Open Mike Night: New Avengers #1 & I Hate Fairyland #1

by Mike Maillaro & Mike Weaver

New Avengers (2015) #1

Written by: Al Ewing
Art by: Gerardo Sandoval
Colored by: Dono Sanchez Almara
Lettered by: VC’s Joe Caramagna

Published by: Marvel
Cover Price: $3.99

Weaver: The basic premise of this book is that Roberto Da Costa (Sunspot) assembles a team of mostly science based heroes and operates them off an artificial island where he has basically a James Bond villain style base, complete with fake volcano.  To top it off, he calls his organization AIM, but insists the A stands for Avengers, not Advanced.  As the book opens, this new group of Avengers is heading to Paris because Parisians are inexplicably being turned into crystal-headed zombies.  The Avengers try to reason with them, then try to keep them at arm’s lengths while they try to figure out what’s going on.  We discover that the Maker, an alternate Reed Richards, is behind all of this, and it’s an experiment in Minus-Life, but the Avengers don’t know that yet. Meanwhile, Dum Dum Dugan goes to Roberto’s island and insists that Roberto add Clint Barton to the team to act as a spy for SHIELD, which he begrudgingly agrees to while wishing that he had gotten the other Hawkeye instead.

As far as first issues go, there’s a lot positive to this.  We get a decent blurb about everyone involved without it being too exhaustive, we see a lot of the structure of the organization including a quick map of their base, and we get introduced to what is likely to be a major bad guy for at least the medium term future.  However, in the action sequences I didn’t see much individuality from each of the characters.  They can all fly and turn invisible because science, and much more time is spent focusing on that than any individual member’s actual powers.  In fact, Hulkling’s powers are kind of overwritten by “all of us can fly”, so he doesn’t get to have the traditional flying hero role of armpitting the non-flyers.

Maillaro: Yeah, I have no idea how they selected the cast for this book.  I love a lot of these characters, like Songbird, Sunspot, Hulkling, and Wiccan, but there is no rhyme or reason.  I don’t even think Sunspot had met most of these characters, but somehow they became his top picks for his team.  I actually think the first issue should have explored that a little more.  I guess we’re to assume it happened in the “eight months” between the end of Secret Wars and the start of All-New All-Different Marvel.  Though that is a big assumption in itself.  Marvel mentioned the eight month thing in a few PR pieces, but there has been nothing in the comics to suggest any of that.

A lot of the ideas were from Hickman’s Avengers books, like AIM Island and Sunspot taking on a bigger role, but again, Marvel handwaved over a lot of that with the massive time jump they did before Secret Wars.  It seems like a lot of Marvel’s publishing strategy this day is “I’ll explain later” and never getting around to it.  It works for The Doctor...

Weaver: Even with The Doctor, they eventually felt they had to explain it, and when they did, it pretty much caused the death of a decades long series. Stringing people along to a theoretical future explanation is a short term solution because while you wait to explain it, people come up with their own ideas. Those ideas eventually become a critical mass of a few basic “camps” whose adherents demand the writers identify which of them are correct.  And whatever is eventually chosen ends up disappointing everyone.  The longer you wait to address it, the more it will blow up later.  At least, that’s the way I see it.

Back to the issue...I don’t like the idea of the zombies being crystal headed, because it’s just a left field odd design choice, unless they explain it later. Actually, I didn’t like the art of anything living/quasiliving/undead.  The scenery was great, especially the map, but the characters weren’t good at all.  The Maker seems a logical villain choice for a science themed supergroup, but it also feeds into the cliche that alternate universe people are largely evil (Miles Morales excepted, of course).  Dugan straight up telling Roberto he was adding a spy to the team...I’m not sure how I feel about that, but surely they had a better choice to add to a largely science group than Barton.

Maillaro: Seeing Maker really made me wonder if anyone else from Ultimate survived Secret Wars.  We know Miles does.  But so far, these are the only two we’ve seen.  We also know that Old Man Logan made it to All-New All-Different Marvel, and Weirdworld is around too.   It’s been real weird to read all these ANAD series, since we still have no idea how Secret Wars ends.  I am real curious if Reed is alive, and if so, does he know his evil double is alive too.

I actually really liked the scene with Dugan telling Roberto upfront about the spy.  I suspect there is another “traitor” in the team too, and Dugan is using Hawkeye to distract from their real spy.  Hawkeye is no more out of place on a science-based team than Wiccan afterall.  And I hope they talk about his past connection to Songbird in Thunderbolts.  Actually, in a lot of ways, this book reminded me of Thunderbolts.  

Weaver: You’d hope that relationship gets mentioned, and Songbird would generally be favorably disposed towards Clint, making his spy work a little easier. There are some decent parallels to Mount Charteris era Thunderbolts, but this is (so far) far below Thunderbolts in terms of quality.  That’s not a huge knock, Thunderbolts is one of my all time favorites.

Yeah, Dum Dum definitely won with being upfront and catering to Roberto’s ego, saying that he wasn’t going to insult his intelligence by faking the spy on to the team.  And he probably has someone else in there too.  Still, theoretically, we’re going to be doing more of Avengers vs Maker and less of SHIELD vs AIM, except as a back burner, so I expect that’ll take a long time to pay off.

Maillaro: I did have one huge complaint about this book.  NO CANNONBALL!  Pretty much the only thing I have enjoyed about Hickman’s Avengers run the last few years was that Cannonball and Sunspot were working so closely again.  Nick Spencer did a great job with this in Avengers World.  I wonder where he ended up.

Also….how is Sunspot even still on Earth?  It’s been hinted at that the Terrigen Mists are poisonous to mutants, and most mutants seem to have gone into hiding.  Uncanny Avengers said that Rogue was pretty much the only one left...but now we find out that Sunspot seems to have no ill effects either.  Two weeks into ANAD, and we already have lots of confusion.  Though I suspect a lot of that is caused by the increasing ridiculous delay of Uncanny 600… That was supposed to come out in May and set the table for mutants moving into Secret Wars and beyond.  And there is still no sign of it.  In fact, Marvel announced yesterday that most of their X-Men titles post ANAD are going to be delayed.  

Weaver: Delays are always horrible, even with self-contained comics.  Sometimes it would be a year between “monthly” issues of Midnight Nation.  In this case, it’s pretty much inexcusable.  Yeah, conspiracy theory, replacing mutants, blah blah blah.  Marvel’s not going to cut off its nose to spite its face, though, and X-Men sell.  This needs to be pushed out yesterday, and if the originally contracted team can’t finish, it’s time to make them hand what they have done over to someone else.  Back in the day, when creators weren’t as celebrated (except for Lee and Kirby who could put out two dozens comics by lunchtime tomorrow if they needed to), forced handovers happened pretty often because the focus was on making sure the monthly books were as close to monthly as possible.  Obviously, people would rather wait than get a low quality product, but there’s a limit to how long people are willing to wait, especially since you’re losing money every month that issue doesn’t come out.

Anyway, I want to say that I’m pretty disappointed in this comic, but it also had a lot of stuff that I liked enough to be willing to give it a few issues to sell me on it.  I want to see how some of these plots develop before just kicking it to the curb.  The art isn’t helping its cause.  I’d go 2.5 on art, 3.5 on story.

Maillaro: I liked how this comic continued a lot of elements from Hickman’s Avengers (which I actually don’t even like that much) and Ewing’s work on Mighty Avengers.  I am not sure this was the best book to bring back the Avengers line, but for what it was I enjoyed it.  I also liked the characters chosen, even if I have no idea why they would have been chosen in the storyline.

I actually had no problem with the art.  It wasn’t all that memorable, but there was nothing that particularly bothered me about it.  It was just kind of there.  Hell, after Jughead last week, I am willing to forgive just about any artwork I see.  I think I will go 4 for story.  3.5 for art.  

I Hate Fairyland #1

Story and Art by: Skottie Young
Colored by: Jean-Francois Beaulieu
Lettered by: Nate Piekos of Blambot

Published by: Image
Cover Price: $2.99

WARNING!  THIS COMIC AND REVIEW ARE FOR MATURE READERS!

Maillaro: I have known Scottie Young’s name since Marvel started doing their “Baby Variant” covers.  In fact, we used a lot of Scottie Young work as part of my sister’s baby shower.  Later, I found out he was also the artist Spider-Man: Legend of the Spider-Clan back in the day.  I loved that book, and kept hoping Mangaverse Spider-Man would show up in a major capacity during Spider-Verse.  Most recently, he did Rocket Raccoon and Howard the Human (one of my favorite Secret Wars tie-ins).  He also did some work on Marvel’s Wizard of Oz books...which seems to have sort of inspired I Hate Fairyland.  Sort of.

I Hate Fairy Land is his first creator-owned project.  I Hate Fairyland tells the story of Gert.  When she was a kid, she made an odd-hand wish that she “be taken away to an amazing world filled with wonder and magic and laughter and joy.”  She gets sucked into Fairyland, basically against her will.  To get home, all she has to do is find the key to the door home, a quest that Queen Cloudia promises would only take a day.  That was twenty-seven years ago...and she’s still looking.  Gert still looks like a kid, but being stuck in Fairyland has turned her into a bit of a homicidal lunatic.  The story starts with her shooting the moon (the High Teller In the Secret Guild of Narrators).  And it basically just gets more disturbing from there.  Gert is attacked by Mushroom Policemen (who she refers to as Dickheads) and ends up eating several of them.

Weaver: I like how this starts out, with the idea that Fairyland, while a fun offhand wish, is really kind of annoying.  In fact, Gert immediately wants out, possibly because her trip to Fairyland resulted in her taking a seriously long fall which she was seriously injured at the end of.  I also liked how everything that sounds kind of awesome in dreams, like an ice cream island, has some really serious negatives.  Gert’s improvised cursing is pretty good too, like “Fluff you” and “Hugger fluffer!” as examples.  This made the use of dickhead a little odd to me, but I went with it.  I don’t know...I think on balance I liked this, but it went a little strange for me.

Maillaro:  It’s a fun concept for a one-shot, but I can definitely see it getting real old, real quick.  Making Gert into a total psycho makes it real hard for this series to show any growth or change for the character.  Even if she suddenly realizes, “Hey, I’ve been going about this all wrong.  I need to be nice or I will never get home” the people of Fairyland are still going to be chasing her with torches and pitchforks.  

Weaver: And that’s going to be the primary focus of the book anyway...psycho girl against Fairylanders with torches and pitchforks.  It seems like she really doesn’t see anything positive about Fairyland, and is willing to rob and murder her way across it, and I can’t imagine that viewpoint changing anytime soon. Obviously eventually she’ll discover the negatives of her choices...although you’d assume she’d have done that in the last twenty seven years if she was going to do it at all.

Maillaro: Yeah, that time jump was kind of odd.  Especially since it’s stated up front that this quest should only take a day.  What the hell happened there?  Did Gert mess it up in some way, or was the queen just delusional.  I’ve had jobs that took far longer than I was promised.  But 27 years is a little excessive. Especially since Gert seems to have no idea where to even look at this point.  A one-girl wrecking crew like Gert should have been able to find anything hidden in Fairyland in this period of time.

Weaver: In the afterword, Skottie talks about how he was primarily influenced by MAD Magazine, and I think the time jump was similar to the kind of devices that MAD often implements to say that things didn’t go down as expected when making fun of the way a movie works.  This was pretty much vintage MAD from start to finish...the only problem being that MAD made these sorts of things as anthology based short stories.  Again, how is this going to last?  I’m not sure I even want to know.  It’s odd, I actually liked this more than Avengers, but I’m more interested in how that pans out.

Maillaro: I actually understand that entirely.  As a single issue, I really enjoyed this comic.  It was fun.  The art was vibrant and alive...and often insane.  Gert was a great character for what she was, and there was a lot of unique ideas here.  BUT, I am not sure this series can have any real legs to it.  New Avengers seems far more suited for a long term series than I HATE FAIRYLAND.  

I actually think that is a huge flaw of the comic industry.  Not enough one-shots or mini-series.  This seems like it would be perfectly suited to a graphic novel. Remember back in the day when basically all Image series started as mini-series, and they waited to see if things would work.  Today, everyone seems to be using the opposite model.  Announce everything as ongoing series...and if they don’t work, change them to a mini series (or series of mini series) later on.

Weaver: Standalone graphic novels are often pretty widely regarded too, because we can pretend that they’re Actual Literature more than we can the monthly adventures of Spider-Man.  I know that things like Pride of Baghdad and God Loves Man Kills and so on and so forth are generally really positively regarded, plus things that started out as individual issues of a miniseries and ended up seemlessly moving over to the trade paperback style like Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen.  Sandman is kind of the exception here as the lone “long term series that seems to be regarded as literature”, but even then, it was one creator, one story, and ended relatively naturally.

I think I’d like this far more as a self-contained story, or even, if we go back to the idea of MAD, a short continuing story in an anthology of similar stories. That’s another style of comic that used to be very common but is all but gone now, the anthology.  Marvel Comics Presents was the last one I remember, although there’s probably been efforts since then.  Anthologies are great because you can spin the stories out into actual series if interest is high enough, and having one well-loved lead story character lets you sell as many true “throwing spaghetti at the wall” ideas as you can shoehorn in.

Still, I liked this a lot...if this were all it was (and it will be for me).  I’m going to give the story a 4.5 and art a 4.5.

Maillaro: For the most part, in recent years, the closest we’ve gotten to Anthologies (from Marvel and DC at least) are series like Brave and the Bold or Legends of the DC Universe, where instead of short stories, we get an issue or an arc devoted to one character, and then the next issue or arc would change to something else entirely.

There actually have been some indy companies doing anthology books.  Monkeybrain’s Amazing Forest and Image has Island.  I have enjoyed Amazing Forest, but I couldn’t get through Island.  Most of the stories I found to be real dull.  You might be right that I Hate Fairyland would be a far better fit.   I don’t think you’re wrong with your scores...but I am going to drop the writing to 3.5.  I really think the format makes this book suffer some.  Is it unfair to judge a book based on what I believe the future issues will look like?  Probably, but I am still going there.

Weaver: As I am the king of hiatuses, I’m going to announce a two week hiatus, this time for the legit cause of “family vacation” (or so I claim).  Hopefully Uncanny 600 will only be a month away by then.

Final Scores