Batman Ambushed As Dark Reign Continues Glacial Pacing

Last month, it seemed that a lot of storylines were building to their conclusion.  Two standouts are Greg Rucka’s Batwoman in Detective Comics and Matt Fraction’s Invincible Iron Man.  Here’s the outstanding art for Batwoman, but more on it later.

I’m a little annoyed with the slight revisions to Iron Man.  We’re now on part eleven of the “World’s Most Wanted” storyline.  If you missed it, Tony Stark is on the run from Norman Osborn after the Secret Invasion fiasco.  Stark was disgraced as all of his technology and security systems were compromised when he was Head of SHIELD during the Skrull invasion.

During his exit interview, Stark told Osborn to shove it and intimated that he had all of the Superhuman Registration personnel files from the Civil War in his head.  Thus began the year long cat and mouse chase, with Stark globetrotting from secret lab to secret lab slowly erasing his mind and destroying any technology that might fall into the wrong hands.

You read that part right, one of the smartest people in Marvel Universe is reformatting his brain.  So each issue, Stark gets a little slower and has to find simpler suits of armor to use in his race against time.  My only problem with this was the most recent issue, which retconned the origin of Iron Man to fit with the 2008 movie.   Don’t get me wrong, Robert Downey Jr was pitch perfect as Tony Stark.  But I tend to view comic book movies as alternate realities slightly removed from the source material.  Would it have been so difficult to stick with the 1963 Tony Stark, arms manufacturer getting ambushed in the jungles of Southeast Asia?  Fraction chooses to go with desert of the Hindi Kush and place the origin in Afghanistan.  We do end up with an amusing bit where Tony gets held at gunpoint by some youngsters in his “secret workshop”.

This goes back to writers and editors reluctance to age their characters in anything approximating real time.  Let’s face it Iron Man was a creation of the Cold War.  The book was devoted to fighting the evil communists  saboteurs lurking about.  He was in Vietnam as an advisor– but now, we have to toss that out and insert the most recent war. It kills the enjoyment of being a fan, if writers ignore established canon in order to please corporate interests or in an effort to get new readers up to speed.  That’s what back issues are for.

Over at DC Comics, nobody seems to have a problem with canon.  Bruce Wayne is still off the board and  the supporting cast is filling in quite well in the original Batman’s absence.  Well kind of, just when it seemed that Dick Grayson was getting the hang of the Batman thing.  Two-Face goes and hires a teleporter so that he can ambush our new Batman in the Batcave.

What struck me as strange, is that I’ve never really thought about super powered beings in Batman stories.  Batman’s Rogue’s Gallery has some but they aren’t as flamboyant or exotic as teleporters.  Sure Clayface isn’t human. But Riddler, Penguin, Two-Face, The Joker– just a bunch of homicidal manics not superpowered.  The really great Batman stories have the Caped Crusader using good old fashioned detective work to solve a crime.  The story is good, its just that a teleporter seemed out of place.

Speaking of detective skills the other monthly book that you can’t find Bruce Wayne in, Detective Comics has been stunning as of late.  Artist J.H. Williams has cranked out an art nouveau masterpiece that breaks all of the conventional rules of comic book artistry.  This along with Greg Rucka’s methodical and snarky Batwoman, has made the book one of my favorites.  They have wrapped up a four part story with Batwoman saving Gotham from a chemical weapons attack.  The only problem is that the vanquished villainess Alice a.k.a the High Madame might be our hero’s sister.

Back over in Marvel Universe there isn’t a book as sumptuous as Detective Comics, but we do have some rare character development brewing.  Editorially, the Dark Reign storyline has swallowed most of the companies titles and its gotten a bit stale.  However, there was some light shed on the character of Ares and his son Alex.

I don’t know when they made him a regular character, but Ares has been pushed into the spotlight with Bendis’ Dark Avengers.  I just remember him as a footnote in the Deluxe Edition of the Official Handbook of  The Marvel Universe back in the late 1980s.  Ares was buried  on a quarter pager in the section on the Olympian Pantheon.  Other than Hercules long time standing as an Avenger, the Greek gods in the Marvel Universe always seemed second rate compared to Thor and the Norse gods.

Now we have Ares the Greek god of War taking a paycheck from the nutty  and evil Norman Osborn.  The wrinkle in the story is that Ares’ teenage son Alex a.k.a Phobos the Greek god of Fear is working for Nick Fury.

Nick and Ares basically agree to disagree about the state of the world, but they do acknowledge that Alex  is old enough to make up his own mind and follow his own destiny.  Obviously Alex likes working for Nick since he decided to rattle Osborn’s brain cage right in front of his old man.  The old man approved much to the dismay of Osborn and the other Dark Avengers.

Ok, that’s enough for now.  I haven’t touched on the amusing work that Hickman is doing on the Fantastic Four.  Or the continuing saga of the Asgardians in Latveria, as Loki plots to do away with Thor.  Also Steve Rogers is still alive, in Captain America Reborn.  He’s just having an out of body experience as his friends and nemesis, the Red Skull, try to bring him back.  So more on that next month.