Review: Secret Wars- Prelude- 2015 (TPB)- Collapse of the Marvel World/Collapse of our own

COLLECTING: New Avengers (2013) 1-3, Secret Wars (1984) 10-12, Fantastic Four 611, Ultimate Comics Spider -Man (2011) 1, Ultimate Comics Ultimates 4
Publisher: Marvel
Released: 6th May 2015


I don’t know if I’m falling in love again, but it feels like the early days of anticipation, before the rejection or awful realisation, that moment when reality clobbers you over the head and you either fall into the pit, or pick yourself up and carry on, carrying that nauseous fresh in your gut feeling that insists on the impossibility of purging what was never there, an impossible bind that is queasy sick, an empty belly mocking false memory that wants you to retreat into hate, and to shut out everything and everybody, forever.

It’s amazing how a comic book can make you feel, even making you feel anything at all is quite an achievement today really, but Secret Wars #1 by Hickman and Ribic made me feel and, yeah, does that explain the spontaneous riff in the previous paragraph?  Hey, it’s a blog, not a review on a site pretending to be the corporate whore mainstream media, so what do you expect? I enjoyed the book, and it gave me hope, yeah that stupid emotion of the eternal loser, but I’m a sucker for hope, it wins elections you know, and the book was cool so why not hope, at least for a while? There’s nothing else to do, is there?

Hope led me to Secret Wars Prelude (tpb) and I’ve just spent my Monday evening which is my Saturday morning, and my Tuesday afternoon which is my Sunday morning, reading and thinking about the book, doing it slowly so I can get my remaining brain cells around it, and now a couple of neurones have fired together and I’m spitting out a review on my blog. Oh crap, been reading too much Kerouac again.

It’s a joke man, did you get it?

Anyway, so the book, it’s cool. It’s a wallop, a reminder, and some back-story research that ties into what is going to happen in the upcoming Secret Wars 2015 story arc. It begins in 1985, those years when comic books still looked like comic books and people like myself didn’t complain about new world order or neo-liberal themes being ignored in the books because they were just comics, and well, I was a comic book reading little kid back then, and this was before the whole new world order thing became the awful reality that it is today, with the focus on social justice warrior nonsense blinding us all to the wall of dry crap reality that is the backdrop to it all.

The first three stories are reprints from the mid 1980’s. There’s a lightness, a silliness to them, but so much packed information, I read it slowly and it deceives. You think it’s silly, childish even, and sometimes it is, but sometimes, it isn’t. Wolverine questions, too much power concentrated in a single man is the theme, and I see how the past is today, how that concentration of power leads to the destruction of an entire country, hundreds of thousands of deaths, and the call for human rights and democracy used as excuse as power does what power inevitable always will do.

The book shifts to 2012, Doctor Doom, a main player today as can be seen in Secret Wars #1, is rescued, by the young, the young indoctrinated by the system as it is now, telling them they are smart as they jump threw hoops marked ‘incorporated.’ A pretty girl, propping up the status quo, with hope, love, naivety, ambition, arrogance/ignorance perhaps she will understand, in time, but will it be too late? The young generation of social justice, neo-liberal warriors, the position fillers of the consensus now, make not the future; instead they prop up the system as it is today. Slotting into place, helping that which needs to be left to die a natural death of evolutionary redundancy, feeling pride as they build platforms for evil, their young minds failing to recognise the slavery system they help to maintain, concentrating on the little, whilst missing the whole.

From there it’s Ultimates, Thor getting beaten up by the young as he represents not the status quo, but a link to something greater than animal man, he represents God, of faith, and faith in this time of the robotic, machine man, transhumanist new world order, has to go.

After old Thor (religion) is beaten up we go to new Spiderman, or ghetto man, as he probably should politically incorrectly be termed. This Ultimate Spider lives in our neo-liberal now, his life a lottery, in squalor and urban Darwinian selfishness he strives, Oprah like, to get out of the hole that he has been placed in. Don’t worry, he’s a comic book character, he will get out, the majority don’t.

After the spider it’s the beginning of the end, a tie in to the world’s colliding stuff that is happening now in Secret Wars #1. Things falling apart, the comic book heroes act on rare love of humanity, of life, think they can fix it, but how to fix neo-liberalism? The only way to fix something so irrevocably broken is to start all over again, to destroy the world and rebuild from the ground up, not top down as is happening now, world’s colliding, destruction inevitable.

And so the stage is set. What did that 1985 stuff have to do with the now? It’s simple, in my mind. Thatcherism, Reaganomics created our neo-liberal world. Thatcher elected in 1979. Reagan elected in 1981. They built the universe we now inhabit, opened everything up to private banks and corporations that have been raping and pillaging the entire planet for how many years now? Thirty something? Do the maths. What has been created since those free market days has resulted in what we have now. They have created the neo-liberal world order, is it now the time where the neo-liberal order crashes into a ditch, spits into flames, dies, only to be replaced by what’s next, you know what’s next right?

It’s the New World order mate, not the pretend one, the real one, and to get to that it’s always been the goal to rip the world in two, to have world’s (east and west?) collide, happening now in the middle-east, and being (subconsciously?) paralleled within the pages of this comic book event. The death of the old world, replaced by the totalitarian new. A one world Police state, one world army, bank, government, chips for everybody, but no tomato sauce available unles GM contaminated, eat up, cancer a certainty.

Umm, I fall down now, exhausted on Jack Kerouac adrenaline, said what I wanted to say, this event then is a parallel between the world as it is now, in a moment of change, I know it always changes, but this one is the big change. Neo-liberal world seen for what it is, the world shudders, things falling apart, a catastrophe, bang, bang, bang, and the world is on fire. But fires eventually die out, and when they do its time to rebuild. Marvel worlds are dying, as is ours, do they recognise how close they are, how much relation there is to the story in the book and the reality of the now? I’m going to get quite a lot of mileage out of this Secret Wars 2015 event. I’m going to follow it closely, see the parallels, talk about them on my blog. I’m looking forward to this one. It’s going to be good, and there's that hope again, feels like love.



Rating: 8/10 (I loved the 1980’s re-prints, and the New Avengers 2013 material is very strong as well).

Comic Review: Secret Wars #1- A beautiful comic book, buy it now

Writer: Jonathan Hickman
Artist: Essad Ribic
Colours: Ive Svorcina
Main Cover artist: Alex Ross
Publisher: Marvel
Released: 6th May 2015


This comic book put me in a good mood, not because it dealt with real world issues and pleased me on a political level, but because it’s a wonderfully entertaining comic book with a lyrical tilt and emotional resonance.

Forget about all of that real world depressing stuff, like the pointless UK election, and jump into a comic book that is well written, excellently pencilled, inked and coloured and a heck of a lot better than I ever thought it could be.

I don’t know what’s going on in the Avengers. I don’t read the book, but after reading Secret Wars #1 I’m going to buy the Secret Wars Prelude TPB and get myself bang up to date with the context behind what is going on in this story.

You know why I bought the book, right? Yeah, it’s because of that excellent front cover by Alex Ross. How could I not buy it? How could any comic book fan not want to buy a book with that cover? It’s excellent, it really is. The detail is lush, complex, stunning, extravagant, hey, it’s beautiful man, and it makes me smile just to look at it.

Well I bought the book because of that cover and saw that the interior artist of the book was a bloke called Esad Ribic. I know him. He’s the guy who did Thor recently. I loved Thor, well the art anyway, and now he’s doing the art in this Secret War as well? Man, how could I miss that? I open the book and BAMM, there it is, that quality, that beauty, it’s already spectacular and I haven’t even read the story yet.

The story is going to disappoint, isn’t it? The cover, the art, that’s just covering the weakness of the
story, right? It’s average, right. It’s just okay, right? It’s just your typical comic book story, right?

Nope, don’t worry about it, the story is great, it really is. I love it, and I’m not even getting the full benefit here because I haven’t yet read all of the other books that have set the story up. You know what that is? It’s good writing, it’s allowing new readers to join in the fun, whilst keeping your long-term readers happy as well, and I know they’re happy because I’ve scanned a couple of other reviews and the vast majority of them have nothing but praise for this book.

I rarely agree with the vast majority of other Internet comic book reviewers, but I have to agree with them on this book. It’s lavishly illustrated, has a big time feel to it, is wonderfully entertaining and has a rare emotional resonance and lyricism to it that you only get in top quality comic book writing.

I’m a real life grump, but I loved the book. Forget the world, jump in, it’s great, that’s all you need to know.


Rating: 10/10 (Beautiful, lyrical, emotional and fun)

Graphic novel review: Jonathan Hickman's 'The Nightly News': No cult membership required

Writer: Jonathan Hickman
Artist: Jonathan Hickman
Publisher: Image comics
Released: June 2007

You’d think that a book such as this, about media manipulation and the role of powerful corporations owning and controlling both the mainstream media and their political puppets, would be right up my alley, but I really didn’t enjoy this book much at all.

I found that it was more of a research project by writer Jonathan Hickman put into a comic book format, with some cult members as the protagonists because I guess you have to have lots of gratuitous violence to make a comic book interesting, right?

Err, I don’t know about that, but what I do know is that this comic book wasn’t very interesting or insightful to me, at all. So, what does it tell us?

Cults are bad. No shit. Mainstream media journalists are career whores. No shit. Powerful corporate elite’s own and control mainstream politicians. No shit. Vaccines are poison. No shit. There is poison in our food. No shit. The television is lying to you, programming you. Again, no bloody shit Sherlock. I already know this stuff, we all do. Just because the corporate whore mainstream media is not discussing it, that doesn’t mean we don’t already know about it, because we do.

WE KNOW.

And what’s the point in portraying those that protest against corporate/media corruption as dangerous cult members that have been brainwashed into committing violent acts in order to further the agenda of yet another corporate elite? What is that saying? That all protest is probably being controlled, and if you want to protest you’ll be joining a mind controlled cult? That’s not exactly a good message, is it? It’s saying that you might as well not bother protesting. It's saying that you might as well stay at home and read silly superhero comics instead.

This is a largely unenjoyable book. It’s a book with overly stylised and annoying page layouts and far, far, far too much textual information per page. This information is presented like it’s shocking, like it’s some sort of secret revelation, when it’s really nothing of the sort.

Anybody with any epistemological curiosity already knows far more about this stuff than is presented here. This is media manipulation for beginners. The fancy pants page layout hides what is a largely formulaic cult story book with lots of violence and swearing, Chomsky quotations, people being Darwinian and ruthless and a message that is stating the acknowledged fact that mainstream media news bastards are lying to us all.

I know this book was released in 2006/2007, but this stuff wasn’t new then, and it’s very, very dated now, especially after the recent revelations by Wikileaks, information that just confirmed what we already knew anyway. This book dresses up fact as a conspiracy, and that's just how the corporate elites like it.

The book did get one thing right though. 'Chomsky's a fucking retard.' He sure is, and that's why he is in the position that he currently fills. An ageing gatekeeper, letting you feel like you're getting close, but then slamming the door shut when you threaten to break through the corporate/banking/education matrix.

Oh dear, and what happens next for writer Jonathan Hickman? He buggers off to a huge corporation (Marvel/Disney) where he will have a very soft and easy career writing escapist books about cold war era, anachronistic superheroes. If you want to get his latest polemic, super controversial and revolutionary mind expanding stuff then pick up the latest issue of Marvel’s Avengers. <<<<HUGE SIGH>>>>Way to go mate. You did a little bit of faintly anti-authoritarian stuff, and then it’s straight to easy Suburb Street working for one of the giant evil corporations you gently criticised in this book. There’s a two-word cliché for people who do that, and it really does apply here.

SELL-OUT.

There was nothing revolutionary about this book, at all. It was a depressing book about media manipulation and how there’s nothing that you can do about it. That is a lie, a lie that promotes learnt helplessness, the feeling that there’s nothing that we can do, so why bother even trying. We need to break through this destructive feeling of learnt helplessness because there is something we can all do about it. The solution is very simple, and that solution does not involve cult membership or violence. All we have to do to break the destructive cycle of corporate/media manipulation is the following. Turn off the mainstream media. Stop voting between left arse cheek and right arse cheek, and stop reading statist comic books like the Avengers. That’s all you have to do. No cult membership required.

Rating: 5/10 (For the information that the largely sleeping comic book fanboy readers might not know about, but really bloody well should do)