The Winter Soldier is a Hot Mess

It's a long week of unpleasant flu, work, and relentless deadlines I have once again found myself without a suitable subject and no time to work on a proper gaming topic. So instead I offer up....Things On My Mind At the Moment. Specifically: comics! Which I feel I don't write enough about. Time to fix that.

Spoiler Warning! You have been warned. There may be spoilers.

Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier #1

In the wake of Marvel's "Who murdered the Watcher?" series called Original Sins --which if you've read it will either make you think, "this is cool," or more likely if you're an old fan of certain characters will make you desperately wish it was another episode of What If?* ...but I digress....so in the wake of that miniseries, some titles spun off as a result of the ramifications of Original Sins. One of those was a Bucky Barnes, alias The Winter Soldier comic. Bucky got lots of film time in the Captain America: The Winter Soldier movie this year, so it makes sense they'd offer up a Bucky for the movie fans, right?

I guess Marvel's decided that the "Marvel Cineverse Fans" who don't read comics probably never will, because this new series is frankly difficult to grasp even for an old diehard Marvel fan. Ales Kot is the author, and had I known before reading this he worked on recent Secret Avengers books I might have skipped it (I am apparently very burned out on the borderline genre-savvy joke humor action book genre; I think my late 80's/early 90's reading of Justice League of America burned me out on it or something). Anyway, its hard to tell if the book is supposed to be funny or even just whimsical because Kot's style blends with Marco Rudy's trippy quasi-sixities acid trip style of story telling about as well as jamming eggs and nails in a blender to make an omelet. Awful, poorly scripted stuff tied to fascinating but incomprehensible art pages that appear to have been randomly sequenced for all the sense the story makes.

If there is some poor soul who saw the movie and thought, "I'd love to read about Bucky's adventures as a super secret Hydra spy!" then they are in for a serious disappointment. At least the new Falcon-as-Captain America title coming up has some lineage that can be traced and understood. If I hadn't read Original Sins I would be 100% absolutely, completely lost with the story in Bucky Barnes TWS #1. And even with that background, I am still about 90% lost.

Bottom line: pass on this one, unless you love Marco Rudy's work (and I do like his style). He needs to get a title with a different timbre of author; Kot's whimsy doesn't translate well into Rudy's illustrated psychedelia.

*I still can't decide if I should blame Samuel Jackson for being so awesome as Nick Fury or if I should just accept that it's because the 60's have become sufficiently historical that the pure essence of what elder Nick Fury is simply cannot fit in the contemporary Marvel Universe anymore. Either way I guarantee we'll see what Nick has become manifest in some form on film, I betcha.

Synchonizing Media - the Marvel Example

This is not something DC quite has down, which is surprising, considering how venerable their characters are, but after reading up on the Marvel comics universe over the last several months and re-watching the movies with my son, it's become clear that Marvel's connection to Disney is stronger than one might imagine....it's subtle, but very, very deep. Specifically, it's the branding, and the "identity" of the Marvel Universe that's at the forefront of it all.

Given that I've only returned to Marvel comics recently, it's possible for some this is old news, but as I have played a lot of catch-up on titles from around 2006 to current it's easy to notice some interesting trends. The biggest trend (aside from Marvel relying on Brian Michael Bendis to deconstruct and write the entire friggin' line of comics, more or less) is to sycnhronize the film mediaverse with the comic universe. As a result, we have a trend in which characters, situations and themes in the comic start to resonate with the film versions of the characters. Nick Fury is awesome as Samuel L. Jackson, a significant improvement over the Hasselhoff edition of the old Nick Fury, who has now gone into retirement (mostly) in the comics, to be replaced by his son he never knew he had, who is now officially the new Nick Fury Jr. Not precisely the same origin as the movie version, but similar enough to avoid confusion for fans of the movie who return to the comic, I guess.

Hawkeye gets a suit that's more suited to his film counterpart (but there's a suggestion the older look will return on film, ironically). Black Widow is a much more interesting character now because of her film representation than she ever was in the comics. Captain America in the comics was the champion of "violence without slaughter" but even that has been corroded a bit as the films amply demonstrate the oddity of a guy who's literally a super soldier trained in the heart of World War II to get the job done, no matter how many dead nazis lie in his wake.

About the only character to not get a severe make-over is Tony Stark, alias Iron Man. Sure, his personality in the comics sounds and feels more and more like the Downey Jr. version (which of course was the quintessential extrapolation of the original pre-movie Iron Man, but with better hamming it up per scene)...but the Marvel version has gone off the deep end as the guy who not only solves problems but often causes them (Civil War) and regularly does super science craziness that even makes the comic universe look a little wacko (Dyson sphere construction, anyone?)

But, and this is something you have to have been reading Marvel a long time to notice....the Marvel universe has gotten very, very tight. The stories are long and detailed, and usually span convenient measurements of 6 to 12 issue story arcs, enough to fill up a TPB release or two. If there is a conceivable way to tie characters into the Avengers it is done. If they don't fit there they make it to the X-Men series. X-Men are a little "out there" these days but that's okay, they don't need to worry about having it all make sense for the film universe, since they aren't tied in to the Marvel continuity of movies. But the Avengers? Definitely.

Downsides to this trend of tight storytelling are a tendency to forget to make the less well known characters much more than props. The number of stories I've read over the last five years' worth of comics appear to all tie to Ultron, Thanos, Kang, and mirror-universe variants of the key characters. The number of time travel stories I have read is so ridiculous that it makes the 52 universes of DC look positively mundane by comparison. And all of this appears to be to keep the comics in interesting holding patterns, to test themes for interest in the bigger media, and to provide themes for forthcoming film releases.

Even Scarlett Witch is back with the Uncanny Avengers (prep for Avengers: Age of Ultron?), and I still haven't read the book which convinced me that anyone would think that was a good idea after her House of M madness. Must still be on my reading list....

So the Marvel universe is simultaneously riddled with high-concept storytelling but also seems to have an alarming tendency to do horrible things to their characters before "resetting the clock" to insure things don't deviate too much. The Disney IP branding methodology seems stronger and more firmly in place than I might have ever imagined it.

But....it could just be me. Next time I'll talk about the wacko timeline of the Marvel Universe, and the interesting ways the writers mess with it (especially Bendis, that mad genius!)