The 40 Years of Comics Project - The Weekly Graphic Novel: Week 56 - Glory: The Complete Saga, 2014

I had quite forgotten how gory Glory is. The amount of blood and viscera flying about this really gorgeous hardcover (one of the few times I've splurged for a deluxe anything!) is overwhelming at times.

Which, I suppose, is kind of the point.

As with the previously-reviewed Prophet collections, and the little bit of Supreme I looked at, the Keatinge/Campbell Glory is a fantastic exercise in taking what was once a rip-off of another character and turning it into something amazing.

Though maybe I ought to rethink that phrase "rip-off." I'd considered, in one of the Prophet reviews, that there might be something to the fact that these are not characters per se, but actually archetypes, and that in removing the corporate ownership of the Wonder Woman-type, creators are free to pursue much more pure distillations of the characters' stories. Both Glory, in this iteration, and Moore's Promethea take on the goddess of war/peace idea that is, in superheroes, originally crystallized in Wonder Woman. While Moore takes her much further out into the mythic substratum, the rebooted Glory puts the goddess firmly into the real world, going so far as to question her very existence in a world that has changed so very much since her creation.

There's an interview at the end of the book, a dialogue between the two creators. Keatinge expresses some grief over leaving these characters behind, but Campbell has no such compunctions. He sees the story as having finished, and thus everything is as it should be in the lives of the characters. This reboot of the character was only 12 issues long, but it managed to tell a compelling, satisfying, and moving story, all the while being respectful of the various iterations of the character and adding its own important point of view to Glory's history. I'll be interested to see if the character ever gets picked up again, and if whomever does that picking decides to pick it up from the end of this series. I could envision a pretty great family-driven superhero weirdness story, like the best issues of Fantastic Four, though whether or not that would sit right with the fans who crave the very violent Glory is questionable.

Onward.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 138: What If?: Age of Ultron #2, June 2014 (Two Weeks From The Dollar Bin - Day 2)

I'm going to be honest: I really didn't understand what happened in this comic. I mean, I understood the story, the narrative that was conveyed. I like Joe Keatinge. His work on the revamped Glory was stellar. But this story was...confusing. Mainly I found it confusing because I'm really not sure what it had to do with the Age of Ultron series. It is the second issue in the series, so I'm willing to concede that rather than a series of one-shots, perhaps these What If's are telling a serialized story. I don't know because, though I own a couple of other issues, I read them ages ago and they didn't really stick with me.

So here's the things I did like: the characterization of the older versions of Hulk and Spider-Man were excellent. Really excellent. I absolutely adore the idea of the Hulk as zen master, finally gaining control over his rage, and, strangely, relinquishing his Banner persona and becoming a giant enlightened superhero. And Peter ending up as a family man is of course how he should end up, regardless of how things go in this story.

The art by Ramon Villalobos is cool and quirky, very much not in keeping with mainstream superhero art, and thus giving the book a somewhat unique feel. It reminds me of Seth Fisher's art in Flash: Time Flies and Doom Patrol, or even Rick Geary's style. According to my database, this is the only work I have by Villalobos, but I'll be keeping my eyes open in the future.

Not much more to say about this one. Nice art, nice story, not sure I got it. I guess that'll happen occasionally.