Or, "Don't Follow Leaders, Watch Your Parking Meters"
Or, "If This Be HOMAGE!"
Gødland #1-7 by Joe Casey and Tom Scioli
Iron Man: The Inevitable #1-2 by Joe Casey and Frazer Irving
A month-long drought on Seven Soldiers can drive a man to desperate things--like trying some new comics for a change. The last couple of trips to the store, I picked up the first trade paperback and the most recent issue of Gødland, Joe Casey and Tom Scioli's tribute to Jack Kirby, seventies Marvel Comics, and all things cosmic.
I have to admit, the first issues didn't fill me with confidence. The cosmic action seemed too labored, too second-order, as if the creators were more concerned with evoking the energy and creativity of their favorite comics than with actually being energetic or creative. (That first sequence on Mars was nice, though, especially the widescreen pan as Adam Archer gazes across the desolate scarlet landscape.) The art was especially problematic, as Scioli's overly faithful homage to Jack Kirby threatened to limit the book's range of antecedents to a single progenitor; something more in the mode of Jim Starlin or seventies Marvel house style might open up some breathing room and leave Gødland feeling less like a museum piece, a precise but sterile recreation of homo kirbius in his original habitat.
But Casey seemed to find his stride in the second storyline, featuring an S&M supervillainess and a square-jawed hero named Crashman who talks like Captain America and calls everybody "friend." And the key element, the thing that may set Gødland apart from its inspirations and justify it as an autonomous comic, is that everybody else thinks this is ridiculous. The mockery is gentle and obviously born out of love but it's enough to give this comic an identity of its own.
That infectious good humor creeps into the art as well. In the latest issue Scioli has terrific fun with the best scene Gødland has yet offered, as villain Friedrich Nickelhead dances and sings along to "Subterranean Homesick Blues" inside what appears to be some kind of giant metal or ceramic teapot, all to celebrate a minor accomplishment. Okay, much of the credit here goes to Bob Dylan--it's amazing how well his cadences are preserved in print--but Casey and Scioli capture the insouciant spirit of his lines and transfer them into Nickelhead's victory dance, the very lines of his home pulsating with beatnik joy.
And that, as much as anything, is why Gødland is now a monthly purchase. It crosses Kirby and Starlin with a dollop of Morrison (Mr. Nobody would be right at home at the Funhouse, don't you think?) and bombards us with goofy character designs and large-scale action, all of it imbued with the futurism of sixties science fiction and the irreverence of the sixties counterculture. A pleasant alternative when your local comics shop is running short on bald Scotsmen.
Meanwhile Casey is writing a much more contemporary tale in Iron Man: The Inevitable, which I'm picking up on Jog's recommendation and the strength of Frazer Irving's art. He's not the only Seven Soldiers artist Marvel has poached lately--Ryan Sook, who did such great work on Zatanna, is drawing X-Factor now, but there's no force on this earth that could get me buying a Peter David mutant book or, indeed, any Peter David book any time soon.
As Jog observes in his sales-clinching reviews, Iron Man: The Inevitable opts for a straightforward updating of Tony Stark and his villains without coating them in a language of self-referential comics commentary or forcing them into a predictable discourse on the author's pet philosophies. It's an earnest approach that doesn't leave a reviewer much to write about, but it could sustain an ongoing series just as easily as a miniseries--it's too bad Casey only has six issues to play with.
The plot is equally pleasant and equally unremarkable, as Iron Man tries to save one old foe from a state of posthuman torture while two others plot against him. The primary attraction is the Irving art: he's doing the colors as well, in a neon palette that's unconstrained by his linework, a perfect representation for the strange technologies and optical intelligences that populate the comic. The unpretentious writing has its charms, though, and Casey offers a functional template for writing new stories about very old characters without turning novelty itself into an aggressive and overstated selling point.
It's a book that works by the little touches, like the way nobody believes Stark or Iron Man when they claim somebody else is wearing the armor now. Actually, I thought it'd be hilarious if somebody else is wearing the armor now, but the remote launch in the second issue seems to rule that out. That may be Iron Man: The Inevitable in a nutshell: not as new as it looks, but not trying to be anything other than what it is, a solid superhero story in attractively modern wrapping.
Let me end with a note of warning: I am the Last Man on the Bandwagon, and when I start hyping a title its days may be numbered. Just look at my track record with these reviews from a year ago. Sleeper: canceled. The Question: miniseries. Deadshot: miniseries. Adam Strange: miniseries, ending ruined by Infinite Crisis. The Human Target: canceled, announced within a week of the review. The Losers: canceled. Captain America: still going, more or less cancellation-proof, but easily the least interesting of the bunch.
Gødland is a fun title, but it's fighting for space in a perverse market that only rewards big names working on big characters of big publishers and now I've gone and given it my mafia kiss of death. Buy it while you still can.
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