Drink your Fruitopia, here comes Utopia. It gives you so much hope-pia to read Utopia.
My reviewing skills are even better than my Adam Sandler impression, so read and comment!
DARK AVENGERS #7
“Utopia” Part 3
WRITER: Matt Fraction
PENCILER: Luke Ross
INKER: Rick Magyar, Mark Pennington & Luke Ross
COLORIST: Rain Beredo
LETTERER: Cory Petit
PLOT:
With Beast literally coming apart, Norman questions whether Dark Beast’s power-dampening Omega Machine tortures its subjects into uselessness. Cyclops drops in to order Osborn out of San Francisco and jetpacks away.
Meanwhile, Norman’s X-Men arrest some C-List mutant vandals and bring them to Alcatraz. Emma Frost demands to see how Osborn treats the mutant prisoners, so Norman shows her around, using holographic inducers to hide the real cell conditions and a few key inmates. However, Charles Xavier manages to overcome the power retardation and telepathically contact Ms. Frost.
At Saint Francis Hospital, Simon Trask rallies a cybernetically brainwashed army of staff and patients.
THOUGHTS:
Minutes after I uploaded the review of Part 2, Zarius posted the following comment:
“I loathe playground politics, I want to see quite little of it in comics…an impossibility these days”
I’m glad he specified “playground politics” (which I assume means superficial partisan digs like the anti-Bush fist bump in a recent Amazing Spider-Man) because purging comics, or any art, of all political content can’t be done. Creators filter every story through their personal lenses, even when not specifically dealing with controversial topics. After all, the very act of sorting contentious subjects from those that one takes for granted as immutable features of the status quo requires a value judgment, meaning nothing remains sanitized from the comic maker’s worldview.
I disagree with Zarius that creators do it more explicitly “these days” than in comicdom’s heyday. Heck, in Amazing Spider-Man #83, Peter Parker flat out calls Vietnam “a war nobody wants, against an enemy you don’t even hate”! Political statements don’t get more blatant than that, and nearly every issue from that time had some sort of social moral. Call it preachy, but Spider-Man would not be the character we love without Stan Lee’s left-leaning social conscience influencing his mission. The same applies to Steve Ditko’s Objectivism’s role in shaping Peter into an aloof, heroic individual striving lonesomely in hostile waters. Superman, the most iconic superhero of all, started out fighting depression era greedy landlords and corrupt politicians. Timely themes in comic books aren’t just inevitable, but desirable because they sculpt our favorite characters into who they are. For this reason, intelligent folk like Zarius distinguish between thoughtful political flavoring and ham fisted “playground” tactics.
Does Dark Avengers #7, in evoking the real world controversy over the classification of certain interrogation techniques as torture, violate the Zarius Doctrine? That depends on the reader. Read it as a direct allegory, with the captured mutants representing Guantanamo Bay prisoners, the Omega Machine representing water boarding, and Norman Osborn representing Dick Cheney, and you’ll probably notice that the portrayal imperfectly mirrors reality and accuse Matt Fraction of unfairly casting one side of the debate in a bad light without giving due weight to its arguments. For example, water boarding’s status as torture seems far more ambiguous than what Beast goes through, the mutant captives are US citizens unlike (with a few crucial exceptions) the Gitmo detainees, and Cheney’s hair isn’t as awesome as Norman’s (I mean DAMN, check it out from the back—CORNROW SWIRL!).
However, I suggest viewing these dissimilarities not as weaknesses in the allegory, but as reasons to dismiss the allegorical interpretation altogether. Start by taking it as just a story. It sure works with the characters. Dark Beast would torturously experiment on prisoners. Osborn would care more about how it hurts his plans than about the moral implications. Frost would play in the gray area but demand that Osborn treat her kind with dignity. See the real world shadow as something secondary, put there to make you think. The inconsistencies with reality invite you to compare and contrast the truth with the fiction, asking questions like, is it morally relevant that one set of prisoners comprises citizens and the other does not? The answer matters less than that Fraction gets readers asking such questions and considering the matter more deeply in the first place. He handled that aspect of the story well.
I also like the funny captions with which he introduces characters. Lord knows the dozens of characters competing for panel space need something to keep them straight in the reader’s head. It gets overwhelming, and the crowding means no one gets a chance to shine. The Dark Avengers do nothing except watch TV and bicker, and the boring Dark X-Men lack any personality or motivation whatsoever. One would expect a team featuring the son of Wolverine, Emma Frost, and the Sub-freaking-Mariner to burst with dramatic fireworks. Not so much.
Luke Ross does a good-but-not-Deodato-good job on the art.
FAVORITE QUOTE:
“If only you could see the world through my eyes, you’d see how big of a win this all is.”
RATING:
3.5 Zariuses (or would it be “Zarii”?) out of 5.
RATING:
3.5 Zariuses (or would it be “Zarii”?) out of 5.
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Yeah, I can’t help it that this comic draws a parallel between itself and a news story people are sick of hearing about. That’s probably a sign that this comic isn’t for you. Personally, I love it when comics echo things that are going on in the real world as long as the characters don’t feel shoehorned into the writers message. I think the worst case of that was probably the ASM civil war arc.
I have a question for everyone. Has Matt Fraction gone down from being hands down one of Marvel’s best writers to a merely okay one in anyone else’s eyes?
Thanks for the honesty, Kev. I wouldn’t be much of a reviewer if I couldn’t handle criticism myself. One thing I think you’d agree with is that my reviews are very diverse, with a lot of experimentation instead of going over the same old checklist of strengths and weaknesses. I wouldn’t be able to do this four times a month if that’s all it came down to. I might do a review entirely in pictures, do a funny paraphrase script of the story or even, like I did with this one, try to say something broader about the underpinnings of comics in general. So much experimentation results in two certainties: sometimes I’ll challenge myself too much and turn out something clunky, and sometimes I wont hit all the right bases for every person. That’s why these comments are so important to me.
I certainly could have expanded on the tiny bit about what I actually like and disliked, but I would have just gone over the same points that every other review source did. I decided to say what I had to say about those things. but in as few words as possible because I don’t want to be redundant. With no deadlines, I have the luxury to go at it from an angle that the guys who have to put their reviews up on the release date simply don’t have the time to think through. I intend to use that luxury, which is why I didn’t simply say Fraction handled this story’s political aspects well or poorly, but instead discussed what it means to handle politics in comics and how success should be judged, and how different ways of interpreting this particular story might lead readers to one such judgement or the other. You still got my opinion on the characterization, and as always I tried to inject a few jokes. I didn’t leave anything out; I just shifted the emphasis. And in all fairness, I shifted it in response to something someone said in a comment that I thought I could run with. Wait a week, and the emphasis just might shift back to where you want it to be. Or maybe not.
Love the phrase cornrow swirl. It should be used more often when Norman’s around.
I love the new rating system.
Osborn’s head is a Cinnamon Mini Swirl?