You don’t have to be an author to know if you like a book or not, and to offer a critique of it.

And you don’t have to be an illustrator to know if you like a particular drawing or not, and to offer a critique of it.

Several times on this blog, I’ve drawn (get it?!) some fire for coming across as too harsh on a given artist or character or series or costume. Which is fine, that’s why they pay me the big bucks. But critique is a perfectly valid — in some ways, an invaluable — method of refining your own understanding of what you like and, more importantly, why you like it. Any art form can be appreciated (or not) at a gut level, and it’s perfectly fine to live your whole life experiencing it there and no further.

But for a subject you love, like me with comics, there’s so much more you can get out of it with a little time and effort. Which is why this week, I’m going to give YOU the chance to play critic.

I want you to go to Marvel’s site and check out the preview pages at the bottom for Rob Liefeld’s “Deadpool” issue 900. And then I want you to come back here and offer a genuine critique of the work. You don’t have to be mean, or glowing in your praise, or sycophantic, or snidely hip, or anything other than honest. I want you to look at the pages of what will surely be one of the best-selling issues of the year, and I want you to think about what you do and don’t like. Maybe you’ll focus on the panel layouts, or the overall page design. Maybe you’ll focus on the costumes or the environment, or the dialog, or the way the action flows.

Whatever it is you choose to comment on, give it some thought and give me your reaction to it. You all know my opinion of his overall “oeuvre” at this point, so there’s no surprises there, but I don’t want this to just be a bash-fest. The point is for you to take something that generates strong reactions in the viewer (which Deadpool 900 certainly should!) and to examine why you react to it the way you do. To articulate what it is you do and do not like.

Criticism gets a bad rap, because it’s awfully easy to slip from knowledgeable commentary for the purpose of enlightening your own understanding to schoolyard heckling. But it’s an important part of how we understand art, and I think it’s very much worth pursuing.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

Granted, fanboys (I’m one) get the urge to outshine Superman, Spider-Man, and Wonder Woman (remember the 90’s ‘Bad-Girl’ fiasco?), but when someone wants to create a unique superhero Super-Skrulls and Amalgam Comics is a good place to start.
Is Badger really a Wolverine ripoff anymore than Black Cat or Ms Fury or Tigra or Cheetah (take your pick, DC or Gold Digger) or Vixen or Red Fox or Silver Fox or Hepzibah …etcetera are to… Catwoman?
Just a thought.

I do seem to obsess over 90’s-era Image and I’ve been trying to define exactly why that is.

Jose’s comments and previous discussions with my friend John I think have finally crystallized and now I think my main beef with it was how lazy it all was. Yes, if you’re coming up with a new hero or group, you can’t really avoid being similar to something that’s gone before. I mean, as much as I like Invincible and think it’s refreshing, it’s basically just “Kryptonians if Krypton didn’t explode”. Certain archetypes exist that are pretty much impossible to get away from — Super Guy who can do anything and is invincible, Rebel Outsider Violent Guy, Misunderstood Loser Guy, Technophile Guy, Super Brain Guy who can reprogram the universe but not his own emotions, Big Strong Guy With a Heart of Gold No One Can Get Close To, on and on.

It’s just that EVERYTHING in the Image books was derivative, and done in a really lazy way. Wolverine was popular and could kill people, so let’s make a guy who doesn’t just have claws on his hands, but whose hands ARE claws! And then make TWO of them! And then they’re really violent! They not only ripped off other comics, and did so in very unimaginative ways, they even ripped off THEMSELVES. Like in this example, two guys with basically the same design, the same concept, the same MO, the same team … do SOMETHING new and interesting, at least.

What’s worse is, they chose all of the stylistic, external elements to accentuate instead of anything substantive. It was all guns and big boobs and metal arms and slashing claws and flying chains and ultra-dramatic poses only moreso (if guns and Colossus are cool, how about a Colossus with four arms, all with guns!), with none of the interesting character development, great back-stories, intelligent plotting, or narrative drama.

It was all of the flash of super-hero comics with none of the heart. I think that’s why old-school guys like me and John hated it so much. They managed to take a medium we loved and exaggerated only its most ridiculous elements to the point where they broke it.

Contrast that with Millar and Hitch’s “Ultimates” run. Here they’re literally taking characters that have existed for decades — the ultimate derivative! — and yet they crafted really cool stories. And that’s because the stories came first. With both the original Ultimates run and the 90’s Image books, you had art that very much reflected the priorities of the book. On the one hand you have overly-exaggerated, hyper-sexualized, completely fantastic (in the non-realistic sense, not “that’s awesome!”) illustrations that match what the title is trying to do. The stories were all about frenetic action and the maximum possible bang-whiz factor, removing it from the land of the real about as far as you could go and not get into abstraction. All of the “grimacing mouth full of teeth” and the wasp-waisted women and the huge rippling multi-muscled male arms and the guns with too many barrels for the bullets and the metal fingers and the twelve foot pony-tails are about the same thing — taking the visual language of super-hero comics to the absolute limit. The story-telling reflects that, with dialog and plotting that are essentially cardboard cutouts of standard tropes, pushed past the limit of what is believable.

With the Ultimates run, however, you’ve got a much more restrained, much closer-to-the-real iconography that matches the imperative of the storytelling. Millar’s brief in this series was, like the “Dark Knight” movies, to make a super-hero world that’s as close to “real” as he could get without losing the idea of super powers completely. While we’re certainly not talking great literature here, still his characters have depth and levels and genuine humanity. Granted, it’s Hollywood action-movie depth, but it’s still more than you get out of the Image books.

I consider comics to be one of the great story-telling mediums of all time. During the Nineties I stopped buying them because the industry (at least the part of the industry I’d always read) had gone down the Image road, sacrificing substance in favor of style. We revere the likes of “The Dark Knight Returns” and “Watchmen” and “Maus” because they’re great stories told well. The art and the writing work together to tell that story. Image basically jettisoned the stories in favor of the art, and the result was like a stool with only one leg — it’s a fun ride but ultimately it’s going to dump you on your ass.

Which, clearly, he has, as you can see at his web site.

But while poking around, I noticed a page from his Store, titled “Nightwing Tryout Page 1″ (already sold) that looked an awful lot — an AWFUL lot — like his gallery page of Blindside. Whoever the heck that is.

For your convenience, here they are side-by-side:

Look, I’m the last person in the world to cast aspersions on someone for re-using art — I do it all the time — but damn. I assume the Blindside work came first, and then was later redrawn with Nightwing’s costume as sample submission. But why bother? If you’re already a published artist, why do you need to try out for something? And if it was the tryout that came first, did he use that basic script later for Blindside?

There’s nothing unethical about any of this as far as I can see (assuming the Nightwing tryout didn’t come with a pre-written script), it’s just kind of weird. I don’t know Marat Mychaels at all, I’d never even heard of him until this morning. His art’s gotten much better, and he’s a published, successful comic book artist, which is far more than I can say. So props to him for that.

It just seems weird, is all.

(All images © Marat Mychaels.)

“Comic Book Villains” failed on both scores.

Poorly written, poorly plotted, haphazardly acted, and offensive when not insufferably stupid, I found very little to like in this movie aside from a couple of good performances from actors who, frankly, should have known better than to take this job.

The plot was insipid, as if the worst parts of super-hero villains were tossed into a blender and only the most inane of their world-beating schemes allowed to escape. Nothing anyone did at any point made sense if you thought about it for more than a second. The characters’ motivations were confused and at times self-contradictory.

I got the feeling the director couldn’t decide what this movie was supposed to be, whether it was a dark comedy or a drama or an outright farce or what. Ultimately I was left with a feeling like “Fargo” had gone under the knife for unsuccessful reconstructive surgery, and what I was left with was a shambling horror with awful bits of its predecessor grafted onto its grotesque corpse.

OK, that’s probably a bit over the top, but I really found myself getting angry while watching “Comic Book Villains” because it had many elements of a good movie. And none of them ever bore fruit. It was a very frustrating experience, and I can’t recommend this film to anyone. For any reason.

The careful reader will notice that this cover sucks. You’ve got Thanos, cosmic villain, standing in a hallway wrestling with five major Marvel characters in what is, judging by the comical way Iron Man and Eros are posed, a tryout for WWF Smackdown. Honestly, does anyone actually use that whole “Trip ‘em by the shin!” move? I do have to give mad props to Destroyer for attempting to kick Thanos in Party Town, though, that’s pretty gutsy. Sadly, Titans keep the family jewels in their chin, as you can tell from looking closely at Thanos. Better luck next time, Destroyer.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was Jim Starlin’s first penciling assignment for Marvel. He got his start with the on-again, off-again Captain Marvel, the huge successes of his career still years in the future. Knowing that helps my scorn for these issues a bit, because let me tell you something, they’re gut-wrenchingly bad. I put some of the blame for just how awful this run is on writer Mike Friedrich, as the bizarre artwork is only matched by the over-the-top purple prose flung at us like a particularly fresh batch of monkey poo.

Part of what makes it so bad is Friedrich’s over-reliance on similies. And not just any similies, but ones that apparently were purchased at the Discount Similie Super-Store. To illustrate my point, enjoy this progression of panels which appear mere inches from each other:

I don’t even know what the hell that is supposed to mean, despite the explanation in the second word balloon. Just thinking about it makes my brain hurt. I mean, does the wind ordinarily have fists where this guy’s from? And if he can be slowed by a stiff wind, how in the world is he capable of bringing Iron Man down?

Oh, and here’s a tip for you aspiring comic book writers out there: If you have to explain what your similie means in the very next dialog balloon, it’s a crappy similie! You can write that down, kids.

Then we’re treated to a twofer, because sometimes just one bad analogy isn’t enough:

To make it even better, both similies require the double hyphens and further clarification, in addition to each needing further clarification by yet another separate similie. It’s a rare example of double-explained, double-interior-exterior similieating, and quite the coup for Mr. Friedrich. Plus, do we really need even one analogy to get the idea across to the reader that the ape-guy just hit the metal-guy really hard? Isn’t that sort of the point of art, to, you know, show us what’s happening?

Anyway. Moving on:

I sure hope “Feast” in this sentence means “Let’s actually consume his flesh” and not whatever else is implied by stripping the dude to his skivvies, because honestly, I shudder to think of our hero’s naked fate in the hands of two guys who strip their dolls often enough to use the concept as a casual metaphor. That’s pretty creepy.

Unfortunately, judging by the next panel I don’t think Tony’s going to get off as easily as just being the main course at the Cannibal Cruise Line’s Buffet:

I dont’ know about you, but if I were in that situation we’d be having a major fluid leak in the Iron Man Underarmor region. Somewhere, I can hear the music from “Deliverance” …

The remainder of the stories in the compilation deal with Thanos’ inane plan to become a God and kill everything in the Universe as his gift to Death, with whom he’s in love. He’s already got this Cosmic Cube device which literally grants any wish he has, and yet we’re subjected to endless pages of the heroes gathering to fight him, only to be instantly teleported to him where they’re instantly captured, only to be instantly teleported away where they are forced to fight these Thanos-built concrete gargoyle-like constructs, at which point I had to put the issue down before I beat my head to a pulp against my desk.

You know how sometimes, when you’re reading a comic book or watching a movie or tv show, you think “Are the writers just jerking us around?” You’re never quite sure, and you hang on just in case the whole thing is on the up-and-up, but you also never really lose that feeling like someone involved with this project is laughing at you.

When the concrete gargoyles show up and Captain Marvel says:

“By KREE_LAR! This confirms my suspicions about his SANITY! Instead of simply BLASTING us into oblivion, Thanos is CREATING from the metal and concrete of the floor — DEMON-LIKE CREATURES whose only purpose can be to cause … OUR DEATHS!”

I had my confirmation that, yes, the writer knows how stupid this is and he just doesn’t care.

Why doesn’t Thanos just nuke ‘em all into non-existence with the Cube? Why does he need to bother wishing himself into godhood, when he can already do everything with the cube anyway? Why are we subjected to dozens of pages of completely, utterly pointless “action”, when with an idle thought from Thanos this would all be over? I mean, just think of the hours Jim Starlin had to waste lovingly inking Captain Marvel’s buttocks in this panel:

Anyway, suffice it to say that had I been reading this run in the Sixties, I never would have guessed that Jim Starlin would go on to such a stellar career, particularly his legendary run on Adam Warlock. But it’s hard to put the art in context of his later work, and in light of the truly, epically, wretchedly bad writing by Friedrich. I’ve taken a few writing classes in my day, and here’s another free tip for you, which apparently they don’t teach at the Marvel School of Writing Like Stan Lee Only Not As Good:

“If you ever find yourself in the middle of a story writing the words:

Stop, use the “BACKSPACE” key repeatedly until those words are no longer in your story, and then proceed.”

Finally, I want to leave you with this image from the back cover of the reprinted edition, by an unknown artist:

I made up my own caption for it, which goes a little something like “No, wait you guys, I totally made my saving throw on my special die, can I get my feet changed back to normal sized now?! Please? You guys?”

Anyway, to prove the point, here are a few of the panels from just one of the super stuttering stories in the “Action Comics 252″ reprint. This all takes place in the span of a mere eleven pages, people, and I am not even including all of the examples — there’s more. LOTS more. Know f-f-fear.

(The actual onomontoPOWia is supposed to just be RR, but of course the avalanche stutters.)

I think that last one is my favorite. Either Clark’s an idiot and thinks the natural assumption when someone resists your grip is “That guy must be Superman!”, or Metallo is literally crushing everyone’s hand to pulp.

Besides the overwrought emotions, what really jumps out at me upon reading this issue is what a douche Superman is. Really. He flies in to find Metallo dead because he used fake Kryptonite — conveniently provided by Clark himself — to power his metal heart. And Superman’s only thought is “He brought it on himself” before proceeding to make two tasteless puns about the deceased. This sort of thing has been well documented elsewhere, so I won’t go on, but really, the Golden Age Superman was kind of a jerk.

The other main feature of these early books is just how implausible and slipshod the plotting is. Nothing really makes much sense if you think about it for more than two seconds, and there’s always some weird coincidence that diverts Superman just in time for the criminal to escape. I also love the cavalier way everyone treats uranium, the other power source for Metallo. It sits around in cans on shelves, the Professor who builds the artificial body just happens to have some laying around the lab, etc. etc. I am surprised no one glows in Metropolis.

Make that “I-I’m s-surprised that n-no one g-g-glows in Metroplis.” I wouldn’t want to not fit in, after all.

On his web site, Claremont says that he is “especially proud” of his creator-owned “The Black Dragon”, so when I encountered several issues of it in the Great Random Comics Pile, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at why that might be.

The creative team on “The Black Dragon” boasted not only the multiple-award-winning Claremont, but the equally illustrious John Bolton. No, not the walrus-mustachioed US Ambassador to the UN, but the English artist of the same name. You can tell from the cover of issue number 2 (left) that Bolton is a master of the horror genre, and it’s when the story shifts to the supernatural that the comic really comes to life.

Unfortunately, those elements are too few and far between. I really struggled with reading this series, and I’ve been hard pressed to understand why I don’t like it very much. I’m a huge fantasy fan, and (obviously) love comics, so this certainly seems to be a natural fit. But the whole project just doesn’t work for me.

I think it starts with the uneasy balance between Claremont’s very ambitious script and Bolton’s panel layout. Take a look at this sample:

The mass of words running across the top seems to physically weigh the panels down, almost threatening to crush the figures below them. Compounding the problem is Bolton’s “Prince Valiant” style of art on the project. The detail of the figures ought to contrast nicely with the plain pastel backgrounds, but instead it just makes them seem even more static and lifeless. There’s so much going on in the detail of the figures, from the beautiful chain mail to the horse’s mane to the smoldering embers of the fire that, combined with the huge amount of text, it just wears me out looking at it.

Even in the strongest parts of the series, when fantastic or horrific elements come into play, that same sense of lifelessness pervades:

As odd as this sounds, I think the main problem is that you’re almost always at chest- or eye-level with the characters in the panel. It makes you feel like you’re just standing there watching, instead of being an active participant in the action. For my money, the ability to change the “camera angle” is one of the strongest weapons in an artist’s arsenal, and yet Bolton has pretty much surrendered it.

I also find Bolton’s inking distracting. Sometimes, like in the undead ghouls dragging James Dunreith into their underground grave, it’s really strong and helps support the action. But much more often, his thin and reedy lines and excessive hatching weaken the figures instead. Here, for instance, the lead female character Ellianne DeValere speaks, again under threat of assault by excessive word balloonage:

The pastel gradient background combines with the uniformly thin lineart on her face to make her seem washed-out and ethereal. Sometimes that technique works, as when Bolton is illustrating the action in the world of faerie:

But when applied to the very realistic figures of the “real” world, the technique clashes with the high level of detail to create a confusing, frustrating muddle. The coloring contributes to that muddled muddiness, living in subdued earth tones and pastels. Combined with the static figure posing, the hatchy inking, the lack of differentiation in camera angles, and the mass of details, I’m left a bit dizzy.

Clearly, Claremont and Bolton were going for a very grounded, believable setting here. I can see that they wanted to produce a story that was believably set in the actual world, with the fantastic elements becoming thus much more powerful. But rather than enhancing the tale they’re telling, that approach instead betrays it. The result is that most unfortunate word a creator can hear — it’s boring. Reading each page quickly became a chore, and not in the same satisfying, that-was-worth-the-effort sense you get from reading the original “Lord of the Rings”, either, but rather in that “My English teacher made me read this and I hate it” kind of way.

“The Black Dragon” fails to use the most powerful aspects of the comics genre to help tell Claremont’s story, and the result is a muddled mixture of too much novel and not enough graphic that leaves me feeling frustrated and unsatisfied. I hate to deliver a bad review, even twenty years after the fact and to such a distinguished duo, but I really didn’t care for this series at all.

(All images and text are from “The Black Dragon” series, ©1985, Chris Claremont and John Bolton, published by Marvel Comics Group.)

All I’m saying is, I sure hope it doesn’t end up sliding further down as the suit finishes forming, ifyouknowhatimean.

Anyway, this batch of random comics was full of contrasting styles and imperatives which I’ll go into after the jump.

In the early Nineties, independent publishers like Valiant, Eclipse, Dark Horse, and Image were challenging DC and Marvel for marketplace dominance. They went about the task in a variety of ways, but their primary method was to hire hot young talent and set them free to create. Sometimes that didn’t work out so well (paging Rob Liefeld and your many iterations of long-clawed anti-heroes), but looking back, I’m impressed by the high quality and creative variety you can find from that time.

Take this week’s haul as an example. One of the issues is a really cool flip-over edition consisting of “Magnus Robot Fighter” number 7 and “Rai” number 3, in a story which also flipped over itself. Take a look at the covers:

I love how they’re basically two panels of an action sequence blown up to cover status, and each is pencilled by Dave Lapham, creator of critically-acclaimed “Stray Bullets”. Each character’s half-book takes place from their point of view, which is a cool story-telling technique. And there’s a great sequence when Magnus pounds Rai with a cybernetic baseball bat that’s just too neat.

I do, however, take exception to Magnus’s Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader-inspired white boots and ultra-short tunic-skirt. I’m no physicist, but take a look at his cover, there’s no way, anatomically speaking, that he’s doing more damage to Rai in that pose than he’s doing to himself with the way his skirt’s binding up. Ouch!

Magnus, Rai, and X-O occupied the same Valiant universe, and the three stories here all touch on one another in some way. The cross-over is deftly-handled. The same is true of the other independent book in the set, “Phantom of Fear City” from Eclipse Comics and Claypool Comics. Claypool set up a fictional ghost-haunted Connecticut town of Mystic Grove where a lot of its titles take place, giving the whole “universe” a comfy feel. It’s all drawn in black and white, which suits the supernatural feel of the comic quite well.

As a bonus, the issue is written by Steve Englehart (who you’ve encountered here before as the author of the “Coyote” series of seriously strange books — you remember, the one with guys walking around with half their brains missing and talking raven-aliens) — who wrote the three issues of DC’s “Millennium” I also found in this week’s batch.

“Millennium” was a huge cross-over saga for DC in the same spirit as “Crisis on Infinite Earths” and “Infinite Crises on Multiple Earths” and “Secret War Crises on Earthly Infinites” and “Urgently Irritating Split Infinitives”. Or whatever. The difference in the ham-handed treatment of the DC universe with the much tighter and smaller Valiant stuff is really striking. Englehart has always been about bringing in philosophical and religious thinking into his books, and you can see him trying with his Millennial tale involving Batman, Superman, Firestorm, and other various spandex-clad people.

Which is where it all falls apart.

We’re being asked to take seriously all of this philosophical hoo-ha coming from what are, if we’re being honest, profoundly silly characters. You’ve got a bunch of popular, mainstream characters, who desperately want to be taken “seriously” on one hand with DC, and on the other you have characters from Valiant who aren’t well known enough to be self-conscious about the fact that they’re super-heroes.

I’ve felt for a while that part of the problem with mainstream comics is that they’re over-burdened with their own long history. They’ve lost the sense of “I don’t care what people say, I’m wearing a damn cape to school” that makes this genre workable. When you start taking yourself too seriously you squeeze out a lot of what’s great about super-hero comics. Part of the problem is in the expectations the reader brings with them, of course. You can’t read “Millennium” and think “What that nice man in the red cape is saying makes sense” because you know he’s Superman, who has in the past fought giant walking clown robots and fought with his own fake future twin to keep him from marrying the wrong girl. Or whatever.

See, we have a history with these guys, and that’s a problem.

I don’t know who the hell Magnus Robot Fighter is, so I’m free to just roll with the punches and have a good time. It’s like dating a girl for the first few times, when you think that little giggle is fun, versus dating her for the 2000th time and remembering how she used that same giggle that time she cut your heart out with a spoon by cheating on you with your best friend.

Popular characters come with baggage, and while there’s sometimes some great stuff in your baggage, there’s no question it weighs you down. Seeing the same guy doing two series for the two different companies really drove the difference home for me.

In this installment of “Retroview” I take on “The New Mutants” number 94, truly a Rob Liefeld masterpiece and a classic of the late 80’s / early 90’s super-hero comics industry:

If you want to learn why Wolverine and Sunspot look like they’re in the middle of an awesome handicapped-stall-handlebar-gripping face-crunching abdomen-flexing Power Dump, follow me after the jump … if you dare!

Just getting past the cover presents difficulties. Take another look at it, because it encapsulates a lot of what drives Liefeld critics crazy. I’ve already mentioned how two of the figures look like they’re trying to pass a kidney stone (or whatever … don’t think about it too much, trust me), but go a bit further and ask yourself just why those two are apparently so torqued up they’re literally shouting, every muscle tensed, while the ladies appear to be in synchronized comas. You also have the patented Rob Liefeld Random Anatomy Generator, where human figures get strange bulbous growths like in Wolverine’s right wrist. Seriously, how did someone’s ass accidentally get grafted onto his forearm?

Speaking of anatomy, I hesitate to even bring this up because, as I’ve mentioned before, I absolutely suck at drawing women. But Liefeld insists on making his females stand in a position only possible for those with severe spinal cord trauma. I mean, I know Boom-Boom is an incredibly lame character, but do you have to break her back?

Of course it wouldn’t be a Liefeld composition without the use of vague horizontal lines in lieu of a background, and the complete lack of feet. My guess is that Cable used that gigantic gun and the endless rounds of missile-sized ammo to blow off the offending limbs.

Finally, one minor gripe is that Cable’s outfit on the cover doesn’t match what he’s wearing in the issue. Inside, he’s wearing an enormous inflatable life preserver vest, his left hand doesn’t have a glove, the glove on his right hand is tucked into a big spiked armband, and he’s not wearing an undershirt. Not a huge deal, but it sums up the major fundamental problem with Liefeld — he’s sloppy. He doesn’t really pay attention to details, large or small, his compositions are all over the place, his continuity is nonexistent, and in general he just doesn’t seem interested in the finishing work that makes an ordinary project really sing.

All that and we haven’t even opened the cover yet! This is how you know you’re in for a thrill ride, kids. All righty, taking a deep breath, I now crack the lid on this beast, and am immediately presented with … a big splash page! What a shock.

I get what he’s going for here, a very dramatic overhead perspective. But it doesn’t make sense. Either Wolverine is diving into the floor or Cable’s standing at a forty-five degree angle. The two figures don’t match, one or the other is drawn from a different perspective from the rest of the room. Plus, Wolverine’s claws are supposed to fit inside his forearms, right? No way that happens with these gigantic, constant-width cleavers. I do give Liefeld credit here for breaking the traditional “legal birdseed text at the bottom” pattern, and I like the way both figures break the planes of the panel.

Aside from the art, we’re told by writer Louise Simonson that the two are ” … now locked in a battle from which, the death of one or the other can be the only result.” First, this is obviously bullshit. No way they’re killing off either Wolverine or Cable. And they’re standing next to each other on the cover, all nice-nice, so clearly this is just nonsense. Still, heroes fighting heroes is a staple of the genre, so whatever.

The fight continues, with Cable kicking Wolverine over his head into some boxes. Sadly, Cable pays the ultimate price of having his head severed during the maneuver.

Also his mechanical hand appears to have two thumbs, but no one seems to care so maybe that’s a design feature. “Mechan-O-Arm 2000 — if two opposable thumbs are good, four are better!” Cable then insults Wolverine:

Presumably the insult has something to do with the large lumpy sacks of potatoes Wolverine had grafted on in place of his thighs, probably to complement the forearm-ass from the cover. Cable has no room to talk, of course, because while apparently his head wasn’t severed in that earlier panel, it was rearranged so it’s coming out of his left shoulder instead. Let he who is without a grotesque anatomical malformity cast the first nuke and all that.

Seriously, someone needs to tell Cable that he’s a fatty. Look at the size of that butt! And those tiny tiny little hands and feet. I bet he wanted to be a ballerina in whatever alternate future history dimension Earth he hails from, but he was told he was just too much of a wide load. Pity. Also, note that here his pistol is on his left leg, and that he’s only got one gun belt, which is solely cinched around his thigh. I’ll bring this up again later.

Meanwhile, we cut to the New Mutants being held prisoner. In theory they are hanging suspended from chains around their wrists:

We’re being asked to believe that Boom-Boom somehow is able to hold up her entire weight with her wrists. Don’t even ask how Sunfire is managing to simultaneously thrust his chest out in front while holding himself up via the forearms. Does Liefeld not care that this layout is impossible? Does he not understand how arms work? Do the laws of physics not apply in the confines of Rob Liefeld’s art studio?

To compound the insanity, a few pages later Boom-Boom somehow manages to turn in her chains, grab Cannonball by the head — despite the fact that they’re chained side to side! By the wrists!! — and kiss him. We also are told that while previously being kissed by Dragoness, Cannonball managed to snag the key to their chains from her headdress.

Whahunh?!

First, why the hell would a person keep a key in their headdress?! That’s just stupid. Second, if you’re supporting all your weight from your wrists over your head, how in the name of all that’s holy do you mange to reach down and find, much less snag, that key? And finally, good for you, you’ve managed to get a key, now how the hell are you supposed to unlock your chains while your hands are locked together over your head?!

Look, Louise Simonson is a good writer. I’ve been trying to wrap my head around how this issue could be so stupid given that the plot must have been at least somewhat sensible when it left her office. I think the only reasonable answer is that the crappiness of Liefeld’s plotting and penciling are so bad they can overwhelm even good writing. What she put on paper got so badly mangled in the actual art layout that it’s unrecognizable and makes no sense.

In any event, they spare themselves having to solve the puzzle of unlocking chains when you can’t use your arms or hands by cutting back to the Wolverine/Cable slugfest. Which leads directly to the awesomeness that is … page 11.

Note the absence of any background elements whatsoever. Classic. But I think each of the three panels on this page deserve their own treatment.

At the top, the first thing to notice is that Wolverine’s bottom jaw has come unhinged. The second thing to notice is that Cable’s face doesn’t look like his face in any other panel — the nose, jaw, chin, eyes, and forehead are all different. If it weren’t for that glowing thingie around his eye and the mohawk I wouldn’t recognize him.

In the second panel, Wolverine’s jaw is now even more unhinged, which is understandable since he just got pimp-slapped so hard he’s flying backwards. We avoid the problem of having to draw Cable’s face the same way twice on one page by putting it in shadow, which is clever, if cowardly. That bit of artistic derring-do unfortunately gets overshadowed by the fact that punching simply doesn’t work the way it’s depicted here. Cable is basically standing with his body facing forward, and yet he’s punched across his chest. To do that, you’d have only your arm strength going for you, with no impetus from your legs or torso at all. But hey, Wolverine looks cool!

Finally, at the bottom, we have another “Cable’s a big fat fatty” rear shot, where his leg covers the place where Wolverine’s thigh got cut off from the hip and was stuffed with balloons. Also, Cable’s gun has now magically moved over to his right leg. As Rob Liefeld likes to say, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little … hey, drawing Hobgoblin in a fight would be cool!”

Anyway, the fight draws to a close as — wait a minute, where the hell did those gun belts come from?!

If you’ll recall, Cable’s gun was on his left leg. Well, I mean, before it moved somehow to his right leg in the previous panel. And now we see from the front that he actually has two holsters with guns, neither of which is attached via thigh belt! Instead each hangs from its own ammo-festooned strap. Also, everything in this panel points to Cable’s crotch. And again with the tiny, tiny hands and feet. You know what they say about the size of a man’s hands, which again raises the question — why is everything pointing to his crotch?

Regardless, we learn that the New Mutants watching the battle haven’t done anything yet because:

Let’s recap. Half the team is being held in durance vile, so the other half has come to rescue them. The area is rife with super baddies, so they want to be quiet. So quiet that Cable and Wolverine get into a giant fight, smashing into boxes and shouting dialog at each other! So how does our intrepid group of wall flowers decide to end this buffoonery without alerting the sentries? Why, they use earthquake powers to shatter a big huge wooden water tower!

This is why you often see ninjas, masters of stealth, dropping water towers on people. Very sneaky and quiet. And of course, no one who’s lived through it can forget the eerie silence of the earth shaking hard enough to explode stuff. No sir.

Idiots.

However, it does give us this panel, which may be the single worst drawing in the entire issue. Which is saying something, as you’ve seen.

How freaking big is Wolverine’s head, anyway? And is he so hard up for a smoke that he’s willing to stuff a water-logged stogie into that broken-jawed pie hole of his? That’s just disgusting.

Whatever, per usual the battling heroes discover that — surprise! — they’re both there for the same purpose and join up, which is convenient because master villain Stryfe has discovered that his erstwhile prisoners have escaped, and he sends in the heavy artillery. Literally heavy.

I want you to take a long hard look at that drawing. I find it incredibly disturbing on a whole series of levels, but foremost among them is this. Rob Liefeld, as the artist, has the choice of what angle use when drawing a scene. And he chose to give us a giant diaper-clad crotch flying directly into our faces! Maybe he was hoping that the prospect of this ginormous — and come on folks, that’s a truly epic spread of butt cheekery and packageosity there — would distract us from the other massive anatomical problems going on here, like the fact that one foot is coming out of his butt and the other appears to be ripped from Scrooge McDuck. Or that he has no chest, shoulders merging directly into sternum. Or that the forearm doesn’t have muscles there.

No matter what he planned, I am going to have nightmares about this panel for a long time, and I’m sending the therapy bills to Liefeld.

On page 27, see Classic Liefeld Costume Designery in action, with the tall pointy bits both above and below the helmet, the lip-eating mask, the giant spiky metal bits sproinging out all over, gigantic shoulder pads, and impossibly-folded cape.

On the next page, of course, the cape is nowhere to be seen. Maybe they joined Cable’s two gun belts in whatever otherverse houses Rob Liefeld’s appearing-disappearing fashion items.

Mercifully the issue ends soon after, with a big explosion that somehow still manages to avoid any background details. Hopefully the force of the shock wave blows everyone’s feet back on the right way and rescues Cable’s guns. The last image with which I would like to leave you is this one, of Sunfire flying:

Because admit it — if you ever got the power to fly, you’d be just as tempted as Sunfire to cop a squat mid-air on top of your mortal enemy. Just once.

Which I think is a fitting metaphor for what Liefeld did not only to this entire issue, but the super-hero comics industry as a whole.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go shower to get the stink of this issue off of me.

(All images and characters from “The New Mutants”, Vol. 1, No. 94, ©1990 Marvel Entertainment Group, Inc. Louise Simonson, writer. Rob Liefeld, penciller. Hilary Barta, inker (I pity you, Hilary, really I do). Joe Rosen, letterer. Brad Cancata, colorist.)

I’ve always assumed his name was supposed to be read all in one, as if his name were “Jack” but had “Ninja” appended to it, like a shortening of “Ninja Jack”. But now I am forced to wonder if perhaps there was a whole line of these guys a la James Bond and the Double-O series. Like this fellow is eleventh in a series of Ninjas, just after Ninjaj and Ninjai, but before the inevitable rise of Ninjal. Regardless, I think Valiant was really onto something with this naming deal, and I eagerly await the appearance of female sidekick “Ninjill”.

But I digress.

Ninjak used to work for The Weaponeers, a global organization that developed and sold high-tech weapons, before they were eliminated by the terrorist group WEBNET (motto: “All your capital letters are belong to us!”). Eventually he’d go on to confront them and their nefarious plot to distribute “Black Water”, which in some way I can’t be bothered to look up is different from Jed Clampett’s “Black Gold”, also known as “Texas Tea”. I think maybe Ellie Mae worked for them, but this particular issue involves “The Djinn”, an assassin using one of the Weaponeer prototype weapons to kill a diplomat at an airport. Knowing how fond of cameras politicians are, the weapon’s the unlikely union of a gun and a car muffler — you take the guy’s picture, pull the trigger, and the “smart bullet” goes out and kills the dude, no muss, no fuss:

Since you don’t have to be in line of sight, you can be anywhere within 700 meters, we’re told, and still get your man. Through the magic of Google Calculator, I was able to determine that 700 meters is almost half a mile. As a result, the dread Djinn fires his weapon not from nearby Short Term Parking, but from … a bathroom. Apparently smart bullets can open doors, they’re very polite that way.

If you can get past that particular bit of lunacy, you won’t have a problem believing that Ninjak spots the disguised Djinn and follows him onto a plane, which still has taken off on time despite an assassination in the terminal. Sure, they delay my flight for an hour because it’s raining in Kuala Lampur, but off a UN diplomat down the hall and everything’s hunky-dory.

Inevitably there’s a fight onboard the plane, which begins with the Ninja assassin ritual of urinating on nearby objects, leg lifted:

Inevitably the smart gun gets involved, taking a lovely snapshot of Ninjak’s cowled face and thus targeting our hero. One might wonder why he doesn’t just loosen the cowl, or change it out for his shirt or something, but maybe the bullet’s really smart and that wouldn’t have worked. In any event, while it may be smart it’s slower than Christmas:

In fact it’s so slow and so maneuverable that it manages to turn around — twice! — in the narrow confines of an airplane aisle. Now that’s some agile bulleteering, my friends!

Apparently, though, like so many youths in the Nineties the smart bullet is addicted to video games, because Ninjak is able to trick it by waving a Gameboy under its metal nose and tossing the device out the door. No, really. I’m not surprised the Weaponeers were brought down if their best tech can be defeated by Super Mario Kart.

Luckily everything’s brought to a satisfactorily bloody conclusion, with a plane full of dead bodies in the sky and a decapitated Djinn used as a flotation device for our “hero”. My only beef with this issue, besides the completely nonsensical parts between the covers and the wanton bloodshed and the name of the character and the inane physics of the smart gun, is that the cover shows Ninjak with a sword while in the comic he’s without his weapons, presumably because even in the go-go Nineties you couldn’t pack a blade in your carry-on luggage. Of course no one had a problem with him boarding with metal armor and a kevlar vest, or with Djinn packing in a parachute, smart gun, and high explosives, but then, you can’t expect airport security to catch everything.

(All images and story from “Ninjak”, Vol. 1, No. 7, ©1994 Voyager Communications, Inc. Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, and Mark Moretti, writers; Andrew Currie, penciller; Andy Lanning and Jennifer Marrus, inkers; John Cebollero, colorist.)