Want to keep up with the ever-advancing continuity porn of the DC and Marvel universes, but simply don’t have the time or money to buy every ongoing? We’re here to help. The Weekend Week In Review aims to give you ((usually) very) brief synopses of what happened in a select few of DC and Marvel’s titles – with a helping of sarcastic commentary – so that when some nasty old writer wants to punish you by heavily referencing a title you didn’t pick up, you won’t be left in the dark. Of course, that means that spoilers are in abundance, but I figure that you could figure that out.
DC’s second wave began this week, and the “Justice League” of the analogy was the new “Earth 2.” No, really; the first issue told a very similar story: Darkseid’s parademons invaded Earth, and the mightiest heroes – wait wrong company – stepped up to stop them. Only, this time, the only available heroes were the trinity – Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. No Green Lanterns yelling “We got this!” all the time here, folks. Instead, however, Supergirl and Robin, the latter of which was Batman’s daughter, were present to help in the significantly longer war against the forces of Apokolips. In one last ditch effort to turn the tides, Superman and Wonder Woman, struck into the heart of Metropolis to clear the way to one of the parademon towers, while Bruce snuck in and planted a virus that would take down the entire Apokolitpian infrastructure. The catch? The tower would explode in the process, killing Bruce while Diana and Kal were torn apart by the forces of Darkseid. Robin’s parent is deeeeeeead! A year or so afterward, the world was without heroes, and was instead inhabited by really awful girlfriends. After being treated terribly and dumped by his, a young Jay Garrick was visited by the Roman god Mercury, who informed him of his heroic destiny. Looks like someone read Talking with Gods!
Speaking of Earth 2, this week also saw the release of “World’s Finest,” a book featuring the former Robin and Supergirl of that world, now better known as Huntress and Power Girl, respectively. What does this mean for Helena Bertinelli, the Huntress that most DC fans know and love?
This week sees two “Avengers vs X-Men” tie-ins, including the next entry into the series and a crossover into “Avengers Academy”, which is arguably the title that needed to be tied into this event the least. Let’s talk about that one first!
In this week’s “Avengers Academy” (which takes place in between the beginning and end of “AvX” #3) Christos Gage is left to essentially pick up some of the pieces from the cancelled “Generation Hope” title while giving it an “AvX” banner at the same time. He does this in two ways: 1) he brings all the kids from Utopia to the Academy and 2) he continues the Sebastian Shaw Reborn storyline.
How does this all play out? I’m glad you asked.
1) The kids who are brought to the Academy are angry at first, but guest lecturer Hercules figures out how to defuse the situation and coerces the kids into healthy sport (as a faux history lesson about the Olympics), featuring Lightspeed racing Transonic and Loa surfing against Finesse. The friendliness of it all quickly ends, however, when Velocidad reminds everyone that there is a war going on and they probably shouldn’t be goofing around. Spoil sport.
2) Sebastian Shaw, despite being docile and having his mind-wiped, is imprisoned by the Avengers because (to paraphrase the discussion that explains why Cyclops left him loose) hell no, fuck that! Shaw is placed in a cell whose walls match his absorption powers with some books, and he proceeds to (literally) beat himself in the head with those books until he has developed enough of a charge to punch through the floor. Because with all that rushed planning the Avengers did when locking him up, they didn’t bother to make the floor as impenetrable as the walls, and it doesn’t take an evil genius to figure out how to break out of that scenario.
Oh, and despite this being a school, all the kids came face to face with Hercules’ dong (who is mysteriously in his old costume and not behaving like Herc anymore).
I guess when you’re training to be an Avenger, you really do have to be prepared for everything.
In this week’s lead book of the event, written by Marvel Architect Ed Brubaker, it turns out Hope running led the X-Men to surrender to the Avengers. Instead of bringing them into immediate custody, the Avengers stand around Utopia discussing the logical fallacies of this entire war as Iron Man points out rather obnoxiously that this is kinda sorta similar to “Civil War” and that Cap had a completely different reaction then.
It’s just about this time that Wolverine, newly dressed with skin regrown from being flayed alive by Hope, arrives to point out the obvious: Hey! The X-Men didn’t surrender for real real! Which is of couse the point where Cyclops’ Extinction Team (comprised of Magneto, Cyclops, Emma, Magik, Colossus, Namor, Storm and Danger) escapes, leaving the kids to be dragged off to Avengers Academy.
Continued belowMeanwhile, Hope puts together a device that makes it impossible for the Avengers or the X-Men to accurately track her, because she’s from the future, trained by Cable and of course she can do something like that from bits and pieces found in a Radio Shack.
The Avengers (going off of misinformation delivered by Rachel Summers, who only Wolverine suspects of being dishonest despite the fact that she is Cyclops’ daughter), break into various teams, assumedly so that tie-ins can cover more ground and the story can be dispersed a bit more:
- Hawkeye, Red Hulk and Doctor Strange are off to Wundagore Mountain
- Black Panther and Iron Fist are off to Wakanda
- Spider-Man and Spider-Woman are off to Latveria
- The rest of the New Avengers (Luke Cage, Daredevil, Mockingbird, the Thing) are off to Tabula Rasa
- Captain America, Agent 13, Giant Man and Wolverine are off to the Savage Land
Iron Man doesn’t get to go out, though. He has to stay at home and figure out how to beat the Phoenix. Poor Iron Man.
Conversely, Black Widow – despite showing up to the meeting – is not assigned to go anywhere.
The issue ends with Wolverine and Captain America having some less than friendly words, as Wolverine believes he has to kill Hope (since she asked him to back in “Uncanny X-Men”) and Cap decides to throw him out of the quinjet and dump him somewhere in the arctic. Despite Marvel’s AR for this section explaining that Wolverine should not have survived so easily, however, Wolverine gets up and starts walking. Look for him to appear in the final issue of the series, just in time to do something crazy.
A fair deal happened in “Exiled”, the beginning of the “Journey into Mystery/New Mutants” crossover, so for the sake of your time and because you really should just be reading these damn titles, here is the entirety of “Exiled summed up into a single line: that creepy guy that has been living across the street from the New Mutants since they moved in turns out to be Sigurd the Ever-Glorious, whose destiny is intertwined with the Disir as “the final portion” and who uses his power to warp reality and trap the Asgardians who came to deal with him (Loki, Thor, The Warriors Three, Hela) in a warped reality where they’re just normal people living normal lives (which we can assume is what somehow happened to him to an extent).
Now, ask yourself: why aren’t you just reading this book again? Because you didn’t know you should? Oh. Well, now you do. Here’s a picture of this month’s adorable Helpup in a bow:
Awww.
This week’s “Invincible Iron Man” revealed who the mole in Stark’s camp has been: it was Pim the whole time, who was really Spymaster all along. For those of you who have not been paying attention, Spymaster was recruited in “Invincible Iron Man” #26 (pre-renumbering) and Pim appeared two issues later in #28 and has since gone on to make zero impact on me as a character. But to everyone who has thought Fraction has been just randomly making it up as he went along, heres your proof that he really did have a plan all along for this ridiculously long con. Whether you like it or not is up to you of course, but hey, the groundwork was there!
Outside of that, a lot of little things happen: the government screws with Iron Man and makes him look like a fool for the benefit of Detroit Steel, Captain America and Ms Marvel offer Tony help which leads to him temporarily leave the Avengers, Stane shows off his weird octopod robots he’s building for Mandarin that we’ve seen premonitions for since the ‘Stark: Disassembled’ story (and fails to get it active, leading Mandarin to beat him) and Iron Man quits being Iron Man. That’s right: he walks right into General Babbage’s office and tells him that he is Iron Man no more. I suspect this will last all the way until next issue, when Tony Stark designs a new Iron Man suit that he still has some kind of control over. Or something.
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“Big man in a suit of armor, take that away and what are you?” “A genius billionaire playboy philanthropist.” Well that really got you far, didn’t it, Tony?
Right now, it honestly just sucks to be Tony Stark. Where this story fits into the “AvX” timeline is currently unknown, considering Iron Man is a main player in that event, but hey, we’ll see how it goes.
Over in Animal Man, it opens the only way it can, and possibly the only way it SHOULD. Buddy remembers meeting the man who created him, the one and only Grant Morrison. The link to our world is still intact, and I bet Morrison is gleefully doing a jig knowing that he’s still a comic book character.
Whatever drugs Buddy’s doing, I don’t want any at all. While on this trippy excursion into the underworld…or something…I swear comic companies need to get a clear idea of what their afterlife looks like because the DC Universe has like…three that I know of, Buddy clearly found out that his underworld was actually the setting from Pan’s Labyrinth. He even met the Faun.
All of this was for his daughter though, the Avatar of the Red (and possible airbender). She knew her father wasn’t exactly in the land of the living at the moment, even though his body was. She was not pleased with this development.
She fought and screamed against her mother, while her brother tried to sleep and her grandmother kept on talking about how much she dislikes Buddy.
Mother-In-Laws, right? Jeez.
This kid seems to know everything though. Her dad really IS posessed by The Rot, and from the looks of it, they may need to call Chris Hansen. But instead they get this guy here, who pretty much tries to guarantee that I have to pick up Justice League Dark.
It’s so nice to see that Keanu Reeves dyed his hair blonde for the role.
Over on the other side of this march to a crossover that feels like it’s slouching toward Bethlehem, there was a minor domestic squabble between Alec Holland and his sort-of-girlfriend-who-kind-of-looks-like-a-Xenomorph, Abigail Arcane. I mean, it’s nothing major, right?
…maybe not. But Alec seemed to nip this problem in the bud (heh heh heh, “The Green” joke there) by adding some non-rotted vanilla seeds into Abigail’s diet. This prevented her from being taken forever by the Rot.
Yeah, girl, vanilla has that effect on me too. Abigail apparently hasn’t taken too kindly to the fact that she was being controlled by that little snot and The Rot, so she shows off her new vanilla styled duds and destroys (most of) The Rot right then and there.
The little kid cries…a lot, but in the end, we get a happy ending to that domestic disturbance between two mystical powerhouses and actually ends in a sweet moment. They totally hug it out, guys.
They don’t get much of a chance to celebrate, even though they don’t know it yet. The Rot has seen fit to bring in the big guns to further their plans, and that just happens to be Abigail’s father Anton. So we get another domestic disturbance on our hands. This time between father and daughter/boyfriend.
Father-in-Laws, right? Jeez.
Over in Action Comics, Superman pulled a Miles Morales and was black! Oh man, there would be no comments about racism from the characters in the fictional universe, right? I mean, it seems crass to–
Oh. Dammit Lex. At the very least, he’s persistent. He doesn’t hate Superman because he’s BLACK, he hates the black guy because he’s SUPERMAN.
ANYWAY, after he laid the smack down on Lex for being a not-racist, he ran into some familiar-but-not-perfectly-familiar characters who were on the run from some bad news. Turns out a Lois, a Jimmy, and a very human Clark came from a tube that stretches across the multiverse! Could this be the beginning of the publication of the book that gets us a cease and desist letter from Time Warner? Probably.
Continued below
that smell, Lois, is your friends on fire. Burning flesh has a distinctive smell, right? Not that I would know. Shia Labeouf might, however. Anyway, not-our-Jimmy and not-our-Clark weren’t doing so well.
But at the same time they could tell Superman, AKA President CALvin ELlis (…yeah) about how they created their own Superman to inspire the world. They came up with the idea doing drugs. Now THAT’S the Clark Kent I want to see. but like all stoned geniuses, they tried to brand their idea and sell it all over the world.
It ended up enslaving the world, because humanity is pretty stupid. BUT IT’S SO CUTE.
OK, so he kind of looks like Nimrod from the X-Men comics. He’s still mean as heck and has a chip on his shoulder the size of a box of Doritos Locos Tacos, and he wanted to kill his creators and anyone who stood in his way. That just happened to include about a dozen or so Supermen. But really, they don’t matter, do they? What DOES matter is that Lex did NOT like the idea of a mechanical Superman, so he did what any racist would do: he attacked it full-on.
Man, Lex has some big brass testes to take that thing on. He even forgets he’s racist against “his” Superman for a moment and tells him to kill the other Superman, but to also kill himself in the process. Oh Lex you little scamp. Meanwhile, President Superman attempted to do both of his jobs at once by contacting his belabored secretary Courtney to take care of some appointments while he instructed Brainiac to pose as him while he fought. There’s NO WAY that could go badly for him. NO WAY AT ALL. The fight continued for a while, but it ended when Superman drop kicked the other Superman in the face. I don’t care who you are, that’s an incredible visual. Even better than Superman kicking a dinosaur in the face.
Yay! Superman saved the day! He then contacted the rest of the League, which revealed this simply wasn’t a negative image of the main universe, because while there was a black Superman and a black Wonder Woman, there was also a black Cyborg, Vixen, Steel, and Green Lantern. In fact, the only white member of the Justice League we met was one Batman. Lois, who was in awe of the fact the mechanical Superman was finally defeated, commented that maybe this Superman was “Superman done right.” That was cute.
There was also a back-up in the book that dealt more with President Superman’s duties as President while being Superman. He did what Superman wanted to do in Superman IV by trying to negotiate the end of nuclear arms with a despot who had nuclear arms. But not for long. Wonder Woman (who looked suspiciously a lot like Beyoncé) commented about how he is technically breaking the law by doing what he’s doing. Hes not of our world by birth but he’s president of the United States, which has that provision in its constitutious. At least he’s not from Kenya.
This Week’s Contributors were:
Walt – “Earth 2” #1, “World’s Finest” #1, “Daredevil” #12
Matt – “Avengers vs X-Men” #3, “Avengers Academy” #29, “Exiled” #1, “Invincible Iron Man” #516
Gil – “Animal Man” #9, “Swamp Thing” #9, “Action Comics” #9
Anything we didn’t get to that you’re interested in? Email me at the link below! This also applies for if you read something that we didn’t and want to share it with others, as I, too, have only so much money and time to spend on comics. Don’t worry, I’ll give you credit.
