Punishermax 15Jason Aaron, Steve Dillon
Matt Hollingsworth, Cory Petit
Dave Johnson, Sebastian Girner,
Axel Alonso, Joe Quesada,
Dan Buckley, Alan Fine
I’m not sure why Jason Aaron thinks we want him to write another frank Castle origin story. Let’s be honest here, the reason people pick this comic up every however often it comes out is that we want to see Aaron put on his best Garth Ennis hat and do the Punisher Max thing. This is why Steve Dillon draws it, so that we feel as though maybe it’s in the same universe, maybe this is the same Punisher that Ennis wrote, and maybe it’s just as good, maybe we can travel back in time to when whole thing was going on. Alas, Aaron is not as good.
We don’t need some convoluted story of “what if… the Punisher worked for Nick Fury?” which confirms yet again that the Punisher is a born killer and could never do anything else. Everything that needed to be said about the Punisher’s origin has been said and by much more capable lip-pens. And some of this stuff even comes off as parts of “Breaking Bad” turned into Punisher comics. But at least Steve Dillon’s drawing it, amirite? This was a series that started off with a bit of gusto but seems to have lost all steam, the really generic big Jesus or whatever (I wish it were Big Baby Jesus and an ODB lookalike, at least then it would be sorta funny), Kingpin doing that thing that crime bosses do in every movie where the good guy goes to prison and he uses his prison connects to kill him, Punisher sitting around mostly silent, so we know that he’s a badass stoic type. It’s like this comic is still trying to convince us that Punisher’s a badass, but considering that that Punisher-fact (thanks flashpoint reverse flash) is pretty evident just by reading his name, I’m completely unsure of what this comic is trying to convince us of. In the tradition of scalped, maybe it’s trying to convince us that Jason Aaron can write like a TV writer, and someone should hire him for sopranos 2 or whatever the hell. The only effect it really had on me was to wish that Ennis were writing it instead, and I’m pretty sure that guy’s tired of writing punisher anyways and it wouldn’t do anyone any good if he were forced by fandom to come back. Still I guess it was okay reading… though it reads like fanfic for a run on almost the same comic.
X-men Schism 1Jason Aaron, Carlos Pacheco
Cam Smith, Frank D'Armata
Jared K. Fletcher, Irene Y. Lee
Jordan D. White, Daniel Ketchum
Nick Lowe, Axel Alonso, Joe Q.
Dan Buckley, Alan Fine
Hmmm… well I didn’t absolutely hate this one! Sure, seeing any of Grant Morrison’s creations reappear in a marvel comic is usually a reason to run (look what they did to anarchist destroyer marvel boy, now a beacon of the avengers empire of normalized superheroes, and without any personality). But, Quentin was almost written well here, though he seems to have far less intelligence than when Morrison wrote him (why would he think “exposing’ politicians as liars would change anything, I’m pretty sure part of people’s definition of politicians is that they lie a lot, we don’t doubt it, we just overlook it). This didn’t read like a shitty episode of an x-men live action TV series, at least, it reads like a pretty okay X-Men comic, and his its beats.
We even get to see Wolverine take on a new Jubilee/ Pixie/ Shadowcat/ teenage girl because part of the Wolverine fantasy, being the best there is at killing all things, needs the balance of wanting to be a teenage girl to make you not feel so evil. We see this Cyclops and Wolverine begrudging respect thing that people love so much, we get to see a room where Magneto’s one of the voices of reason, we even get to see sentinels! What becomes disconcerting are the same issues with almost any comic which tries to be political in any way which purports to relate to our universe, but takes place in a superhero universe. The aforementioned simplistic view on how people assess politicians, the inclusion of North Korea as the first nation to send out sentinels (have mutants ever gone to North Korea in an X-Men comic?) the generic brown middle-eastern guy from country unknown being the first to speak out against Cyclops at the “conference” or whatever. It’s tough writing something that works as political allegory when the allegory is so muddied that it’s just the mud that a superhero genre flick has sprouted from. The idea of the X-Men, as created in the 60s, may have some politics behind it, but the execution of the X-Men at this point really should not try to be overtly political, Cyclops as politician only makes this thing seem ridiculous and forced. But whatever, Cyclops as X-Man (no, not Nate) and the x-men as x-men were sort of comforting here. When Aaron steps away from trying for some sense of “realism” (something I’m having a hard time understanding in comics) it starts to get pretty alright, and seem more like a “real” x-men comic, whatever the hell that means.
