Comic Book review: Inhumans: Attilan Rising

The Inhumans have long stood among the strangest of Marvel’s organized costumed supers, living in a secret society which utilizes hyper-advanced technology, and subjecting themselves to the gene-altering Terrigen Mists as a coming-of-age ritual. It is curious, then, that the Battleworld series focused on the Inhumans turns this familiar formula on its head. In this strikingly different version of the Inhumans tale, Black Bolt is host of the Quiet Room, a bar which permits many of Battleworld’s denizens entrance for drinks and company, provided they do not start any quarrels within its walls. In truth, the Quiet Room is a front for Black Bolt’s growing rebellion against Baron Medusa and her Doom loyalists.

Medusa, meanwhile, has access to the highly-advance technologies commonplace in previous Inhumans comics. She is devoutly loyal to Doom’s law – more so than many of Battleworld’s other resident Barons. And she is ever-suspicious of the Quiet Room, believing that it more than what it appears. Sending in one of her most trusted spies, Kamala Khan, Medusa hopes to expose any dissenters and quash their aspirations before they can move against her.

On Black Bolt’s side are his ever-trustworthy compatriots Karnak and the 1602 version of Matt Murdock, as well as a patrol that consists of young Inhumans, a Hulk, and G-Man, a Ghost Rider who appears to hail from the Marvel Noir universe. As luck (or perhaps a lack thereof) would have it, G-Man and company’s activities are what first tip Medusa off to the possibility that Black Bolt may be plotting against her, but there are plenty more twists and turns that come to play throughout the course of this story.

Inhumans: Attilan Rising begins with a style not unlike the Marvel Noir stories. The dangerous game of ‘cat versus mouse’ that Black Bolt and Medusa are playing builds the suspense as the sell one another bold-faced lies. The first two chapters are something of a slow burn, taking additional time to craft this unusual vision of the Inhuman conflict. But by the conclusion of issue three, Inhumans: Attilan Rising picks up its pace and its intensity, and delivers a few key powerful twists that significantly improve the quality of the narrative. Inhumans: Attilan Rising’s slow start should not discourage readers from seeing the five-issue series through to its conclusion, because the explosive series of events that make up its finale are well worth the price of admission.

My rating: 8.5 (out of 10)

Comic Book Update: "Bub, I'm the best at what I do!"

Most of the Secret Wars tie-in series I had been following have just recently wrapped up. It’s been a brief, but wild ride. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed each of these series, for the very different narratives and characters they bring to the table, even if they did only last four or five issues a piece. Obviously the most high-stakes story lies with God Emperor Doom, the central figure that has cobbled all these realms of Battleworld together, but it’s been fun to branch out and explore series I might not have otherwise been so keen on investing the time and money into.

Age of Apocalypse still has one issue remaining in its 2015 reimagining. Meanwhile, Armor Wars (2015), Ghost Racers, Guardians of Knowhere, X-Men ’92, and Inhumans: Attilan Rising have all come to a close. I’ve already posted my review for Age of Ultron vs. Marvel Zombies, which concluded last month, and which you can read here. As for the other previously mentioned series, expect reviews for them to gradually trickle out between now and the end of October.

The mid-1990s run of the original Age of Apocalypse will resume as my priority reading material. Expect reviews of the first and second numbered trade paperback releases soon. I also plan to post (somewhat long-overdue) reviews for the fifth volume of the Marvel NOW! Nova series, as well as Thanos: The Infinity Relativity, and I recently completed the third trade paperback volume of Captain Marvel. Beyond those, I will likely pick up the sixth volume of Nova, and the fifth volume of Guardians of the Galaxy later this Fall. There may also be a few odd additions to my comic book library that I purchase at this weekend’s Grand Rapids Comic-Con. Either way, expect all of the comics listed above to be among the last series I will be reading and writing reviews for between now and December 31st, as I believe that a reasonable stack for this one-man production to appropriately cover in the months that remain before year's end.

Top 5 Comic Books of 2014

Though I only started posting my comic reviews to this blog earlier this year, I first started uploading them to my YouTube channel back in 2012, beginning with Y: The Last Man and Saga. However, they did not become a regular part of my channel’s uploads until 2014, and that year saw quite a few video reviews. Below are my picks for the five best comic books that I read last year. Rest assured, I will be posting a list of the five best comic books I’ve read in 2015 this December, but I first wanted to go back and give credit where credit is due on last year’s reads. (Note: in the same vein as my year-end top five lists for best video games and anime, not all of these comic books were actually released in 2014, rather they were comic books that I read between January and December of 2014.)

#5 – Nova (volumes 1-3): One of the strongest runs in the Marvel NOW! series, Nova carries on many of the themes that drew me to the Spider-Man comics years ago, before the webslinger’s plotlines became so convoluted and of a sub-par quality. Picking up the mantle of Richard Rider and the now-annihilated Nova Corps, young Sam Alexander slowly familiarizes himself with the cosmic powers of becoming a human rocket. Sam is a wonderfully likeable kid – he stumbles in the company of long-established heroes like Beta Ray Bill and Rocket Raccoon, he has to balance the cosmic adventures of heroism with his school studies and helping his mom with household chores, and he’s willing to admit his faults and learn from them to become better as the new Nova one day at a time.

#4 – Annihilation: The first major pillar of Marvel’s mid-2000s cosmic renaissance, Annihilation lays the foundation for the eventual formation of the Guardians of the Galaxy, the tensions that would lead to the War of Kings breaking out, and the eventual invasion from the Cancerverse in The Thanos Imperative. Annihilation opts to place some of Marvel’s stranger cosmic heroes and villains in the spotlight, with tales centered on Drax the Destroyer, last surviving Nova Corps member Richard Rider, shamed warrior Super Skrull, lawful extremist Ronan the Accuser, and the many heralds of Galactus. Annihilus and his insectoid army seek to devour everything in the galaxy, and with the events of Civil War playing out on Earth, Richard Rider must (reluctantly) step up to the plate as the champion and leader the galaxy needs during one of their darkest hours.

#3 – Inhumans: One of Marvel’s more bizarre cultures, The Inhumans’ future-tech and medieval hierarchy saw a revival in the late 1990s. This series, spearheaded by Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee, focuses on the Inhuman society and the way the royal family keeps the city of Attilan in order, far away from the prying eyes of mankind and other superhumans. The Terrigen Mists proves a weird, but compelling rite of passage for young Inhumans once they reach maturity, and what lies in the future of each Inhuman is a greater unknown factor than even the mutants of The X-Men face on a regular basis. This Inhumans series is brilliant for its uncompromising choice to focus almost exclusively on its titular culture – Reed Richards and Namor both have minor cameos, but the remaining ninety-five percent of this story is focused on conveying just how secretive the lives of the Inhumans are, and what desperate measures a gun-jumping military division will go to in order to try and topple the fabled city of Attilan.

#2 – Venom: Reinventing one of Spider-Man’s most popular villains/rivals is no small task, and the Flash Thompson-led series (penned by Rick Remender, and later Cullen Bunn) is a bold new vision for the symbiote soldier that pays off in spades. Having returned from his military service, and having lost both of his legs in the line of duty, Flash Thompson spends many of his nights emptying bottles of alchohol, until he is presented with a highly-classified opportunity to make use of the Venom symbiote’s powers as a black-ops super soldier. Flash is sent in to the most hostile of hot zones, ordered to rescue civilians caught in the cross fire and quash enemy forces, but it isn’t long before he discovers the involvement of sadistic supervillain Jack O’Lantern, and subsequently picks up a thread that will eventually lead him to a criminal organization so closely tied to the missions Venom is tasked with putting an end to. Venom is very smart in its writing, and hones in on the difficult balance of Flash Thompson’s personal life and romance with Betty Brant, with his tactical operations as Agent Venom, ever-aware of the fact that his employers have placed a kill-switch on him in the event that the Symbiote gains control and runs rampant. Venom is one of the best examples of Marvel taking a character of relatively minor importance, rounding them out, and giving them their own series wherein they are not only consistently human and imperfect in nature, but where they emerge to stand so tall in the company of long-established heroes and villains.

#1 – Age of Ultron: An alternate history where Ultron bested the Avengers in one fell swoop, few heroes remain to challenge the vengeful A.I. The remaining Marvel heroes are battered, beaten, and have practically no plans for taking down Ultron, until Captain America comes up with a desperate plan. I found the cast of Age of Ultron a wonderful mix of the more mainstream heroes and some of the less iconic Marvel characters. Age of Ultron does not present a ‘who’s who’ of the most physically powerful of characters in Marvel history, rather a collective of the most quick-witted and capable during the descending mechanical apocalypse, or those who simply lucked out in not being at the epicenter of Ultron’s attack. Gone are Hulk, Thor, three members of the Fantastic Four, and the majority of the X-Men. Tony Stark’s sanity begins to slip, Cap’s faith in his own leadership abilities waver, and an uneasy alliance is struck between Red Hulk, Black Panther, and Taskmaster. Age of Ultron paints a bleak picture, a seemingly unwinnable scenario, and the extreme measures that these heroes are willing to go in order to return the world to some semblance of its state prior to Ultron’s takeover.

Comic Book Update: “I am as far beyond mutants as they are beyond you!”

I’m going to be altering the format with which I handle comic book/graphic novel reviews from this point forward. While I certainly feel there is a benefit to seeing the visual artwork and layout of the graphic novel format within a video review, the comments sections of my YouTube videos have, over the course of the last year or so, become increasingly populated by lazy, rude, and overly demanding individuals. As such, comic book reviews going forward will be adopting a format similar to my video game and anime reviews. With perhaps rare exceptions, I still expect to review individual volumes of a longer running storyline, as opposed to the entirety of that storyline. However, when the end of the year ‘Top 5 Comic Books of 2015’ list is posted (alongside my ‘Top 5’ lists for video games and anime) it will list my best-of-the-best selections for this year as the sum of its parts – or, at the very least, the extent of what has been released before the end of December 2015. In short, my comic book reviews are not going away, they are simply seeing a format change that will be more in line with the style I have already established for my video game and anime reviews.

With that order of business taken care of, what follows is the current list of upcoming reviews. Keep in mind that I have no concrete date in mind for the posting of these reviews, only that they will be coming sooner rather than later. From the Marvel Now! line, I’m still following along with Nova and Guardians of the Galaxy, and while the latter won’t see its fifth proper installment released until later this year, I recently finished the second crossover with the X-Men, titled The Black Vortex. I also picked up the first volume of Angela: Asgard’s Assassin, as I rather enjoyed how they opted to introduce her character in the Guardians of the Galaxy run, and am hopeful that a solo series of her own can garner a solid balance between Marvel’s cosmic and fantasy realms. It certainly doesn’t hurt that she kicks all kind of ass on her journeys of self-discovery.

I also recently finished Thanos: The Infinity Relativity, the second of three original graphic novels by Jim Starlin, focusing on the Mad Titan himself, as well as plenty of other familiar cosmic Marvel faces. And I continue plugging away at the magnum opus that is X-Men: Age of Apocalypse, a series which, frankly, has no right holding up as well as it does in this day and age (it continues to blow me away, in the best ways possible). In a similar gamble to Black Science, I decided to pick up Divinity from Valiant Comics (a label with which I have no prior knowledge of), as it too dabbles in the territory of fringe science and men playing gods. Meanwhile, the third volume of Black Science is en route to me as I write this, and in all likelihood, I will power through this latest release on the day it arrives on my doorstep.

While I typically wait for the trade paperback releases of comics to purchase them, some of the current Marvel Secret Wars/Battleworld storylines proved too appealing for me to pass up, and so I am currently reading X-Men ’92, Inhumans: Attlian Rising, Guardians of Knowhere, Age of Ultron vs. Marvel Zombies, Armor Wars (2015), and Age of Apocalypse (2015). Currently, X-Men ’92 is my favorite of the bunch, but Age of Ultron vs. Marvel Zombies is proving a surprisingly solid read as well. I’m only one issue into Age of Apocalypse, so I can’t properly gauge that series as of yet, while Inhumans: Attilan Rising, despite being one of the more wildly inventive offerings from the bunch, has not yet left as strong an impression on me as most of the other series. Perhaps it will prove a slow burn. Either way, I certainly appreciate the fact that these storylines will all be limited runs, and that Marvel isn’t pretending that the Secret Wars/Battleworld mish-mashing of different places and times in their history is in anything but temporary. On a side note, I have been reading the main Secret Wars series on loan from a friend, and it is easily one of the better crossover events in recent history – possibly a better read than Infinity, depending on how these upcoming later issues play out. More likely than not, I’ll end up purchasing the Secret Wars trade paperback before year’s end.

Comic Book review: Inhumanity

My review of Marvel's Inhumanity event. Written by Matt Fraction, Mark Waid, Brian Michael Bendis, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Warren Ellis, Keiron Gillen, Al Ewing, Sam Humphries, Matt Kindt, Christos Gage, and Jonathan Hickman, illustrated by Olivier Coipel, Nick Bradshaw, Todd Nauck, Clay Mann, Seth Mann, Miguel Sepulveda, Jheremy Raapack, Tom Grummett, Joe Bennett, Ruy Jose, Karl Kesel, Andrew Hennessy, Kris Anka, Matteo Buffagni, Paco Diaz, Augustin Padilla, Greg Land, Andre Lima Araujo, Paul Davidson, Stephanie Hans, and Simon Bianchi.

My rating: 4.5 (out of 10)

Comic Book review: War of Kings

My review of Marvel's War of Kings event comic. Written by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, illustrated by Paul Pelletier and Bong Dazo.

My rating: 9.25 (out of 10)

Comic Book review: Inhumans

My review of Inhumans. Written by Paul Jenkins, illustrated by Jae Lee.

My rating: 9.25 (out of 10)