Ugly American # 17 – Five Weapons

Hand Me That Cudgel…..Now Where Did I Put The Dead Horse?

Marvel just released Guardians of the Galaxy 0.1 on Wednesday, and I instantly got a headache. You’d think I’d be over this by now….but I’m not, because they keep upping the audacity ante. Look, Marvel, I didn’t make the rules, YOU made the rules! And the rules for .1 issues, while stultifyingly misguided, were quite simple:

• They were to signify a jumping on point for new readers
• They were to illuminate a tone or plot vehicle for the title’s direction
• They were to be followed by another book shipping that same month
• They were to be priced at $2.99 to encourage test-driving

Since the initiative started, Marvel has routinely made a mockery of the first two tenets. The transgressions are so numerous at this point that I think the blatant misuses far outnumber the times they’ve played fair. No trouble with point # 3, mind you. Everything Marvel publishes ships 2.8 times a month now, so does that even qualify as a .1 thing? And then I look at GOTG 0.1 and see that disgusting looking $3.99 on the cover, so now they’ve taken a hot dump all over principle # 4.

As if there were ever a shred of doubt, .1 is an unattractive turd of sound and fury, signifying NOTHING. So the program is confusing and ill conceived, but at least they lied to us about everything. Well, everything but the part where they gouge you for double the cost in a month by over-shipping. Whew! Dodged a bullet there, huh?

What’s extra funny about all this is that if you listen to guys like Brian Bendis or Jonathan Hickman talk about the marketing/numbers guys at Marvel, you’d think they were referring to extra-dimensional savants. These numbers guys at Marvel have come down from heaven to show us mere mortals how the science of selling works. Except if you look at the mass attrition, the over-saturation of every workable brand, the over-saturation of every non-workable brand, the failure to produce any title sustainable past twelve issues, and the embarrassment that is Marvel’s performance in the book market, you might wonder if these guys aren’t so smart after all.

News to the “wizards”….that red stripe at the bottom of all your books looks like ass. Propping up your numbers with variant covers is not smart, it’s poking an economic badger with a pointy stick, and it’s going to bite you sooner rather than later. You have the most vibrant and powerful IP library in comics, and Robert Kirkman’s Walking Dead outperformed your ENTIRE CATALOG according to Bookscans numbers. Don’t just gloss over that, folks. I want you to stop for a moment and consider that one independent black and white horror property outsold everything Marvel produced in 2012. And this with a billion dollar movie in the theaters! Yeah. Those are some sharp cats over there at Marvel marketing. Given the choice between the current regime and a pack of syphilitic hamsters…I’m taking the hamsters.

Meanwhile, the Distinguished Competition is learning all the wrong lessons from these kinds of shenanigans. Word from the grapevine is that the Geoff Johns Green Lantern Finale is going to have a big fat $7.99 price point, just like ASM # 700. Ugh. Yeah, yeah, extra pages. But what kind of pages? If this were 80 pages of Geoff Johns/Doug Mahnke swan singing, I wouldn’t champion the idea, but I’d understand. Everybody knows how this is going to work, though – it’s going to be 40% Johns/Mahnke, and a heaping pile of forgettable professional yeomen’s work.

Ask yourself this – if DC published one GL finale with just the Johns/Mahnke story for $4.99, and also published the $7.99 version with this “bonus” material, how many would purchase the comic with the extra content? I’m going to put the over/under at 3% of the $4.99 version. And by the way, half of that 3% would be savvy speculators betting on the “scarce” version for future profits. If DC really believed in the material, they’d publish it separately. But mostly, they just want as many $8 monsters as they can rape out of you for Q1. And that’s comics.

But this is also comics:

Five Weapons # 1
This is another new book from Image, and it’s Jimmie Robinson’s baby. Paul Little is handling the colors, but other than that it’s the Jimmie Robinson show. He’s doing the writing, the drawing, he’s washing the dishes, sweeping the floors, and tucking you in at night. That’s full service.

Five Weapons is the story of one intrepid Tyler Shainline. He’s the new kid at the School of Five Weapons, where today’s youth are trained to become tomorrow’s professional assassins. Tyler’s got a couple of wrinkles to work out, though. One, his father is a legend at this school, so he’s got a sizeable reputation demon to exorcise with everyone he meets. The other problem is that he appears to be a pacifist. This is kinda not what Weapon School is looking for.

The schtick seems to be that Tyler’s weapon is going to be his mind, and it’s a shockingly enjoyable schtick. If you’re super old like me and have favorable memories of Encyclopedia Brown, this will feel pleasantly like going home. For a more contemporary camp, I would say that if you liked Veronica Mars (and shame on you if you didn’t) you should absolutely give Five Weapons a shot. There’s the backdrop of fitting in at high school, dodging cliques, making an impression on the cute girl in home room. All good stuff, but standard. The twist is that the story is laced with puzzles and brain teasers. By the end of the issue I noticed I was on yellow alert, searching for clues about which rug might get pulled from beneath me. That was fun, and I don’t get that from many comics. The cliffhanger ending for the debut issue doesn’t have anything to do with shocking violence or a stunning reveal. It’s a puzzle. How the hell is Tyler going to pull that off? (You’ll have to read it to find out what that is) I don’t know. I’m interested enough to find the next issue, though.

This is an all ages book. It’s not labeled as such, and the marketing I saw beforehand didn’t suggest that. Perhaps if we asked Mr. Robinson, he would deny it. But it’s an all ages book. Frederic Wertham would feel comfortable handing this book to a 12 year-old. The sensibility skews a little young, and that’s not a pejorative, it’s just a fact. When Tyler was being introduced to the teachers, (one of whom has an arrow inexplicably jutting out of her head) it almost lost me. By the time I got to the “exotic weapons” student talking to Tyler through a presumably poisonous snake, I recognized that this is a book pointed more at the Ben 10 crowd and relaxed. There’s nothing wrong with Ben 10 or all ages material. Diary of a Wimpy Captain Underpants sells more books than comics can imagine. And like Han Solo, comics can imagine a lot. So I’ve been waiting for something in this vein to hit gold, and maybe this can do it?

I know Jimmie Robinson from his Bomb Queen work, so Five Weapons surprised me a little. Bomb Queen is, how shall we say this….saucy. It’s a little like hiring me and Chronic Mike to write for The Suite Life of Zack & Cody. We could probably do it, maybe even do it well. But you wouldn’t exactly expect it. I like that. I like creators stretching their creative muscles, and I like it when creators take on more control of their product.

Five Weapons is pretty darned good. Right now it’s in the “Oh, isn’t that sort of clever and interesting” category. If Robinson is able to really sell the brain teaser elements while naturally progressing the relationships in the book, Five Weapons could be really special.

Hawkeye # 8
I just couldn’t take it anymore. I wanted to wait for the trade to come out and then catch up and read it all, but all the cool kids kept talking about it, so I had to crack open Hawkeye and see what the hullaballoo was about.
This just in: Hawkeye is super cool. It’s so cool, it makes you feel cooler for having read it. This particular issue featured a series of full page splashes paying homage to golden age comics while simultaneously adding weight to the tone of the scene. In the hands of lesser men, those pages would feel like wasted fluff. In Hawkeye, it’s just cool.

FUN FACT: You know how the “track suit draculas” like say “bro” at least once every five words? Know where Fraction got that from? It’s a gentle ribbing of Warren Simons, currently the executive editor at Valiant. I’m guessing it’s exaggerated. Let’s hope so, at any rate.

Clint Barton is arrested in this issue. How cool is that? It’s Hawkeye cool. Also, between this and the Young Avengers - I’m officially in love with Kate Bishop. The end!

As always, your comments are very welcome so leave them below.