be quite an interesting saga.

Brilliant is a great book, well written and drawn, based on an intriguing premise and it’s going to be interesting to see where Bendis and Bagley take their creation next. Pick it up next time you’re at your local comics store! (Hmmm. Possibly getting a little bit more reviewy than I thought there…)

Posted in Comic book geekery
Tags: bagley, bendis, brilliant

(This is heavy on JPEGs. There will be some awesome JPEGs, but still heavy on JPEGs nonetheless. Just a heads-up.)

As it’s coming up to blockbuster season again, we’ll be seeing a lot of big films out over the next few weeks. Big films aren’t just about the film only, though, increasingly they’re forming part of a whole entertainment experience. Leaks of spoilers, trailers, tie-in viral stuff… the blockbuster is no longer just “a film” on its own. The studios are coming up with more and more elaborate ways to market their stuff, but to my mind they’ve left something very important slip by the wayside: the movie poster. It’s really a shame that it’s been overlooked, because for me the movie poster is one of the things that really makes (or made) the cinema going experience. You go in, you go up the escalator or walk towards the box office and as you go there your attention is drawn towards adverts for coming attractions, attempting to get you to think “ooh, that doesn’t look too bad”.

Why do I think the movie poster has been given a bum deal in this day and age? Well, increasingly it’s now become the realm of Adobe Photoshop which at least to me is a crying shame. Take a look at the international poster for The Avengers (I flat-out refuse to call it the rubbish UK name Avengers Assemble, which sounds like a kid’s TV series):

I find it kind of… underwhelming for such a big production. It looks like it’s been whipped up in Photoshop in five minutes by someone, and it’s all reused art from other posters. There’s no real craftsmanship or anything, just a poster featuring some movie stars and the title and that doesn’t really sell me on the film. If I didn’t have the trailers and the set reports and everything else, if I was just learning that they were making a film of The Avengers from this poster I can’t say I’d be particularly excited for this film. The other poster does a bit of a better job:

with some stuff going on in the background, but for me there’s still something missing. They don’t really capture my imagination, and to be honest I think it would’ve been better if they’d just contracted some of the fans to do the poster, because just a quick image search shows up efforts far superior to the “official” version:

or this one:

and this one:

Three examples of fan art that is superior to the one that Marvel Studios came up with. If I’d seen these up in the cinema when I last visited, I think I probably would have looked and thought “awesome”, instead of “meh”. I think out of all of these fan designs, the second is my favourite (designed by Cure4, a cursory glimpse of his deviantArt gallery reveals other creations superior to the “official” version) as for me it’s really evocative of a lost era of the design of movie posters, when they employed artists to draw a poster for a film rather than just photoshopping together publicity shots. Of course the fan poster is Photoshop too (I think) but the designer has put a little more thought into the way it’s put together. All three sort of evoke the feeling that The Avengers are a group of super-powered people coming together to face a grave threat to the future of humanity and imbue it with a certain sense of excitement, rather than just showing a few people posing in a messy New York street.

There’s an idea that films of the 1980s had something that modern films lack. JJ Abrams appears to be most definitely of this mindset as for Star Trek he said he was trying to evoke the feeling of 1982′s The Wrath of Khan and Super 8 is an out-and-out love letter to the Spielberg blockbusters of the 1980s where ordinary people found themselves having the extraordinary pushed into their lives. Part of the reason, I think, is that these films were the first “modern” blockbusters where they existed in the form that we know them as today: CGI was just appearing, and it was becoming possible to insert special effects in a slicker and more believable manner. We’d been amazed by Ray Harryhausen’s monsters, and numerous costume effects, but  Star Wars and its ilk really took it up a notch, pioneered the effects driven flick and today’s are imitating them in a slicker manner and the excitement has gone a bit from SFX overload. But I’d argue that part of that lost magic was the movie poster. Take a look at the poster art for the aforementioned Wrath of Khan:

I’ve always loved this poster, as for me it epitomizes that film perfectly. It tells me that this is going to be a story about the relationship of Kirk and Spock, and also a struggle against Khan who’s survived on the deserts of Ceti Alpha V and is now out for vengeance. The fact that it’s drawn, rather than photographed, allows the artist to try and draw together all of the elements and emotions within the story and try and express them to the potential viewer without giving too much away. This poster succeeds on every level for me, and it’s far superior to today’s cut-and-paste-on-a-Mac movie poster design as beautiful hand-drawn art manages to truly capture the drama and emotion of the film and give those who see the poster a sense of the movie’s soul, so to speak. I’m not quite sure who drew this one, to be quite frank, but it’s good.

However, no-one epitomizes the classic 1980s movie poster more than Drew Struzan, the artist who designed the posters for many of the 1980′s classic films. His artwork is actually the best part of some really shitty films such as the rather forgettable 1980s “warring psychics” film Dreamscape:

I can’t find many better versions of it sadly, but the Struzan poster actually makes the film look a damn sight more exciting than it actually is. It actually amounts to a hilarious scene of Dennis Quaid wrestling with a rubber snake man being the only worthwhile thing in it, but the Struzan poster evokes the promise of action and adventure and positively demands I see it, even if afterwards I’m going to be walking out of the cinema thinking “boy, that sucked monkey balls”. As it so happens, it was merely put off by my mother as a kid and later rewatched by me on Netflix leaving a vague sense of relief at not having spent money on it…

If Struzan can improve the appeal of a shitty film, he can create epic imagery for classics such as Blade Runner that just make you think you’ve got to see them:

It evokes the noir atmosphere of Blade Runner, and you can see that Struzan put a lot of thought into the makeup of the poster and the emotions he was trying to evoke in those that would see it. Rather than just five minutes, the man’s put a lot of effort into the poster and you can really feel it and in turn it makes you actually give a shit about the film and if it were coming out would give me a real sense of anticipation. You can see why Paramount decided to create a Struzan-style poster for Super 8:

I fell in love with this when I first saw it. I enjoyed viewing it when I saw it on the net, and when it popped up in the Vue cinema in Swansea I spent a good five minutes looking at it and trying to see all the detail in the image. It was unique in an era of Photoshop where craftsmanship of the movie poster is becoming a rarity. There are many things I love about Super 8 (good cinematography, story, sound design… I could go on) and this is one of the best things about it – its promotional team really made an effort. Sadly, it’s all too rare these days, and I hope it will return someday when Hollywood finally decides to start giving a shit again rather than just trying to find ways to squeeze money out of people for as little effort as possible. In fact, here’s a suggestion for Marvel Studios: when you do Avengers 2, give the gig to Cure4, the man behind this awesome poster for Thor:

because let me tell you, anything by him kicks the ass of some of the five minute photoshop-jockeys that seem to inhabit the studios’ promotional departments today. Whoever you are, sir, I take my hat off to you – if I’d seen this hanging in the corridors of Brighton Odeon a few months before Thor came out I’d have been there on the opening night, rather than just sloping through the doors a week after it had opened…

Posted in movie magic
Tags: avengers, blade runner, cure4, drew struzan, film posters, movie poster art, the wrath of khan, thor

And so another year, another Marvel crossover event. For those who don’t know much about Marvel (and that’s more people than you’d think), every year Marvel has one or two big events that draw just about all of their comics together in some huge event where everyone in the Marvel Universe has to come together to save the world from a stick of giant cosmic broccoli, or something like that. There’ll usually be a main limited series chronicling the overall battle with the cosmic vegetable or whatever, and then individual issues dealing with the different individual heroes’ perspectives on it. This means that there’s a hell of a lot of comics to deal with there…

This year’s crossover is Avengers vs. X-Men, which is fairly self-explanatory as to the premise. To expand a bit further, the Phoenix Force, a cosmic god-entity that’s heavily associated with Jean Grey, is heading to Earth again and the Avengers and the X-Men have differing ideas as to what this means. Of course, if this were the real world they would sit down around a table and work it out but as they all have superpowers the answer is obvious: beat seven shades of shit out of each other. And judging from the previews I’ve seen, that’s exactly what we get.

I’ve been looking forward to this for a while, and I picked up Avengers vs. X-Men #0, the first issue last week but because I was away for a few days I haven’t had much of a chance to blog about it, so here we go…

The first thing I’d like to say is: I love the art in this issue. Frank Cho’s artwork is beautiful, expressive and wonderfully clear and I’ve seen very few better-looking comics recently. The action in the book is really brought to life by it, and really draws you in when compared with some other books I’ve read recently (one that I shan’t name here has a bit of a problem with melty faces) and several panels, especially one with Scarlet Witch on a white background, are stand-out.

AvX #0 is really a scene-setter and focuses on two central characters: Scarlet Witch and Hope Summers. Scarlet Witch’s section of the story is pretty decent, and sees her do battle with giant-head MODOK as he attempts to assassinate an ex-AIM scientist before getting some help from some of her ex-teammates from the Avengers. Hope Summers, meanwhile, is living out a frustrating existence on the X-Men’s island Utopia and subsequently enjoys taking that frustration out on a bunch of super-powered bank robbers in nearby San Francisco.

I’m not really going to talk too much about the rest of the plot because a) I’m trying not to be a spoiler-hound for anyone who hasn’t read it yet and b) quite a bit of it would require me to elaborate on a lot of Marvel history. That’s what I consider to be the main flaw of this issue: a lot of the dialogue references past continuity, some of which happened over eight years ago such as the Avengers Disassembled and House of M events.

Bendis and Aaron’s writing is good (in the case of Bendis as always as I’m a huge fan of his work… don’t know so much about Aaron) but the problem with having Scarlet Witch being the focus of the “Avengers” section of the issue is that she comes loaded with a heavy backstory that I’m not quite sure new readers or those who’ve kind of tuned out from the Marvel universe for a while will be able to get. The former event, especially, is needed to understand quite a bit of Scarlet Witch’s interaction with some of the other characters.

I think the “X-Men” section with Hope Summers is more successful in this regard: a lot of the dialogue explains why she’s important and what she means to the X-Men, and really you can just enjoy the action without having too many questions raised as to what’s going on and why someone acted in the way that they did. Hope flies over to San Francisco, and beats up the Serpent Squad, and that’s really it – no moments that would confuse a new reader. It’s markedly more successful in setting up the coming conflict.

Skip ahead a week, and we get to the true inaugural issue Avengers vs. X-Men #1:

AvX#1 sees Bendis take up sole writing duties, and also a change of artist towards John Romita Jr. Compared with Cho’s art, which leans more towards realism, Romita’s work is often more stylized and I feel generally suits the tone of the crossover (i.e. superheroes lamping each other senseless) perfectly. It’s big, expressive, and exciting and matches Bendis’s writing perfectly.

We open with the Avengers in New York who see a comet… or something collide with a passing plane and then leap into action to save it. This is a pretty decent action sequence, and gives the story a pretty effective opening. Some of Bendis’ other books, such as Ultimate Spider-Man can be a bit slower-paced, but it’s fairly obvious that this will not be the case here.

The Avengers end up receiving a warning about the return of the Phoenix Force and we move over to Hope on Utopia being given a bit of a hard time in training by Cyclops, causing her to have a firery (and possibly Phoenix-powered) outburst which brings Utopia to the attention of the Avengers, who head over to Utopia to take Hope into “protective custody” to prevent her from unintentionally destroying the Earth should she end up being possessed by the Phoenix Force. The issue ends with an opening broadside by Cyclops against Captain America, and the battle is indeed on…

Unlike the previous issue, I think readers whether familiar with past continuity or not can come in and enjoy it perfectly. Things that might confuse new readers such as the history of the Phoenix Force are explained, and there’s not much need for people to go and google up previous events just to figure out what the hell is going on. The one thing I wonder about at this stage is how the Avengers plan to stop the Phoenix Force from being able to do anything – all we’re given is that “protective custody” is their plan – whereas the X-Men’s idea of the return of the Phoenix representing the rebirth of the mutant race is pretty clear cut. Of course, that could be explained later, but sometimes things can get swept away under a desire to see superpowered people hit each other…

Oh well. Overall, it’s a good read and worth checking out, and it’s going to be interesting to see where they take this although hopefully they manage to avoid the arseholeification that Iron Man suffered during Civil War, the last time two groups of “good guys” started kicking the shit out of each other…

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Tags: avengers v, avengers vs. x-men, bendis, crossover event