Wolverine Week: Wolverine Gets Manga'd

Our old pal Wolverine is taking Living Between Wednesday—and the world!—by storm this week. We all know Wolverine has spent some time in Japan, but no one saw this coming: Wolverine manga! Hold onto your bone-claws kids, 'cause this ain't your mama's Wolverine.

Prodigal Son is the first of a series of Wolvie Manga, written by Antony Johnston (or Wasteland fame) and drawn by Wilson Tortosa (who the internet tells me has worked on a bunch of stuff including Tomb Raider).

I'm not a big manga fan, but I'm not all that bananas about Wolverine to tell the truth so maybe meh+meh=coool?

Well, I know this for sure:

THIS

  PLUS THIS

EQUALS

WOLVERINE MANGA!

Prodigal Son is a re-imaging of our hairy mutant friend, in which Logan is a teenaged orphan living at a secret Canadian Dojo. Man, Wolverine Week is really proving how cool Canada is! Logan and the other kids at the Dojo do say, "eh" a lot, which gives the whole thing credibility.

The book has all the makings of a fun teen action/adventure comic. Logan's got a secret past, and mysterious special abilities. He doesn't know who his parents are, how he ended up at the Dojo, and why he can heal like a mofo. All this existential questioning throws him into whirlwind of emotion that ranges from mopey and emo to totally self-righteous. Ah, teenagers!

Logan's crushing hard on his Sensai's daughter. She's fiesty and super tough, so they spar all the time and it leads to SEXY RESULTS.

He's also got the requisite tubby best pal, always there for support.

The dude is totally the type to like, loudly open a Twinkie package when you're crouched down behind a rock, hiding from a bad guy.

 

He's all, "What, guys? I get hungry when I'm nervous!"

On top of baby Wolverine's emotional crisis, he's got to deal with a crazed rival who's totally pissed that Wolverine kicked his ass, and that he's losing the big hair competetion.

 But I'll tell you what this book is all about: FIGHTS!

Fights and fights and fights and fights. Lil' Wolvie is scrappy as all heck, and this book provides all the SNKTing you could ever want.

I think the kids will be all over this one.

High-Tech Tomorrow: Review of the Concentrator, Part One, By Johnathan

Hey there, friends - it's time for another review-as-voted-on! Looking way back to Adventure Comics No. 321, we're going to have a look at the fearsome Concentrator, mua-ha. I think, though, that this is one of those times that it's better to look at the whole issue, rather than extracting bits of it for humourous out-of-context ridicule. I estimate... three entries, maybe? And this is a three-day weekend! Keep tuning in to see if I can manage to meet my own very easy deadline! (Ha ha ha! It's Monday already: I fail!)

We join the Legion on page two:

Man, I sure do wish that Phantom Girl had remained all ghostly and pigment-free - just imagine how much weirder her string of peek-a-boo uniforms would have been if the cloth and her exposed bits were all the same colour. Also, think of the savings on ink! Im sure that by now we'd have seen a Phantom Girl and the Phantom Squad, Featuring Phantom Ape miniseries or something, if only because of the rising cost of little pink dots.

"Who is this stranger with Bouncing Boy's haircut, clothes and voice? Dammit, I told you not to let just anyone wander in here! Now, where's my chair? No, that's not it. No, my chair was facing the other way, so that can't be it! Also, this isn't the cactus that was here before - that cactus was shorter!"

See, what I'm trying to hint at here is that Star Boy has poor recognition skills.

Also, he's an A-1 jerk. "No, you can't be Bouncing Boy - he was a fat asshole. "

And I'll tell you exactly what Mon-El - and possibly Sun Boy - is thinking in this panel: I wonder if anyone's noticed the new way I combed my hair?

Bouncing Boy goes on to tell the story of his slimmening, which involves a shrink ray and is patently something that the writer threw together just to get rid of the guy. Not that anyone was listening to him anyway:

They were far too busy voting on whether to toss him out on his ear or not, with maybe a quick roughing up by Ultra Boy to make sure he keeps his mouth shut if any reporters think to ask about the Big Computer Sex Parties or anything like that.

So presumably they send the Reservist out for Astro-coffee or something, and then it's back to the meeting!

Now, this is back from when the Time Trapper was a super-scientist hiding behind the Iron Curtain of Time, thirty days into the future or so. Long, long before he became the Irritating Emo Plot Device From the End of Time that we all know and I loathe, he was actually mildly interesting. He sat behind that curtain and made fun of the Legion and every once in a while he tried some ridiculous scheme involving Glorith or the Molecular Master or someone like that.

Ah, there's the first mention of the Concentrator. Time to find out what it is: speak on, Star Boy!

Aw. I guess we'll never learn what that darned thing is. grumble grumble this is why I have to write such long reviews, damn Legion and their secrecy...

Superboy: Hey, Mon-El's hair looks great. I wonder if I should change my 'do?

Chameleon Boy and Triplicate Girl then show up and completely coincidentally tell everyone about some really lame attempts to wrangle info about the Concentrator out of them. This elicits some fairly elaborate eyebrow-raising and not a little nose-wrinkling, and then, in a completely coincidental occurrence:

Science Police Commissioner Wilson shows up! He's heard some talk of a Concentrator of some kind and he wants the poop! He's... kind of paunchy!

Now, this comes up later, so I'd like to point it out specifically: the chain of events here is that a) This guy hears a vague rumour about the Legion having a super-weapon of some sort. b) He asks them about it and they say that it could potentially threaten the entire Universe. c) He believes them, just like all good people should when a group of teenagers make grandiose claims.

d) Based solely on space-radio scuttlebutt and their collective word, he decides to put them through gruelling psychological torment, with possible life imprisonment waiting for anyone who blabs.

Planet Althar, uninhabited except for strange life-forms! (Space Directive X21v states that planets may be considered inhabited only if the life-forms in question are regular, small or boring. Technically, Althar is considered to be in-friggin'-habited, but the term was coined in the 2530s, and scientists of the Legion era don't talk like that any more.)

A better site for testing astronauts' suitability for space travel, you say? Could it be, just as an example, somewhere that you don't need a rocket ship to get to? I only ask out of curiosity, you understand.

Heh, Matter-Eating Lad. Nice one, Querl.

See, it came up again (sooner than I'd thought, but still): based solely on their word, this man is prepared to imprison these people for life if they reveal a secret that they themselves decided to keep. That's like... ag! I can't even think up a good example! Legion logic hurts my head!

Good issue, though.

NEXT TIME: the Legionnaires get psychologically tortured!

Supplement to the Addendum to the Review of the Legion of Super-Heroes (SARLSH), Part Two, By Johnathan

INVISIBLE KID II

There is a rule that I just came up with: Invisible Kids have lousy costumes. The original, Lyle Norg, had that brown-and-green workout outfit with the headband and all and poor Jaques up there has that yellow-and-black monstrosity. Heck, even the current, totally rebooted and up-to-date and not dead Invisible Kid looks like he just grabbed four or five random things from his closet and called it a costume. It's kind of like they want to be sure that their power will be appreciated every single time that they use it. "Oh, thank Space-God, Jaques. That thing was starting to sear my retinas."

Jaques Foccart got to be the second Invisible Kid basically through random chance. He had come to Legion HQ to get Brainiac 5 to make his sick sister well and then Computo had shown up again and possessed said sister, possibly using nanotechnology. Since Jaques had no powers or anything, Computo just totally ignored him to focus on beating up Legionnaires and in the confusion our pal drank some of the original Invisible Kid's formula (that was just, you know, lying around) and saved the day somehow (it's been a while since I've read the story, okay?). Computer-tyrants take note: underestimate Frenchmen at your peril. Afterward, Jaques joins the team and does okay. Oh, and at one point he starts teleporting as well as turning invisible and ends up in some weird hellscape and finds out that poor Lyle Norg didn't end up boinking some ghost-babe for the rest of time but rather was suffering eternal torment, which was a bit of a bummer.

I like that Invisible Kid II was named Jaques Foccart, because I was an English major and so occasionally read it as Jaques Focault, who would have the combined powers of Jaques Derrida and Michel Foucault, and have a giggle while I imagine him deconstructing the semiotic of the super-hero team (or something like that. I was an English major a while ago). Also, he's from Côte d'Ivoire and as far as I know is the only superhero ever to come from there. Dammit, except for his sister, eventually.

This picture, however... eesh. I kind of hope that it was accidentally released unfinished, because invisibility is really the easiest power to illustrate ever. Just make the outline of his legs dotted instead of solid about halfway down and then ask the colourist to fade out the yellow at about that point. Ta-da! You did it! Alternate method: leave the whole panel blank. As it stands, this is just terrible as a showcase for the character. I mean, when Superman has a shot where he's just standing there with his arms folded, he's at least hovering a foot or so off the ground, right? Take some notes, Jaques.

Invisible Kid II had two modes: brooding and surprised. In the first, he thought a lot about how his sister was sick (she was in a tube for a couple of years before Brainiac fixed her) and how invisibility was a lame power, which showed that he didn't think about the implications of having superpowers so much as read old Maxim articles about lame super-heroes. Don't listen to them, man! Sure you can't fly through the sun, but the sun's boring. You can fly through, say, the changing rooms of the stars. Plus, you can punch villains on the back of the head, which I for one have always wanted to do to Universo. In the other mode, Jaques shocased the fact that he wasn't a super-scientist or an adventurer or something, just some guy who had drank some goop. Every time that Validus or Darkseid or whoever would show up he would jump about a foot and shout "WTF!" Okay, he would shout "Sacre coeur!" but the spirit of the thing was the same. For me, it never got boring.

And that's pretty much that, Invisible Kid II-wise. Except to note that of all of the bad hairdos, post Five Year Gap, his was the worst. Still, on the balance:

JOHN APPROVED

Addendum to the Review of the Legion of Super-Heroes, Part Five, By Johnathan

Well, it's been a little while, huh? One reason for this is that I'm having a bit of a hard time thinking up anything interesting to say about the last four old Legionnaires that I have to cover before moving on to the exciting, new, awesome Legionnaires. So I'm going to plow through them all at once. Yee haw!

SUN BOY

Good basic picture of Sun Boy. I've always been fond of that costume, though the fact that it's never really changed in any significant way makes it hard to think up any new snarky things to say about it. Same goes for his hairdo, which really hasn't changed since he first grew it out in the 2970s. Mrs. Morgna's boy knows a good thing when he sees it, I guess. Oh, what I wouldn't give for him to have had a momentary lapse and started wearing a big spiky sun mask, like something Electro would wear if he was Solaro Energo instead. I coulda gone on for days!

The pose is great, though. This is almost certainly the exact posture and facial expression that Sun Boy adopts when his girlfriend of three months catches him sleeping with her sister. "Sorry baby," it says, "Dirk Morgna just can't be tied down to one woman."

JOHN APPROVED

TIMBER WOLF

Again: very hard to say anything new about this costume, as it's basically the same as the one he started out in (barring some minor redesign. The same bits are all there, just in different places). The ol' orange-and-brown-or-black-maybe costume isn't anything to write home about, but it's not terrible either. See? Not much to say.

Evidently, this picture hails from one of those periods in which Timber Wolf was having rage issues on the side. I have to admit, I always think that that sort of thing is bullshit, at least in Mr. Londo's case. I mean, he was given super-powers by a ray that his father developed out of a rare mineral, right? And then he called himself Lone Wolf because he was under the impression that he was an android and had some asinine belief that a self-aware android wasn't fit to interact with humans and so vowed to live apart, right? And then he changed his name to Timber Wolf when he joined the Legion because Lone Wolf doesn't work as well when you hang out with twenty other guys all the time, right? So... where does the 'bestial temper' thing come from? I don't recall any in-continuity explanation other than the assumption that wolf = bad temper. Could the origin of Timber Wolf's rage and interesting teeth be that Wolverine was/is a very popular character and the Legion was filled with very polite folks with no anger-management issues? Nah.

I like the mean-looking drawing in the background, though. Check it out: it looks like a drawing of a vampire from a 1970s black-and-white horror comic - Creepy or Eerie or something. Neat!

NOT APPROVED

ULTRA BOY

Favourite Legion costume, with no changes, check. Flying around looking like a loveable lunkhead, check. Nice sideburns, check.

JOHN APPROVED

WILDFIRE

Again with the unchanged costume that I like. Bah!

The only thing that I can really think of to comment on is the fact that Wildfire seems to be venting an awful lot of his anti-energy in this picture. Perhaps, says the juvenile portion of my mind, he has just experienced the energy-being equivalent of letting a large fart? I know, I know. Far too obvious. Consider this, though: could this be what Dawnstar looks so surprised about, over in her picture?

JOHN APPROVED

Okay! Next up: new folks!

Addendum to the Review of the Legion of Super-Heroes, Part Four, By Johnathan

SHRINKING VIOLET

This is an interesting picture. The power-demonstration aspect of it is both highly effective and highly accurate. One look and we know exactly how small Violet's ass is. Well, kind of. On my ruler, it's 1/16 of an inch, but I hail from a land of metric measurement, so it beats me if that's standard. Basically, this is one small heiny. Her outfit isn't bad, I guess. It's not as pleasing to mine eyes as the little (haw!) number she was wearing when she clocked Phantom Lad, but it's okay. The gloves are nice. Green is nice.

What really puzzles me about this little scene, though, is her head and face region. Why is she all dolled up? Why is she shooting a sultry look to stage left? Why does she look kind of like Elizabeth Taylor? Ever since I noticed this stuff it's been tormenting me. I mean, who is she trying to seduce? Not Micro Lad, I hope, but it can't be anyone at regular size, can it? Take a look at your ruler - even if her rear is 1/8 of an inch wide, Ms. Digby is just to tiny for a smoldering look to register. Unless she's flirting with a microscope-wielding scientist (and why wouldn't she?) whoever it is is just going to think she has some sort of facial tic.

Eh. Green is my favourite colour and the Growing Uppercut is my favourite special move, so:

JOHN APPROVED

STAR BOY

See, now this is the outfit that I was talking about in the original review of the Legion - the plunging neckline is history, hooray, and there is a pleasant shaggery to the facial features. As one of the very few super-heroes to sport the full beard (let's see... Star Boy, Hercules, latter-day Blockade Boy, uh, one of the Thors and... and the good Lex Luthor that died in the first Crisis, I think) he's a pretty good representative for any union or benevolent society that they might form. It's just so much better than his old no-beard-and-crew-cut look. And he's so affable, if occasionally insane.

This image, by the way, was taken from a poster that the Legion had made up in an attempt to get Rann Antar to stop coming around for the tryouts. The text, which has been omitted here, read WE ALREADY HAVE A GUY WHO CAN MAKE FEATHERS HEAVY. It didn't work, though.

JOHN APPROVED

Addendum to the Review of the Legion of Super-Heroes, Part Three, By Johnathan

SHADOW LASS

I quite like this costume. I mean, sure it's got a great big revers-cleavage window, but frankly that's the acme of good taste compared to here old "couple of bats on some string" outfit. I only wish that the feature that I pillaged these images from had occurred a couple of years earlier, so that it would have featured possibly my favourite Shadow Lass look ever, the one with the 1920s haircut and the one-piece black swimsuit (but without the Caucasian-tone makeup). Ah. well. This is almost as good.

Special bonus: you can tell that Shadow Lass and Mon-El are a couple because they have similar habits. In this case, they're both invading other people's panels with their capes! See if you can find the ends of the blasted things! Uh... after I finally finish this series of posts.

JOHN APPROVED