Luke Cage’s Baadasssss Song
Mighty Avengers #11
So this is a crossover with the “Original Sin” thing, which is all kinds of irritating. Worst thing about it is how long it takes to describe what the whole thing is about. Basically, someone killed the Watcher and stole his eyeballs. A low-level villain called the Orb got hold of one of the eyes, and then it blew up like a bomb and somehow made a lot of people learn about secrets they’d never heard of before. Spider-Man finds out someone else got bit by his radioactive spider, Thor finds out he has a sister, and Luke Cage finds out his father ran some sort of street-level superteam back in the ’70s, which he is, for some reason, all freaked out about.
Anyway, most of this focuses on Luke’s dad, James Lucas, telling the story of his big team-up, which featured him, as a homicide detective, a reporter named Constance Molina, Blade the vampire slayer, Dr. Adam “Blue Marvel” Brashear, and Kaluu, Master of Black Magic, as they tried to track down a bunch of shapeshifting monsters.
Verdict: Thumbs up. Other than Greg Land’s incredibly irritating tracing, I really do enjoy the blaxploitation vibe of this story. It’s actually really cool to see Blade in his old retro costume from the old “Tomb of Dracula” days.
Shutter #3
Kate Kristopher narrowly escapes serious injury in a rocket attack on her apartment, though her longtime friend Alain is hospitalized with extensive burns. She needs to go find some place where she won’t have to worry about assassins trying to kill her — so she goes to her father’s old homestead, meets up with the bony butler Harrington, and learns that there will be other guests at the mansion as well.
Verdict: Thumbs up. Wonderfully weird stuff all the way through, but I was completely sold four pages, when a bunch of underworld lowlifes drawn to look like characters from a Richard Scarry book plot an assassination.
She-Hulk #5
She-Hulk has decided to investigate her mysterious blue file — a record of a lawsuit filed against her and a number of superheroes and villains. Unfortunately, she has no memory of the case at all. In the process of speaking to the other defendants, Shulkie talks to the Shocker, who doesn’t remember anything significant about the case. Hellcat talks to Tigra, who promptly freaks out and goes into robot attack mode as soon as Patsy mentions the case. Jennifer’s paralegal, Angie Huang, travels to North Dakota to research the case, finds some information, and unknowingly sends a clerk into freakout mode. And Shulkie, unaware that the case is making some people completely freak out, calls up Wyatt Wingfoot to quiz him about it — while he’s climbing a mountain…
Verdict: Thumbs up for the writing and story, which is deepening the mystery about this case wonderfully — but thumbs down for the fill-in art, which is often really, really unattractive.
Today’s Cool Links:
- Gail Simone on how rotten the comics community was just a decade ago, how great her readers are, and how cool other female comic writers are. Gail Simone is the best.
- Animals dancing to Salt-n-Pepa’s “Push It.”
- I’m a sucker for a capella renditions of punk rock songs.