The Comic Cave – The Nice House On The Lake

 

Originally published on Set The Tape

The Comic Cave is a fortnightly feature where we spin the Wheel of Comics and see what graphic novel story it brings up for us to deep dive into! This week we take a look at The Nice House On The Lake, one of the popular entries in the DC Black Label imprint that took the world of comics by storm.

“How do you think the world will end?” A question that seem innocuous, if a little creepy, as The Nice House On The Lake begins. A question asked between friends, a thought exercise, a way of learning about you more as a person and how you see the world. It’s the kind of ‘what if?’ scenario that I’m sure we’ve all been asked by a friend at some point or another, one of those random questions that you never think twice about. Unfortunately, for the characters in James Tynion IV‘s twelve issue series, it becomes something that they can’t escape.

DC Comics have had a lot of stories over the years that don’t fit into established continuity, from things such as Superman: Red Son or The Dark Knight Returns, that take familiar characters and do something completely different with them, to their Vertigo imprint that crafted series like The Sandman and Hellblazer, stories that could take place within the regular universe, but made more sense being their own things. The already mentioned Vertigo was joined by the Elseworlds imprint, but over the years things changed and Vertigo was folded into the DC Universe, and the Elseworlds label was dropped for out of continuity books. Then, in September 2018 DC launched DC Black Label. Black Label would create darker and more adult stories that didn’t have to follow the continuity of the regular DC Universe, becoming something of an amalgam of Elseworlds and Vertigo.

Black Label enjoyed early success with titles like Batman: Damned by Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo, and Dark Knight Returns: The Golden Child by Frank Miller and Rafael Grampá. Many of the early Black Label books involved Batman, thanks to the character being an almost instant guarantee of sales. As time went on more characters like Superman and Wonder Woman would receive Black Label titles, but the series also produced titles that had no connection to the DC Universe at all, that played by their own rules and took place in more real world settings. One of these titles was The Nice House On The Lake, first launched in June 2021.

The Nice House On The Lake begins normally enough, with a group of ten people being invited up to a remote mansion on the edge of a forested lake for a weekend away from the pressures of the real world. Most of the people know each other, though not all of them are friends, but they all have strong connections to Walter, a nice guy who they’ve each known at some point in their life. Walter seems like a bit of a loner, a quiet guy who collects friends and keeps the ones who mean a lot to him, creating a handful of strong relationships that mean the world to him. And it’s these people that he invites up to the lake.

As the group arrives at the house they find a world of luxury awaiting them with a cinema room, a huge library, a pool, and gorgeous countryside surrounding them. It feels like the perfect getaway, even if not everyone there is completely cool with each other. Their friendship with Walter and the gorgeous weekend is what matters. Until one of them checks their social media feed. Post after post detail the end of the world. “The sky looks like it’s on fire. I’ve never seen colors like this before”; “I can pull my skin off in sheets. It doesn’t even hurt. It feels like pudding. My skin is sticking to the phone as I type this. Fuck.”; “My mom just called me screaming that her skin is coming off in pieces.”; “I think we need to start having a reasonable conversation about a painless way to kill yourself, before the fire gets you.”

As the group watch people die, watch cities burn on their phone screens, they realise the end of the world has come, that everything is over. It’s then that Ryan remembers a conversation that she and Walter had: “How do you think the world will end?”; she simply points at him as she comes to the realisation “You picked”. Walter reveals to his assembled friends that he brought them to the house to spare them from the end of the world, from the apocalypse that his people brought. He wants them to survive, to live on, and he’s created a haven for them. In the panic and anger that follows, Walter reveals himself to be more than human, beyond what we’d understand, displaying powers beyond imagining. Vanishing, he leaves his friends to continue on as the world burns around them.

Thus begins a mystery story, and a horror story, as the ten survivors of the end of the world try to figure out what to do with themselves. They discover that their haven has been designed to keep them alive, that they can write down requests for food and supplies which will then appear on their doorstep the next day, preventing them from starving to death or getting bored. However, their haven is determined to keep them alive in other, more sinister ways too. As the group digs deeper for answers they learn that Walter has been testing them for years, making sure that they’re the people he wants to save, making them forget things if they ever get close to learning the truth about him. The more they learn, however, the more dangerous things become for them, and the more Walter becomes involved, determined to prevent his friends from going too far.

The Nice House On The Lake is a dark book, one that very quickly into the first issue enters a realm of existential horror and grief that never really lets up. Its characters watch the world end, via their smart phones and the strange statues around the property that let you see the outside world when touching them. Being the last of humanity, knowing that your old life is gone, and everyone you’ve eve known and loved died in agony and fear is enough to break most people, and we see that in the book. Characters slip into depression, some even become suicidal, and it’s this for me that really makes the book a horror story. It’s a horror for the soul, it’s the emotional pain that seeps in that none of them can do anything about that sends shivers down my spine. Normal grief and depression are hard enough to manage, but when your old life is gone forever, when there’s no end in sight, how do you move past that?

James Tynion IV spends at least one issue of the series focusing on each of the members of the group, members who are picked to be archetypes for humanity, almost reduced to their role in life to fit some kind of alien agenda that Walter is working towards. There’s the artist, the pianist, the writer, the comedian, the accountant, the scientist, the reporter, the acupuncturist, the consultant, and the doctor. Each issue moves the mystery forward, deepening the mythology of the world and revealing more about Walter and his past, whilst also putting the focus squarely on each character, getting into their heads and seeing how the story is affecting them at that point.

The result is that you get a chance to know each of them, but you also feel like you’re not really spending any time with them as well. We get small insights into each of them for an issue, but them most slip into the background for a while. The only characters that seem to get a bigger focus are Walter, who we learn more about each issue as we see flashbacks to his relationships with each of the members of the group, and Norah. Norah is the character that I found to be the most fascinating of the group, and not just because I’m biased because she’s a trans woman. Norah seems to know more than is first apparent, and as the story evolves goes through some extra hardships and trials that the others don’t, and she plays a pivotal role in the ending.

Speaking of the ending, I’m not going to go into the small details of the story, as this is first and foremost a mystery, and ruining that would make reading the book pointless for anyone who hasn’t yet, but I can say that the ending feels like an ending, yet sets up for more to come. Tynion IV has seeded hints that things continue on after the events of the book from the very first page. Each issue opens with the focus character talking directly to the reader, dressed like they’re a character from Mad Max, in ruins and the wreckage of the world; something that doesn’t happen in the book itself. Whether Tynion IV is planning to do more, or if this is his way of adding further mystery, to get the reader thinking about what could happen beyond the final page, is still unknown. There are rumours that there might be more, but this has so far been based on vague statements and fan speculation. But even if it doesn’t go on, the twelve issues that we have craft a fantastic story all in itself.

The art on the series is provided by Álvaro Martínez Bueno, with Jordie Bellaire on colours, and is a wonderfully dark and moody series, one that keeps things fairly visually simple, yet manages to pack a lot onto each page. The art team are at their best when they’re either portraying the beauty of the world around the house, showcasing the rich landscape or the gorgeous buildings, or when things are going horribly wrong for the group. The moments when emotions are high (of which there are many) jump off the page as Bueno and Bellaire flood the characters with visible emotion. You don’t need to be told how they’re feeling, because you can see the anger, the range, and the despair coming off them just by how they’re standing, the looks on their faces, and the way the colours and lighting shift subtly. And each issue has covers that can only be described as works of art. They convey the horror of the story, the destruction and the loss in ways that the book doesn’t always do, and it’s easy to see how seeing these books on the shelf at your local comic book shop would lead you to picking the series up.

With DC Black Label filling up with darker and edgier superhero stories, most of which ended up being Batman, The Nice House On The Lake felt like something new and different. It took a big, bold step away from the world of super heroes and told a much more focused, character driven story that’s part mystery, part horror, part sci-fi, and part emotional drama that has an incredibly simple hook but will keep you reading and guessing throughout. Whilst it’s not the easiest read, and it’s full of dark emotions, it’s certainly never a dull one.

The Nice House On The Lake was published from June 2021 to December 2022 by DC Comics.

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The Comic Cave – Uncanny X-Men: The Dark Phoenix

 

Originally published on Set The Tape

The Comic Cave is a fortnightly feature where we spin the Wheel of Comics and see what graphic novel story it brings up for us to deep dive into! This week we take a look at Uncanny X-Men: Dark Phoenix, one of the most influential, and most adapted, X-Men stories of all time.

When Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created The X-Men, the book was far from the comics juggernaut that it would go on to be. In a Marvel landscape where characters like Spider-Man dominated the scene, and The Fantastic Four were the premier team, no one had time for this strange collection of mutants. After barely more than a decade on the shelves the series was cancelled in 1975. But, it wouldn’t be gone for long. Later that year the book would return with a new creative team, and a whole new host of characters.

Of the original five team only Cyclops would remain, continuing on as the leader, joined by a hastily assembled group of mutants from around the world, including Wolverine, Nightcrawler, Storm, and Colossus. After rescuing the original team these new heroes would stay on as the Uncanny X-Men, and under the control of Chris Claremont, would go on to become a series that dominated sales. The X-Men that people think of today, the kinds of characters that you’d pick first for a line-up, the colourful costumes unique to each member, and the wild stories involving not just evil mutants but time travel, space entities, and other universes, all came about during the Claremont era.

One of the biggest changes made early on, other than the new team, was Jean Grey sacrificing herself to save her team on a mission to space. With their ship having to pass through dangerous radiation on the way back to Earth, Jean locks the others in a chamber that will keep them safe, and flies the shuttle. After the ship crashes into the waters of Jamaica Bay the team assume Jean lost; but then she rises from beneath the waves, in a new costume, surrounded by flames, and calling herself Phoenix. After this Jean would come and go from the team, with most of the stories between Phoenix’s first appearance in X-Men # 101 and X-Men #129 (the start of this story) being as a minor character.

Despite not being on the team much her powers continued to grow, and she became an easy solution to most of team’s problems. The creative team were faced with the question of what to do with Phoenix if she could wave her hands and save the day every time. It was then suggested that perhaps Phoenix would better serve the series if she became a villain. The groundwork for this was laid across several issues, as Jean kept meeting the mysterious Jason Wyngarde, which resulted in her having visions of herself in the Regency era as his lover. But it wasn’t until X-Men #129 that things really kicked off.

The story begins with Professor Xavier detecting two new mutants that he wants the group to approach. The team splits up to go meet these new mutants, with Cyclops, Jean, and Nightcrawler heading off to meet the musician Dazzler, whilst the others go to introduce themselves to the parents of 13-year-old mutant Kitty Pryde. However, there’s another group looking to get these mutants, the Hellfire Club; which includes Jason Wyngarde. This group tries to recruit Pryde into Emma Frost’s school, whilst sending their troops to kidnap Dazzler. Cyclops and the others in New York fend off the Hellfire Club, but when Frost sees that her plan isn’t working, sends troops in to capture Kitty and the other X-Men.

Thanks to her new powers, Kitty is able to get away, but the other X-Men are captured. Using her powers, she follows the Hellfire Club to their base, and calls for the other X-Men to help. With the help of Dazzler, the others manage to infiltrate the facility and free their friends. During the rescue, Jean gets into  psychic battle with Emma Frost and defeats her, bringing the entire building down upon her. Having learned about the Hellfire Club, however, the X-Men decide to look into their new foes.

Days later, the team infiltrate a swanky party at the club’s New York premises. However, thanks to Wyngarde’s previous manipulations of Jean’s mind, he’s able to fully put her into his illusionary world, and convinces her that she’s not only his wife, but the new Black Queen of the Hellfire Club. Using their mutant powers, the leaders of the Club are able to beat the X-Men and take them prisoner. Fortunately, thanks to Wolverine’s combat skills, and the psychic bond between Jean and Cyclops, the team are eventually able to defeat the club and escape into Central Park.

However, it seems like the strain of everything Jean has gone through, and the increasing growth of her powers, have pushed her over the edge, and she changes into Dark Phoenix. Wearing a red version of her costume, she attacks the X-Men and quickly defeats them. Following this she set out into space, testing her new powers. Needing to recharge, she flies towards an alien sun and feeds upon its fires, a process that ends up destroying a nearby planet and killing all five billion inhabitants. She also engages a close by Shi’ar ship, which gains the attention of their Empress, and X-Men ally, Lilandra.

Returning to Earth, to her family home, Jean appears confused, slipping between her normal personality and the murderous Dark Phoenix. The X-Men arrive, and manage to get through to Jean, who regains control of herself. Things look to be back to normal, when the team is beamed aboard the Shi’ar Imperial Cruiser. Lilandra tells the X-Men of Jean’s genocide, and how the Phoenix Force within her must be stopped, and to that end, Jean must die. Xavier invokes a Shi’ar tradition that would allow the X-Men to fight for her freedom, and so the team engage the Shi’ar Royal Guard on a special arena on Earth’s moon.

Fighting as hard as they can to save their friend, the X-Men are defeated one by one, until only Jean and Cyclops remain. With the Dark Phoenix personality beginning to re-emerge, Jean knows that if it does it will kill everyone, including those she loves. Jean activates one of the discarded alien weapons within the ruins of the arena, and fires it at herself. Jean is reduced to ashes, the threat of the Dark Phoenix defeated by her self sacrifice.

The corruption of Jean Grey, one of the very first X-Men, and her eventual death was a story that rocked comic readers at the time. Marvel used to have a rule: dead means dead. Death has become a revolving door in comics, and characters dying and coming back has become so second nature that even just this year Marvel announced that they were killing off Ms Marvel, and then announced her return three months after her death. But, in the ’80s a character death was a big thing, and this story sent shock waves through X-Men readers. But it might surprise people to learn that this iconic comic book death was never actually supposed to happen.

The original plan for the final issue of the Dark Phoenix story was for the Shi’ar to not want to kill Jean but strip her of her powers. Much like in the final issue, the X-Men end up losing their battle on the moon. However, rather than Jean sacrificing herself, she’s placed inside a device on board the Shi’ar ship that strips her of her mutant abilities. Of course, the X-Men argue against this, saying how taking her powers not only makes her human, but makes her less than that; Wolverine has some wonderfully ableist slurs to describe this. Once stripped of her powers, Jean returns home with the others. This version of events was eventually released in a special issue, Phoenix: The Untold Story #1.

This plan never made it to print though due to Jim Shooter, who was checking out the proof copies of X-Men #135 and saw that Jean kills five billion people. Shooter had been part of the discussion to turn Jean into a cosmic villain for the team, but had been mostly hands off the production after that, so was not completely aware of the creative teams plans for her. Upon seeing that, however, he became more actively involved, and vetoed the idea of her being de-powered. In an interview in Phoenix: The Untold Story #1 he described the scenario as being like taking the German Army away from Hitler and making him live a quiet life somewhere else.

It was during discussions on what to do in the final part that creators Claremont and artist John Byrne explained that they saw the Phoenix entity as possessing Jean, and that she was therefore innocent. However, after going through the issues again they could agree that that wasn’t clear in the text, and that a more drastic punishment would be needed; and thus Jean Grey was killed off. This was a decision that the creators would later agree worked best for the story, and it was one that would impact the X-Men for decades to come.

Eventually Jean was brought back to life, with the explanation that the Phoenix Force has created a duplicate body from Jean, and that the real Jean was still beneath the waters the original Phoenix emerged from, getting around the fact that ‘Jean’ was guilty of genocide. Over the years the Phoenix Force and its relationship with Jean would continue to evolve, but Uncanny X-Men: Dark Phoenix is where this still evolving saga really began. And it caused such a stir at the time that it has become one of the most adapted and revisited story in the entire X-Men catalogue.

The story was adapted in the hugely popular X-Men: The Animated Series where both the introduction of Phoenix and the Dark Phoenix saga were told over nine parts. Unlike the comic, however, the Phoenix entity eventually left Jean, so as not to kill the character off permanently. Phoenix was heavily hinted at in the X-Men: Evolution series, and was planned to take place in its fifth season, but had to be shelved when the show was cancelled. It was also a big plot point in the final episodes of the single season show Wolverine and the X-Men.

It wasn’t just the small screen that made use of the Phoenix though, as the film X2: X-Men United saw Jean tapping into a fiery new power and sacrificing herself to save her friends, with a large, fiery bird seen briefly beneath water in the final moments. This would lead into the Dark Phoenix being a central plot point in X-Men: The Last Stand, in which she would kill several characters before eventually being stabbed to death by Wolverine. This would be revisited in the prequel films, with Jean using Phoenix-like powers in X-Men: Apocalypse, before becoming the villain in X-Men: Dark Phoenix. Interestingly, both movies that used Dark Phoenix were written by the same person, Simon Kinberg. Both movie versions were received negatively by fans.

The lasting impact of the story, its continued adaptation, the repeated use of the Phoenix Force in the stories that would come after show just a small part of the impact that the Claremont era of X-Men would have. Just in this story alone several new characters are introduced who would go on to become huge characters that would have hundreds of appearances over the years; characters like Kitty Pryde, Emma Frost, and Dazzler. Claremont would create dozens of characters and stories that would become so popular and so ingrained into the X-Men mythology that he might be one of most influential comic creators of all time, especially when it comes to one who worked on a series they didn’t create.

If you’re wanting to look at early X-Men stories, Uncanny X-Men: Dark Phoenix is a perfect book. It’s early enough into Claremont’s era to be easy and accessible, and showcases some fantastic issues. From here, the series continues to have some fantastic stories, with the hugely popular Days of Future Past only a handful of issues later. Claremont made the X-Men a group worth following, and Dark Phoenix is, for many, the story that made them realise that.

Uncanny X-Men: Dark Phoenix was published in X-Men from October 1979 to June 1980 by Marvel Comics.

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The Comic Cave – Batman Versus Predator

 

Originally published on Set The Tape

The Comic Cave is a fortnightly feature where we spin the Wheel of Comics and see what graphic novel story it brings up for us to deep dive into! This week we take a look at Batman Versus Predator, the very first time the Predator crossed-over with a pre-existing comic creation.

When the Predator franchise first came to comic form in 1989 it was a success for publisher Dark Horse, who had taken something of a gamble with the IP. Unable to use the character of Dutch, played in the film by Arnold Schwarzenegger, the writers instead created a brother character, a cop who has to deal with the alien hunters coming to the big city. Whether or not the popularity of that story, later re-printed under the name Predator: Concrete Jungle, led to the second Predator movie taking a similar route in its own story is conjecture, but what we do know is that the popularity of the book led to Dark Horse investing more into the franchise.

That same year Dark Horse crossed the Predator over with their other big 20th Century Fox franchise, Aliens, creating Alien vs Predator. Much like all of the best pairings, it’s hard to think of the two franchises as not being linked. It feels like they must have always been designed to go together, because they work together so perfectly. And it’s become a pairing that has only continued to grow in popularity over the years, even surviving terrible films. Putting the two of them together in comic form basically printed money for Dark Horse, and so the next question was ‘what other cross-overs can we do?’.

According to Dave Gibbons, who would pen the script for the cross-over we’re looking at, the idea to jump universes and put the Predator in the pages of Batman belonged to Dark Horse editor Mike Richardson. At first glance it might seem like a strange pairing, and it might seem like the only reason to put the two together is to cash in on Batman’s sales numbers. But when you consider that Batman not only exists in a universe with aliens, but is best friends with one, him fighting the Predator isn’t too outlandish. And when you look beyond his familiar rogues’ gallery and see that he’s fought demons, vampires, ancient gods, and all kinds of supernatural, there’s nothing that’s really too out of character for Batman to fight.

The book opens in Gotham City, where a boxing title match is underway, with each of the fighters representing one of two warring crime bosses in the city: Alex Yeager and Leo Brodin. Across the city, in one of the junkyards, a man sits in his trailer watching the fight when something spooks his dog. Investigating, his gun drawn and ready, the man is blown apart by an invisible killer. The Yautja hunter enters the trailer, watching the end of the fight on the screen, with Yeager’s fighter crowned the city’s champion.

Later that night the winning fighter is relaxing in his hotel room with his girlfriend when the skylight shatters, and the Predator drops into the room, thirsty for blood. When the police come to investigate they find the blood and carnage and the Bat-signal is immediately lit. Batman, Commissioner Gordon, and his right-hand woman, Detective Kandowski, examine the scene, finding the headless boxer and the traumatised girlfriend, all whilst the invisible killer watches on. The Predator identifies Batman as worthy prey, and follows him as he leaves to question Leo Brodin and his men, believing them responsible for the death of the winning fighter.

Batman goes to Brodin’s gym, and briefly fights with the criminals there, but leaves satisfied that Brodin had nothing to do with the death of the champion fighter. Returning home to Wayne Manor, he spends some time time thinking over the case, but is summoned back out into the night by Gordon, who reveals that Brodin’s gym was hit after Batman left, and that everyone but a blind trainer was slaughtered. As they lead the trainer out of the gym he’s shot by an energy blast, killing him. The GCPD open fire on the rooftop, but fail to hit anything. Three red dots briefly appear on Batman’s chest, before the creature leaves, his warning given.

In the Batcave, Batman examines some rust left behind at the gym, and comes to the conclusion the killer is hiding in a scrapyard. As he goes off to watch over a meeting between the crime bosses and the mayor, he sends Alfred to check out junkyards for him. At the meeting the Predator attacks once again, and Batman learns that he’s dealing with an alien. Brodin manages to wound the creature, and it escapes. Using Alfred’s information, Batman heads to one of the scrapyards to confront the monster.

Unfortunately, the Predator comes close to killing Batman, and he’s forced to flee in the Batmobile before it finishes the job. Heavily wounded, he begins to recover at Wayne Manor as the Predator continues his hunt. Over the coming night more victims are claimed by the creature, including the Mayor, and Leo Brodin. It seems like everyone who makes a statement on television about stopping the murders becomes the creature’s next victim, and once Commissioner Gordon appears on the news he becomes the next target.

As Batman lies in his hospital bed, recovering from his wounds, he works on technology that he’ll need in order to challenge the alien once again, knowing that until he does there’s no way he can survive. As Batman continues to fail to answer the Bat-signal the city starts to lose hope, and the Predator reigns supreme. Eventually, it comes for Gordon, killing its way through his protection detail. It’s only thanks to the sacrifice of Detective Kandowski that he survives the night. As he retreats back to GCPD to think of a plan the Bat-signal ignites. Gordon and his men rush to the roof, to find an armoured Batman waiting for them. Rematch time has come.

Batman uses the signal to lure the Predator in, and the two clash once again. His new armour protects him from the energy weapons, and his mask lets him see the creature, giving him half a chance. The two fight across the GCPD roof, over the edge, and into the street below. Knowing the city is no place to fight the monster, Batman summons the Batmobile, and drives away, with the Predator clutched onto the bonnet, trying to kill him. Speeding out of the city, Batman takes the creature to the forest outside Wayne Manor. Here he uses bat swarms to disorient it, causing it to crash through a hole into the Batcave, where a net is waiting for it. However, the Predator breaks free.

Fortunately, Batman was prepared for this, and lures it into a trap, caging it behind thick metal bars. With nowhere to go, knowing that it’s lost, the monster activates the bomb on its wrist. Batman recognises it as a bomb, and stops it from going off; he breaks it, but releases the Predator in the process. The creature begins to get the upper hand, and starts beating Batman across the cave. It’s then that we get the best moment in the book, an ‘ahem’ from off panel as Alfred stands holding a blunderbuss. A polite ‘That’s quite enough thank you’, then Alfred shoots the Predator in the chest. I love Alfred Pennyworth, and this might be one of the greatest things he’s ever done.

The heavily wounded Predator escapes from the cave, up into Wayne Manor, where it smashes through the window in the games room back out into the forest. Batman follows behind, grabbing the first weapon he finds in the wreckage, a baseball bat. Finding the creature in the woods he starts smacking it around with the weapon with a ridiculously brilliant ‘it’s me… Batman’, before the forest is illuminated by an alien ship. Several Predators come out, including their leader. The leader hands the defeated Predator a sword, and it uses it to take its own life, ending its shame. The sword is then presented to Batman as a trophy, and the aliens leave.

The first question for stories like this, where two unconnected things come together, is ‘is it actually any good?’. Yes, absolutely so. Batman Versus Predator does the perfect thing for a crossover: it makes both sides work well. The Predator in the book here does do some things a little differently to others we’d seen by this point and since, such as taking hands as well as heads as trophies, and does kill an unarmed man at one point, but he still seems to be playing by rules. Much like the creature in Predator 2, which focuses on Danny Glover’s character to a scary degree, this monster is doing his own thing, and going to an extreme, but you can see a twisted logic to it.

The Predator goes after the champion boxer because the TV said he’s the city’s champion, so that makes him worthy prey. After his death, the other boxer is declared champ by default, so becomes a target. And as the TV that has been left running in the trailer the creature has set up shop in keeps showing people who declare that they’re going to stop the killings and bring the Predator down it adds more and more victims to the list. The only person really who ends up becoming a target the traditional way is Batman. This Predator is different to most, but he’s still recognisably a Predator, and he still gets moments to shine, he still gets gory kills, and to be scary, and so the book ticks those boxes.

But the Predator was probably the easiest thing to get right here; making it work with Batman is the harder part. Luckily, Gibbons is experienced with the character, and knows how to make something as outlandish as this work in his world. Batman fighting the Predator feels no more out of place than him dealing with Bane, or the Joker. And, as with some of his villains, he has to investigate to find the bad guy, he is physically challenged, and has to overcome the odds using his brain to win the day. In some ways it almost feels like a proto-story for Knightfall in which Batman will be so beaten by his opponent that the city falls into terror, and the next Batman builds armour to fight him. So yes, this absolutely works as a Batman story too.

Other characters like Gordon and Alfred get utilised well here too, and the scenes in which Gordon is saved by Kandowski are dark and upsetting, and Gordon’s reaction to it makes it the only death in the book that feels like more than just a moment of gore and spectacle; she was someone you were supposed to care about, and Gordon makes you do so. But as my enthusiasm earlier made clear, Alfred is the stand out here. Alfred defending the Batcave with a gun is something that gets used again in future stories, but none of them work as well as they do here. The fact that this is all in continuity for the DC universe, and that these are our regular versions of these characters makes it better too (you actually get to see a Predator mask in Batman’s trophy room in issue 56 of JLA a decade later).

The art on the three issue series is by Andy Kubert, with his brother Adam lettering and inking, with Sherilyn van Valkenburgh on colours, and looks absolutely gorgeous. Kubert is a name that folks into comics will recognise, and Andy and Adam are sons of the great Joe Kubert, who founded The Kubert School which has taught many comic artists over the years. The book is suitably grim and gritty looking, with dark colours and grime abounding. But it also has a sharpness and crispness to it that makes this a wonderfully atmospheric and detailed book to read. The Kuberts are true giants of the industry, and most pages of this book could easily adorn any wall.

The success of the series, released as three prestige bound books, led to further crossovers between the two characters, though none received the acclaim that the first did. As with most DC crossovers with the Predator and Alien franchises, the first time is usually the best, and thanks to Disney now owning Fox, and the Alien and Predator books being made through Marvel, there will not only likely never be any more crossovers with DC, but no more copies of these stories printed. So, if you ever find a copy of Batman Versus Predator on the shelf, do yourself a favour, and grab it whilst you can.

Batman Versus Predator was published by DC Comics and Dark Horse from December 1991 to February 1992.

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The Comic Cave – Invincible: Family Matters

 

Originally published on Set The Tape

The Comic Cave is a fortnightly feature where we spin the Wheel of Comics and see what graphic novel story it brings up for us to deep dive into! This week we take a look at Invincible: Family Matters, the first volume in the hugely popular Image Comics series Invincible.

Most people have heard of Marvel and DC, the two titans of the comics industry whose heroes are the most iconic and well known in the world. However, in the 1990s DC wasn’t in the top two, it was trailing at number three as a new company came into power, Image Comics. Founded in 1992 by Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee, and Rob Liefeld, creators who had achieved huge success with Marvel and DC, but who felt that they weren’t getting the attention or accolades they deserved, and that by working on other people’s properties they wouldn’t make the kind of money they wanted.

Image was founded on the notion that creators would own their characters; the company would print the stories, but it was ultimately the people who made the stories who were the owners. This led to a number of big names, and up and coming talent, heading over to Image to try their hand at making their own big thing. And it worked. Image comics sold in huge numbers, and the darker, grittier, and more violent nature of Image Comics attracted an audience who weren’t getting those things at Marvel and DC. Characters like Spawn, Youngbloods, Savage Dragon, ShadowHawk, and Gen13 came out of nowhere and took the industry by storm, making a name for the company.

Whilst things eventually shifted over the years, and the Image bubble burst somewhat and DC once again became part of the ‘big 2’, Image continued to produce brand new projects. One creator who worked well with them was Robert Kirkman, who launched two hugely popular series with Image in 2003, one being the horror comic The Walking Dead, and the other being the superhero series Invincible.

Invincible tells the story of Marc Grayson, a seventeen-year-old boy in the US, who’s doing the best he can at school, flips burgers, and is a bit of a geek and the kind of guy who gets overlooked by the popular crowd. He’s perfectly average and normal; at least that’s how it appears. Marc is the son of Nolan, a popular writer who is also secretly the superhero Omni-Man, one of the strongest men on Earth. Marc has grown up watching his dad save the world, and has lived a life where his father can speed off at any moment to go save the world, never knowing if he and his mother will see him again.

Despite these pressures, the family seems to be doing well, and Marc hasn’t let his father’s power or fame go to his head. He’s also been patiently waiting for the day when his own powers might kick in. One day he’s taking out the trash at work, and as he throws the bag into the dumpster it instead shoots up into the sky. From here Marc’s powers quickly build, and soon he’s much like his father, and he can fly, move incredibly fast, has super strength, and is pretty invulnerable. And, like his father, he wants to do the right thing and becomes a hero, donning a homemade costume.

When his father takes him to see his special tailor, a man who creates everyone’s suits, he asks for something ‘iconic’, something that will make him stand out and be remembered. Looking for inspiration for the design, he finally comes upon his hero name, Invincible. Now, wearing a black, blue, and yellow suit that just so happens to resemble the Image Comics logo, Marc sets out to build a name for himself. He soon teams up with the Teen Team, a group of young heroes including the mechanical Robot, Dupli-Kate who can make multiple versions of herself, the destructive Rex Splode, and Atom Eve, who is able to change objects at an atomic level. He also learns that Eve, real name Samantha, goes to his school.

Marc begins to settle into his new role as a hero, working alongside the Teen Team, and becoming good friends with Samantha, but soon learns of a number of students going missing from his school, all of who later turn up in various shopping malls with explosive devices embedded in their chests. As Marc and Samantha set out to put a stop to this series of forced suicide bombings they learn that the culprit is much closer than they first thought.

Invincible: Family Matters is an okay introduction to the world of Invincible. I say okay, because the book only contains the first four issues, and not a huge amount really happens in those issues. Well, perhaps that’s not completely true, as Robert Kirkman has a habit of packing a lot of stuff into his comics; just look at how the very first issue of The Walking Dead told a story that most series would do over an entire six issue arc. The first four issues of Invincible give you a lot, you get to know Marc, you see him become a hero, he makes new friends, he gets his first real villain to try and stop, and we get a big backstory for his father in the second issue too. A lot happens here, but none of it really gives you much reason to keep going with the series.

There’s no hook in this first volume, it’s a set up for a new world and a new group of characters, but there’s nothing here to indicate that there’s a bigger narrative than just watching Marc be a hero. I’m sure, however, there’ll be some readers who know what’s coming with this series, even if your only knowledge is the TV series. This is because something happens just a couple of issues later that really should have been included in this first volume to get people invested. Spoilers for a twenty year old book: Omni-Man, Marc’s father, murders this world’s equivalent of the Justice League, and Marc learns that his father isn’t a benevolent alien protector here to guard the planet, but a conqueror for a race of warrior aliens who want to rule the galaxy.

This revelation is the big hook for the series, and informs everything that comes after it and plays a huge part in things to come. The fact that it’s not included in the first graphic novel is frankly astonishing, and may be why some people ended up not really realising this was a series to pay attention to. That has changed, however, as the previously mentioned animated series has gotten a lot more people aware of Invincible, but the book really didn’t help itself with the division of the issues. As such, anyone thinking of picking up the series would be better avoiding Invincible: Family Matters and instead getting the first volumes of Invincible The Ultimate Collection Vol 1 which collects 13 issue, The Complete Invincible Library Vol. 1 which collects 26 issues, or Invincible Compendium Vol. 1 which collects 50 issues.

Outside of the problems with the main meat of the series not being included in the first book, Invincible: Family Matters is an enjoyable read. Even with only four issues we get a good idea of the kind of person Marc is, and a lot of the qualities that he has here will continue to be a big part of his character for most of the series. He’s a decent kid, and makes for a good protagonist for the story that Kirkman is telling. He has a fun, youthful energy that comes from being a teen hero, and those readers that enjoy the mix of personal life dramas and super heroics of something like Ultimate Spider-Man will find a lot here to like too.

The art for the book, by Cory Walker, with colours by Bill Crabtree, are simple and neat to look at. The book doesn’t get bogged down in tons of detail, nor does it drape everything in dark shades and heavy shadows. The book is fairly easy to look at, with art that’s brightly coloured with minimal shading involved. Because of that there’s not really a single panel that I’ve come across in the series (up to issue 35 at least) where I’ve found myself lost because of the art, or unsure of what I’m looking at. The character designs are all really good, and you can see where some characters are making small nods to existing comics from time to time. The art team work well together, and whilst Cory Walker does leave the series after issue #7, the style established here remains consistent for the series as a whole, and the title remains true to what’s established here.

With the second season of the animated series airing its first half this November, with the rest airing in 2024, now is a great time to jump into the comics that inspired the show. As with most adaptations, the show does things differently, and you’re not going to just be getting the same story again, but a different, enjoyable version of the same tale. So why not go out and pick up a copy of Invincible and get caught up in time for the new episodes?

Invincible was originally published for 144 issues by Image Comics from January 2003 to February 2018.

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The Comic Cave – Green Arrow: Year One

 

Originally published on Set the Tape

The Comic Cave is a fortnightly feature where we spin the Wheel of Comics and see what graphic novel story it brings up for us to deep dive into! This week we take a look at Green Arrow: Year One, the post-Crisis origin for DC’s Emerald Archer.

Today, thanks in large part to the CW television series Arrow, the character of Green Arrow has a decent following, and is known to people who may never have picked up a comic book before. Despite the series playing incredibly fast and loose with the character (he was treated like a green Batman) it made one of the earliest members of the Justice League better known, and it made people begin to see him as more than just a Robin Hood-like character. But those who read the books knew this already, we understood that despite the sometimes cheesy outfit Oliver Queen was an amazing character. And 2008’s Green Arrow: Year One showcases that brilliantly.

Chances are if you were a reader of Green Arrow comics you’d know his origin story: marooned on a deserted island, billionaire playboy Oliver Queen had to learn to survive until his eventual rescue, using a bow and arrow to hunt. As with most characters though, this origin went through some revisions, and the origin that everyone knows for Oliver Queen isn’t even his first one. Originally, the character was an archaeologist who specialised in Native American culture. This Golden Age origin was altered by the great Jack Kirby in the Silver Age to the one we know. Post-Crisis changes kept a lot of these changes, and altered how Oliver manages to get off the island, changing it from saving a passing ship from pirates, to him fighting criminals on the island who are using it to grow drugs. And Green Arrow: Year One takes this story and expands it into a six issue mini series.

The book begins with Oliver Queen, a young billionaire playboy, travelling the world with his bodyguard/survival expert Hackett, who is taking Ollie to extreme locations, such as the north pole. Ollie has a lust for adventure, a desire to experience the thrill of adrenaline in the most remote, dangerous, and extreme environments. After a brief trip to the Arctic, the two of them head home to Star City, where Oliver attends a charity auction to raise money for drug rehabilitation centres in the city. He’s come for one particular item, a bow and arrow set once owned by the legendary archer Howard Hill.

Hill, who is a real person, performed the archer in old Robin Hood movies that Oliver watched as a kid. He loved the films so much that his parents even paid to have Hill train him for a while. Oliver drunkenly boasts that Hill told him he had the most raw talent he’d ever seen in an archer, but like most everything else in his life Ollie gave up on it. However, his love for it is still there, and he immediately bids a ridiculous amount for the bow and wins it. In his drunken ramblings Oliver manages to insult everyone else at the auction, and makes a fool of himself. This makes Oliver decide that he needs to get out of the city for a while.

Luckily for him, Hackett is due to leave Star City on Oliver’s private yacht in order to make an illegal deal for him. Hackett has set Oliver up with the opportunity to secretly invest in a new resort being built in Fiji by an old business associate of his, Chien Na-Wei. Armed with a bag filled with $14 million, Hackett is supposed to sail out into the pacific to meet Chien Na-Wei and make the handover. Oliver sees this as the perfect opportunity to get out of the city after his embarrassment at the auction, and insists on joining Hackett, even if Hackett keeps telling him it’s a bad idea for him to go.

Days later, out in the ocean, Hackett confronts Oliver. There is no resort deal. Hackett is stealing Oliver’s money, but now that Oliver is on the boat Hackett has to deal with him too. The two of them fight, and Hackett gets the upper hand over his former friend. Despite knowing he needs to kill Ollie, and receiving orders to shoot Oliver in the head from a mysterious phone call, Hackett dumps the unconscious Oliver over the edge of the ship, leaving him in the middle of the Pacific, thousands of miles away from civilisation. Fortunately, Oliver doesn’t drown, and eventually washes up on the beach of a remote island.

From here we observe Oliver trying to survive on the island, using the few bits of survival knowledge he’s picked up from all of his extreme vacations and Hackett over the years. He eventually finds an old village on the island, burned to the ground and abandoned. Scavenging supplies, he manages to find a water source, and crafts himself a rudimentary bow from scrap metal, and makes arrows from bamboo. Oliver uses the bow and arrow to hunt, and is able to keep alive. He keeps on improving his equipment, crafting better arrows, arrows fletched with the green feathers of the island’s parrots.

One day, months into his time on the island, a plane comes flying in low over the beach. Oliver tries to signal for help with a flare arrow, but soon realises his mistake when one of the people on the plane begins to shoot at him with a rifle. Oliver manages to wound the attacker with his bow, causing the man to shoot up the cockpit, crashing the plane into the centre of the island. Oliver takes off after it, and discovers that it has crashed in a mountaintop crater in the centre of the island, a crater being used to grow fields of poppy seeds.

As Oliver scavenges from the crash, a pregnant woman named Taiana, approaches him. She tells him how the criminals came to her island, killed those who resisted them, and enslaved the rest, forcing them to work the poppy fields in order to grow their drug crop. Oliver is forced to hide when more of the slavers arrive, including Hackett, and their boss, Chien Na-Wei. Knowing that the island is home to a group of ruthless killers, and that the man who betrayed him is there, Oliver begins a guerrilla war on the slavers, attacking them from the jungle. Eventually, Oliver launches a full scale assault on the criminals, one where he will either destroy their operation and free the slaves, or die trying.

Green Arrow: Year One is an incredibly stripped down, back to basics approach for the character, one that if you changed the lead characters name could just be a cool action comic set in the real world. The book shows a realistic version of the DC Universe, because there are no hints at the DC Universe existing here. Other than the names Oliver Queen and Star City being in one issue there’s nothing here that ties it to the larger universe. There’s no mention of Superman or Batman, the bad guys don’t have any kind of powers, and you don’t even see Oliver as the actual Green Arrow until the final page of the book. But none of these things are criticisms at all.

Andy Diggle, who never again wrote for Green Arrow after this, has a history of writing for non-superhero comics, having begun his career in British comics writing for 2,000AD, before moving across to writer American comics in the DC Vertigo imprint, creating for characters like Constantine in the Hellblazer series. Diggle’s history of writing less showy, less colourful characters sets him in good stead for this story. Despite people thinking of Green Arrow as being a bit hokey, of dressing a bit like Robin Hood, this story doesn’t do that, and makes a very real, and very justifiable version of the character. He isn’t wearing all green, sporting a fancy hat or hood. He’s wearing scraps of clothing, and he’s wearing a hood sewn together from scavenged tarp to keep the potentially deadly sun off his head during the day. He’s not making a fashion choice, he’s doing the best he can.

Despite this stripped down, bare bones version of the character it still feels like Oliver Queen. The douchey playboy at the start of the book fits the background you expect for the character, and the events on the island fit into the kind of person he will eventually become. The island is his crucible, it’s taking the raw elements of who he was before and forging them anew. The parts of the book where we get to see this, seeing him search for water, building his shelter, refining his equipment, are fascinating to watch as we’re seeing a man broken down and remade into something better than he was before.

The book also does action incredibly well, and manages to make a man with a bow and arrow feel interesting each and every time he has to go into battle. The first time we see him having to turn his weapons on another human is when he ends up shooting down a plane, something that sounds ridiculous on paper, yet the book makes feel very plausible. After this, the next action sequence is Oliver and Hackett hunting each other through the island jungle. This is perhaps my favourite part of the entire series, and the issue it takes place in, issue three, is one of the best in the book. Later in the book we see Oliver starting to do things that you expect from Green Arrow, covering arrow tips in tar to create burning arrows, removing the tip from an arrow to create knock-out arrows, and performing trick shots that take out multiple opponents at the same time.

There are a lot of elements here that fit into the character as already established, whilst the book does add new things to the story. Characters like Hackett, Chien Na-Wei, and Taiana are all new to this book, and their inclusion doesn’t alter Oliver’s origin in huge, substantial ways, but it does make it more personal for him, it does add more depth, and it makes him surviving on a remote island into something more interesting than just ‘I hung out on the beach for a few months’. A lot of the elements introduced in this book would actually go on to be included in the already mentioned Arrow television series. Chien Na-Wei, who Ollie keeps calling China White, would go on to become a recurring villain in the series, appearing in thirteen episodes across the eight seasons. Taiana would also appear, in a similar story in the fourth season flashbacks, where she and a number of people have been enslaved to work drug fields on the island. Most notably, however, would the the character of John Diggle, played by David Ramsey, who was named after Andy Diggle (his brother would later be introduced in the show, named Andy).

The artist Jock, also British born like Diggle, provides the art on the book, alongside colourist David Baron, and helps to sell the more grounded, realistic take on the character. The two of them had previously worked together on Diggle’s Vertigo series The Losers, and they seem to work well together, with a creative process whose end result is gorgeous. Jock has a way of creating both weight and a sense of movement to his figures, and the times where Oliver is running around the island, stalking his prey, attacking from the shadows, all look fantastic. The colours play a large part in the art too, and there are some scenes where certain colours seem to take over everything.

For example, the scene where Oliver is fighting with Hackett in the jungle is incredibly green. Some panels are simply Oliver’s silhouette in an action pose in front of a plain green background, which feels like it shouldn’t work, but looks absolutely gorgeous. It’s also not a coincidence that the first scene in which Oliver chooses to take action against bad people, to becomes the kind of hero he’s destined to be, is filled with the colour green. The colours don’t just help to set the scene, but they indicate where we are in Oliver’s journey too. There are a ridiculous number of pages and panels in this book that you could take out and slap onto a poster and they’d make for gorgeous Green Arrow prints.

Green Arrow is one of those characters where those who don’t really know much about him tend to dismiss him. ‘He’s just a guy with a bow and arrow’, ‘he looks like Robin Hood’, but there’s a lot more to the character than people first think. Green Arrow: Year One showcases how versatile he is, how you can take this character and drop him into an action movie setting and it works. He’s one of the biggest characters in the DC Universe, he was the first person to join the Justice League outside of the founding seven, and he’s been around since the Golden Age. Oliver Queen is more than an archer, more than a guy who wears green, and this book proves that. If you want to make a great Green Arrow movie that will appeal to folks who don’t normally go in for superheroes, this book would make the perfect basis for it.

Green Arrow: Year One was published by DC Comics from July 2007 to October 2007.

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The Comic Cave – Old Man Logan

 

Originally published on Set The Tape

The Comic Cave is a fortnightly feature where we spin the Wheel of Comics and see what graphic novel story it brings up for us to deep dive into! This week we take a look at Old Man Logan, a Wolverine story that’s often held up as one of the character’s best. But is it actually any good?

It’s hard to think of the X-Men and not imagine them as one of Marvel Comics’ biggest properties. 1991’s X-Men #1 is the highest selling comic of all time, when Marvel was in danger of going bankrupt in the 90s the various X books kept them going, they’ve had successful television shows and films. They’re big money for Marvel. That’s why people are often surprised to learn that the X-Men were originally cancelled, and it wasn’t until they were given a second chance with Giant Sized X-Men under the creative leadership of Len Wein that the franchise really took off. Part of this was down to the new roster of mutants in flashy costumes unique to each of them. And one that stood out immediately was Wolverine.

Originally introduced in an Incredible Hulk story, Wolverine made the jump to the X-Men and got a lot of his details smoothed out and improved, and soon became one of the most popular characters in Marvel. Over the years the character has had multiple mini-series, his own title, and his mysterious hidden past has been explored and revealed in depth. He’s even been allowed to join the Avengers, which – considering he routinely horribly murders people with knives that come out of his hands – is a bit of a surprise for sure. But, when a character is that popular there’s pretty much nothing the Marvel will say no to them doing. And this might be a large part of why we got Old Man Logan, a story originally published in the third volume of the solo Wolverine title.

Written by Mark Millar, with art by Steve McNiven, Old Man Logan transports readers 50 years into the future of the Marvel Universe, to a dark time where the heroes have fallen and the US is a wasteland of crime and corruption. We find Logan, older, with grey hair and a weathered face, living with his wife on a small pig farm in California, struggling to get by. They have got issues with sick pigs, and no one wants to buy from them, leading them to struggle to make their rent. His wife raises the idea of selling their kids’ toys to try and make some cash, which Logan instantly shoots down. Instead, he takes the beating given to him by his landlords, the Hulks.

Bruce Banner is the warlord who rules over California, and he does so thanks to his children, a group of inbred, disfigured rednecks that he created by raping his own cousin, and eventually then having sex with his own daughters. The result is a gang of cruel, even more monstrous Hulks who could easily fit into stories such as The Hills Have Eyes. Shortly after Logan takes his beating from the Hulks, an old friend arrives on his doorstep: the former Avenger Hawkeye. Hawkeye, now an old blind man, needs to transport a package across the US, and offers to pay Logan to help him get it there. Knowing that this is his best hope at raising money, and enough money to keep the Hulks happy for a long while, he agrees to go with Hawkeye. He has one condition, however: he will not fight.

Thus begins a cross-country road trip as the two old heroes jump into the spider-buggy, and head for New Babylon, the new US Capital. This gives Millar an excuse to show off the state of the rest of the country, as we spend several issues watching the two leads go from place to place, getting into awful situations. We get small insights into what happened when the heroes fell, learning that the key villains divided the country between them, and see all kind of odd things such as Ghost Rider gangs, roving dinosaurs, giant dead bodies, and natural disasters.

Along the way Hawkeye learns that his daughter from his third wife (and Spider-Man‘s daughter) Ashley, has decided to become a hero, taking inspiration from her grandfather, wearing a Spider-Man inspired costume and taking up the name Spider-Bitch. Spider-Bitch and a couple of other new heroes go after Kingpin, but get captured. When Hawkeye learns of this he and Logan go to help her get free, but learn that she didn’t go to take on the Kingpin to free people from his rule, but to take over. With her now in control of his criminal empire the two men are forced to flee as Ashley tries to kill her own father.

Later, Logan (who still hasn’t stepped into any of the fights) reveals why he’s a pacifist. It turns out that the big fall of the heroes happened because all of the villains banded together, swapped notes, switched up which heroes they fight, and all attacked at the same time. When the attack on the X-Mansion came, Logan was present as dozens of villains such as Omage-Red, Sabertooth, Bullseye, Mr Sinister, and Doctor Octopus broke in and tried to kill the children. Logan jumped into action and killed as many of them as he could, wondering desperately why he was the only X-Man protecting the school. After an hour of fighting he killed the last assailant, and it’s revealed that he was never fighting villains. Only one bad guy came to Xavier’s, Mysterio. Using his tech, he made the X-Men look and smell like the other villains, and tricked Logan into murdering all of his friends. This is why, 50 years later, Logan refuses to ever pop his claws again.

After several issues along the way, such as sink holes, and a Venom-infected T-Rex, the two make it to the capital, where it’s revealed to the reader that Red Skull rules over his territory from a swastika-emblazoned White House. Hawkeye reveals that he was transporting a case full of vials of super soldier serum for a fledgling resistance force hoping to create an army of Captain America-powered heroes, and take on the Red Skull. But it turns out the whole thing is a sting operation, and he and Logan are shot and murdered.

Their bodies are brought before the Red Skull in his trophy room, a room filled with pieces of the heroes he helped to kill, such as Iron Man‘s armour, a piece of the Silver Surfer board, one of the Thing’s arms, and Doctor Strange‘s cloak. Logan bursts out of the body bag he’s in, and attacks the Red Skull, decapitating him with Captain America’s broken shield. Grabbing the case full of cash from the bogus deal, he puts on Iron Man’s armour, and flies out of the building, heading home to California. Unfortunately, when he arrives he learns that the Hulks came back a few days after he left, and his wife and children have been murdered.

Wolverine pops his claws, and sets out for revenge. Over the final issue of the story Wolverine methodically makes his way through the Hulk clan, killing each and every one that he can find. Eventually he comes face to face with Bruce Banner, who’s become a tiny and pathetic man. Banner transforms into a giant, monstrous version of the Hulk, and eats Wolverine. Believing that Wolverine is dead, the Hulk relaxes, but is ripped apart from the inside as Wolverine claws his way out. Looking at the murdered and mutilated remains of the Hulk clan, Logan finds a tiny Hulk baby in the ruins, and takes it with him. The book ends with Logan burying his family, and setting out to try and make the world a better place whilst raising his new son.

Old Man Logan, as you’ve probably realised from the description, is not a nice book. It is filled with violence, gore, and general nastiness that feels very much at home in Mark Millar’s writing. Millar is perhaps one of my least liked writers in comics, and there are very few of his books that I find actually enjoyable. Civil War is perhaps the best of his work even if it runs out of steam at the end, ends horribly, and turns a number of heroes into horrible people. But crafting horrible people is a key feature in Millar’s work, and Old Man Logan exemplifies a lot of that in a number of ways.

The entire premise of the book hinges on something that feels slightly ridiculous: the idea that all it takes to destroy the world is for the villains to have a meeting and decide to work together. The book doesn’t reveal an amazing scheme, a piece of tech or magic that swung the war in their favour, instead it makes the heroes look ineffectual and weak by just having the villains all jump them at the same time. And this kind of sums up a lot of the book; stuff just happens with little to no explanation, purely because Millar thought it would be cool.

Things such as dinosaurs roaming through the US gets a hand-wave explanation. Venom goes on a T-Rex because it would look cool. Emma Frost and Black Bolt have a super special safe haven carved out for them and the last few mutants. Why? Millar doesn’t appear to care, and doesn’t fill us in on it. How does a biker gang have Ghost Rider bikes, when you have to be a Ghost Rider to have one, and they’re just regular people? Don’t worry about it, just look at the flaming motorcycles. It’s all spectacle and flash with nothing to it, that could be removed from the book and you’d lose nothing from it.

And it wouldn’t be a Millar book if rape wasn’t included somewhere in the story, this time with the Hulk raping his own cousin and his daughters. Rape is a subject that seems to pop up whenever Millar is able to get it into a book. In Nemesis, the story’s lead character kidnaps a girl, impregnates her with her own brother’s baby, and sets up her womb to collapse if she tries to have an abortion, rendering her infertile if she doesn’t have an incest baby. In Kick-Ass 2 the hero’s girlfriend is gang raped by the villains to get at him. In Wanted, the protagonist commits rape multiple times. In The Authority, a villain travels back in time and molests one of the heroes to mess with them in the future, a hospital victim gets raped, villains are punished with rape, and one of the series’ prominent gay heroes is raped by a villain. And, in the 90s, when DC killed Superman and broke Batman‘s back, Mark Millar pitched a similar story for Wonder Woman, ‘The Rape of Wonder Woman‘ which reportedly would have been a full issue sexual assault scene that ended with Wonder Woman raped in public.

When coupled with stories of his that have included depictions of domestic violence, racism, brutal violence, excessive swearing, and other ‘edgy’ content it’s hard for me to see Millar as nothing but a writer pandering to the teen boy demographic, or those readers who delight in the awful, who hate superhero comics as they normally exist, and who don’t see harm in the depictions of sexual violence against women. It’s made even worse that Millar has seemingly shown no care in how this constant depiction of rape has been used. In an interview with The New Republic, when asked about it, he said: “I don’t really think it matters. It’s the same as, like, a decapitation. It’s just a horrible act to show that somebody’s a bad guy.” With that kind of attitude it’s hard to really get on board with Millar.

The awful writing aside, the art in Old Man Logan is, at least, good art. The times where McNiven isn’t having to draw incest hillbillies or gruesome murders make for some decent parts of the book. The desolate landscapes looks eerily beautiful, the characters all have a sense of realism to them that you don’t always get, and some of the designs for the locations and characters the heroes meet along their journey are very interesting. It’s a shame that so much time is given over to the violence and gore, and we couldn’t have spent more time seeing more of this dark future, as McNiven seems to be doing his best to make the world work, and it would have been good to see more of that.

Old Man Logan took place within the pages of Wolverine, in the middle of another writer’s run on the character. This, along with the future setting, makes the story feel very out of place, and it’s odd that the series wasn’t released as a stand alone mini-series, as it had no effect on the main title. However, this wouldn’t be the last time this character and setting would be used. A younger looking version of this Logan, along with his now adult Hulk son, Bruce Jr, would appear in Fantastic Force, as part of a new superhero team setting the future world right. Old Man Logan would return years later as part of the Secret Wars crossover event, which would see the older version of Logan come into the main Marvel 616 universe, where he headed up his own 50-issue series, as well as appearing in other books.

Old Man Logan is a book that often gets brought up in discussions about great Marvel stories, and stand out Wolverine books. But with the story being both an alternate future and a different universe it bears little to no impact upon the Wolverine we know, or the main universe. As a standalone story it will either deeply appeal or deeply disgust. Millar is a divisive writer, and how you feel about him and the things that he puts into his stories will affect how you enjoy this book. If you have no issue with that, and love Old Man Logan, then it’s a great book, and if not, then perhaps it’s hard not to agree with Grant Morrison’s feelings on the man.

Old Man Logan was originally published in Wolverine from June 2008 to September 2009 by Marvel Comics .

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