The Character-Driven Adventures of the Superfisters
We are loath to lead this week's comic review with a Marvel title -- we're spozed to all about the little local guys, fer chrissake -- but, ugh, we just can't find anything nice to say about the San-Francisco-located Criminal, so we'll just have to kick it off with some glowing words about Doctor Strange: The Oath, which we'll also be discussing on our comicbookian podcast. By uncomfortable coincidence, the same book is reviewed this week on ANOTHER comics podcast produced by a bunch gay men -- what is it about Stephen Strange that the queers can't resist?
Perhaps it's golden-silly dialogue like "I've sworn many oaths in my day, to every being from Hoggath to Watoomb... but the first oath I swore was the Hippocratic." It's all just so freaking INSANE. In issue one, Doctor Strange receives a near-fatal gunshot wound, and as Night Nurse races to heal him, he appears above his body as an astral projection to harass her about her cape. He's just been to Dimension Pi, you see, where he fought a god of pain shaped like a cat who might guard a mystical cure for brain tumors ... oh, it's all just too ridiculous to even summarize. It's pure pulpy unassuming fun, the stuff of legendary campfire stories, and every meticulously absurd word fills us with glee.
After the jump: we complain about Criminal, and also a blah war-comic called Other Side.
Here's what Stephen Strange has that our other titles this week do not: Character. He's got it in spades. So much so that James Sime, proprietor of Isotope Comics, has a custom-made Doctor Strange costume from which he has been known to glide around making declarations in the persona of the Doctor himself. Dr. S is interesting, unique, sexually irresistible, and utterly peculiar. That's what makes him so NEAT.
The characters of Criminal (by former San Franciscan Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips) are barely characters at all; instead, they're more like a Mad Libs of stock-character dialogue. A down-on-his luck petty criminal with a dark past is recruited by a hard-boiled detective with a loose-cannon sidekick; meanwhile, the ex-junkie girlfriend of one of the criminal's former associates -- an associate killed in a heist-gone-wrong that was attended by both the criminal and the detective -- emerges from the shadows to plead for an opportunity to start fresh for the sake of her innocent daughter.
Even if we could dislocate our jaws like a snake, we could not yawn widely enough at this book. Each panel elicits an aggravated SO FREAKING WHAT. It is completely impossible to identify with stereotypes, which is all these people are -- so dimensionless, they don't even have the millimeter of width enjoyed by cardboard cutouts. The only remarkable thing about the book at all is that they have quotes from positive reviews on the back cover. "Criminal reads like a dangerous walk down a bad street," goes one, and we have to wonder, how dangerous can it be if it's so predictable you could walk it with your eyes closed?
And then there's Other Side, by Jason Aaron and Cameron Stewart. Set somewhere in the middle of the Vietnam war, a young American endures cruel military training; simultaneously, a young Vietnamese guy prepares to repel the Americans. There are aspects of each character's training that mirror each other, but the two are very different: the Vietnamese kid looks forward to battle with a stoic fearlessness, while the American is so scared he starts hallucinating zombies and hears homoerotic taunts echoing from the barrel of his gun. It's a cute gimmick, but that's about all it is -- a gimmick.
It's very likely that the Vietnamese kid and the American kid have names, but we can't really recall and we don't want to re-read the book to find them. Like Criminal, it's nearly impossible to find any texture the the one-note characters of Other Side. Ho hum, the Vietnamese kid has found noble peace with the jungle. Ho hum, the naive American kid talks a good game but finds himself weak and full of doubt once training starts. Ho hum, the commanding officer at boot camp dehumanizes the recruits. Is there anything about this recycled story that really needs to be retold yet again?
Okay, we admit, the side-by-side with the American and the Vietnamese kid has potential. Maybe some issue down the road, they'll actually do something with it, instead of repeatedly pointing out, "hey! Look! They're kind of alike, these two, but also, they have some differences!" Er, yeah. So? And also, the American's hallucinations of dead soldiers and saucy quips from his gun are kind of atmospheric, and hint at an unpredictable depth of character. So, there you've got it: "it's got unmet potential" and "there's a possibility of unexplored depth" are the nicest things we can say.