Along with the ongoing batches of randomly-selected Marvel Unlimited issues, the latter half of 2021 found me doing background reading for two different Watchmen Bestiary articles: the one on Dante and the one on Dalí. In the Marvel realm, I finally figured out that the way to read 100 issues of a character was to use the invaluable Complete Marvel Reading Order site rather than ComicVine or some other substitute. This not only gave me a more coherent reading experience, it tended to focus on older issues, which helped balance out the novelty bias of my random selection method, as Previews always devotes way more pages to new things than old things.
As always, there may be spoilers in here.
Dante
John Took
3.7/10 · May 10, 2021
This was a real slog. Took’s writing style involves interminable sentences with clause after clause strung together by lots of commas and occasionally other punctuation, and peppered with foreign and hyper-academic words. Example picked from a random page (304): “And specularity is indeed the order of the day here, for while on the face of it, and right up to the moment of its evaporating somewhat after the manner of the morning mist, Dante’s, in the remaining part of the text, looks to be simply an exercise in prescription, in a laying down of the rules for composition, what in truth we have here — and on analogy with the notion of speculative grammar — is something close to a speculative poetic, a hymn to the canzone stanza as but a mirror held up to self in the now perfect resolution of self.” Plus page-long (or longer) excerpts from Italian and Latin texts translated in tiny print down at the bottom of the page. O M G. There were 545 pages of that. Pretty painful and slow overall.
There were diamonds to be mined, but it took a lot of hammering. Took’s argument (when it occasionally appears) centers around reading Dante as an allegory/metaphor about the evolution of self, in particular the three parts of the Comedy as self-confrontation (Inferno), self-reconfiguration (Purgatorio), and self-transcendence (Paradiso). This is useful, as are the biographical insights. But boy is it a lot of work to get to the useful parts.
Spider-Ham (2019)
Zeb Wells and Will Robson
8.4/10 · May 11, 2021
This is some rollicking fun, with lots of kooky meta stuff, almost verging on a Not Brand Ecch vibe in places. I dig all the wacky animal equivalents of Marvel characters — Moose-ter Fantastic, Sandmanatee, the Bee-Yonder, etc. I also like how Spider-Man gets unwillingly dragged through the whole thing and spends the entire series trying to figure out how to make it stop. Certainly not anything I’d want to read on a regular basis — 5 issues was a little more than enough — but a pretty enjoyable romp.
Web of Venom: The Good Son (2020)
Zac Thompson and Dio Neves
2.6/10 · May 11, 2021
Oh boy, an evil child corrupting an innocent child. And the parents + caretakers have NO idea! What a great trope, totally not bored and repulsed by this at all.
Star Wars: Age of Republic (2019)
Jody Houser, Cory Smith, and Luke Ross
8.0/10 · May 23, 2021
This was a series of 9 one-shots — 4 focused on heroes, 4 focused on villains, and one with a bunch of micro-stories — set during the prequel era. Obviously this is not my favorite Star Wars era, but this series did a creditable job of putting the characters in good stories that bring out their core themes and provide some fun along the way.
Annihilation Omnibus
Marvel
9.5/10 · June 5, 2021
Or the Marvel Unlimited equivalent anyway. Drax the Destroyer #1–4, Annihilation: Prologue, Annihilation: Nova #1–4, Annihilation: Silver Surfer #1–4, Annihilation: Super-Skrull #1–4, Annihilation: Ronan #1–4, Annihilation #1–6, Annihilation: Heralds of Galactus #1–2. Missing Annihilation: Nova Corps Files.
This is a comics event I’ve heard about for years, but never really read until now. Cosmic Marvel has never really been my favorite flavor, so I wasn’t super-motivated to seek it out. Now that I’ve read it though, I’m glad I did. It’s easy to see why the storyline jump-started the cosmic characters again — a big part of it comes down to structure. The Drax book revives the character in an Earthbound setting, with a smart-alecky human counterpart, making him more grounded and moving him beyond his Starlin-y origins. Then they introduce the wave, then pull back and deeply characterize four different protagonists, a melange of heroes and anti-heroes, with varying motivations, before bringing them all together against the common enemy.
That enemy, Annihilus, is WAY more of a threat than he’s ever been before, and for once it’s not about his cosmic control rod. His characterization is great too, especially in his interactions with Thanos. The weird mix that goes into fighting him breaks the “heroes vs. bad guys” mold in some pretty interesting ways, as they come together then splinter apart again with all of us understanding each other a little better. A satisfying experience that lives up to the hype!
Annihilation Scourge
Marvel
7.4/10 · June 5, 2021
Well, this was a disappointing follow-up. This was partly because it continues some stories I never connected with — the “Cancerverse” (never read it) and the Sentry. But also it was much less ambitious, by like a factor of five. Consequently, there wasn’t much interesting character development, and some of the character interactions we did have weren’t credible, such as the nihilist Annihilus, who sought the destruction of all life in Annihilation, now suddenly caring enough about the Negative Zone’s life forms to seek out help from Nova of all people, and turn himself into kind of a comic relief figure by doing so. A real degradation of what was built in Annihilation. Also, rather than picking up under-used characters and making something interesting out of them, this shoehorns in characters in the middle of other story arcs, and thus has to deal with stuff like the Silver Surfer’s intangibility. It was okay, but forgettable and not really deserving of the Annihilation imprint.
Star (2020)
Kelly Thompson, Javier Pina, and Filipe Andrade
8.7/10 · June 7, 2021
Thompson’s writing is a pleasure as always — she’s great at mixing humor with emotional themes. In this case, the emotions are confusion, compassion, and fear. I didn’t read the Captain Marvel arc that initiated this character, but I get the gist — emotionally stunted person carrying around childhood trauma suddenly gets to control her own reality. The Scarlet Witch is the perfect character to bring in here, and I love how Wanda sees herself in Star. Captain Marvel, on the other hand, is acting like a cop, understandably. This was a really interesting dynamic, though the series is too short to do much with it. Maybe we’ll see more?
The Empyre crossover
Marvel
8.7/10 · June 18, 2021
For somebody like me with a lot of Marvel reading history, this was pretty enjoyable. I thought the Road to Empyre book did a great job of setting up the history, and I really appreciated the connection to the Byrne story of the Kree & Skrull fighting for eons on the moon. (Though apparently that connection was more fleshed out in the previous event.) Also, the notion that the “Celestial Messiah” was JUST for plants made for a nice twist. Nothing mind-blowing, but good solid comic book fun.
Danteworlds
Guy P. Raffa
7.1/10 · June 22, 2021
I probably didn’t give this the treatment that would have extracted the most value from it. I used it as a guide for reading the Inferno in chunks, and then read all the summaries, etc., at once rather than going back and forth between the poem and the reference. Then I did the same thing with the notes in the Mandelbaum translation. So I wasn’t quite as directly engaged between the lines and the apparatus as it might wish. Still, it provided useful descriptions and explanations for various references. The “study questions” felt a little more dubious, or perhaps just not suited to my purpose. I did like the significant lines — a nice touch.
Inferno
Dante, translation by Allen Mandelbaum
9.6/10 · June 24, 2021
After all this time, Dante still blows me away. Revisiting it here was a real pleasure, bringing back lovely memories of class with Ed Nolan, the manifesto of my teenage self, etc. That final moment of emerging to see the stars is just breathtaking. One of the best parts this time has been hopping onto the Walking with Dante podcast. I’m definitely going to keep it going even after I’m done with the Watchmen post. It feels a lot like being in a class with an excellent teacher. Can’t wait to write about it all.
X-Men/Avengers: Onslaught Volume 1
Marvel
4.7/10 · June 25, 2021
I suppose people can have nostalgia for anything, but to me the entire Onslaught fiasco was a real nadir for Marvel, right down there with the Clone Saga. Spread across a bazillion issues, a huge mess narratively, constantly privileging art over story. And worst of all, the way it ended runs that had been going since the 1960s — ESPECIALLY Fantastic Four — was unforgivable. To be fair, there’s a germ of a good idea in there — Xavier’s frustration & absorption of Magneto turning him into a monster — but the execution, ugh. Really, it felt like a storyline symbolic of what was happening to Marvel during that time — an onslaught of greed and mutant overload destroying everything in its path.
X-Men/Avengers: Onslaught Volume 2
Marvel
3.7/10 · July 2, 2021
I guess it was supposed to be fascinating that the X-world was infested with all these Age of Apocalypse holdouts (Dark Beast, X-Man) even as the next mega-event unfolded, but to me it just felt like an already grossly swollen “What If” story had overflowed its bounds into regular continuity and was throwing even more nonsense into the pot on top of everything else. Hard to maintain an emotional impact when narrative threads are all over the place and still awaiting resolution. Verdict remains for this section — a mess that needed much better editorial control, and a monster that killed too many undeserving books.
100 issues with Taskmaster
Marvel
7.9/10 · August 2, 2021
Tony is a real utility character, so it’s not surprising that this was all over the place. He’s at his best when he shows up in stories with an overall comedic touch, given that he’s fairly ridiculous. The Taskmaster limited series, therefore, was probably the highlight of this selection, since it was not only funny but gave him a good reason for being in the story — needing to unlock tech that only took “kinesic signatures” from certain people, thus giving him a MacGuffin to chase and providing an interesting angle on his powers. Mostly, he’s just a supporting character in somebody else’s storyline, but these stories can be good. I quite liked the extended Spider-Man storyline in which Kraven captured a bunch of animal-themed villains and let them be hunted in a barricaded Central Park.
100 issues with Miles Morales
Marvel
8.8/10 · August 25, 2021
So for this, I read the full runs of Ultimate Comics Spider-Man, Spider-Man (2016), and Miles Morales: Spider-Man (so far). I also read the first 18 or so issues of Champions. I did NOT read Secret Wars, or whatever the heck series it was that brought Miles into mainstream 616 reality, so I ended up pretty baffled at how major plot points (i.e. who knew MM’s secret identity) got reshuffled from one reality to another. Ultimately, this felt like one cohesive story from Bendis that was truncated and interrupted, then turned into a different cohesive story from Bendis, until he left and Saladin Ahmed took over in a mostly smooth transition. Ahmed even addresses some of the weirder plot points, like why the fuck any Black parents would name their kid “Jefferson Davis.” Champions was much more scattered, more prone to crossover-itis, and (naturally) less focused on Miles. Wonderful work by Bendis (and Pichelli, and Marquez, and etc.) plus good work by Ahmed, plus okay work on Champions.
Team Topologies
Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais
6.5/10 · September 5, 2021
Certainly not a fun read — I read it because I’d heard that’s what’s in our leadership’s heads around organizational structure, and I wanted to be able to speak in its terms when I talked to them about reorganizing the team I’m on. Predictably, that discussion did not go the way I wanted it to, but I did feel like I was able to use the book’s concepts to my advantage at least. Main takeaways for me:
- Conway’s Law: the idea that software architecture tends to mimic team structure
- Four kinds of teams: stream-aligned, complicated-subsystem, platform, enabling
- Three kinds of interactions: collaboration, X-as-a-service, facilitation. You can also build trust with communities of practice, internal conferences, etc.
- Everyone does not need to communicate with everyone
- Focus on reducing cognitive load for teams
- A good platform should simplify the developer’s life. Doing so results in faster flow & better quality
- Development and operations should not be split. Rather, operations should be an input to development.
- Team interactions, user feedback, telemetry & metrics are analogous to an organization’s senses — crucial for obtaining the feedback necessary to make good decisions.
10 issues with Iron Man stealth armor
Marvel
8.2/10 · September 12, 2021
For as much focus as the stealth armor gets in games, toys, etc., it seems to be incredibly minor in the overall Iron Man canon. It debuted in Iron Man #152 for a special stealth mission, and from that point forward seemed to mostly show up in issues where a bunch of armors appeared. That said, reading those issues meant I got to hit some big highlight moments in the IM narrative, plus the 2008 Iron Manual which provided a thorough breakdown of IM continuity prior to the movie. Pretty enjoyable stuff. I especially liked the Armor Wars issues, which I’d never read before.
The Surrealism Reader
Edited by Dawn Ades and Michael Richardson
4.8/10 · September 29, 2021
This was a real challenge to read. Very academic, and lots and lots of texts in translation. Also, it’s tough for me to get my mind around surrealism as a concept past the visual arts, and I find I don’t care much about it in poetry, etc. Much of it felt like grandstanding, infighting, or naive posturing. The Dalí essay — at 4 pages — was by far the most interesting part. That said, it gave me a grounding in some of the core surrealist concepts, and even beyond the Dalí provided a few good and possibly usable touchpoints — on masks, dreams, and humor.
100 issues of Ghost
Marvel
8.0/10 · October 10, 2021
My main takeaway from this was to try using reading order instead of ComicVine for these character dives. It was quite frustrating jumping around in time and picking my way through non-US releases. My second takeaway was that while Ghost started out as a one-note villain (that note being “hates corporations”), it was really Jeff Parker’s work on Thunderbolts that gave him the depth and pathos he needed to become a more interesting character. I’m happy to have done my homework on him, and I’ll be happy to do a more linear path through the other characters coming up.
Dalí
Dawn Ades
7.5/10 · October 12, 2021
It’s difficult to judge this one, because my copy arrived with 16 pages having been ripped out from various parts of the book (accounting for 32 total pages of reading — about 15% of the total). So my reading experience had a lot of frustrating skips and gaps. This was especially aggravating because the pages torn all had reproductions of paintings on them, to which other parts of the book referred. That monumental annoyance aside, this book was certainly much more accessible than the Surrealist Reader, and Ades does a creditable job of combining a broad biography with an examination of the major themes in Dalí’s work.
Essential Dalí
Kirsten Bradbury
8.4/10 · October 30, 2021
Well this was certainly better than my other Dalí book, which had tiny reprints and a bunch of THOSE torn out. This book has gorgeous full-color reproductions of 100+ Dalí works, and useful commentary that almost always frames the work in contrast to some other piece from another part of the book. Unfortunately, it is distressingly error-prone. For instance, the description of The Enigma of Desire mentions a bunch of stuff not shown in the reprint, because the reprint is just a detail from the painting, not that the book seems to realize that. Elsewhere, two different sculptures are labeled “The Profile of Time”, or rather, one is labeled that and the other is labeled “Profile du Temps”, when in fact the one labeled in English is actually Nobility of Time — even the description gets this one wrong. So an enjoyable tome, if not entirely trustworthy.
~100 issues of Constrictor
Marvel
8.1/10 · October 31, 2021
Using the reading order site for one of these runs was a MUCH more satisfying experience. It was cool to watch Frank move from a “villain of the week” to a character with some moral compass (in the Captain America arc), to a wacky neighbor for Deadpool, to a redemption arc in Thing, to a regularly appearing antihero in Avengers: The Initiative. In the process, I got to pop through a bunch of different pieces of Marvel history, including some of Priest’s run on Black Panther, which I dug, and his run on Deadpool, which not so much, though it was okay. There was some overlap with my Taskmaster read-through, especially towards the end as those characters joined up in Initiative. Uneven quality, as you’d expect, but a fun ride overall.
~100 issues of Spider-Woman
Marvel
8.2/10 · November 15, 2021
She-Hulk and Spider-Woman turned me off Marvel when I was 8 — they just felt like cheap weird copies. Now I know they were made to protect trademarks, for fear some other company would knock them off! Now I’ve come to enjoy each character on their merits, and this course on early Spider-Woman was enjoyable, though it was clear Marvel had no idea what to do with the character, and ended up depowering her (then walking that back a bit.) Interestingly, uncostumed Jessica in Wolverine was probably the most compelling version of her in this initial batch.
