Mark-Millar

By this time, long-time readers of Comic POW! will know that I have been exploring pulp comic storytelling via Dynamite’s offerings. As the main deal-makers with many of the rights holders of the old pulp characters, Dynamite is leading the way in neo-pulp in comics. So far I’ve really been enjoying Gail Simone’s run on Red Sonja. However, of course she’d be able to do justice to strong female characters with her pedigree on Women in Fridges (the website) and lauded runs on Birds of Prey and Secret Six (among other titles). What would happen with a campy vamp (in both senses of the word) written by one of my favorite writers (Grant Morrison) and a writer that just as often rubs me the wrong way as the right way (Mark Millar) in which they teamed up on the script? They didn’t go in the same direction as Red Sonja in which she had a less ridiculous outfit within the comic, but that’s OK (while not the best possibility). What I didn’t like about the main story, and perhaps it’s an effect of the way the story was collected, is that it appeared quite disjointed. It went from Vampirella trying to save a mob boss from vampires to being accompanied by a wannabe vampire hunter. Additionally, if this girl can easily fight vampires after like a month of training - just how hard are these vampires to fight, anyway? Overall, it appears they just wanted to create an action romp and there’s nothing wrong with that, but with these guys as the writers I was expecting something groundbreaking in the mythos - especially with how interested in these types of things Grant Morrison tends to be. Instead we got the same tired refrain - the head vampire is Judas Iscariot.

It may be cliche to say that art reflects its times, but that does not make it any less true. Mark Millar’s relatively new book, Jupiter’s Legacy, is a book that very specifically speaks to 2013. However, as I’ll get to momentarily, the way we feel now isn’t unique in American (or even world) history and so, depending on which direction the book goes, could end up becoming one of the classics like Watchmen or V for Vendetta which are both very much products of their time, but still stand up today. The book opens up during the Great Depression, after the stock market crash of 1929. Within the first two issues there are a lot of parallels drawn between 1929 and 2008. It’s not perfectly parallel, as I intend to return to later on, but it certainly is the closest the world has come to that moment. Many European countries are still reeling from the Euro collapse and even here in the USA we haven’t yet fully recovered. Folks can debate on the reasons why things didn’t get as bad as they were in the 1930s, but it certainly is the closest that about 3 of the 4 living generations have actually experienced and so we can understand what drives the main characters. ...

It’s funny - Superman’s the most iconic Super Hero comic book character, but until recently I barely knew more about him than the average person on the street that doesn’t (or never did) read comics. I knew he was raised by the Kents and I knew from the old cartoons and the Christopher Reeves movie that Lex Luthor was his enemy. I knew a little more because I had read The Death and Resurrection of Superman at a friend’s house in the nineties. But that’s about it. I knew way more about Batman. Because so many writers have a hard time writing for Superman he tends to be talked about as a loser. I Fight Dragons has the song “No One Likes Superman Anymore”. But as I got back into the comics scene over the past two years, people started to say that the average Superman story might not be anything to write home about, but there were some stories that any fan of comics should read - many of them standalone stories. ...