The Jeph Loeb Drinking Game

Note: Do not try this at home. This Avengers: X-Sanction preview alone will get you completely plastered.

--When a fight scene erupts for no clear reason other than to have a fight scene, take a shot. (Avengers vs. Lethal Legion)

--When a bunch of heroes or villains are assembled in an "iconic" arrangement, take a shot. (The Avengers are Marvel's Big Five-- Wolverine, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Captain America, the Hulk by way of the Red Hulk-- joined by the Falcon, presumably as a token. The Lethal Legion are veteran Avengers foes Living Laser, Grim Reaper, Whirlwind, and Radioactive Man. The latter of which hasn't been a conventional super-villain in a long time, instead acting as a loyal soldier for China).

--When a character makes a quip with the same amount of wit as a schoolyard taunt, take a shot. (Spider-Man: "Why is there never a jailbreak on nice, pleasant, warm nights in New York?" Wolverine: "Why is it you never shut up?")

--When a character goes into heavy-handed, mopey first-person caption narration, take a shot. (Cable's internal monologue about being a soldier).

--When the conflicts are revealed to be the acts of an ubermensch villain manipulating events with far more capability than they should be able to have, take a shot. (Not seen here, but with Loeb's history of using villains like Hush, Romulus, Ultimate Doctor Doom, The Intelligencia, and others, there's often a mastermind with unconvincingly extreme mastery).

--When a character is brought back to an "iconic" state in a way that defies everything previously established, take a shot. (This series is about bringing Cable back from the dead. Even though his absence wasn't exactly derailing the Marvel Universe.)

Now excuse me as I go into the ER for alcohol poisoning.

Superman/Batman: Apocalypse: Lolita of Steel

Stanley Kubrick was one of the most accomplished and innovative directors in the history of film. One of his most interesting feats was the fact that he made a film of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, and under the MPAA's totalitarian Hayes Code no less. While Kubrick wasn't satisfied with the way the thoroughly censored adaptation turned out, he did manage to create a film riddled with sexual suggestion. If he couldn't do a film that explicitly told the pedophile's story, then he'd find plenty of ways to hint at Humbert Humbert's lust for a 14-year-old girl*, using careful direction to show the character's gravitation towards Lolita (and her reciprocation) without actually stating it.

Superman/Batman: Apocalypse, the animated adaptation of Jeph Loeb and the late Michael Turner's Supergirl reboot, works the same way, except the disturbing implications AREN'T intentional. And that's why it went from just being a lame movie to an outright disturbing one.

The story centers around Kara Zor-El, Superman's teenaged cousin from Krypton. Its plot, typical of a Jeph Loeb story, is a frenetic jump between various action sequences without much plot connecting them. All of the instances follow Kara trying to find a place to fit in, given the destruction of her homeworld. She arrives on Earth completely naked, witnessed by some construction workers who try to rape her (big mistake, given her super-powers). From there we see her trying different identities influenced by the adults guiding her. It's worth noting that she meets few if any other teenagers, and is the sole icon of youth and inexperience amidst a cast of grown-ups. It's also worth noting that each time she tries out an identity, Kara gets a new set of clothes that invariably fails to adequately clothe her. For example...

-- When Clark Kent takes Kara in, he takes her shopping. As Kara becomes assimilated in an improbably quick fashion (because apparently teenaged girls across all cultures take to conspicuous consumption like a duck to water), she tries on a bunch of trashy outfits, while Clark looks on with a raised eyebrow and a stern expression at his younger cousin's choices.

-- When Wonder Woman decides that Kara would best grow up on Paradise Island with other super-powered women, she takes to the Amazon wardrobe of leather body armor (and not much of it). Though Kara bonds with the Amazonians, she's still clearly the youngest there, taken in with a firm, trusting, and blatantly homoerotic hand from Lilah (a.k.a. Harbringer).

-- After being kidnapped and brainwashed by Darkseid, Kara wears a really trashy black leather ensemble, using the time-honored tradition of using leather fetish gear to evoke eeevil.

-- Finally, once she and Clark defeat Darkseid and return, Kara's "independent choice" is to become Supergirl, with a bared madriff and improbably short skirt.

The last one is the nail in the coffin; even Kara's final decision has her dressed in her paternal figure's colors, but skewed to emphasize her youth and sexuality. Worst of all, the character design clearly imitates Michael Turner's version. While I hate to speak ill of the dead and don't think Turner was a bad human being at all, his version of Supergirl was especially troubling. She had no body fat, a very thin bone structure, and an elongated torso to show off her belly button. Turner's Kara was an anorexic with big breasts attached.

To be fair, the scenes on Paradise Island keep Apocalypse from failing the Blechdel Test, because Kara and Lilah talk about things other then men. However, Kara is still the lone teenager in a cast of adults, and every wardrobe change has her re-interpreted through the lens of an adult's sublimated fantasies. Be they the outfits Clark outwardly disapproves of, the dominatrix getup Darkseid assigns, or the miniskirt outfit with branding borrowed from Superman, Kara is only given an identity in the context of others. And this wouldn't be so troubling if Kara actually looked and acted like a real girl, instead of a middle aged man's sexualized interpretation.

Needless to say, I didn't like this movie and thought it a waste of the talent of Summer Glau. I hope she gets a voice-over role soon that is closer to the complex characters she's known for playing, as opposed to an emaciated underage superloli.

New Ultimates #2: Captain America Can't Handle Your Internets

( preview courtesy of Comic Book Resources )



Finding a flaw in a comic written by Jeph Loeb is like finding a grain of sand on a beach. New Ultimates, the third mini-series involving Loeb writing the ersatz-Avengers as bungling morons failing to do much of anything besides indulge their sex addictions, is yet another example. Only two issues in and already it's another instance of a very thin plot, a two-dimensional cast, an extremely adolescent portrayal of adult relationships, and a bunch of action scenes trying to compensate for those other failings. Granted, Loeb is capable of making the action scenes outrageous enough to be entertaining, even if ironically ( see: Red Hulk ).

But what bothers me most about modern Jeph Loeb comics isn't when he's being outrageous, because that's what he does. It's when he's being sincere. It's when Loeb is treating these characters as though their emotions have real dramatic weight, and that we should care about them in a context other than seeing them fight and/or shag. Case in point: Captain America's narration this issue, where he makes the following comment on modern society...

" I grew up in the streets not far from here. Only compared to today, it might as well be a million miles away. We had no iPad, no iPod, no anything. In fact, the closest telephone was down the block in Ed Carlman's drugstore on the corner. And no one complained that life was downloading too slowly. "

As much as it may seem like nitpicking, I'm going to go the three major things wrong with this quote, why it's a microcosm for bad writing at large, and how other writers of the Ult-U version of Cap have expressed the same sentiments better..

1.) Captain America is not at odds with technology. The Super-Soldier Serum not only enhanced his body, but also his mind. This is especially apparent with Ultimate Cap, who was shown to be the super-soldier that everyone else tried and failed to duplicate with his quick-thinking and master strategies as well as his physical strength and fighting skills. Millar even had Nick Fury reference that Cap " learns skills faster than a damn computer ". And in Ultimate Human, Warren Ellis had Bruce Banner say that his failed derivative of the Super-Soldier Serum was meant to enhance his intellect the way the original made a regular Brooklyn grunt into the finest military mind in history ( and yes, we all know that it didn't QUITE work out that way, but still ). Digital technology is not going to be one of the things Steve Rogers finds most objectionable with modern times. If he can pilot an F-16, he's not going to find a mass market entertainment device to be a Gordian Knot for his 1940's brain.

Now, there are plenty of things about modern times that do confuse and bother Steve. Loeb touches on the obvious ones, namely that all his friends and family either died or aged terribly, and that he doesn't understand modern women. But he missed the Civil Rights movement, the removal of the Hayes Code for movies ( and a general darkening of pop culture in general ), several unpopular wars, an increasingly poor standard of American health with an increased complexity to medicine and psychology, and more massive cultural shifts. And the iPod is what's got his knickers in a twist?

2.) Captain America is not emo. Millar had him distract himself from his problems with being a man out of time by throwing himself into his missions. In some cases, we'd get him in quiet moments and see how hard his adjustment was going. But those were glimpses of Steve in his private life, and furthermore, they were emotions that came about through is interactions with others. He broke down in front of his old war partner Bucky because he had been holding in how isolated he felt for so long, and Bucky was the only person he felt safe confiding in. That's why the scene was so great-- because it came as a surprise to everyone, especially Cap. The other scenes had him taking action, even in his personal life ( for example, his arguments with Janet van Dyne as she drifted back towards her abusive ex ).

I've already talked about why first person caption narration is a crutch. It's obnoxious to see it here when previous volumes of the Ultimates ( even Loeb's ) steered clear of it. It's worse because both New Ultimates and Loeb's Ultimate X have taken on this storytelling method, and have done so with all the pathos and nuance of a Lifetime Original Movie.

3.) It's the most obvious and cliche reference. What extra-textual references a writer makes can be a good barometer of their creativity. If they use the most familiar reference possible, that's usually a sign that they aren't trying hard enough. This is why when we see great literature discussed in pop culture, it's very often Shakespeare, and it's either Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet ( more often the latter ). This is why writers looking for a real-world evil will invariably use Hitler, despite so many other complete monsters throughout history whose legacies haven't been trivialized to the point of being internet flame war arguments. And this is why the most common pop culture references we see in fiction are the ones going on right now-- Titanic, the Matrix, Britney Spears, and Mortal Kombat being some of the more brutally over-used examples from the past two decades.

The iPad was announced shortly around the time this script would have been written. If nothing else, couldn't Cap have made reference to a different high-tech gadget or technological process? Perhaps go off on a rant about file sharing, or internet porn, or other modern development outside his experience? He could at least have mentioned that naming a new computing device as though it were a feminine hygiene product would be an affront to Lady Liberty's decency...

Emo Narrative Captions: The Second Deadly Sin of Modern Comics

The Trend: The comic is told by caption boxes containing the protagonist's thoughts. These are not inherently better or worse than most storytelling tools, but the trend refers to when the captions have the character going into long internal monologues about their personal problems, talking about their tragic past/present relationship problems/fears about the future/whathaveyou in very elaborate prose. It's bad when it sounds so melodramatic and over-the-top it could have come from a high school English class, it's worse when these caption boxes are used so often that they crowd out the art in the panels, and it's worst when the information in the captions is something we could have easily figured out on our own ( like a character being punched in the face, grimacing, then having the narrative caption, " This punch to the face hurts worse than when my uncle used to beat me! " ).

The Culprits: Pretty much any solo superhero comic will do this to some extent, so I'll list the most egregious examples from the past ten years;

-- Geoff Johns' Green Lantern ( see above cartoon )
-- J. Michael Stracynski's Spider-Man ( especially the purple prose in the 9/11 tribute issue )
--Jeph Loeb's Superman/Batman ( for a particularly homo-erotic example, Clark and Bruce talking about how awesome the other is )
--Brad Meltzer's Justice League of America ( similar to Superman/Batman, except pulled across the entire ensemble cast, with each character getting their own narrative caption color )
--Chuck Austen's Uncanny X-Men ( Particularly the issues with Nightcrawler's thoughts on religion; " More people die of religion than cancer. And we try to cure cancer. " )

The Problem: In previous years, comics used thought balloons in the same excess, having the characters go on endless internal soliloquies. With thought balloons, anyone could go off on a long whine to themselves ( and to a lesser and more unfortunate extent, the audience ), even characters less important to the main plot. The gradual shift over to narrative captions over thought balloons seems to have been motivated by a need to focus the narration more by only giving us one character's thoughts. However, this didn't do anything to help or hurt the contents of the character's thoughts. A good writer would still give characters good internal dialogue, and a less-good writer would give them the same whiny, drawn-out nonsense. The fact that the thoughts were restricted to one or even a few characters only served to exacerbate the feeling that the heroes are gazing longingly into their own navels, making whatever problems they face irritating and contrived instead of dramatic and sympathetic. Horse carcass, meet spiked club, repeat.

( And for the sake of fairness, I should note that I've been guilty of this too.Since then, I've tried to ease up on internal narrations. )

The Solution: Don't make the contents narrative boxes so literal. The problem that thought balloons were accused of was that they didn't sound like something a person would actually think during a tense moment-- writers like Chris Claremont had a tendency to use them for obvious plot purposes, like telling us about a bit of character backstory informing the current scene, or giving us characterization in a very artificial context that treated it like an essay requirement ( " You have to tell us how Nightcrawler feels about this! " ). The latter can be communicated much more eloquently by the way the artist draws the character's facial expressions, and the former is rendered moot by recap pages. Instead, we should see things in the character's head that give us information we don't know. Just read any Ed Brubaker comic with a first person narrator*-- his characters only sound completely articulate and intentionally poignant when they're actually in a scene where they're alone with their thoughts. In the midst of an action scene, their thoughts will sound choppy and incoherent as befitting of someone busy, y'know, trying not to die.

Alternately, a simple framing device can do wonders to make melodramatic writing work. As obnoxious as Hal Jordan's green-boxed whining can get, his narrative in Secret Origin was much easier to tolerate, because he was recounting events from the past and talking about how he felt THEN. Grant Morrison gave us Xorn's narrative in an issue of X-Men as a letter to Professor X, which was pretty good then, but was later elevated to brilliant when we learned that Xorn was Magneto in disguise all along**. And one of Neil Gaiman's Death stories ( " The High Cost of Living " ) used internal narration to express what good writers tend to avoid-- that the character was LITERALLY a whiny, navel-gazing teenager with no serious problems.

And then there's Alan Moore, who does write caption boxes full of purple prose, but gets away with it because he's Alan Moore and he's that damned good. But unless you are Alan Moore, it's best to err on the side of caution.

* I'd recommend his and artist Sean Phillips' Sleeper for a particularly good example of this.
** I'm not going any further than that. You can't make me.

Red Hulk Volumes 1-3 Review: Gar for Rulk

The Concept: A new Hulk has emerged, one who is red-skinned, brutally intelligent, cheerfully merciless, and just as tough as his predecessor ( if not tougher ). Little is known about him, but he utterly hates the original Hulk and will stop at nothing to get revenge. If you thought that Bruce Banner's life was just one endless conga line of tragedy and degradation, this confirms it.

The Authors: Jeph Loeb ( writer ), Ed McGuiness ( main penciller ), Dexter Vines ( main inker ), with guest art by Arthur Adams, Frank Cho, and seasoned Hulk veteran Herb Trimpe.

The Assessment: The internet has recently spawned the word " gar ", which describes a character of such overwhelming masculinity that even the most culturally respectable of heterosexual men fall for them, a giggling schoolgirl by contrast. Urban Dictionary gives us a better definition, and the Red Hulk gives us a good example.

" Rulk " ( as he's more commonly called ) is gar incarnate. Every act he makes is a feat of ridiculously over-the-top masculinity. In his very first appearance, he kills the original Abomination with a handgun sized proportionally to massive Hulk hands. And that's just the start of his frenzy of hilarious beatdowns upon hero and villain alike. When he fights the Silver Surfer in an alternate universe, he drains the guy of his cosmic power, breaks his neck Steven Seagal-style, and flies away on his surfboard. And when the omniscient cosmic being known as the Watcher is drawn to observe Rulk's actions, Rulk punches the guy out to spare us his hypocritical speech about never interfering with the events around him.

If that paragraph has not convinced you that this makes for an entertaining story, there's nothing else I can say.

Characteristic to contemporary comics written by Jeph Loeb, the plot to Red Hulk is either thin or outright absent. If the rule of drama contradicts the rule of cool, the rule of cool wins. Why does Thor appear to battle Rulk? So Rulk can pull him into outer space and beat the shit out of him with his own magic hammer. Why does She-Hulk form a new " Lady Liberators " of superheroines to take down Rulk, when a unisex team would do just as well? So we can get Rulk battling a bunch of women in colorful tights ( though to Loeb's credit, this is not played for T&A, but as an opportunity for uncommonly-seen superheroine girl talk ). And why is there a story arc where cosmic gamesmasters reunite the original Hulk's old team of misfits, the Defenders? So Rulk can form his own team of villains, predictably called the Offenders. There's an ongoing plot about where the Rulk comes from and the larger gamma-science conspiracy behind him, but that's just window dressing for seeing a big red jerk beat up guys in tights while offering goofy banter.

There's little to nothing in the way of intellectual stimulation here. Fortunately, the series compensates in many other realms. It's got very funny dialogue, especially when the Green Hulk appears to offer his third-person sentence-fragment wisdom; you feel like the various Marvel guest stars are subconsciously aware of the absurdity this story has, and are acting accordingly. It has slapstick violence to the point of resembling an old Tom and Jerry cartoon, in an era where most superhero comics favor horror-movie levels of blood and guts. And it's got the perfect art; Ed McGuiness already skews entertainingly towards the cartoony, and the adventures of irradiated steroid freaks fit right into that category. Guest artists in Volume 2 Adams and Cho also get the memo to go as ridiculous as they can.

There's not much in the way of drama to Rulk-- which isn't to say that there aren't poignant moments ( the Green Hulk especially is portrayed in a sympathetic light, since while he's not much for brain power, he is treated as a genuinely good-hearted monster ), but that it's used as an inverse of comic relief ( since this is such a ridiculous story to begin with ). But if you want something that's silly-- and that's something that everyone needs sometimes--you can hardly do better. And for the heterosexual males who enjoy the Rulk's escapades-- he proves that male sexuality is a moving target, and that's okay.

Strongly recommended if you're reading with a sense of irony, mildly recommended if you're not.

New Ultimates Details Surface; Can Comic Companies Learn?

News article courtesy of Comicbookresources.com

Being a fan of corporate-owned comic characters has, especially since the resurgence of the regular crossover event, required a healthy ironic distance. It is inevitable that the creators for our favorite heroes have all either died or moved on, and their rights fall into the hands of freelancers working for entertainment companies. Lowest common denominator is the name of the day, and in the case of the American comic industries, that usually means convoluted multi-title storylines and massive death tolls. The choices a fan have are to complain about it on the Internet, or take it with a grain of salt, focusing on the few comics that are genuinely good while finding ironic bemusement in the majority. The latter is usually a better choice, since the creative turnover of franchise comics means that eventually creators who you actually like will get the reins to your favorites, even if eventually ends up being a long time.

However, there are some decisions the companies make that can't be ignored so easily-- the kind whose implications sour even their good publications. The attached link is one of them.

To talk about the quality of Jeph Loeb's writing at this point would be redundant-- he's been turning in laughably awful stories like Wolverine: Evolution and Ultimates 3 for years now, and while his work has gone from respectable to unprofessionally simplistic and mindlessly violent, he can be ignored. The problem represented by his upcoming comic with Frank Cho, New Ultimates, is that it's making the exact same mistake that Marvel wanted to correct with their Ultimate Marvel line. It's nothing that, aside from superficial comparisons, couldn't be done with the main line; it just confirms complaints that the Ultimate comics are " Marvel-Lite ".

The preview images are the most telling. The conceptual hook for New Ultimates is that it's the big public super-team to the black ops Ultimate Avengers by Mark Millar-- basically, exactly what they were before the big Ultimatum event. Loeb comments that they've cut ties with SHIELD, so they don't even have the " shady government super-cops " hook that helped make Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch's Ultimates series so compelling. The characters appear to be Captain America, Iron Man ( in his mainstream look of solid reds and golds, instead of the more unique, manga-like Iron Man that Bryan Hitch designed ), Hawkeye, Panther, Valkyrie, a woman who appears to be Zarda from the Squadron Supreme universe, Tarzan analogue Ka-Zar and his wife Shanna the She-Devil, and Thor. Yes, the same Thor who died in Ultimatum, now back from the dead. And they're all fighting an army of orcs led by Loki, who's in his original look instead of the civvies his Ultimate counterpart is better known for.

Nothing in these previews looks distinct from anything that could be done in the classic Marvel Universe. The characters have moved back towards more traditional superhero costumes, with only Cap keeping the multi-textured Ultimate look. The villains are monsters from Norse mythology, detached from the unified genetic engineering arms race that drove the best Ultimate comics; they don't even like much more than Sauron's orc legions from the Lord of the Rings. Thor is back, further destroying the notion that characters in the Ultimate Universe can actually stay dead. Loeb mentions in the interview that he prefers to leave the political stuff to Mark Millar, but without the politics, the Ultimate Universe isn't distinct from its predecessor in any meaningful way.

And even the justifications Loeb makes in the interviews-- that this book takes place in a world where the Ultimates are the only super-team-- doesn't have any practical meaning. For one, Mark Millar's Ultimate Avengers still exists, and has its own superhero team ( albeit of less heroic black-ops characters, but still the kind who could save the day effectively ). For another, the mainline Marvel Universe has taken on the same structure of importance, with the Avengers becoming the flagship franchise that influences the line's master narrative. Loeb mentions how here there are no Fantastic Four or X-Men anymore in the Ultimate Universe, but since the FF have never been a classic superhuman police force so much as a group of explorers who gained powers, and the X-Men have completely cut themselves off from concerns outside their species in the modern comics, how is that so distinct?

The most ridiculous aspect is the fact that at the same day this article was published, details were released for Brian Michael Bendis' storyline " Siege "-- which also stars Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor, deals with big hero teams getting together after a disaster ( in this case Dark Reign, not Ultimatum ) and also has Norse god Loki as a major villain. And if Marvel truly believes that the Jeph Loeb version of this premise is acceptable as professional work, then it's the audiences who lose.