BAD DUDES: Power Man, Shaft, and David Walker's Very Good Week

The cover of SHAFT #1. The variants are handsome, too.

I didn't plan to buy and compare two books with NYC-based black vigilantes this week, but oh, am I glad I did. If you aren't following David F. Walker yet, oh, you will be.

Both of the books I read this week feature characters that have captured the popular consciousness through television appearances, but beyond that, they couldn't be more different...even in terms of how they represent themselves when compared to their audiovisual counterparts.

Power Man & Iron Fist #1, featuring art from Sanford Greene, is a stylistic feat for the Marvel relaunch. Within its pages, Luke Cage and Danny Rand pal around New York City to help their old friend and recently-freed office manager, Jennie, retrieve an amulet with a great, though implied, power. The MacGuffin here is rather inconsequential, although it does lead to a fun encounter with a wonderfully drawn Tombstone.

Seriously, look how cool Tombstone looks. Sanford Greene pulled no stylistic punches with this debut.

Thankfully, the real highlight of the story here is the banter between Luke and Danny. Their conflict is clear and well-worn in a familiar, fun way. Luke Cage is now a total family man, with his wife Jessica and his baby girl waiting at home. He doesn't want to be called Power Man at any point, and Jessica even takes shots at his old tiara. Danny, however, can't wait to be Iron Fist, changing in the car and preferring to be called his superhero name by people who know his true identity. Danny's ready to jump back in and make Heroes for Hire work, while Luke insists that they are only friends now, and not business partners.

TANGENT ALERT: Of all the shifts Marvel has made after Secret Wars to make their print universe seem more like the MCU, it really stands out to me that they haven't shifted Jessica Jones back to a more independent, dark state. Daredevil couldn't look more like Charlie Cox, I'm pretty sure they've stenciled Iron Man panels over shots of RDJ, and Reed and Sue Richards may as well be on the thinly-veiled FOX planet. Seeing 13 episodes of Jessica Jones cussing, drinking, and giving Luke Cage the sweetest of Christmases makes it all the stranger to read her asking her husband to clean up his potty mouth around their daughter, for whom she stays home and does not work. TANGENT OVER.

Greene's amazing angles (check out his final page arrangements of Jennie and Black Mariah, and how they become equals after a boisterous intro for Mariah) and the confident, consistent color scheme for the book provide an interesting canvas for Walker's story, which plays with toys that he clearly loves (I could read the banter between the Heroes for Hire for hours) while warming up to something significant. It follows the current Marvel debut pattern of small-time villain (although, how the Hell did the Heroes for Hire end up fighting someone more exciting than the Avengers? #forgetWarbringer) attacking the heroes, leading to a bigger threat down the line.

Luke Cage & Iron Fist #1 is definitely a fun read, but I'm not yet sure if it's essential (it drops the same week as Silver Surfer, and Marvel isn't sending me free books...yet...) for the casual reader. The reintroduction of Black Mariah at the issue's end signals a clear direction for the book, and Greene's art paired with Walker's words is a combo not to be counted out for the next few months.

Another Walker book, however, is not to be missed, period. Shaft: Imitation of Life #1, with story and words by Walker and art by Dietrich Smith, is a nail-biting distillation of everything I enjoy about blaxploitation and comic books, played with absolutely zero irony. In the book, John Shaft is a straight-talking Vietnam veteran and current private detective. He's taken a few courses on literature, so he knows a thing or two about word choice. He frequently emphasizes that he wants to dehumanize his enemies, in order to make them easier to kill. However, it's John who seems to be losing his touch with the human race throughout the book.

"Easier" is the operative word for John Shaft, as he remains haunted by every life he takes in the book.

Like any great noir protagonist, Shaft never quite accepts the call to heroism, but rather stumbles in to the role through ambivalence and avoidance of his real problems. He takes cases to help block out the awful memories of Vietnam, and to help convince himself that he is a hero and not a monster. Walker's understanding of this character is so deep that even the smallest panels contain so much information, and every line either begins or furthers an internal conflict for John Shaft.

All of the fun of a Shaft story is here too. You can practically feel Walker joyfully off of his Marvel leash, as Shaft curses like a sailor and leaves his lover nearly comatose. Readers can understand why it might be tempting to live like John Shaft, even with the "monster" deep inside you, because it seems like so much damned fun. Dietrich Smith does a great job of turning Walker's words into a cinematic Hellscape of New York City, too. Splash pages tell the story of Shaft's morning commute, one action sequence unfolds like the side-scrolling fight in Oldboy, and Shaft's aforementioned lover seems to have all the toppings.

Shaft finds himself failing even as he succeeds, fighting to free trafficked humans and confused, lost souls in darker corners of the city throughout the story. Even at the darkest point in the story, I never lost faith, most importantly, that David F. Walker was fully in control of the yarn he's spinning. Walker's work with the big 2 publishers is more beneficial for them than it is for him (he single-handedly brought Cyborg back to relevance in time for his movie), and you can feel him truly flexing with a book like Imitation of Life. While Luke Cage can't figure out if he wants to go by Power Man or not, everyone in another fictional NYC already knows the greatest superhero is named John Shaft.

Power Man & Iron Fist #1
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Shaft:Imitation of Life #1
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OH WE TALKIN' TEAMS?: Ultimates #4 by Ewing, Rocafort & Brown

The incredible cross-pollination of Marvel's post-Battleworld team books shouldn't work as well as it does. Two different teams feature two different Star-Spangled Avengers (Sam Wilson is flying in All-New All-Different Avengers while Steve Rogers is slumming it with Uncanny Avengers). For a quick hit of relevance and sales, Marvel even had Hyperion snap Namor's neck over in the pages of Squadron Supreme. All of these teams are fighting violent threats. They are all built using major characters from hit movies (except for the Squadron). After the death of the Sub-mariner, they have all failed dramatically. There's a distinct feeling that these books are, for the most part, coloring inside the lines.

One reason for this is that many of these teams exist for the purpose of existing. Books with that arrow-shaped "A" on the cover, like some kind of super-powered scarlet letter, are bound to sell a bit more than the average issue of Ant-Man. Now that these teams are meeting up and fighting, it makes me all the more grateful that Al Ewing and Kenneth Rocafort were allowed to take the Ultimates to space.

In Marvel's newest comic titled The Ultimates, published now after the title has been stripped of all 1610-baggage, a team of Marvel's MENSA nominees have seemingly banded together to take on problems and threats too large for other forces...but truthfully, what Ewing and Rocafort have done with this book is annotate parts of the Marvel canon that, to this point, have gone mostly untouched. A great alternate name for this book would be Challengers of the Unquestioned.

The book collects genius-level characters like Adam Brashear, Black Panther, Miss America, Captain Marvel, and Spectrum to not only think outside the box, but to ignore that one even exists in the first place. The first 2 issues focused on the team "solving" the Galactus problem, not by banishing/fighting/killing/stunning him, but by altering his nature itself. Now, Galactus is the World-Seeder of the Marvel universe. In issue #3, the Ultimates agreed to leave the fabric of the universe entirely, in order to seek out whatever is powering the cosmos themselves.

With a scope that huge, it's a relief that issue #4 has been a bit of a breather, but even more dramatically tense than past installments. In it, Brashear goes up against the Anti-Man, a villain with a connection to Brashear so personal that this issue feels as big as the team appealing to the hanger within Galactus. It ends on a cliffhanger that refocuses Ewing's eyes on the universal prize, but it never betrays the intense focus on character introduced in this issue.

Ewing and Rocafort usually focus on small groups within the team, which is good because Rocafort's strong, clear pencil work gives you great facial detail while also illustrating the beauty of the universe at large. Miss America and Spectrum haven't quite gotten their time in the spotlight yet, but I trust Ewing to balance his stories throughout the run of this book. One of the more amazing things that Ultimates gives us is a quietly diverse and interesting team, without Marvel bending over backwards to celebrate its own diversity.
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If you can only read one team book right now, make sure you're picking up The Ultimates and savor every page. I know that my pull has been reduced to just this one, and not just because it's the best on the shelf, but because it's challenging what I thought Marvel team-up books could be about in the first place.

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Meme with a Mouth: Spider-Man/Deadpool #1 by Kelly, McGuinness, Morales & Keith

Like many fans, I suspect, who have returned to reading monthly superhero comics later on in their life, I went through a phase where I was convinced that this stuff, essentially modern myth (and on the Marvel side, bold and confrontational allegories for modern issues), was for children. My prime years of devouring Marvel books, sixth through tenth grade, went behind me when I started noticing swaying hips and my friends wanted to spend more time on video games than discussing Animal Man. 

The cover to Spider-Man/Deadpool #1.

Deadpool, as a character, is essentially born out of that impulse. Deadpool's characteristics, on the surface, are "kewl" enough to stop the heart of the most dedicated MLGito consumer. He's a ninja clad in red and black, wielding twin pistols and dual katana blades. He's a trained, cold-blooded killer with both. He's got a tragic backstory involving the Weapon X program and cancer. If you thought most of that was over the top, wait until Wade Wilson opens his mouth.

Deadpool is more than your typical snark-machine in a comic, doling out far more zingers and bon mots than Peter Parker and Johnny Storm combined. He frequently mocks whoever he's working alongside and whoever he's fighting. He's made gay jokes to ghosts of dead Presidents, and he's proven his 2016 bonafides by professing to be an open pansexual. The "Merc with a Mouth" breaks the fourth wall so much in any given comic (or film, or video game) that there basically isn't one. Reading one of his stories is akin to having Damon Lindelof over your shoulders as you watch The Leftovers telling you, "yeah, this shit is dumb." I suspect he's connected with, and helped the House of Ideas retain, many teenage boys specifically because reading Deadpool so often feels like being a teen in practice: you're cursing, you're fighting, you're trying hard to convince everyone that the world around you is fake while clawing desperately for substance, and you're talking about sex a lot while not having much of it. To read the adventures of Wade Wilson is to be actively encouraged to not care, but also urged to continue reading.

A character that abrasive and off-putting really only works if the one-liners come both fast and furiously. In certain runs, such as Brian Posehn's Marvel Now! run on Deadpool, the character and his interactions with S.H.I.E.L.D. veer so far into absurdity that you can't help but be charmed. In the 2013 video game, Deadpool went all Devil May Cry on villains while the game around him featured plenty of mixed genres and asides to the player. 3 days before release, Tim Miller's Deadpool features an 82% Fresh rating. All signs point to it working well as a low-stakes superhero farce from a studio that can't seem to do anything else right with Marvel properties (WHERE U @, JOSH TRANK). In other books, such as the abysmal 2015 miniseries Mrs. Deadpool & the Howling Commandos, and the relaunch low-point Uncanny Avengers, the character stands out as a dramatic dead end. The latter book, the undeniable sixth finger on Marvel's handful of Avengers-themed books at the moment, featured a debut issue with Spider-Man leaving the new team because of a rift with Deadpool. I wish Wade had taken the hint.

In the first issue of Spider-Man/Deadpool #1, the character doesn't work at all. For those unfamiliar, the ongoing dynamic with Spider-Man and Deadpool is that Spidey hates Deadpool, while Deadpool loves Spidey. Subtextually, this should work. There is no character more representative of "old Marvel" and the values associated with traditional superheroics than Spider-Man. There should be interesting friction between Mr. Responsibility and Mr. Dank Memes. However, everything between the two characters is entirely surface-level, Odd Couple stuff that doesn't quite fit. At this point, Peter Parker has teamed up with Squirrel Girl and Silk. Would he really be that annoyed by Deadpool?

Local men ruin everything.

It doesn't help that, in recent months, Spidey has been drained of everything that made him the perfect foil for Deadpool. In reframing Peter Parker as the Elon Musk of the Marvel Universe, he's not exactly the common man we're used to anymore. Why is he fighting Hydro-Man at the outset of this issue anyway? Deadpool dragging Spider-Man to Hell to face off with Dormammu confuses the adventures of both of these characters while also cheapening a villain that Marvel should be ramping up for the release of a certain film about the Sorcerer Supreme later this year.

The plot is serviceable, but because Deadpool pulls an already-struggling character into his vacuum of LOLZ, it ultimately services a tone-deficient machine. The art by Ed McGuinness is clear and crisp, but Dormammu is a little too abstract to be feared.

WHY WOULDN'T DORMAMMU JUST LEVITATE THEM?

Like the titular character's approach to joke-telling, Marvel is quickly putting out as many Deadpool books as they can print at this point, to gear up for his big screen resurgence. Unlike Deadpool's sexuality, however, I suggest you be a bit selective when it comes to books like Spider-Man/Deadpool.

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MORALES BACK: Character Essences & Spider-Man #1 by Bendis, Pichelli & Ponsor

Cover by Sara Pichelli

I was 12 and all-in on the first X-Men movie and Ganke-level hyped for the upcoming Spider-Man movie when most of the internet was blowing up about a then-rising writer named Brian Michael Bendis and his major Marvel project, Ultimate Spider-Man. It didn't take long for my DragonBall-Z post-&-play RPG site to recommend the first 2 arcs, including then-modern and fresh takes on the Green Goblin, Electro, and Wilson Fisk. I saved up a couple weeks' allowance for both trades and fell in.

I came to Bendis and his writing in the same summer that Wizard instructed me to read some books titled Daredevil: Born Again, Watchmen, and The Dark Knight Returns. Say what you will about how the Ultimates leveled Manhattan or how Ultimate Jean Grey was a little too thirsty for Ultimate Logan, but I would place the totality of Bendis's run on Ultimate Spider-Man on the level of those works. For one, his Claremont-level commitment to seeing a vision for a book through is almost unheard of in our current climate, wherein a writer could be plucked from a book in a prime run for any number of extratextual reasons (film promotions, economics, politics). Bendis (and frequent collaborator Mark Bagley) took a character wildly popular but weighed down by continuity and freed him, once again, to swing the skyline of Manhattan.  11 years after they saved Peter Parker, they killed, buried, and replaced him with a newer, younger character named Miles Morales.

Through Miles, readers were able to rediscover the youthful hope and challenges of growing up through fresh, and wonderfully diverse eyes. One cannot help but look at Miles and see the missed potential in a comedic actor like Donald Glover never getting to play Spider-Man, but Miles acted in memory of Peter Parker's wonderful example, but he'd experienced no major loss himself; he was only doing the right thing because it had to be done. Bendis quickly had Miles butt heads with his uncle, who became the Prowler in an arc that inverted the classic Peter & Uncle Ben dynamic, and before they knew it, Marvel had a new, definitive Spider-Man on their hands...just over in the 1610 continuity, which they were planning to jettison anyway...

Pichelli is routinely unafraid to mix styles within pages on Spider-Man #1. Miles's teacher would be so screwed if this was an observation lesson. 

That idea of a definitive Spider-Man was on my mind a lot when I read issue #1 of the new run of Spider-Man, by Bendis (his 16th year on this book) and Sara Pichelli. While Marvel is seemingly busy having Peter Parker off attempting to be Iron Man with a heart of gold (which is confusing, because they also seem to be attempting to turn Stark himself into...Iron Man with a heart of gold), they've found themselves free to work Miles Morales, one of a very small, select group of 1610 characters, into the main world as the premier Spider-Man. I don't think Slott's Amazing Spider-Man run is a travesty for the character (the Uncle Ben Foundation idea is cute) but it has nothing on the essence-capturing work Bendis and Pichelli are doing with Miles and co.

I liken it to the revelation that is Sam Wilson: Captain America, a book so brazenly liberal and raw in its honesty that I'm shocked that Marvel allowed the current arc, which sees Captain America, now a black man (literally dehumanized when he is unwillingly transformed into Cap-Wolf) going up against the true evils of the modern Marvel Universe: corporations and banks that are "too big to fail." In a time when our own political sphere is threatened by the presence of a take-no-prisoners corporate mentality, I don't think the writers of Captain America are being indirect when they have a young, victimized Latino be the hero of the story. Contrast this with the lackluster action and snark over in Totally Awesome Hulk and it's clear that not all relaunches are created equally.

Miles Morales, as a hero in the new canon, leaves almost nothing to be desired. Like the web-slinger of old, he's able to get dates but he catches plenty of heat when he misses them. He stands up to his teachers and simply walks out of class (teacher's note: students do this, and I know many of them aren't Spider-Man) if he needs to go fight Shocker. He worries about his future, if he's doing the right thing moment to moment. Even after a couple of years, Miles feels out of place in his elite charter school. Miles feels like Spider-Man.

His supporting cast, always a major highlight of Spidey books in their prime, is also stellar. In the first issue, Ganke (absolutely the Landry Clarke of this book, which is part of why I love it so) takes up plenty of real estate, encouraging his friend to be Spider-Man while also holding down school and the occasional date. Bombshell is also mentioned in this issue, showing that there might be more Ultimate characters waiting in the wings to reveal themselves (more than Miles and The Maker, at the least). The dynamic between Mr. and the newly-resurrected (in the single-most cathartic moment in Secret Wars) is ridiculously interesting now that Mr. Morales knows about his son's heroics, while Mrs. is still in the dark (for now; one of the best parts of Bendis's run has been his liberalism with secret identities).

YA BOI GANKE

I won't spoil the threat that nearly levels the Avengers toward the end of the book, nor the amazing art Pichellil produced to depict it. One of her many stellar abilities involves changing styles between pages, creating dynamic visuals like the ones included above. For Miles Morales (and sometimes Ganke), life is always moving quickly.

On a critical note, I do wonder just how much more story Bendis can get from Miles encountering Peter Parker...yet again...at the end of the book. When everything else is so good, however, I'm willing to let the mystery unfold.

And so at the outset of the new ongoing Miles Morales book, simply titled Spider-Man, we have a teenage hero struggling with grades, girls, and a secret identity while fighting crime. He feels uncomfortable socially and academically, even though he's got the brains to back up his brawn. Unlike some of those other stories you've heard, Miles isn't motivated by survivor's guilt or deep pain; he's simply following a great example of doing the right thing, regardless of the cost. Miles is a a high school student; he's a young man of color; most importantly, he is Spider-Man. Give him a spin.

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