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Jay Leisten

Comic Book Review: Weapon X #1 by Pak, Land, Leisten, D’Armata, & Caramanga

April 13, 2017 by krisis

One of our household’s favorite movies, The Prestige, starts and ends by explaining the steps of a magic trick.

First, comes “The Pledge,” where we are shown something ordinary. Then, comes “The Turn,” when the magician takes the ordinary and makes it do something extraordinary. The best magic comes with a third step – “The Prestige” – where you bring back the ordinary, if you can.

Comic books are a lot like magic tricks, in that way. Every new series or story arc is a Pledge based on the creators and characters you can see when its announced. What happens within its issues is The Turn. And, whether or not the story returns its many pieces to where they can be used again in the future is The Prestige.

(Some fans love a good Prestige, while others see it as a cheat – but that’s a conversation for another time.)

As comic book magic goes, the Weapon X didn’t engender much excitement in readers when it was announced a few months back. Greg Pak isn’t a high-selling author on his own, penciller Greg Land is tolerated (at best) by most fans, and the title looked and sounded like another take on X-Force with its cast of Old Man Logan, Sabretooth, Lady Deathstrike, Domino, and Warpath.Weapon_X_2017_0001

Is this book more than meets the eye?

Pak has never been a creator to give us a weak Turn. This is the man behind Planet Hulk and who used Dazzler to explore a whole multiverse of X-Men in X-Treme X-Men.

Greg Land is one of the most reliable monthly artists in Marvel’s stable, always on a standout book that are rarely destined for poor sales.

And, the cast is a mysterious mix – all hunter/killers, but without an obvious through-line between them all.

There’s going to be a major Turn here. I’m sure of it.

Weapon X (2017) #1 (digital)

Written by Greg Pak with pencils by Greg Land, inks by Jay Leisten, color art by Frank D’Armata, and letters from VC’s Joe Caramanga.

CK Says: Consider it.

Weapon X #1 is a solid opener to an intriguing new mutant mystery that feels less like a superhero comic and more like a bloody game of cat and mouse.

The mice in the game are Old Man Logan – an alternate future Wolverine stuck in our present – and his longtime foe and former fellow soldier, Sabretooth. Sabretooth had been on and off the straight and narrow recently, but this issue finds him holed up in the woods hundreds of miles from civilization.

That’s not too different from Logan’s location at the start of the issue, but the story doesn’t linger on the why of their chosen isolation. Instead, author Greg Pak quickly shifts the focus to on the cats in this game of chase.

They’re an upgraded version of the traditional half-human Reavers from the late-80s portions of Claremont’s run -regular people that are undetectable to the enhanced senses of our pair of clawed mutants, but beneath their skin these pursuers are killer robots prickling with blades.

Their sudden appearance is clearly tied to a very angry Lady Deathstrike, held in captivity in a lab that’s very interested in our other cast members.

(As for how she got there, it was teased in X-Men Prime).

Why is Deathstrike held captive? Why is a secret program out to capture Wolverine and Sabretooth? And, what do two very different mutants – Domino and Warpath – have anything to do with it? [Read more…] about Comic Book Review: Weapon X #1 by Pak, Land, Leisten, D’Armata, & Caramanga

Filed Under: comic books, reviews Tagged With: Frank D'Armata, Greg Land, Greg Pak, Jay Leisten, Joe Caramanga, Lady Deathstrike, Old Man Logan, Sabretooth, The Prestige, Weapon X, Wolverine

Comic Book Review: X-Men Gold (2017) #1 by Guggenheim, Syaf, Leisten, Martin, & Petit – The X-Men Are Good (Guys) Again!

April 5, 2017 by krisis

There is a recurring theme in today’s X-Men Gold #1: “past is prologue.”

It’s a theme I lean into heavily in my every day life. Being obsessed with data and truth tends to emphasize the impact of the past on the present. Most fresh starts in life consist of actors with past track records of behavior, models of behavior that have previously been described. They aren’t really that fresh

That’s part of why everyone loves a sudden success story, whether that’s an indie movie or a hot new start-up. It’s not just the success we’re celebrating, but the subversion of trends and predictability.

When you swim in the data of a thing all the time, it’s really hard to be pleasantly surprised by those fresh starts. I looked at the return order probability of hundreds of start-ups. There was no novel return curve to discover. After the first few dozen, everyone snapped into a story I had seen before.

Comics can feel like that, too. It’s a tiny industry where the most read book never even approaches a million eyeballs (and I’m counting individual eyeballs here, not pairs).

Marvel and DC are creating most of their stories with characters who have been around for over 25 years. Most of them have been combined into the same teams before. Most of the writers and artists are part of a crowd that flip flops back and forth, with stops at Image or another indie to take a breather. Most of the world-changing stories just echo back and forth between the big two publishers, copies of copies of copies of big ideas that have already been had.

Past is prologue. We’ve seen it before, so we know what we’ll see. And, like in the rest of life, we’re pleasantly surprised when we get something truly novel…

…and then we want more and more of that novel thing, until it’s our new past and becomes our next prologue.

When Marvel or DC say they are launching something “new,” it’s with the caveat that a seasoned reader already knows the introduction to this story.

The question is: does that mean you can predict where it will wind up?

X-Men Gold #1 (digital)

Written by Marc Guggenheim with pencils by Ardian Syaf, inks by Jay Leisten, colors by Frank Martin, and letters by VC’s Cory Petit.

CK Says: Buy it! Bottom Line: Guggenheim’s new take on flagship X-Men feels familiar and maybe a bit fan-service-y, but that doesn’t stop it from being remarkably fresh as it achieves its back-to-basics aim: the X-Men feel like heroes again.

Marc Guggenheim takes his second swing at the X-Men in three years, and this one is a solid hit. X-Men Gold is a delightful first issue with hints of many past teams, but it has a fresh outlook that’s intent on minimizing the recent past as leaden prologue weighing the series down from the start.

The X-Men’s past being prologue isn’t something you’ll often hear me lament, X-Men_Gold_2017-0001-interior-002as a studied X-fan of over 25 years. I’m all for continuity-dense mining of years of history, but Guggenheim -the successful creator of CW’s Arrow – was wise enough to know now isn’t the time.

What’s X-Men Gold all about? The story’s title says it all: “Back to Basics.”

The X-Men are back to being a team who scrambles the Blackwing because they hear someone is in trouble – mutant or not. Or, at least, that’s what newly-minted leader Kitty Pryde wants them to be, which is how we wind up in medias res with the team facing down Terrax, whose previous X-book exposure comes solely from Dazzler.

Why are they fighting him? Because The Avengers and The Champions didn’t show up and the X-Men are heroes. [Read more…] about Comic Book Review: X-Men Gold (2017) #1 by Guggenheim, Syaf, Leisten, Martin, & Petit – The X-Men Are Good (Guys) Again!

Filed Under: comic books, reviews Tagged With: Adrian Syaf, Frank Martin, Jay Leisten, Kitty Pryde, Marc Guggenheim, X-Men, X-Men Gold

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