Comic Book Awesome Can Come In Different Flavors

I wasn't planning on doing this until next week. For one thing, I hadn't decided on a full format for this place. The concept of celebrating awesomeness in comics and awesome comic books is a good idea, but how do I present the stuff I find? I have several ideas, but the only way to do it is to do it.


So, for my first substantive post over here at Nerdiodrome, I wanted to do a current comic. Not necessarily something that came out week-of, but I didn't just want to showcase the glorious days of yesteryear. This is for many reasons: first and foremost, I didn't want to be a nostalgia-goon who only loves comics during his youth and hates anything new. I'm not that guy. I love comics. All kinds of comics--yeah, I love old comics, but just 'cause there are more old comics than current comics doesn't mean I get to ignore current comics. Also, I wanted to avoid retellings of stuff that was based on shows or comics from my youth or earlier. Like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic, or the Star Trek comic, or anything of that sort--if it is something that is tugging on the nostalgia strings, it would have to be something new and/or better than what came before. I'm saying that right out, okay? Also, I haven't read every comic that came out this week. I do have a tendency to browse before I buy (my money is hard-earned and slight, I'm not gonna spend it on something I don't actually want to own), but that still leaves a metric mess and a half of comics I haven't bought, haven't read, and probably won't do either.

Okay. So those basic disclosures are out of the way, let's do this thing.

First, we have Avengers vs. X-Men #0. This is the prelude to an event, and I'm going to say this right now, I am sick and tired of over-blown, over-hyped, over-long event-driven storytelling in comic books. They take too long to tell, are ultimately less engaging than they should be, and rarely worth the time. So I browsed this thing to see if there was going to be anything worth getting worked up over in the first place. $.10 review: it probably won't. But I got it based solely on the following page, that I'm still going to preface, because I am full of it.

Hope is a recent character added to the bloated X-Men family. There was an event where the massive number of mutants in the Marvel-Universe was downsized, and there was question about whether the species was even endangered, and fear that there wouldn't be anymore mutants being born. And then Hope came into the picture, and because of time-travel shenanigans, she was taken to a possible post-apocalyptic future where she was raised, and trained, and came back to the "present" a young adult. She has the power to mimic the powers of other near her, she was trained in a variety of fighting styles, and she is considered a messianic figure amongst the mutants because she managed to essentially jump-start the return of mutants. She has a semi-team of new mutants called the Points of Light that she sort of leads and sort of manipulates into doing what she wants. But she is also the most important figure in recent mutant history, and so tends to be coddled and isolated by the Mutant leadership and community. Boo-hoo for her. She's not ever been a very compelling character to me, partly because she still has a sense of self-entitlement due to her age and (lack of) maturity, and also because the audience is told she's special and great, and rarely does she get called on her more extreme behavior. However, one cool turn can get the audience on the side of a less well-liked character rather quick.

Case in point, Hope sneaks away from the Mutant HQ to do some good old fashioned lifesaving. She runs up against the Serpent Society, a group of go-to mooks who can be as dangerous or as easy to beat in any situation as the plot demands. They're a bunch of goons with snake-themed powers of one sort or another. Hope finds the Society, and gets to fighting them, and there's some back and forth, until:

But simple badassery is easy to point to and say "That's AWESOME!" It's nowhere near the only kind of awesomeness we here at Nerdiodrome are after. Because of ease, I don't want to just pop up Atomic Robo whenever it comes out, or anything like that. But Atomic Robo is awesome, don't ignore it just because I'm not posting an image from it. It's would quickly take over the blog.

Which brings us to another kind of awesome, a simpler, low-key kind of awesome.

Savage Hawkman was not very good in its first several issue. I've outlined elsewhere some of the problems I had with the first three issues (only the 1st 3 because afterwards I dropped it like a hot steaming bag of . . . something hot and steaming in a bag that you drop, I guess? I don't know where I was going with that). But this issue had a new creative team, and I don't know if it's a permanent change or only temporary (from what I can tell, it's short-term before Rob Liefeld takes over around issue 9), so I gave it a look-see. It's . . . better . . . (which isn't saying much). It's not utterly terrible. It's got that going for it, at least. But it does have something that is refreshing.

You see, when I grew up reading comic books, there was a tradition. Whenever two comic book heroes appeared in the same comic book issue and it was more than a cameo, they'd fight first and then they'd team-up. They'd fight, and then work together. They'd beat each other up, and then they'd stop beating each other up.

Sometimes it happened because of a "misunderstanding," sometimes because of a genuine differences between how characters operated. Mainly it was out of tradition, no matter how contrived. When I was a kid, this was still seen as cliché, and a few jokes were made about how cliché it was. This was back in the 1980s, people. I am old.

Anyway, superheroes would fight each other. It was tired when I was a kid, which is another reason I'm still not so much interested in Avengers vs. X-Men. But in Savage Hawkman #6, we get something else.

Mutual respect. And they also just get down to business and work together to help people in the current crisis (a zombie invasion, bleh, but whatever; super heroes need acceptable bad guys to fight, so it goes).

In case you can't spot the awesome, I'll outline it for you:

1. As I said, Savage Hawkman was terrible in it's previous issues. This is not terrible. This is competent and beyond competent.
2. Static's own comic, Static Shock, is being cancelled for a number of dumb reasons at issue 8, but it all boils down to not respecting the character. This goes beyond sad to downright tragic because the character comes from the Milestorm universe, which was co-created by the late Dwayne McDuffie, who passed away last year. McDuffie was also involved in the cartoon Static Shock that lasted for several years on the KidsWB cartoon block from several years ago. Here, in one panel (that I'm focusing on) he gets all sorts of respect, possibly more than the creative and editorial team of the comic he was starring in.
3. Hawkman has traditionally been a rather hard-nosed and reactionary hero (particularly against more liberal characters, like say Green Arrow). It's a new universe, so that doesn't have to be the case, and it's certainly nice to see Hawkman working well with someone not named Hawkgirl.
4. They get down to business and start saving lives and fighting bad guys instead of stupid macho posturing (something that took up too much space in the new relaunch of Justice League, to point out a current example).

As I said, awesomeness isn't limited only to one character beating up another.

So here are two examples of what I'm looking to make this blog be about. Agreements, disagreements, suggestions are all welcome, here or at my email..


I wonder if I should have a standard sign-off or the like at the end?