Stormwatch #1, Original Cover Date March 1993
Story/Script by Jim Lee and Brandon Choi, Penciled by Scott Clark, Inked by Trevor Scott

I think I’m pretty open-minded when it comes to 90’s comics. I’ve really tried to emphasize that the 90’s were not all gigantic guns and weirdly proportioned women gritting their teeth at one another. That said, that’s exactly what Stormwatch #1 is. It’s everything you associate with an early 90’s X-Men comic except it replaces the characters you know and like with poorly designed doppelgangers!

We begin with Battalion, the aging, gun-toting, African-American leader of the Stormwatch as he leads his strike team of Fiji the even-keeled Japanese muscleman, Diva, the hot chick, Hellstrike, and Winter (I don’t know anything about these guys, they each get about one line). They are on assignment in Sarajevo to rescue an old friend of Battalion who is trying to get a school bus full of genetically important children to safety. The bus is attacked by the “Mercs,” an evil Brotherhood-like team led by Deathstroke the Terminator, I mean… Deathtrap. Let me guess, he's named “Blade” Wilson? Deathtrap is joined by Slayer, Razer, and Kilgore, with Kilgore as the Wolverine/Sabretooth type. Slayer and Diva square off, and we learn that Slayer was a good guy and that she talks like Rogue. I am not exaggerating. “I’ve become an exceptional cold-blooded killa, sugah.” Mid-fight, another Merc appears, a spikey-shoulderpad wearing guy that looks like minor villain “Ahab.” The mission goes well-enough, except Battalion’s friend gets murdered by Deathtrap.

Battalion wakes up in New York, re-living the events of the battle, when his mom comes in to tell him someone’s at the door. Synergy, a Stormwatch employee and former rival, is there with some government goons. Battalion’s brother Malcolm was arrested for robbery, but his diplomatic immunity gets him off the hook. Battalion listens to his brother’s insane story of his arrest, featuring pony-tailed white men breaking into an electronics shop for zero reason and carrying off televisions. Malcolm doesn’t actually take anything, but he runs off with his pals. When the police arrive, his pony-tailed idiot friend produces a gun and tries to shoot the cops, but gets shot to death for his trouble. The officer, having shot the kid to death, has his gun drawn on the unarmed teen and shouts “Don’t make me do it, son!” Which I mean, good for him for not shooting an unarmed teen for standing too close to an armed white guy! I feel like that would have been a bad thing to do! Battalion calls his brother Malcolm “boy” and lectures him for being a disappointment.

The next day, Battalion and his family are at his friend’s funeral, when who should appear but the Mercs. They start blasting everywhere, and Malcolm gets shot. Synergy checks on him and finds he’s completely unhurt. But that means… Battalion is forced to let Synergy “activate” his brother’s potential powers, causing pink optic blasts to shoot out of Malcolm. To be continued!

Review:

Let me start by saying some nice things. Scott Clark (RIP) has some nice pencils. He’s not a superstar artist, and I think he may be tracing Jim Lee or some other contemporary artists on some of this, but overall his linework is clear and solid. Malibu’s vaunted coloring process is on display as the coloring is pretty good.

On the other hand, the first fight scene is staged incomprehensibly. I don’t know how much design work he put into these characters, but they all feel like below-average Lee/Liefeld action figures, and I say that as someone who had action figures of Gideon and other Externals. The plot is pretty much a train-wreck from jump-street, built around two confrontations with the blankest slate bad guys, mercenaries creatively called the Mercs. This is also a first issue that doesn’t introduce much in the way of character, setting, or anything else, devoted as it is to confusing fight scenes where new, unnamed characters appear halfway through. As alluded to, the rest of the team doesn’t ever talk to Battalion, who isn’t particularly sympathetic as he lectures his brother for having loser friends. The whole Malcolm scene is completely ridiculous, with Malcolm inexplicably getting caught up in the worst-planned theft in history. Typical NYPD cops though, talking about how they were going to charge him with “robbery,” even though it was clearly theft. Why is Malcolm associating with these clowns? Why are the heroes so flat-footed when the Mercs show up at the funeral? How did the mission even end, since we cut out that part? Why does Deadshot re-use essentially the same line about how he should have killed Battalion in Kuwait both times he sees the guy?

90’s Fashion: so much! Battalion’s costume is full of pouches, electronic doo-dads, and huge shoulder pads. Diva wears a Psylocke-style one-piece with knee-high boots, complete with spikes going around her thigh, and a pouch-belt around her waist. Winter wears a jacket over his bodysuit. Deathtrap has even more pouches, and an over-one-shoulder bandolier. Slayer, another member of the Mercs, is just wearing one of Magneto’s acolyte costumes she found lying around. Synergy wears a short red dress with a big blue jacket over it to Battalion’s home. Stoney, one of Malcolm’s pals, has a long, stringy ponytail. One of the Bosnian(?) schoolchildren is wearing an Image t-shirt.

Arc Review: Fantastic Four, Unthinkable

In a previous post, I talked about how I didn’t share in the relatively common sentiment that J. Michael Straczynski’s take on Spider-Man was a sort of Renaissance, ruined only by editorial marriage-meddling, organic web meddling, Civil War meddling, and “Gwen Stacy secretly had Norman Osborn’s kids” meddling. In my review of the “Spider Totem” arc, I think I explained why JMS’s work didn’t do it for me, even coming after a truly dire run by John Byrne and Howard Mackie.

I bring this up because recently in my Fantastic Four re-read I’ve reached Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo’s celebrated run on the book, and while I enjoyed the first arc quite a bit, I found their much-touted “Unthinkable” arc to be… not good comics. Which stinks, because I love Ringo’s art and Waid can be one of the best comic writers in the business when he’s on; I have no vested interest in disliking a story made by creators I like. The story, for those unfamiliar with it, is that Doom, tired of his failures(???), embraces magic, sacrificing his teenage love Valeria in order to gain new mystical powers, which he then uses to capture the Fantastic Four and torture Franklin Richards by sending him to, as the comic puts it, “hell.” This is controversial to some fans, as apparently there’s a sentiment that this goes against Doom’s characterization as made famous by John Byrne and others, but the general consensus is that the vileness of Doom’s actions makes this a more memorable story. In 2011, it was ranked the #11 Dr. Doom story by Comic Book Resources.

I have quite a few problems with this story, so I’ll go over them one at a time. My first issue is: why does Dr. Doom feeling like he’s a loser? The idea of the story appears to be that Doom is tired of losing to Reed Richards, but that characterization doesn’t really make any sense. It’s the perception of Doom impotently shouting “RICHARDS” in Wizard magazine given form in a comic when it doesn’t reflect the comic’s reality. In Doom’s last appearance in FF, he’d successfully delivered Valeria, naming the child and one-upping Reed, who had failed to save Sue’s second child in one of Byrne’s best issues. So in his last appearance, he wasn’t “defeated” at all- he totally won. He's also the head of a small but important country. Before his latest appearance, he showed up at earth’s doorstep with an invading army after successfully conquering Counter-Earth. On earth, he rules a small country that he’s managed to keep independent from either Western or Eastern or Middle-Eastern powers, and he’s got diplomatic immunity: his previous story appearance prior to Unthinkable featured him offering asylum to the Inhumans. But for the purposes of this story, he feels like science isn’t working, and chooses magic, in what is a perfectly good prologue issue that doesn’t feature the FF at all. I’m fine with this issue showcasing Doom, and there’s a nice little fake-out that might surprise new readers, as Doom ups his magical powers at the cost of personal happiness.

So what does Doom want to do with these new powers? Humiliate Reed Richards, I guess? Now you can argue that Doom’s acted this way before, carrying petty grudges against the team, but there doesn’t seem to be any reason for Doom’s actions in the story beyond “Grr I hate Reed Richards.” But worse than his motivation is his execution, my second issue with this arc: Doom targets the family through their children, possessing Valeria, and mystically sending Franklin into “hell,” where he is tortured, presumably for hours if not days, by demons. Just so we’re clear, Franklin is 6-7 years old in this story. I get it, Doom’s the bad guy, but this is pretty bizarre stuff from the character, and seems to exist only to show that “this ain’t your daddy’s Dr. Doom!” It’s poor characterization that only makes sense from the outside looking in, trying to show that Dr. Doom isn’t just going to tie up the heroes and force them to dress as Blackbeard any more.

In the story, Doom then fights the team, whose “this time, it’s personal” response to their children being attacked is to bring guns. Also, Ben snaps Doom’s neck. But of course, since Doom is magic now, he Linda Blair’s his head back and captures the heroes. Except for the team immediately crossing their own moral event horizons, this is all pretty standard, but again, what bothers me is that Doom, who has engaged the team just because he hates Reed, then tortures the rest of the team too. Look, I’m not saying I oppose torture in my superhero comics (although I don’t like it), but here it’s just gruesome and needlessly grim. And unlike the old comics, where the heroes would be put in some sort of deathtrap and have to get out of it, the rest of the family just sort of sits there being tortured for the rest of the story until Reed saves them. I guess it’s nice in theory that we’re fridge-ing male characters now? Franklin, Ben, and Johnny’s literal torturing is just a means to make Reed feel bad. But don’t worry, Sue is tortured too, in that she is given an uncontrollable version of Johnny’s powers, leaving her painfully on fire. We cut to Reed, who has been left in Doom’s library, where Doom promises the tools to beat him are in some magic books he’s left scattered around a big library.

Reed, a character who regularly uses energy drawn from other dimensions and who hired a literal witch to be his child’s nanny is like “pff, magic is fake, I hate magic," as his characterization is somehow confused with Tony Stark's, and Dr. Strange appears to lecture him about magic technique (badly characterized Dr. Strange is apparently a favorite deus ex machina of early 2000’s comics: he had similar roles in JMS’ Spider-Man and the disaster that was Disassembled). Because this isn’t the focus of the story, Strange disappears and just leaves a vague ‘magic gun’ for Reed to use. He frees the team and they fight Doom for awhile, magicking him into the hell dimension, where Doom magically scars up Reed’s face. And it’s PERMANENT (for like, one arc). The rest of the team, uhhh, congratulate Reed for doing all the work, I guess?

And that’s that, except for a really tasteless denouement where Franklin is hugely traumatized and we need a two issue arc of him literally attacking people on the street because he thinks they’re monsters, and needs to be told it’s okay by Ben and Sue. Arguing with a friend about these issues, he pointed out that a “lesser writer would’ve skipped over Franklin’s trauma.” I think maybe a “lesser” writer wouldn’t have based a story around torturing children and the psychological damage it can do (that’s solved in two issues). I don’t want to read about psychologically damaged seven year olds in superhero comics, so maybe don’t base your storylines around total “Dr. Doom is EVIIIIIIL” mustache-twirling villainy stunts.

Maybe it’s just my own hang-ups, but Marvel in this period was really not what I wanted from comics. This was during the time Bill Jemas was trying to “fix” Marvel by focusing less on continuity and more on selling six part stories at Borders, and the rejection of the comics code resulted in some truly dire material as Marvel really wanted to sell ultra-violence and teased “adult content” in the most juvenile way possible. (Aren’t you glad none of this is a problem in mainstream comics anymore?) The whole story reads like an attempt to do “Ultimate”-style Mark Millar bleakness; the arc after Franklin’s PTSD has direct references to the Authority, after all (it's bad too). There’s a demographic that this sort of story appeals to: a demographic that thinks Kirby comics are uncool or that the FF in general or Dr. Doom is lame; unfortunately, that’s not me. I think there’s space on the shelves for gritty, realistic, Nihilistic comics, but I don’t think Fantastic Four should be that comic. There’s some cool visual moments by Ringo, but overall, there’s much, much better stuff out there that’s truer to the spirit of the characters and is just in general more enjoyable to read than this.

RIP Paul Ryan

Paul Ryan, comic book artist and cartoonist, died yesterday at the age of only 66. As a dedicated fan of 90’s comics, especially those that flew somewhat under the radar, this is really sad news. A veteran who contributed lasting work across three decades, it’s a shame that Ryan’s name is not particularly well known, even to comic book fans. Originally Iron Man artist Bob Layton’s assistant, Ryan moved on to penciling work at Marvel, taking over the art duties on Iron Man and the Squadron Supreme, and co-creating the series DP7 for Marvel’s New Universe. Perhaps his most famous single issue is Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21, aka the wedding issue.

 Ryan began the 90’s working on the Avengers comic at a time when the book was struggling to find consistency or much in the way of sales success, but was pulled from it in order to work with then Editor-in-Chief Tom DeFalco on Fantastic Four, where he’d work for the next four years. In the wake of Walt Simonson’s incredible, boundary-pushing work, De Falco and Ryan focused more on the soap opera aspect, a decision that played to Ryan’s strengths at conveying emotion and character in his art. Perhaps most infamously, Ryan designed Sue’s “invisible cleavage” 90’s outfit, notable for a four logo being cut out, along with various other missing strips of fabric along her legs and arms. In some ways it was a response to the “bad girl” trend, but it seemed less extreme in the context of the story, where Sue was behaving more recklessly over time due to the slowly returning “Malice” entity from John Byrne’s run.

After Ryan left the title just before the Heroes Reborn event, he became a freelancer, working on Superman: the Wedding Album and Flash. He returned at the tail end of the 90’s as part of the MC2 line, where he’d be reunited with DeFalco. In 2005, Ryan, the former artist of the Spider-Man newspaper strip, was chosen as the daily artist for the Phantom strip, a job he’d hold until his death. In addition, he spent several years illustrating the Sunday strip.

That Ryan isn’t particularly well-known, even among comic book fans, is not correlated to his talent as a storyteller. Not particularly flashy, Ryan, along with relative contemporary Ron Frenz, was a sort of throwback to an earlier era of clean lines and strong anatomy at a time not particularly known for either. That ability to draw simple, clean characters helped Ryan become one of Marvel’s most prolific trading card artists.

A fan of the industry since childhood, Ryan was fortunate enough to make his living drawing. His contributions, even of the invisible cleavage variety, should not be forgotten.

I Knew There Was a Reason I Didn't Trust That Baby

Sorry to followers of this blog, I haven't had the time to update even on a slightly reduced schedule. I just don't have the time for humorous and insightful comics reviews at the moment, as I am somehow able to write as a full-time job. But I do have time to read great 90's comics and then screencap them:

Via Supreme 52-A, Alan Moore and Jim Mooney