The Comic Book Club: Jennifer Blood, Silver Surfer and Spider-Man

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This is what happens when Techland goes to the comic book store: we end up discussing what we picked up. This week, Graeme McMillan, Evan Narcisse and Douglas Wolk talk about the first issues of Jennifer Blood and Silver Surfer, as well as Amazing Spider-Man #654.1.

DOUGLAS: It’s been very strange to watch Garth Ennis over the past decade or so as he’s evolved from an enormously versatile writer with a couple of pet subjects and an immense, delicate grasp of character to someone who writes the same two and a half stories over and over and over. I loved Preacher and Hitman and his run on Hellblazer, and I’ve at least looked in on everything he’s written from Troubled Souls on down, but now everything seems to come down to: Badass protagonist is badass, and kills evil people. The supreme source of comedy is sex, which always consists of an interaction between a lustful stooge and an uninterested victim; the secondary source of comedy is mutilation. Sometimes there are historically accurate military details.

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And now we’ve got Ennis and Adriano Batista’s Jennifer Blood #1. Some sources seem to call Jennifer Blood an ongoing series; the text piece in this first issue calls it a limited series (and the “Jennifer spends a week getting her revenge” conceit sure makes it look like one); the indicia says “Volume 1 #1.” I can’t imagine it sustaining Ennis’s interest for very long, because Jennifer’s one of the least convincing not-a-total-caricature characters I’ve ever seen him write. Tulip O’Hare from Preacher was his previous attempt at a badass girly-girl with a gun–but Tulip felt real and deep, a genuine invention of an extraordinary character. Jennifer is an Erma Bombeck routine with a gun grafted on; in action, she’s the Punisher with boobs. Lustful stooge/uninterested victim sex jokes, check; mutilation jokes, check. The one gag that actually clicked for me was a self-aware one–where she finds herself striking a “check out what a badass I am” pose, and immediately chastises herself for it. I keep waiting for the project where Ennis is going to challenge himself to break out of his comfort zone and make himself write more-than-one-dimensional characters again. Maybe that’s City Lights, but it’s not this.

EVAN: I’m glad you mentioned Ennis’s Hellblazer run specifically, Douglas, because that’s my personal favorite of his work. His Constantine was a bad-ass, but Ennis still would pull back the veil to show the cost of bad-assery. He’s long since stopped doing that, and it makes his work a lot more two-dimensional.

To me, Jennifer Blood feels like he’s trying to have his cake and eat it, too. The self-aware notes in the narration wink at the absurdity of the premise–”can you believe I built an arsenal in the basement? And how about drugging my family, huh?!”–but we’re still expected to be wowed by the action sequences and Jennifer’s steely demeanor. The problem here is that it feels like Ennis doesn’t believe in any of his characters. They’re all means to an end, and the end isn’t very satisfying.

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GRAEME: I’ll say this for Jennifer Blood: It exists.

I’m not a fan of the majority of Garth Ennis’ work – his mix of machismo and sentiment has never really appealed to me, for some reason, and even his “classic” things like Preacher and Hellblazer don’t really win me over for much more than technical chops. So it’s fair to say that I wasn’t really the target audience for this series, but having read the first issue, I’m not sure who is. Ennis completists? People who thought that Punisher needed some more lazy jokes about suburbia? ABC execs looking for a new plot for Desperate Housewives?

This seemed a particularly lazy comic: Ennis’ plotting and dialog seem really overfamiliar (and unrealistic: the narration seems as if he’s never met a real suburban housewife, but has certainly watched a lot of bad TV shows about them), and the art – which I think is reproduced directly from the pencils? – is scratchy and completely uneven. (The husband, in particular, seems to change shape between panels.) There was nothing that really tried to engage the reader here, apart from the high concept and awkward titillation aspect. (That silhouette through the shower curtain at the end? The t-shirt and panties shot as she gets ready for bed? Really?) It was just horrible.

DOUGLAS: At some point, somebody involved with The Amazing Spider-Man #654.1 decided that it would be a great idea for the “jumping-on point” issue to not have Spider-Man in it. Everyone else involved with it evidently thought that would be a good idea too. (Maybe at some point someone relented a little: Peter Parker appears, out of costume, in two panels, and there’s a two-page “coming up this year” preview at the end, Geoff Johns-style.) It is not, in fact, a good idea.

EVAN: This is the third of Marvel’s Point One books that I’ve picked up. They’re supposed to be great jumping-on point for new storylines, and presumably new readers, too. Wolverine #5.1 and Iron Man #500.1 were pretty much standalone stories heavy on character development. (The Wolvie issue did have a ton of action and a set up for future stories, though.) But they delivered on the general premise of shedding continuity to feel more inviting and communicating the basic architecture of a title character.

Amazing Spider-Man #654.1 doesn’t.

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First off, the title character’s barely in the book. When Peter Parker does appear, he’s moping and confiding to Mary Jane about some stuff that happened in a storyline that doesn’t get recapped. Strike one. (Or strike .1) Who does star in the issue, then? Flash Thompson, Peter’s best friend since high school, who’s lost his legs while on duty as a soldier in Iraq. But, don’t worry! Flash gets to wear the Venom symbiote as part of a new (?) black-ops program. How’d the symbiote get separated from Eddie Brock? When did this Project Rebirth 2.0 start? Not explained, so strike two.

Still, leaving aside the first two problems, you’re left with the simple reality that the story told here isn’t very good. It’s wish fulfillment and power fantasies that don’t really offer up any depth of insight into the characters involved. Oh, there’s “darkness,” in that Flash isn’t dealing with his recent traumas terribly well and bites a C-list villain’s hand off. But it’s all happening in line with a fairly blatant formula, which apparently calls for one part Captain Marvel, Jr. + one part Hulk x warmed-over spy fiction cliches.

The issue’s basically a zero issue for Rick Remender’s Venom series, but, oddly, isn’t written by Remender himself. I mean, it builds on plot points without giving context, failed to sell me on the new Venom premise, and there’s no Spidey in it. Just a weak mishmash overall.

GRAEME: I’m agreeing completely with Evan on Amazing Spider-Man. Not only does it fail at the stated aims of Marvel’s Point 1 program – some narration about how Peter has gotten his life together really doesn’t count as catching new readers up to the status quo – but even as an introduction to the new Venom, it’s not particularly good. It does, however, underline something I’ve been feeling about Dan Slott’s writing for awhile: That he’s good at ideas, and not so good at execution. Venom rethought as government weapon that has to be controlled so that it doesn’t bond with/corrupt the agent using it? Fine. That agent being Flash Thompson, who signed on to regain mobility after losing the use of his legs at war? Also fine. So why does this story feel so generic? (And, for that matter, why does Flash seem like an entirely different character when he’s on mission? That whole opening doesn’t ring even vaguely true for the character as he’s previously been portrayed. Since when has he been able to pull off being “charming spy who can dance”?)

Slott’s Mighty Avengers was filled with this kind of thing. He’d throw out ideas that were completely worthy of exploration (The Infinite Mansion! Hank Pym as “Scientist Supreme”! Jocasta falling in love with Hank because she had Jan’s mind!), and then do absolutely nothing with them. I’ve noticed that Slott has been getting writing assists on ASM lately, with Fred Van Lente writing some backups and Christos Gage coming in to co-write some in future – I wonder if that’d be the best arrangement for the book, with Slott acting as ideas man and other people coming in to flesh them out?

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DOUGLAS: I’ve realized that what I like least about this story is the way it grafts an extension onto Flash Thompson’s story arc. His role over the last half-century has made a lot of dramatic sense: a bully who’s inspired by the hero, eventually mends his ways, and ultimately makes a heroic sacrifice and is reconciled with everyone he used to torment. That’s it: as of the end of “Brand New Day,” his story is resolved, in a way that very few superhero-comics characters’ stories are resolved. Turning him into “charming spy who can dance because he has magic symbiote legs” doesn’t build on his established character, it just violates storytelling logic.

DOUGLAS: I picked up Silver Surfer #1 on the strength of writer Greg Pak’s name, but I expected a lot more from the guy who wrote World War Hulk and The Incredible Hercules than this shabby mess of a first issue. This is Marvel’s fourth crack at an ongoing Silver Surfer series; I’d have hoped its first issue would have laid out what this incarnation is going to be about, or set a tone, or something. Instead, we get the big cosmic opening, then a jarring downshift to a domestic crime story, then a bit of high-tech ’90s stuff (the return of Cybermancer–!), and then back to a gunfight with the Surfer that has to have been going on for a couple of hours for the story’s chronology to cohere, and then the High Evolutionary shows up and does something that makes no sense at all…

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On top of that, Stephen Segovia’s artwork is flashy but awfully awkward. The scenes with the human characters have no sense of scale or distance–the first time we see the two cannon-fodder humans, they look like they’re actually running on the surface of the Rio Grande. On the third-from-last page of the story, something dramatically important happens to the Surfer’s board, but it’s impossible to tell what from looking at the page, even though (or maybe partly because) Segovia’s gone with a dramatic layout that has the Surfer’s head and board bursting from one panel into another. In general, throughout the issue, Segovia keeps electing to draw birds’-eye views, worm’s-eye views and heavily foreshortened poses rather than images that make it clear what’s happening on a basic storytelling level. It’s a cluttered, flailing comic book, and I have no interest in finding out what happens next in it.

EVAN: After the first cosmic sequence, I was really hoping that this book would turn out to be about Norrin’s dysfunctional relationship with Earth. And, yeah, it’s there in the subtext but I was hoping it come through to the foreground in a more significant way. Instead, Pak buries it underneath wishy-washy paramilitary drug lord/global peacekeeper nonsense. And then the High Evolutionary shows up. The High Ev never really did for me as a villain because he gets played as a ‘tweener a lot, and the Knights of Wundagore never seemed particularly menacing. Pak’s a great writer, especially when it comes to character nuance, but the earthbound stuff in this issue felt way too overheated and forced to me.

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As for the art, it just felt like Segovia was trying too hard. He’s got a bad case of new artist-itis, and tries to show off in every possible way that he knows how. The frantic, insecure storytelling that results makes a poor fit for a book that’s told through contemplative first-person narration.

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