December Comics Round-Up

Ultimates #2 (Marvel)

Yes, this is definitely the Avengers-esque title I'm going to follow. Black Panther's team - Blue Marvel might nominally be calling the shots, but it's definitely Black Panther's team - are all incredibly powerful, hyperintelligent, or both, and they're travelling the universe to sort shit out. Dan Brown's art is perfect for this. There's a real cosmic feel to this issue, ending with a complete inversion of what Galactus stands for, that could lead to some very interesting things indeed.

Doctor Who - Eighth Doctor #2 (Titan)

Emma Vicelli absolutely nails her depiction of the eighth Doctor. I prefer this issue to the first; this is the other side of the eighth Doctor, the careworn old man who's trying to remain positive in the face of an overwhelmingly cruel universe. It ends on an optimistic note, but we know that this Doctor is going to have to face his own war soon, which adds depth to the story. Very good.

Doctor Who Magazine #494 (Panini)

Haven't we had sword-and-sorcery planets in the comics quite recently? This is fine, but there's not an original element in it. Adrian Salmon's art style doesn't really work for it, either. I'm going to call this one a miss.

Batman/TMNT #1 (DC/IDW)

Just much more fun than it has any right to be. I like that this avoids going for all out campery. Batman and the Turtles might actually work very well together. And using Killer Croc here is so obvious it would have been foolish not to do so.

Ms. Marvel #2 (Marvel)

This is rather excellent, with Kamala facing the twin evils of gentrification and the exploitation of fame. There are some rather lovely moments with both Bruno and her adorable older brother, and pitting the youngest Avenger against a new, corporate version of HYDRA makes sense. The important stuff is Kamala's entirely believable reaction to the developments, though.

The Mighty Thor #2 (Marvel)

"Just take me to my cell, serpent. I figure it's best I get one now... before all the good ones are filled." That's just a brief line showing how awesome Heimdall is, but this is brilliant throughout. Thor is just excellent right now. The war between the Light and Dark Elves rages, with the incongruous sight of Roxxon tanks mowing down unicorns. Loki is back, all re-grown up and bad again, while the Elves and Jotnar lay waste to the Nine Realms in a beautiful and finely written story. Recommended.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #3 (Marvel)

A fairly middling issue for Squirrel Girl, but still way more fun than pretty much any comic series running right now. Retro-Dr. Doom just about works in this context, revelling in the campness of the character, but Nancy isn't quite up to the task of holding the storyline up against him without Doreen. Things work much better once the girls team up again. Digging Doreen's sixties costume. Includes the perfect footnote, "That guy's The Punisher! Like all men who take themselves extremely seriously, he likes to spend his downtime sewing cartoon skeleton heads onto every shirt he owns, so that way everyone can tell right away how extremely serious he is." When a comic running at half-power has lines like that, it's a keeper.

Lucifer #1 (DC/Vertigo)

Well, that wasn't nearly as bad as I'd feared it would be. I still don't really see the point of it; the original Lucifer series by Mike Carey was truly brilliant and a closed story, ending in the most perfect and final way possible. I'd expected this to be a reboot, rather than a continuation as it is here, and I'm not sure which is more pointless. Still, Lucifer returning to the Universe in the wake of God's apparent murder has some potential. Not a patch on Carey's work, but approximately 130 times better than the shit they cooked up for TV.

The Wicked + The Divine #17 (Image)

Wow, this has gone off the boil. The last issue of the current "let's look at everyone's backstory" season, this one focuses on cat-goddess Sekhmet, who is only interesting in fucking and drinking and is correspondingly boring as hell. Looking forward to how the series kicks back into gear upon its return in April, as it really needs some forward momentum.

And that's yer lot. I'll be cutting right back on the comics next year - Saga, Squirrel Girl, Ultimates and The Mighty Thor will be on my list, probably along with Ms. Marvel and maybe Spider-Woman. 

REVIEW: Lucifer - pilot episode

Lucifer is one of the greatest comic series of the modern period. It was perhaps inevitable, in the current comics-obsessed climate, that a screen adaptation would be optioned. As with its parent series The Sandman, it's often been argues that it would be impossible to adapt for the screen without losing what made it so remarkable in the first place. Warner Bros' new TV version is a powerful evidence for that argument. Judging by the "leaked" pilot episode, the series will be, if you will excuse the pun, diabolical.

A short introduction: while Lucifer is, of course, one of the most widely known beings in all mythology, the comicbook version is not as famous as his quality would suggest. In short, one of the first two entities created by God (the other being the Archangel Michael), Lucifer rebelled against his Father and when defeated was consigned to rule over Hell, a ten billion year sentence which he found insufferably boring. Shortly after his introduction in Neil Gaiman's seminal Sandman, he decided to abandon Hell and go make his own way in the world. This led to Mike Carey's spin-off series, in which Lucifer fought to take control of his own destiny, away from the omniscient controlling will of God. Lucifer, as a comic series, was beautifully, angrily written, utterly disrespectful, and quite brilliant. The news that DC intend to renew the series after almost ten years is worrisome in itself; apart from the fact that the series had perhaps the most perfect and final ending of any story I have read, the New 52 iteration of the title character lacks the intelligence and nuance of Gaiman and Carey's original.

And then we have this embarrassment. Even from the initial description, this sounded awful. Reimagining the series as a supernaturally-themed cop show is both the most depressingly unoriginal and painfully inevitable way it could have gone. I've nothing against the format - I enjoy a cliched set-up as much as the next telly watcher, and paraprocedurals are a popular and growing subgenre. But honestly, it really is the laziest possible way to adapt this material, and frankly displays a complete misunderstanding of everything that made the original so compelling. The wrongness of the approach is almost boundless. Rather than the aloof and complex character of the comics, the TV Lucifer is a sex-obsessed prick who is entirely bound up with humanity. His superpower is seemingly that everyone wants to have sex with him, which automatically makes him the sort of character I will dislike on principle. It also smacks of a desperate need to make this PG-rated fluff "edgy" and controversial. There's sex everywhere in this episode, never shown because of course they're not allowed to actually let anyone see a nipple or anything, but continually referred to because that's what passes for adult drama in the minds of the series' creators.

Beyond this, though, the character is completely misinterpreted. Maze, a feebly watered-down version of the comics' complex demoness Mazikeen, asks why Lucifer would care about a human life, and she's entirely right to ask. The comicbook Lucifer never displayed compassion. Humanity, for most part, were at best an amusement and mostly beneath his notice. He would never display compassion, although he may step in to save a life if it belonged to one of the very, very few beings he respected. He most certainly would not go to great lengths to investigate a murder of someone he was briefly involved with in his earthly holiday. It would be beneath him.

I can try to watch the show without the original in my mind, but even then, it's terrible. It's not without some charms, in fairness. Tom Ellis is charming in the lead and is genuinely fun to watch at times, while Lauren German is watchable as his unwitting partner, Chloe. The problem is , they've got such poor material to work with. The problems with Lucifer's character I've outlined, but then there's Chloe, whose sole point of interest is that she doesn't want to have sex with Lucifer. Other than that, she's a walking cliche. She's a female cop in a male-dominated force, she's a single mother with a difficult relationship with her ex, and I'm nodding off just writing this. In what is presumably an attempt to make her a little more interesting and "edgy" (there's that word again), she once took her top off in a movie. Well fuck-a-doodle-doo. I know primary school teachers who are edgier than these characters.

I'm struggling to find anything else to praise in this episode. The effects were pretty good, I guess. The angel Amenadial (D.B. Woodside) looked really quite impressive with his wings unfurled. That's about it. The dialogue is appalling, the performances largely forgettable, and there's not a shred of originality to be found. As an entirely new property, I would have forgotten about it almost immediately. As an adaptation of a truly great comic series, it's an insult. At least it's already pissing off some hardline Christian types, so I guess that's something.

REVIEW: The Wicked + The Divine: The Faust Act

Gods as pop stars. In less talented hands this could be a tragically naff concept, but Kieron Gillen makes it work perfectly. The risk is that it's simply too obvious; celebrity is the modern divinity, the movie stars, singers and frontmen the god-kings of 20^th and 21^st century society. To make this work in a way that seem fresh, cutting and surprising is no mean feat. Gillen is most known for his lauded series Phonogram, which is now going straight on my reading list, but I know him through Young Avengers, on which he works with artist Jamie McKelvie, who joins him again here. Gillen has a knack for witty yet believable dialogue and realistically portrayed teenage characters, something which is notoriously difficult to manage. Most writers end up with nonsense or idiocy, even the ones who are the age of the characters they're portraying. The only slight oddity is that the characters here, in spite of inhabiting London, all have a certain Americanism to their dialogue, unless that's just how kids talk now and I'm even more out of touch than I thought.


Every ninety years, twelve gods return to Earth, for two years. Or rather, twelve young people are chosen, becoming the physical embodiments of the Pantheon. They are granted incredible powers, far too dangerous to use on any mortal, and are adored, hated and feared in equal measure. In two years, they die. By the end of this volume, we have learned the identities of ten or eleven of the Pantheon, (depending on whether Ananke counts as one of them or something else entirely), cherry-picked from various faiths and mythologies and each reflecting some facet of our culture. Our window into this world is Laura, a London teenager, obsessed with the gods that dominate celebrity culture. She becomes part of the gods' circle through Luci, the most engaging, original and attractive Devil I've ever seen. Luci, with her immaculate appearance and sexually predatory persona protecting someone who is still fundamentally a young woman, is the most fascinating version of Lucifer since the eponymous protagonist of Vertigo's series.



Indeed, there's a definite feel of the works of Gaiman and Carey, in the melding of contemporary culture with ancient myth. The Wicked + The Divine feels altogether sharper and more powerfully modern than Lucifer ever did, and has more of a claim to being today's Sandman that Gaiman's prequel series has. This is mythology as it always truly was; dirty, violent, beautiful and terrifying. So here's another title for the pull list.