The Weekend Week In Review (6/20/2012)

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.

Before Watchmen continued to get off the ground — or, at least, to attempt to — with the first issue of “Before Watchmen: The Comedian.” The issue opened up with the titular Comedian playing a rousing game of football with President Kennedy’s sons, making repeated references to being a “funny guy” — get it? — and talking to Jackie Kennedy about how much he loves respects the President. Even rapists have their soft sides, guys. Eventually, though, he is contacted by the FBI for a job. At this point, I am willing to be a million fanboys started going wild with theories: there has always been a conspiracy theory floating around that the Kennedy assassination — spoilers, he dies — was an inside job, and the Comedian was shown to be Kennedy’s assassin in the opening credits for the Watchmen movie. Could Azzarello be interested in doing that thing fanboys love to hate: taking changes from comic book movies and making them “canon?”

Quite the opposite, actually.

The job in question that Blake was given was simple enough: Moloch the Mystic had moved on to distributing opiates, and the FBI wanted the Comedian to take him out, and maybe get a bit of publicity in the process. Blake’s entrance into the warehouse where Moloch was holed up was just as you would expect: rough and nonconsensual. After finding his way to Moloch, though, he found the Mystic not barking orders, but moping in front of a television. Asking Moloch what was wrong, Blake learned that the President had been assassinated, and joined Moloch in crying it out. What a twist! …but only for those who have seen the movie.

Here’s my forecast that no one asked for: this miniseries is going to focus on Kennedy’s assassination as the thing that made Blake adopt his “Everything is a joke” outlook on life — never mind that he was always a dick, and that Darwyn Cooke’s own “Before Watchmen: The Minutemen” emphasized this. But, hey, maybe I’m wrong. Wouldn’t that be funny?
“Daredevil” #14 found our dear old hornhead stuck in a box in Latveria he had been teleported into at the end of last issue. Yeah, the new volume of Daredevil has taken a big step away from the gritty, street-level realism of Brian Michael Bendis. Soon, a Latverian official arrived to let him know that the reason for Murdock’s hasty extradition was for the destruction of the Omega Drive, an act that put Latveria out of a lot of money they were owed and that thus transferred Megacrime’s balance to Matt himself. Let’s be honest, though, it isn’t like Dr. Doom has any right to berate others for fiscal irresponsibility.

Trapped in his Daredevil-size prison, Matt was unable to escape as the Latverians began filling his box with some kind of green gas — and if comics, television, and movies have taught me anything, it’s that green gas is the worst kind. Thinking he had finally met his fate in the bottom of a Latverian prison, Matt was surprised to find that he came out of the ordeal alive, and even more surprised that he was soon released. Of course, that kind of treatment is liable to make one a bit antsy.

Oh, Matt, you played right into their hands. On the run from the Latverian law — basically low-budget Nazis — Matt slowly realized that his sense of smell was becoming less and less heightened, and that the same was happening to his tactile functions. Indeed, a brief scene featuring the Latverian official from earlier revealed that the green gas that Matt had been subjected to was not poison at all, but a cloud of nanobots that set to work on debilitating Matt’s senses — except, you know, his sight, because… well, he’s blind. Managing to make his way to the Latverian/Hungarian border — is that where Latveria is this year? — Matt’s final, most important sense began to give out: his radar sense. Pursued by soldiers, Daredevil lived up to his moniker and made the jump completely blind — or, blinder than he already was — and, against all odds, made it!

…or so he thought.

Church bells were ringing through the beginning of “Wonder Woman” #10 — and, for once in the history of Hades’ realm, they were golden bells, not iron. That’s right, I managed to fit an Edgar Allan Poe reference not involving ravens into this column. Only one thing had to happen before Hell could take Diana’s hands in marriage: he had to test her loyalty and love by asking her whether or not she loved him and then hanging her with her own lasso of truth. I guess the “till death do us part” is not such a remote point in time after all. Diana said that, yes, she did love Hades, but decided she would rather not put that to the test, proceeding to kick more ass in a dress that any man could accomplish in an all-spandex body suit. Pursued by Hades minions, and eventually by Hades himself in a giant thing regarding a mecha but more like a giant cadaver, Wonder Woman eventually found her friends that had come to rescue her, Hephaestus, Eros, and British rock-guy.

Prospects seemed grim, until Strife turned on Hades — naturally — giving Hades a weak moment to talk about his feelings, asking Diana if she was telling the truth about loving him. In a shocking turn of events, Diana said yes, and not even because of Eros’s bullet; Diana, it seems loves everybody. Well, that would hardly make anyone feel special. At the same time, though, and somewhat contradictorily, Diana said no one could love him because he did not love himself — and, for whatever reason, this was enough to get Hades to let the quartet go without any trouble. All this time, people have been trying to figure out how to cheat death, and it seems all you need to do is deliver some sappy line that seems like it comes from a dollar-store self-help book. To drive the point home, Wonder Woman took Eros’s gun and shot Hades as they group was leaving. Just what a we need — a god of the underworld who loves everyone and wants us all to spend more time visiting him.

Alright kids, strap in because this week’s “AvX” output comes with a whopping six titles! We’ve got the main book, “Avengers vs X-Men,” the second installation of the Infinite Comics, and then “Avengers Academy” #32, “New Avengers” #28, “Secret Avengers” #28 and “Uncanny X-Men” #14. It’s a veritable smorgasbord of Avengers and X-Men and fighting and punching and omnipotent characters and god complexes and general alpha-male cock waving.

So let’s start with the cream of the crop: “Avengers vs X-Men” #6. The book sees Hickman returning to the title (to the elation of many) as well as John Romita Jr leaving, to be replaced with Olivier Coipel of “House of M” and “Siege” fame (again, to the elation of many). Opening ten days after the events of the previous issue, it seems that the Phoenix Five have gone ahead and taken over the world, for better or for worse. Rebuilding their island home into a city in the clouds and disarming the entire world of weapons by force for what is now referred to as Pax Utopia, Cyclops has gone ahead and gotten it into his head that he should now be in charge of protecting the world, whether they want to be protect or not. Keep in mind that this is the same guy who Wolverine didn’t think was fit enough to protect children. You know you’ve got a flaw in your plan when genocidal/part-time hate-monger Magneto is your biggest supporter.

Suffice it to say, the President of the United States of America, a man in a position also known for believing it has the right to police the entire world as a dominant superpower, is not a fan of being told what to do. Subtlety, thy name is Marvel Comics!

On the plus side, there’s still plenty of time for omnipotent Cyclops to take some time out of his day to read Moebius (as seen in the header).

An elite squad of Avengers are formed comprising of Captain America, Iron Man, Hawkeye, Wolverine, Black Widow, Thor, Iron Fist and Spider-Woman, all equipped with special additional extra armor to protect them from the might of the Phoenix. Suffice it to say, when they come into Utopia firing rocket arrows at kids playing videogames and attempt to kidnap Hope, it doesn’t go so well. The super-powered Cyclops and Emma Frost wipe the floor with them a bit until Wanda and her Chaos Magic shows up to turn the tide of battle and take Hope (willingly, mind you) away from all the madness. There’s also an instance with Iron Man blocking the Phoenix powers with —

Oh, crap, I skipped a bunch. OK, some other stuff happens: Xavier comes to Utopia sans Legion to talk to Scott, Scott has an awkward/menacing conversation with Hope about why she needs to stay with the X-Men, Beast and Black Panther disassociate themselves from the Avengers, Wanda has a vision that the Phoenix is going to destroy the original line-up of Avengers (assumedly meaning it’s going to destroy all Avengers, which lines up with the final line of the book), Lei Kung is shown acknowledging all the stuff happening in “New Avengers” (which we’ll get to) and making it obvious that Iron Fist is important to the story, which is what I was getting at earlier when some weird Iron Fist-y DHARMA-looking shield appears to protect Fist from a full blast of Phoenix fire.

At any rate, Cyclops goes on a brief rant about how the Avengers are, like, the worst ever, y’know? And he declares “No More Avengers.” Oh, so THAT’S what all that teaser campaign stuff was about. I would’ve never guessed.

(There’s also a neat moment here for those of you using the AR app where the final panel of the comic is animated. It’s super cheesy, but hey, at least it’s something new?)

In “AvX Infinite” #2 (or is that #6.1?), Cyclops takes a moment just to himself to sit and think about all he is doing. If the main book seems to insinuate that Cyclops has turned into a megalomaniacal God-thing, this installment seems to imply that no, a conscience and instance of self-doubt does exist. How does Cyclops, a character notorious for being filled with self-doubt, react to his newfound power? By flying to the moon and “resurrecting” his ex-wife’s corpse out of moon dust.

Yeah, that’s probably healthy.

That’s basically it, though. It’s a bit of a talky, and it’s written by Mark Waid that plays on the assumption that you care about Cyclops and his emotions, because boy, let me tell you, HE CANT CONTAIN ALL THESE FEELS

Alright, let’s move onto tie-ins.

“Avengers Academy” is probably the simplest tie-in this week, in that there really isn’t too much to discuss. It basically goes like this: Emma has been flying around the world de-powering Sentinels, and she finally comes down her long list to end up at Avengers Academy to take care of Juston Seyfert’s best friend, a goddamn Sentinel! Juston says no, Emma says yes, X-23 says “how do I feel?”, Sentinel says “DESTROY ALL MUTANTS” and Hank Pym says, “Hey, untrained kids, let’s fight the omnipotent super mutant!” And they wonder why Avengers Academy is going to get shut down.

Also, it seems Chris Sotomayor is attempting to do his best Liefeld impression with some of the art:

Strike a pose, everyone!

This week’s “New Avengers” draws to a close as young Fongji, the Iron Fist, is brought face to face with the Phoenix in K’un Lun. Using her power, she manifests the power of the dragon Shou-Lao and defeats the Phoenix, becoming the new hostess of the beast while also being Iron Fist. Talk about over-powered! However, instead of sticking around to do all the stuff the Phoenix Five did, she leaves the planet, fearing the power of the Phoenix and taking towards the stars as “the world isn’t ready” for the might of the Phoenix. I wonder what she could’ve meant by that? The world isn’t ready… to be destroyed? To be corrupted? To be dominated? To be enslaved? WHICH IS IT, FONGJI, WHAT ARE WE NOT READY TO DO?!

As it turns out and comes full circle to relate with “AvX” a bit more (outside of the whole Phoenix thing I guess), Hope, having absconded with the Avengers at the end of “AvX” #6, is now shown to be in K’un Lun, being lectured by Iron Fist (who assumedly came to K’un Lun after his weird experience in “AvX” for explanation), who is telling Hope the story we just heard ourselves. She is given the same treatment that Fongji had, being brought to the Scrying Vessel and seeing a vision of “the Spider”, which leads Yu Ti to believe she needs to be trained by Spider-Man who himself was recently taught the ways of kung-fu.

Everything goes about as well as expected:

However, I think the “great power/great responsibility” thing is probably what she needs to learn, and not so much the whole “how to punch people well” thing. She’s already pretty good at that.

“Secret Avengers” kicks off by reminding everyone that this story takes place before the events of “Avengers” #26-27, basically saying, “Hey, ok, we know this doesn’t really match up, but let’s just pretend that all these guys hang out and do friend stuff and then Protector/Noh-Var is a real dick because, uh, that’s how it goes.” Take that as you will.

So, last issue revealed that the resurrected Captain Marvel was actually brainwashed by the Minister Marvel, who’s a real patoot, and he, Noh-Var and Ms. Marvel fly against the oncoming onslaught of the Phoenix Force to unbrainwash Hala and save the day. This is basically Mar-Vell’s “I’ve made a huge mistake” moment (before Noh-Varr’s similar moment in “Avengers” #27 before the Secret Avengers kick him out for misquoting Arrested Development). It only kinda works. The people are un-brainwashed and told to evacuate, but before the Secret Avengers can secretly avenge anything the Minister Marvel kills his son and shoots himself in the head to forever — and bear with me here — reclaim the Marvel family honor in the history books who tricked the Phoenix force into bestowing its gift upon all the Kree (as the family apparently feels slighted that Captain Marvel was so fond of humanity).

It is what it is.

Suffice it to say, the Avengers drive back to the Phoenix force to the best of their ability. Ms. Marvel once again becomes Binary and dukes it out with the Phoenix alongside Thor, although they’re both defeated quickly. Captain Marvel steps up his game to hold back the Phoenix briefly, but it’s ultimately down to Captain Marvel to sacrifice himself to send away the Phoenix, giving away his own life for the benefit of others before falling onto a planet and being surrounded by flowers (foreshadowing something, according to Rick Remender on Twitter).

If you try and line up the continuity of it all (in that the Secret Avengers go to space to fight back the Phoenix), this basically amounts to a really long and weird pitstop. I’d liken it to when you’re on a roadtrip across America and you stop off at a Chipotle and find yourself in the middle of a robbery or something. I don’t know. It’s all kind of weird, but whatever, continuity doesn’t matter! … Right?

Finally, in “Uncanny X-Men,” we’re given an explanation for what Kieron Gillen has been trying to do with Sinister since bringing him back. We learned that Sinister is now a large, multi-faceted system, and now we know what he’s done with all that:

He’s made a big ol’ Sinister London underneath the Earth’s surface, a city full of Sinisters acting sinister for sinister purposes and Sinister’s purposes. That’s a lot of Sinister.

The issue follows one of Sinister’s Sinisters as he embarks on a sinister quest to usurp Sinister and take down Sinister through sinister means. He does this through the sinister act of interviewing Sinister as a Sinister fan of Sinister. Sinister and Sinister talk about Sinister’s sinister plans for Sinister London and the eventual sinister takeover of the world (Sinister Earth?), but reporter Sinister plays his card against real Sinister too early, only to learn that real Sinister is actually fake Sinister and real Sinister has been tricking reporter Sinister through a sinister plot to work out the kinks of his sinister system. It’s all part of a game Sinister is playing to be the perfect sinister Sinister for when omni-potent Cyclops and his gang of friends come after him. Oh, and Sinister’s final sinister reveal is that he has several sinister clones of sinister versions of the X-Men (and associated mutants) alongside six sinister clones of Madelyne Pryor for whom he hopes to sinisterly use against Cyclops, because that’s the kind of sinister thing Sinister likes to do.

You know, if you say “sinister” enough, the word just kind of loses its meaning.

LONG STORY SHORT: Mr. Sinister has a bunch of clones of Cyclops, his friends and his other dead (maybe?) ex-wife, and he’s going to use those clones and an army of himself to fight the Phoenix Five, whom he assumes is going to come after him because he’s vain. How sinister.

Over in “X-Factor” #238 it opened much like a lot of mutant crime procedurals do, and that’s with a cop getting killed by some sort of demon monster thing. The demon monster thing killed the poor guy in a demon carnival (ugh, carnies) with a sonic scream so terrible, his brain leaked out of his ears. That tells us one thing, Katy Perry is in town.

Meanwhile, Jamie and Guido threw around the idea of Members Only Jackets for those who came back from the dead (let’s face it, everyone would have one at this point, even Maggott) while standing over Longshot’s comatose body. Really classy guys, Jesus. After that, Guido suggested that all politicians, liberal or conservative, suddenly dropped dead or at the very least, got really bad jock itch. At first he thought he might have said that because he lacked a soul, but no, Jamie, assured him everyone feels that way. Hell, I bet the President feels that way.

Over at the office, Alex was talking to Logan on the phone while Monet looked fabulous as ever and Logan told them about the sap who was killed by Katy Perry, even though he thinks it was Theresa AKA Banshee who did it. It happened to have happened in Ulster, which is a town in Ireland. Except it’s a town in New York. If I were Theresa, I’d be a little insulted.

In another sub plot, Rahne, Rictor, and Shatterstar went on a road trip to rescue Wolfsbane’s son from Hela, but went off halfcocked. As superheroes are wont to do.

After that, Lorna and Monet discussed the fact that Longshot could stay in his coma forever.

…Or not. That lucky bastard.

And Jaime and Layla continued the creepiest relationship in comics. She’s like twelve, right? BRO. Also: Katy Perry works for Morrigan, who hates Theresa because she’s an “imposter Banshee.” You think Sean ever had this problem?

In “New Mutants” #44, the Defenders showed up while our heroes were fighting off some demons in an amusement park in Maine.

I’m suddenly having the biggest moment of déjà vu. Am I the only one? Weren’t there demons in a carnival in the northeast in another book this week? No, just me? Ok.

Anyway, the Defenders showed up because there’s some weirdo juju going on in the New Mutants and Doctor Strange, Iron Fist, and Silver Surfer had pizza with the gang back home in San Francsico and described just why everything is so wrong. But while they were talking The Latverian neighbor brought over some food for the guests but cause an inconvenience for the still-in-costume heroes. Luckily the good doctor raised a glamour to hide the fact they were superheroes and she left her stew and went on her way.

This must have REALLY set Roberto off, though, because he attacked Danny Rand out of nowhere and they fought until Roberto came to his senses, or until they got more stew. Whichever.

Anyway, they realized that this bad juju seemed shared the same signature as Karma, who just happened to be back as the Jean Grey School for Higher Learning in New York. So they head back east, which is totally not a waste of gas at all.

These mutants man, they waste so much gas. They talked to Karma, who was positively OFFENDED at the idea of their accusing her of fiddling with their mind with her juju (can you tell I just like saying “juju?”) . They clarified they didn’t mean she was the bad guy, and they all realized they have been having similar moments since before ”SCHISM”. Creeepy. Then Dani had a moment where she lost control of her body and stood frozen while she watched Sam glow like his name was Mike Wizowski in Monster’s Academy and then exploded like he was the Death Star. She quickly regained control of her body and went to go alarm everyone else. Unfortunately, while she tried to, she froze again, and another bright light burned in front of her and Karma vanished as well. Bummer.

This Week’s Contributors were:
Walt – “Before Watchmen: The Comedian” #1, “Daredevil” #14, “Wonder Woman” #10
Matthew – “Avengers versus X-Men” #6, “Avengers Academy” #32, “New Avengers” #28, “Secret Avengers” #28 and “Uncanny X-Men” #14 — yes, he really has nothing better to do loves comics that much.
Gil – “X-Factor” #238, “New Mutants” #44

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, we’ll give you credit.