EVAN: I knew it was gonna suck, and even yet I feel disappointed. I was hoping Deadpool MAX would be like a dirtier, nastier version of Bizarro Comics or Strange Tales: Two really good creators on superhero material, giving it a off-center twist.
But the biggest letdown with this is that it’s not adventurous enough. It comes down on the most conservative interpretation of the character and what he does. Adolescent humor, “k3wl” bad-assery, and look-how-crazy-I-am non-sequitur. Yawn. I’m really tired of this character. I move that we never discuss Deadpool again.
DOUGLAS: A moratorium, at any rate.
EVAN: The thing about Baker’s art is that I remember his early Spider-Man work in the 1980s, and it was far more realistic than anything he’s turned out in years. I like how he’s able to go back and forth between a more cartoony style and the grittier stuff we see a little bit of in this book. I did like the action sequences and wish there were more of them.
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And, like Graeme, every time I see Lapham on work-for-hire stuff that fails to ignite, I think “this is why I’m not getting new Stray Bullets?!” Young Liars was a crazy, effed-up book that got so much right about using rock-n-roll energy and youthful alienation in a modern comic book–not the least of which was re-inventing itself at least twice during its run. I was hoping for more of that wild unpredictable vibe in Deadpool MAX, and it didn’t show up at all.
DOUGLAS: While we’re at it: what do y’all think of that new “DC Comics Presents” line that started this week–the 100-page reprints of DC material that’s got some relationship to creators or storylines that are hot at the moment, but isn’t quite big enough to make a trade paperback out of? (This week’s are one with some old Green Lantern material, and one devoted to the four extant issues of Jack Cross, which was written by Warren Ellis but never got off the ground no matter how frantically it flapped its wings.) I like the idea in theory, and I especially like that it’s going to encompass some material that’s been sitting in the archives for a while (like Ellis’s Hellblazer story “Shoot”). But I’d like to see some slightly more adventurous programming–what about a collection of DC’s old humor comics, or a ’60s-era romance serial, or stories drawn by Nestor Redondo, or something along those lines?
MIKE: Here’s a fun game, replace the name Jen with Veronica and the name Terry with Betty, and the Green Lantern one is a perfectly acceptable Archie comic. The majority of this book felt like an Afterschool Special. I could almost hear the live studio audience cooing “Awwwwww” on some pages. The scene where Kyle tells Terry that it is, in fact, OK to be gay should have been punctuated with the tag line “And knowing is half the battle.”
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Then the book swings over to this alien planet featuring a very nicely packaged civil war that I couldn’t begin to give a crap about which included the poignant and terrifying bombing of school children. Two pages ago we were all delighting over vegetable lasagna! Now we’re supposed to care about an old, bloody war that Kyle isn’t even tangentially related to? Actually, no, because he doesn’t care either and says so out loud. Besides, he has to get back to Earth and attend the smoothest coming out / birthday party of all time.
GRAEME: Yeah, I’m with both of you again. I like the format – and the price point, because $8 for 100 pages squarebound works pretty well for me, thanks very much – but neither the Green Lantern nor Jack Cross selections seem like great introductions to the line. The GL book, in particular, just feels like four random issues thrown together for no apparent reason at all (Wasn’t the solicit something like “Jade’s back in Brightest Day! Find out more about her here!”? There is nothing of interest about Jade in this book!). I like the format and hope it continues, and succeeds enough to allow the collection editors – who seem to be the ones behind this, judging from the information at the front? – to get more interesting material back into print, especially more of the promised creator-led collections. DC COMICS PRESENTS GRANT MORRISON’S SECRET ORIGINS STORIES, anyone?
DOUGLAS: I would buy that in a heartbeat, and I actually bought all those Secret Origins issues the first time around. (For the record: Animal Man in #39, the Justice League’s HQ in #46 and a “Flash of Two Worlds” rewrite in #50.)
EVAN: I didn’t get the Green Lantern one because, honestly, the cover didn’t jump out at me. I literally could not identify it.
Maybe it’s because I came to Transmetropolitan late, but I still have lots of love for the standard-issue Warren Ellis archetypes. It’s usually the Mad Bastard or the Hard Man, and Jack Cross is more of the latter. I was picking this up in singles when it was first coming out but then stopped. I wonder if something this overtly political could come out now, which makes me think this 100-page format could be a great place to experiment. What I don’t want it to be is a sausage factory for stillborn back-catalog stuff.