Wolverine and the X-Men #1 by Jason Aaron and Chris Bachalo

This book’s gonna be ‘da billz. The X-books are the best thing Marvel has going right now. Jason Aaron’s been doing a bomb ass job on X-Men: Schism and Chris Bachalo is DOPE. King.

Fear Itself is one of the worst comic books I’ve read in years. YEARS. This is trash of the lowest, smelliest order.

For those unaware, Fear Itself is Marvel Comics’s latest summer “event” book. Event books involve most if not all of the major characters of a comic book universe, and, at least in theory, change something about the status quo. Since 2004, Marvel has put us through this nearly every summer. The results have been… inconsistent. To sum it up briefly, the good: Avengers Disassembled, House of M, Siege; the bad: Civil War, Secret Invasion, and now, most of all, Fear Itself.

Fear Itself is about Red Skull’s daughter seizing seven Asgardian hammers and making some heroes crazy or some such shit. It’s incomprehensible. Every issue so far has gotten worse and harder to follow than the one before it. Marvel would have you believe it’s about modern U.S. politics (recession, tea party, etc.), but listen to Flavor Flav.

Issue five plumbs new depths of utterly cringe inducing dialogue. I need not explain why the panel below is perhaps the worst in the history of comic books.

There’s also choice lines such as Tony Stark’s “Know what I do before a big battle, you bellowing one-eyed beard, you?” OR the moment when Spider-Man was the first to give up and decide fighting the forces to evil to the very end was pointless OR when Cap’s shield was shattered by some meaningless nothing of a villain OR when Cap decided to join Spidey and give up, too.

Matt Fraction is a better writer than this. While he was never one of my favorite writers, he’s had some great runs on Immortal Iron Fist and Invincible Iron Man. This is a level of awful writing I’ve not seen since Chuck Austen’s Uncanny X-Men.

Stuart Immonen’s art is the only remotely good thing about Fear Itself, but even that is beginning to look rushed by this fifth issue. He deserves a better book.

Fuck this shit. It sucks, and if you like it and support it with your money (I didn’t), you’re supporting the death of artistry in a struggling industry. Fuck you.

Captain America: The First Avenger (Joe Johnston; 2011)

The majority of Marvel Studios’ output has been very middle-of-the-road. The initially impressive Iron Man reveals itself to be clunkily constructed and lazily directed upon second and third viewings, 2010’s Iron Man 2 is one of the worst superhero movies of recent years, and Thor from earlier this year is well made, but slight. Only 2008’s The Incredible Hulk manages to remain within my consciousness, and that’s mostly due to Edward Norton’s performance.

Of course, all of these films are leading up to next year’s Avengers movie, as they remind us every half hour or so throughout any given one of them. Avengers set up has certainly hampered most of the Marvel films from standing on their own, an issue I was sure would hurt the studio’s newest production, Captain America: The First Avenger. However, despite its idiotic subtitle, Captain America avoids most of the pitfalls of its predecessors.

Captain America integrates the little Avengers tie-in material there is in a much more convincing way than say, the laughable Hawkeye scene in Thor. This film ends pretty much where Avengers will probably begin, but it works, because it ties back into the central relationship of this film, rather than a movie that’s coming out a year from now.

Joe Johnston directs this film in a clean style recalling the Indiana Jones films and his own The Rocketeer and October Sky. Though he has a decent amount of shitty films on his resume (Jumanji, Jurassic Park III, The Wolfman), Johnston is a far more interesting visualist than Jon Favreau or Kenneth Branagh (whose uncharacteristically awful style in Thor was pretty off-putting). This has a way more cinematic aesthetic than Favreau’s barely-better-than-Brett-Ratner visual style. It has dramatic lighting, gorgeous set design, and creative framing that still doesn’t call attention to itself.

Captain America is a tricky character to bring to the screen, as most of the film-going public sees him purely as a dated propaganda figure from a bygone era. What this film does right, like many of Cap’s better comic book adventures, is presenting the character in just that way, while still giving him some depth. The decision to set Captain America during World War II was a vital one. WWII is a crucial part of Cap’s identity, and had the Marvel films simply skipped over that aspect of his character, they would have lost me completely.

Captain America is drenched in faux period movie trappings of the 1940s. There’s a re-creation of the World’s Fair, USO girls, and kids playing stickball. None of this is set in any reality, but that works perfectly for Captain America, a character designed to beat up Nazis and raise morale at home by presenting an idealized version of the war.

One of the few issues with Captain America is the substitution of fictional Marvel Universe organization Hydra for the Nazis. In this film, Hydra is a branch of Hitler’s regime which, under the leadership of the Red Skull, secedes from the Nazi party to seek power of their own. This kind of felt like a way for Marvel to get around having too many swastikas in the film. On the brighter side, Hugo Weaving plays a characteristically excellent villain with his portrayal of the Red Skull.

The performances on the whole are fantastic. Chris Evans perfectly embodies Steve Rogers/Captain America, imbuing him with an innocent charm without making him too naive or boyish. Hayley Atwell makes us actually care about love interest Peggy Carter, a feat never before accomplished in any Marvel Studios film. Tommy Lee Jones and Stanley Tucci also provide entertaining supporting turns.

There’s a lot to love about Captain America (not least of which being the excellent score by Alan Silvestri), and its safe to say it’s my favorite of Marvel’s lackluster slate so far. That’s not intended as a backhanded compliment, however. Captain America: The First Avenger is a fun, refreshingly timeless superhero film, a bright spot in a genre which has been languishing for quite some time.

Daredevil (2011) #1 by Mark Waid and Paolo Rivera and Marcos Martin

I’ve been reading Daredevil since around 2000. Before even getting into his films, I remember reading Kevin Smith’s Guardian Devil in Barnes and Noble eleven years ago and falling in love with the characters. When I started reading comics on a regular basis a year later, Daredevil was one of the first titles I picked up. This was the beginning of the much-beloved Brian Michael Bendis/Alex Maleev run, in which Matt Murdock’s identity as Daredevil was blown, thus sending his life into a seemingly never-ending spiral.

Ten years later, and we’re still dealing with the ramifications of that event, but, oddly enough, superhero comic traditionalist Mark Waid has finally injected a new energy into the proceedings. It’s not that Daredevil has been bad this past decade—in fact, Bendis’s run on the character is one of the best in his history—but consistently piling terrible shit on Matt Murdock for that entire time had gotten old, as proven by Andy Diggle’s disastrous run on the title, which actually led me to drop one of only three books I’d been buying for the entire time I’d been reading comics (the other two are Amazing Spider-Man and Uncanny X-Men, for the curious).

Waid’s book is a fresh start, both as a publishing venture (new #1) and as a story. This is a Daredevil we’ve not seen since before Frank Miller took over the title in 1978. Ever since Miller, we’ve pretty much gotten variations on the themes of his run (and his later 1986 landmark Born Again). Waid is writing Daredevil as a superhero. Matt Murdock is having fun, making wisecracks and beating up criminals with a smile on his face. The great thing about Waid, though, is that he’s able to start things anew without forsaking everything which has been going on in Daredevil for the past ten years. People haven’t forgotten that Matt is Daredevil, and that’s still hurting his law firm and creating conflict with his partner, Foggy Nelson.

This issue is split in two halves. The first sets up the ongoing storyline (classic Daredevil mob plot), but the second is more about not only setting the tone for the book, but explaining it. Matt seems carefree, but, as he tells Foggy, he’s well aware of all of the terrible things that have happened to him over the last few years (identity revealed, hundreds of dead girlfriends), but now he’s simply ready to forget about all that stuff and throw himself into his work. Not a particularly healthy attitude, and I’m sure it will result in some heavy shit later on, but for now, it’s nice to see Matt being happy, even if it its forced.

The art in the first section was by Paolo Rivera, an artist I’ve come to love from his insanely good fill-in issues on Amazing Spider-Man over the past few years. Javier Rodriguez’s colors make the change in tone completely visible, with bright, primary colors, evoking the look of ’60s and ’70s Marvel books, while still utilizing today’s superior coloring technology. The second story is drawn by the incomparable Marcos Martin, who I can safely say is the best Spider-Man artist to come along in 20 years. His aptitude for Spidey transfers well to Daredevil, who moves in a similar way. There is an absolute tour de force of a two page spread of Matt and Foggy crossing an intersection, with Matt pointing out the various sounds and smells he experiences. Aside from Mike Allred and J.H. Williams III, I can’t think of anyone in the past ten or twenty years who has played so much with the comic book medium in a book from Marvel or DC.

As a somewhat lapsed Daredevil reader (I only dropped the book a year ago), Daredevil #1 doesn’t so much feel like coming home at the end of a long vacation—this is a very different book from Frank Miller’s or Kevin Smith’s or Brian Bendis’s—but it feels like moving to a new town, where everyone seems really nice and there’s new places to visit and new things to experience. It feels like a fresh start.

X-Men: Schism #1 by Jason Aaron and Carlos Pacheco

Aside from Spider-Man, the X-Men have always been my favorite superheroes. I’ve read a good chunk of every major era of X-Men since it began. Like most everyone, Chris Claremont’s decade and a half long reign on the franchise contains most of my favorite storylines.

I started reading comics regularly (through friends) around 2001 (I began buying them myself around 2003), and it was a great time to love X-Men. Grant Morrison had just begun his (in my view) brilliant run on New X-Men and Peter Milligan and Mike Allred’s X-Statix was also starting up (that book is an underrated classic—go pick up the trades). After Morrison left Marvel and X-Statix ended, Joss Whedon started Astonishing X-Men, another great series which kept me satisfied for another couple years.

Since then, though, the X-franchise has languished with very good writers like Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction turning in very mediocre runs on Uncanny X-Men. Fraction left the book a few months ago to Kieron Gillen, who has done quite a respectable job in his five issues so far.

This book, X-Men: Schism, is a mini-series written by Jason Aaron (creator of Scalped from Vertigo), dealing with a disagreement between Cyclops and Wolverine which will lead to a division within the team.

The first issue really brings that classic Claremont vibe (obviously written in a more modern style). There’s sentinels, the Hellfire Club, and even some school stuff, all of which have been sorely missing these past few years. The only thing missing is Xavier, but he’s in most of the promo art for this series, so I’m sure he’ll show up soon.

As a lifelong X-Men fan who often forgets why he’s an X-Men fan, Schism served as a great reminder of X-Men at it’s best: big action, light political intrigue, and excellent soap opera.

Can’t wait for the new Daredevil series by Mark Waid and Paolo Rivera (who is going to be alternating with Marcos Martin!).

Fear Itself is fucking GARBAGE. This second issue was paced like a movie trailer. Hey! Let’s see who got this hammer! Now let’s see who got this hammer! And this one! And this one, too! Is there anything else to this issue? No, just a bunch of very bad hamfisted political allegory. Immonen’s art is fantastic, but this is the worst thing Matt Fraction’s ever written. What utter trash.