Cancelled Comics Commentary
for 2010
January 2010
World of Warcraft #25
(Wildstorm): based on the popular RTS and MMORPG computer game
produced by Blizzard Entertainment, this project, one of the last
published under the Wildstorm imprint, featured both the Alliance
and Horde characters usually seen in the game. Presumably it ended
production because of the financial losses DC, as owner of
Wildstorm, brought upon themselves, and a proposed graphic novel
that was to be based on the game ended up canned as well. Back to
the computer console, I guess.
February-March
2010
Nothing to declare.
April
2010
The Incredible Hercules #141
(Marvel): Starring the MCU version of the famous Greek deity of
strength, it got launched out of one of the previous volumes of the
Incredible Hulk (following issue #112), and while this might've been
fine if it had been spun out of one of Marvel's anthology series of
yore - like Stan Lee did when he continued the Hulk's numbering from
Tales to Astonish in 1968, to launch it out of the numbering of a
particular protagonist's own solo book seems dishonest at best. But
this being the era of Joe Quesada (and now Axel Alonso), what could
one expect?
Hercules made his first appearances in Thor's own adventures in the
Silver Age, and has been depicted many times as a likable klutz, had
at least 2 pretty good miniseries in the early 1980s and a memorable
role in the Avengers back in the day, and if it weren't for the
people in charge of Marvel at the time this was being done, the
prospect of giving the great Herc his own ongoing series might've
worked well. But alas, the discouraging editorial staff aside, this
did not catch on with anybody and dropped off the top of the sales
charts pretty fast. Hercules deserved much better.
Ms. Marvel #50 vol. 2
(Marvel): Carol Susan Jane Danvers' second starring book may have
run longer than the 23 issues the earlier one did in the late 1970s,
but it was still one of the biggest victims of Joe Quesada's
atrocious company-wide crossovers like House of M and Civil War,
exactly why, in sharp contrast to the original series that ran
alongside Black Panther's own first series back in the day, it was
just simply not worth bothering about. A grave pity too, because Ms.
Marvel, who is one of my favorite lady protagonists in the MCU, had
some real potential as a solo star, and they have to base much of
the new book's existence on being part of crossovers, or invalidate
it by launching it out of now notorious monstrosities like the
Disassembled "event".
Carol Danvers first debuted in Marvel
Super-Heroes #13 in 1968, the creation of Roy Thomas and
Gene Colan, first as a non-powered human and security director for a
USAF base, who befriended Mar-Vell of the Kree, first meeting him in
his earthly disguise as Dr. Walter Lawson. After being held hostage
by an alien nemesis of Mar-Vell's named Yon-Rogg and being injured
in an explosion of a Kree-built machine, she gained superhuman
powers she's since been known to have courtesy of the same accident,
and during 1977-79, that's when the initial series was launched,
first written by Gerry Conway and then by Chris Claremont. She later
joined the Avengers briefly, but it was that story in Avengers #200,
subsequently wrapped up in Avengers Annual 1981, that alienated her
from them for a time. Having first been exploited via mind-control
by the son of Immortus, she later fell victim to Rogue, in her first
appearance as a member of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants when
Mystique was running it, and was fortunate that Prof. Xavier was
able to help build back 90 percent of her memories. But as
mentioned, she was mad at the Avengers for taking Marcus' story at
face value (and as noted here, this was a very well-written
confrontation she made with the EMH), and alienated her from the
Avengers for about a decade before she decided to return. During
this time, when she with the X-Men, she gained another set of powers
that led to her taking up the role of Binary, and joined the
Starjammers for a few years, adventuring in space before returning.
Over the following decade, she would make appearances here and there
around the MCU, and it was with the reforming of the Avengers in
1997 that she began to return to more prominent status.
And unfortunately, as Brian Bendis and company at Marvel have since
demonstrated, the potential to make her really click was wasted.
They connected a lot of it, as mentioned, to the aforementioned
crossovers, and given how it also spun out of that now notorious
"event" story called Disassembled, that's one more reason why this
series was not built upon legitimate grounds, nor did it have any
real stand-alone writing. I recall how one of the stories even
involved Carol ending up technically dead, all for the sake of
replacing her with Moonstone! Carol subsequently came back, but it
was already too late for any storytelling that's authentically
centered around the real heroine as the book lost audience. The
ending could only be considered a mercy.
Now, with Avengers vs. X-Men on the horizon, we can only expect yet
more of the potential-wasting for many protagonists, Carol included.
May
2010
Spider-Woman #7 vol. 3
(Marvel): another starring series for Jessica Drew, the first
official lady to take the role of Spider-Woman back in the day, but
with Brian Bendis as the writer, I can't feel sorry this got canned
so quickly. It's shameful he practically dominated the whole
Avengers franchise for as long as he did, and that includes just
about all work Marvel published of Spider-Woman at the time. The low
point was when, a year after this ended, Bendis wrote a story in
Avengers where Jessica was captured and held hostage while naked (!)
by the Wizard, the supercrook who led the Frightful Four. If that's
how Bendis is going to treat the babes of Marvel, then that's one
more reason why nobody need waste time on his writing, and by that
time, most people had indeed lost interest in his work.
S.W.O.R.D #5 (Marvel): the
title is acronym for Sentient World Observation and Response
Department, and was a series about a counterterrorism unit assigned
to deal with extraterrestrial menaces. It may have first appeared in
Astonishing X-Men by the overrated Joss Whedon (if he's going to
write an intro to the abominable Identity Crisis from DC, as he did
when it was formatted for publication in trades, then that's
actually putting it lightly about him), and made for one really
short-lived series later on; these days, it's actually difficult for
me to ascertain if some really brief ongoings are just that and not
miniseries. The unit was supposed to be working in cooperation with
S.H.I.E.L.D, but Nick Fury, as part of some of the dumbest things
the people holding Marvel hostage could think of doing today, was
written leaving the agency he's famous for managing, and relations
between the 2 outfits faltered. The head of S.W.O.R.D was Abigail
Brand.
And with the way things are going now at Marvel and DC, who can both
give some ongoing series about as much of a chance as network TV is
willing to give some short-lived TV series, I guess it can't be too
surprising this went down pretty quickly.
June
2010
Green Arrow #32 (DC): until
the 29th issue, this had been titled Green Arrow and Black Canary,
but thanks to some of the worst story turns they've taken, like with
the repellant Cry for Justice series, the couple broke up, and the
latter turned against the former, because she and a couple of other
Justice Leaguers opposed Ollie's gunning down Prometheus as
punishment for annihilating Star City! As though it weren't bad
enough that the miniseries seemed to exist only for killing off Lian
Harper (and even the Three Dimwits, those comedy relief characters
seen in the Golden Age Flash tales), they add insult to injury by
making it look as though the League was more concerned about what
Green Arrow did to the supervillain than what the supervillain did
to Star City! Identity Crisis clearly had one of the worst
influences on DC's output.
Even before this, the series wasn't amounting to much. Judd Winick
wrote an absurd story where Connor Hawke underwent a ridiculous
injury that led to his taking up an entirely different fighting
style, and no more archery. And during this time, there was even a
near-wedding for Ollie and Dinah that ended disastrously and was not
worth the paper it was printed on. I'd say this was asking for a
cancellation, though there'd be one more volume after this before
the horrid Flashpoint crossover set in.
The Punisher #16 (Marvel):
as a product of the Civil War embarrassment, this was one of the
worst returns to "form" for decent vigilante creation. I think
what's really ruined Frank Castle over the years was liberal dislike
for vigilantism, one of the reasons why even a superhero like
Spider-Man - in whose pages the Punisher first appeared back in 1974
- has been destroyed as well. I remember one moonbat writer for
Scripps-Howard who once implied that depicting the Punisher as a
lunatic per se was the way to handle the character. I must
vehemently disagree, at least if the criminals Frank Castle's blown
away were depicted as cold-blooded murderers. If they were to be
characterized as such, and the Punisher were to terminate them on
those grounds, then the stories with Frank would certainly be
palatable. (I do recall a letter column telling that in one old
issue, the Punisher did spare some shoplifters, and I will concur
that if it's only simple robbers in focus, then of course Frank
should most definitely NOT be depicted killing those type of
crooks.)
Unfortunately, leftist notions of how to depict a vigilante and a
superhero for that matter, have prevailed badly of late, and it's
led to Frank Castle being rendered ever more unrecognizable from
what he used to be. I read an op-ed on
National Review telling how some left-wing movie critics
cannot stand the notion of vigilantism, and wouldn't be surprised if
this mentality leaked over into the mindsets of leftist comics
writers very badly. Here, Matt Fraction was the writer turning him
into a tool for leftism in his own way. I think the most offensive
thing about the storytelling here is that one story depicted Frank
"paying tribute" to Captain America by wearing a duplicate costume.
If the idea there was to shame the image by having him kill
criminals while in the guise of a hero who usually avoided killing
following his thawing out after many years in suspended animation in
an iceberg after WW2, then honestly, there's something very
wrongheaded going on there.
July
2010
Zero input.
August
2010
The Brave & the Bold #35 vol.
2 (DC): An attempt to revive the older series that ran from
1955-1983, which began as an anthology series mostly for superheroes
(the Justice League of America's first adventure took place in its
pages), and in the late 1960s became more of a Batman and
fill-in-the-blank adventure (a foreshadowing to how Marvel
Two-in-One did the same with the Thing/Ben Grimm), and you could say
it served as the perfect spot for Batman to appear in a more sci-fi
oriented story than what his 2 flagship series featured. After its
cancellation, the Outsiders took over from where it left off.
Unfortunately, with people like Dan DiDio at the helm during the
time this was published, that's one reason why this was doomed to
failure. Another is that J. Michael Stracynski came aboard after
Mark Waid left (and Waid has really gone downhill since 2009, even
writing stories belittling heroism, as his Irredeemable series from Boom Studios can attest),
and wrote some stories featuring at least 2 superheroes once
published by Archie Comics that ran the gauntlet of more leftist
political soapboxing.
And with that, this new would-be attempt at an anthology series soon
slipped into obscurity, becoming just another cog in a circuit
that's since burned out.
September
2010
Ex-Machina #50
(Wildstorm/DC): a political drama about Mitchell Hundred, a
superdoer who gets elected mayor of New York City following his
actions on 9-11. And because writer Brian Vaughan's leanings are so
leftist, that's why I don't think I'd be in such a rush to check
this one out, because of how this particular position appears to be
what the comic goes by too. A real shame.
The Warlord #16 vol. 3
(DC): This series, which put Mike Grell back at the writing helm
many years after he'd left Travis Morgan's stories behind, restored
some of the continuity that Bruce Jones trashed in the previous
volume listed in the 2007
files. But really sad, it followed a pattern I am honestly
weary of now: Travis was killed towards the end of this series at
the hands of his own son Joseph, who'd been brainwashed by Deimos.
And soon afterwards, guess what happens? Joseph becomes the new
Warlord. They had to rub out Travis just to do that?
Okay, it was Grell who created Morgan to begin with, and I suppose
it's only fair if he wants to end the character that way too. But
even so, that Grell followed practically the same pattern that's
been taking up the bulk of many superhero baton-pass-ons is simply
sad. And now, with the pseudo-talents now in charge of DC having
rebooted much of the DCU for still more publicity stunts, this has
all probably been obliterated regardless.
October
2010
Blank slate. Mostly because mainstream comics and indie comics alike
have been getting worse and worse with each following year, and so
there's not much to find or comment on.
November
2010
Conan the Cimmerian #25
(Dark Horse): another take on the warrior of Robert E. Howard coming
from a company that pretty much seems quite good at obtaining the
rights to producing series like these.
Web of Spider-Man #12 vol. 2
(Marvel): after Joe Quesada forcibly split up the marriage of Peter
Parker and Mary Jane Watson-Parker in 2007, it should come as no
surprise if this spinoff didn't make the grade.
December
2010
Batman: The Brave and the Bold #22
(DC): I think this was based on one of the animated cartoons Warner
Brothers was producing at the time. And the sad thing is that their
kiddie lines, while better in some ways than the flagship material,
still aren't given very inspiring treatment nor very convincing
marketing.
Billy Batson and the Magic of Shazam! #21 (DC): this take on
the Big Red Cheese was definitely part of the "Johnny DC" line,
which was aimed more at younger crowds. But as the short shelf life
tells, they never really made any serious effort to market it more
widely and it certainly didn't draw much interest.
Copyright Avi Green. All rights
reserved.