Yearly Archive: 2008

Though you can’t go to a comics convention panel without hearing some fan decry crossovers, it’s readily obvious why they keep appearing and tying up comics series: Crossovers sell.

As editors and creators quickly point out, slapping an event label on a comic cover can immediately boost sales by a healthy margin. And when books are struggling for readers, those opportunities are hard to pass up.

But for those who closely follow a particular series, crossovers certainly have the potential to seriously gum up the works, which is made evident with perfect clarity in the two issues of X-Factor released last week.

The issue from the main series has the main team in Detroit, sort of teaming up with She-Hulk to take down a Skrull attacker. The other, a Layla Miller special, has that character still stuck in the future, having some very strange adventures and knowing stuff.

The series proper has been one of my favorites since it started up again a few years ago, with Peter David knocking out  some of the best superheroics seen this decade. His scripts are smart, funny and well crafted, and continued reading makes clear how good he is at plotting stories out in the long term.

But the past two Secret Invasion tie-in issues have been easily the worst of the run, in part because of sub-standard art and in part because the Skrull situation feels as forced as it is. Even Jamie Madrox’s patented monologues lack their usual flair.

This is then highlighted (or perhaps lowlighted) by the brilliant Layla Miller issue, which is clearly Miller in more unadulterated form. Layla — herself a deus ex machina from House of M, another event/crossover — has been a driving force of X-Factor. But for now she’s relegated off to an alternate future, not coincidentally by the last X-Men crossover, Messiah Complex.

All told, the past year and a half of X-Factor has seen it cross over with three events (Civil War being the only one I haven’t mentioned yet). For fans of the series, all we can do is wonder what the book might have been if David had been left to his own devices.

DC Comics got a lot of press last year when they signed up bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult to write their monthly [[[Wonder Woman]]] series – gallons of ink about her being the first female “regular writer” on the series, and about how this would finally catapult WW into the position DC keeps insisting she already has: a central, iconic figure whose comics people actually buy and read.

Well, more than a year has passed year later, and Picoult’s run turned out to be only five issues long – so much for “regular,” huh? – and also served primarily as set-up for one of the log-jammed line-wide crossovers, [[[Amazons Attack!]]] Picoult’s five issues were gathered into a classy hardcover, suitable for libraries (where I found it, actually) and real bookstores, with her name given huge prominence.

Assuming that the point of making Picoult’s name so large is to draw in the many readers of her novels, or other casual bookstore browsers, it’s fair to ask whether [[[Love and Murder]]] makes sense as a book in its own right, and provides anything like a satisfying experience to those new readers.

I haven’t read any of Picoult’s novels, unfortunately, but I also haven’t ever read Wonder Woman, and I haven’t read a mainstream DC book regularly in a few years – so, with my ignorance wrapped around me like a cloak, I dove in…

Wonder Woman: Love and Murder
Written by  Jodi Picoult
Art by Drew Johnson & Ray Snider with Rodney Ramos, Terry Dodson & Rachel Dodson, and Paco Diaz
DC Comics, November 2007, $19.99

Well, the first thing a seasoned comics reader notices is that the art team changes entirely twice during five issues, which is usually a bad, bad sign. Readers coming from the world of prose probably won’t notice that – the three art styles are all minor variations on today’s version of superhero-standard, and the transitions aren’t particularly jarring – but it is a danger sign, implying that something was going on behind the scenes.

And then, before the story actually starts, we get a one-page “Previously in Wonder Woman,” explaining how she killed Maxwell Lord in some other cross-over that we didn’t read and don’t care about, and now she’s pretending to be “Diana Prince” again, working at the Department of Metahuman Affairs with her face-changing partner Tom “Nemesis” Tresser under the literally iron-fisted Sarge Steel. (I’m not sure if we believe that, since Diana has some much trouble with ordinary life later that we doubt she could convincingly fake a history or paper trail to get such an impressive job.) OK, fine, that’s backstory, and we’ll get into a brand new adventure now, right?
 

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