Ultimate Iron Man: Demon in the Armor

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518iRfWjZWL._SY346_The perplexing thing about Ultimate Iron Man is how really well he’s written in the Ultimates (and in any guest role he performs in other comics, usually Spider-Man), yet how mediocrely he’s written on any of the few occasions he gets his own title.[1] Continuing this trend (and the trend of really generic collection names) is Ultimate Comics Iron Man, in which Tony learns that a Chinese conglomerate calling itself the Mandarin is in the midst of a decidedly hostile takeover of Stark International.

It’s by no means a bad story, and in fact the “romantic” subplot is basically great. But it’s telling that I had to grasp for the preceding sentence, instead of working to try to hold back discussion fodder in case of spoilers. Oh, okay, I should also add that the Demon in a Bottle callback in the run’s unmentioned title is probably quite clever, a nice parallel but with 2013’s Tony being addicted to heroism instead of liquor, but since I haven’t actually read Demon in a Bottle yet, this seems like the kind of parallel I’m not qualified to confirm.

But man, mostly I’m just grateful to Robert Downey Jr. for showing me that at least someone can do Tony Stark right.

[1] Armor Wars was an exception, though not a bright shining one.

The Map of the Sky

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9102OsNohAL._SL1500_You know that book The Map of Time that is so intimately tied up in my Kindle ownership? It turns out that it was the first book of a trilogy of standalone books. Who knew? The important thing to focus on here, besides that I also definitely liked The Map of the Sky, is that word “standalone”. Because while this book makes more sense if you’ve read the first one, that is not necessary and there is definitely not a cliffhanger at the end, or even any more hint of a third volume than the first one implied that this book was coming. So if you’re worried about reading it? Don’t, it will be fine.

Okay, now that that’s out of the way: You know how the first book in the Victorian trilogy riffed on the Time Machine? This one riffs on the War of the Worlds, albeit a lot more straightforwardly than that other time. And really, I think that should be all you need to know? Yes, it’s in the same tone and voice as the first book, like you’d expect, and since that worked for me just fine then, I’m happy with it here as well. And what it somewhat lacked in byzantine twists, it made up in my deepened emotional attachment to the characters (and their deepened emotional attachments, for good or ill, to each other).

Also, one part of the book, set in the 1830s instead of 1898, is possibly based on a Poe novel instead of War of the Worlds? I am saddened to be unfamiliar with it, if so, and especially saddened that I did not get to choose him as my American Literature senior focus, back when I was getting my lit degree. I tried, but one can only wait so many semesters before you just have to agree to get on with graduating instead. In any event, it reminded me a great deal more of a completely different narrative which I shan’t mention here, to avoid spoilers.

The Conjuring

A large percentage of the modern horrorscape is devoted to possessions, hauntings, and the intersection between the two. So it makes perfect sense that people would comb through the documented cases of such things and put together a movie around that. After all, nothing adds verisimilitude to a project like slapping “based on a true story” to the tagline.

Thusly, The Conjuring, in which actual people named Lorraine and Ed Warren set out to assist an actual Rhode Island family which consists of two adult Perrons and their five daughters, who mostly like to play Hide&Clap and get haunted by restless demons who are hidden implausibly poorly in a boarded up basement. Which doesn’t sound so implausible, I know, except that the house’s furnace is in the basement, and the first time it got cold (demonic or regular), someone was going to go looking for that, you know?

The thing about a true story is, you’re constrained by it. If you’re trying to be anything like faithful to the narrative at all, you will have sudden stops and starts that don’t really fit the expectations of story progression, and no particular themes, just a series of disconnected events and an unreasonably creepy doll. The upshot of which is, this is a perfectly serviceable scary story about which I have basically nothing relevant to say.

The Wolverine (2013)

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MV5BNzg1MDQxMTQ2OF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMTk3MjAzOQ@@._V1_The Wolverine is the first new sequel to the X-Men trilogy in seven years. That’s kind of a long time, right? I’m not going to get into a “worth the wait” discussion, since those never end well and speak to expectations, which I try not to set in the first place. But certainly it was good.

First, a recap of relevant information: Wolverine is a pretty old mutant whose DNA has an impressive healing factor, such that he can recover from nearly any wound you can imagine and he doesn’t really age. Over the past hundred, maybe hundred and fifty years, he’s seen a lot of the world. Also, he has claws that grow out of his hand. Also also, his entire skeletal structure has been coated in adamantium, the hardest substance known to comic-book man. (This was made possible by his healing factor, you see. If you pause a moment to consider what having molten metal forged around your bones would feel like, not to mention the logistics of it, you will see why this would suck more for anyone else than the prodigious amount of sucking it did for him.)

So, okay, that should have you nice and caught up. This movie? Is about a haunted Wolverine, filled with regrets over the outcome of the last X-Men movie. Then, he gets caught up in some Japanese family politics. Since this is a comic book movie, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to promise you some hot mutant-on-ninja action, and also there’s a samurai with a distinctly silvery cast to his features, if you know what I mean and I bet you probably don’t, honestly.

The most important plot issue in a mostly character-driven movie (despite all that ninja action) is in the scene after the credits, when we are promised one hell of a spectacle of a new fully X-Men sequel. So, y’know, yes please.

The Unwritten: Dead Man’s Knock

51NFb36LVHLI am surprised and not a little annoyed to report that I completely failed to write a review. (Well, technically two, but one of them is on purpose[1].) I can’t even figure out how it happened. I know I read the third book in the Unwritten series, and I know I thought I had reviewed it, but when I went looking down the recent list, it’s definitely not there. So, um, oops? I’ll do my best, some week-and-change later.

My best ain’t gonna be a lot, unfortunately. I cannot even put together what the title, Dead Man’s Knock, is meant to indicate. (I mean, maybe I still wouldn’t have known if I were fresh?) I do know that this one was a little lighter on the deep literary thoughts and a little heavier on kicking Tommy Taylor’s story, not to mention the war being waged against him by the weird cognoscenti cabal that views him as such an unexplained threat, into high gear. Which is okay. I like the concepts swirling around, but without some excitement and menace, Carey’s latest opus would probably feel self-involved.

Also, there was an entire issue laid out as Choose Your Own Adventure, and you cannot tell me that’s not really awesome. You could try, but you would not succeed.

[1] Don’t worry, I’ll get there.

The Boys: We Gotta Go Now

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618Jw8k7spLIf it looks like I’m reading slowly, it’s because I’ve been hyper-focused on old Marvel stuff, both the ongoing acquisition and consumption thereof. But I finally read the fourth volume in Garth Ennis’ The Boys series, so that’s nice at least. It occurs to me that this is an incredibly aptly named team, insofar as its one female member (cleverly named “The Female”) never speaks and has yet to actually do anything that was her own event on the side, unlike all the other team members. I pretend to myself, each new book, that we’ll suddenly learn something about her. Maybe a name of some kind. (I will say that she’s not also sexualized, so that’s… something?)

But anyway, though, the ongoing war between Butcher and his team versus the supes continues on, this time extending to Ennis’ X-Men parody, with its vast number of teams and splinter groups. Which made a fine, albeit occasionally horrific, story. But I’m really ready for the meat of this series. Our main character, Hughie, who I probably mentioned is based on actor Simon Pegg? He and his girlfriend have been carefully concealing themselves from each other this whole time, and it’s a ticking time bomb, and I really want to see what happens when the truth gets revealed. Downside: probably that will start the roller-coaster ride toward a series climax, and Ennis probably isn’t done poking fun at superhero comic tropes and standards just yet.

So, okay, but at least give me some character development on the Female and the Frenchman. ‘Cause seriously, especially that Female thing I mentioned back at the start? It looks bad. (It probably is bad instead of just appearing that way, and probably having the whole plot laid out in front of me would not change that, but since it isn’t yet, it feels premature to judge. He tricked me on the homophobia. Sort of.)

World War Z

First of all: while it’s possible that this WWZmovie borrowed some small amount of plotting from the book that shares its name, I would be hard pressed to name anything besides the title and its attendant premise. This does not make it a bad film, but it certainly makes it a misnamed one. Second of all: I’m probably fast and loose with spoilers here, although none plot-destroying. You’ll see why I didn’t care much about that.

Okay, disclaimers aside, was World War Z in fact a good movie? Almost. It started off pretty solidly by introducing Brad Pitt (who had gotten too old for this shit) and his family, and then immediately dumping them into Run For Your Lives! And then it exposited about how he’s the kind of guy who could help find out how this[1] happened and therefore save humanity, and then blackmailed him into doing it when “saving humanity” was somehow insufficient. Like rich, pretty people don’t know that they are part of what’s being saved? I dunno.

Then he starts globetrotting, picking up clues, narrowly escaping each place he goes to like a non-parodic version of John Cusack, and just when I started to get the impression that his arrival spelt doom for any place he might show up at, the movie kind of trickled out into nothing. I seriously expected another 30 to 60 minutes of plot, until about 5 minutes before the credits rolled.

So, shorter version: cool, albeit stolen and warped, concept; cool execution; terrible payoff. Hot Israeli soldiers, though.

[1] The zombie apocalypse, obvs.

This Is the End

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There were three things I liked a lot about This Is the End. First: Los Angeles gets destroyed. I mean, that’s always fun, right? Second: a lot of actors demonstrated a really solid sense of humor about themselves. Sometimes you get one or two, but this was pretty much a whole cast’s worth. (Special kudos to Michael Cera.) Third: I found it to be damned funny[1]

See, some guy I don’t know who is clearly a stand-in for longtime Seth Rogen writing collaborator Evan Goldberg has come into town to visit Seth, even though they both know how much he hates LA. Seth, see, hopes to make some inroads between notEvan and Seth’s actor friends. So they go to a party at James Franco’s house, where everyone acts exactly as annoyingly Hollywood as notEvan expected them to, and even Seth is slightly less likable / more dog-piddly than usual due to their influence. Then, out of nowhere, *boom*, it’s the Rapture Apocalypse. Suddenly, everyone is having to deal with unceasing waves of death and destruction, limited resources, demonic possession, the worst human being in the world[2], and coming to terms with the fact that, yep, they’re in this situation because they probably deserve it[4], all from the comforts of Franco’s post-modern mansion.

Also starring Emma Watson!

[1] Koz, as you will see in paragraph two, it’s generally about bad people, so you will probably not find it funny. I think most other people I know would, though?
[2] Spoilers, but if you insist:[3]
[3] Danny McBride
[4] I know, that’s not really how the Rapture is supposed to work, but somehow, getting an atheistic, uninformed view of the Rapture is very in keeping with the spirit of the thing. on every level. (Also, an accurate[5] representation starring Kirk Cameron would have been terrible in every way.)
[5] Yeah, I had fun with that word choice, not gonna lie.

Ultimate Comics: Divided We Fall, United We Stand

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The latest Ultimate crossover event was pretty exciting to read, but will I think be hard to review. Every story affected the others, but every story distinctly belonged to its own group and had its own thematic resonance, none of which the other stories were involved in. Which is to say, it was truly a crossover instead of just a big event affecting everyone. I’m not sure the Ultimate universe has done that before, not really.

Also, man, I feel like there are a lot of spoilers down there. I’m trying not to, but it’s basically impossible to say anything useful without a few, especially for events in recent books. Also, this turned more into my thoughts on the state of the universe in general than on the story told in particular, which I guess was inevitable considering the subject matter? Either way, if you’re leery of spoilers, catch up to issue 18 of each line first (or this book, obvs), is the best I can recommend.

I’ll take them in order, mostly because that is the order of scope reduction, and the title is nothing if not sweeping and grandiose. Divided We Fall, United We Stand is both an accurate description of the situation in the United States and a spoiler for how things will turn out (although, in keeping with the darkness that has fallen over the Ultimate universe since Magneto’s Ultimatum, I have not expected things to turn out as happy as all that in quite some time). And the Ultimates’ section of the story, which is mostly focused on the until-recently absent Captain America, is about the big battles in the wake of the country’s collapse. Because, see, the Sentinels have taken over the Southwest on a mutant extermination spree, and several other states have splintered off as they realized that the government was ineffective and also had been nuked. In addition to being big and sweeping, it is also (like Captain America, really) fairly unsubtle, so I will leave him to his explosions and big shocking events and move on to the mutants.

So, Kitty Pryde, right? It’s weird, because she and maybe Rogue are big important characters to me in the Ultimate universe, and yet (as of December, 1978) I still have yet to meet them in mainstream continuity. Therefore, uniquely in this experiment, their new incarnations will impact how I see the originals instead of the other way around. And I’ve got to say, I am a really big fan of Kitty Pryde right now. I can’t say for certain, but I expect this to be an unpopular decision from the other direction. I think it’s mainly that, for all that mutants have been at the core of everything that’s happened in the last few years (well, except the oddness with Reed Richards), almost nobody in the mutant storyline has been the least bit sympathetic. Karen Grant is an enigma, Quicksilver is a puppet, Wolverine Mark 2 hasn’t done anything meaningful yet, and Storm has not evidenced the least bit of agency. So a natural born leader who wants to go out and make a difference, and better still, seems capable of it? Yeah, that’s what this plot has needed for a good long while. The only downside is that her story should have been spread out over a couple more issues instead of being shoehorned into the deadline set by the main plotline over in the Ultimates.

Side note that fits here as well as anywhere: one of the absolutely strangest things about the Ultimate universe is how insignificant the Fantastic Four are. Even back when they were an existing concern, they were bit players outside of the Galactus story, and now that they’ve disbanded, it’s like people don’t even know who they are. When I compare that to mainstream Marvel, and especially the year plus break-up of the team that occurred across 1978 and how each individual was still really popular in the public eye regardless? It’s almost confusing, and certainly indicates how divergent the Ultimate story has become.

And, lastly, Spider-Man. I’m glad to see that Aunt May is still one of the best characters in Ultimate Marveldom, I’m glad to see Mary Jane at all, I want to see more of Jessica Drew now that they seem on the verge of making her interesting again in a way she hasn’t been since she stopped interacting with Peter. None of that really has to do with Miles Morales, of course, but that’s because they were all at the fringes of his story, which I don’t want to get into all that much. I guess the short version of it is this: just like the X-Men, a little more time should have been spent here, because this is the first new take on the death of Ben Parker and the power/responsibility shtick in fifty years, and Bendis did a pretty good job; but I think if he’d had a little more time to spread his wings and a little less necessity to shoehorn that into this crossover, he would have done an amazing job instead.

Okay. That was a lot of words.

 

Ultimate Comics Spider-Man – Volume 3

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I’m about to read a large crossover event in the current greatly-reduced-in-size Ultimate Universe, and it turns out that 3/4 of the current Spider-Man book (cleverly titled “Volume 3“) is also in the crossover book. Why they released a crossover book for the X-Men and Ultimates but then still let Spider-Man be published separately was a mystery to me, and now that I’ve read the opening section that isn’t in said crossover book, the solution to that mystery seems to be “publishing mistake”.

Because, seriously, the two issues I am reviewing are solely about wrapping up the Prowler and Scorpion plotlines from Volume 2. Not only did they belong there thematically, but they also made for one hell of a cliffhanger! It’s hard to review this any better, because it’s so short that I can only get into spoiler territory, so let me just say this: you know how I was intrigued by the “dark uncle” mirror that Miles is facing? I cannot really imagine a more impactful moral resolution to that mirror than the one I was presented with, and I am once again really looking forward to what comes next.

Oh, also, the thing where every time I read one of these books, I’m caught up in missing Peter Parker too much to appreciate Miles’ story for what it is? I guess that has ended! Either it was the year off or Spider-Men bringing the two characters face to face or me reading three different Peter Parker books in 1978 continuity, but whatever it is, I’m settled. So that’s nice!