The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1491: The Zaucer of Zilk #2, November 2012

Seriously. Look at that cover. That's got to be one of the best comics covers I've ever seen. And I want a pair of "fancy pants."

The Zaucer travels "behind the scenes" in his pants, exposing himself to ravenous consumers of content who float on clouds. I'm not sure there's a lot of social commentary in the story, but this part definitely is. The Zaucer must escape these creatures, who transform into a giant mouth, before they devour him.

And then he enters Dankendreer, Errol Raine's domain, and the McCarthy colours disappear. Pages and panels are streaked across with rain, bleeding from the panel borders right across our field of view. It's a lovely touch, to give us the impression that literally everything in this dimension is sodden and miserable. Such wonderful contrast to the psychedelic swirliness (that's the technical term) of the rest of the comic.

A nice thing that we see, and I like to these days call it The Squirrel (or Zquirrel?) Girl Effect, is that the Zaucer attempts to help the bad guy (who isn't who you might think), rather than simply defeating them. So much violence is born of fear and feeling powerless - if we can help people to not feel that way, we reduce the amount of violence in the world. I'm not trained in these sorts of things, but that seems pretty straightforward to me. Help people, don't hurt them = better world.

If only that were a majority sentiment.

"A thousand billion aeons of time burst from Charognae's every cell, to seep into the infinite mansion of Darkendreer --"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1490: The Zaucer of Zilk #1, October 2012

I don't know how it is for other comics fans, but I have a hard time walking past a Brendan McCarthy comic without at the very least having a flip through. He is, bar none, the most colourful and psychedelic artist working in mainstream comics, and everything he does looks amazing.

Today's comic could really be set in Pepperland (from the Beatles' Yellow Submarine). Both the tone of the series and the look of the series hearken back to that crazed wonderland. The Zaucer's realm is populated by bizarre and colourful characters, as you can see from the cover, and their adventures are, for the most part, exercises in randomness and chaos. At least, that's what it looks like to us. The Zaucer's realm is a very different place from ours, and all that randomness actually seems to work for the characters in the story, almost as if, from their perspective, it's not random at all.

My favourite scene in this issue is when the Zaucer has to get himself some "fancy pants" in order to walk between dimensions. He had to actually trap these free-roaming pants himself, jumping into them both legs at once, after luring a pair with a tasty piece of pocket lint.

And that right there tells you everything you need to know about the story. Its silly and weird and beautiful, and very much work a read.

"Merely a facilitator for those cosmic intelligences who've paid to watch your intrepid struggles."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 314: Avengers Assemble #15AU, July 2013

I have by this point managed to track down the last three tie-in issues for the Age of Ultron, so I thought I'd read them, just to break up the main series. Though this issue was published around the same time as the last issue of AoU, it's set a little farther back in the story as far as I can tell, though it certainly sets up some of the more magical twists that we'll see in the story as we continue.

One of the questions the New York-based heroes have been asking throughout the series is whether what's happened in Marvel New York has indeed happened all over the world. Leaving aside, but not forgetting, the ridiculous North America-centrism that this represents, it's great to get a glimpse of what's happened to the world outside of that hub of superhuman craziness, and, unsurprisingly, it's much the same as our focal location. Captain Marvel tells us that it took 8 1/2 minutes for Ultron to take Britain, which actually begs an interesting question: how long has the occupation been a thing before we come into the story? With the size of the building that Ultron has erected over Manhattan, we're led to believe that it's been some time, but how long would it really take to construct something like that when you have an unlimited work force? The longest part of the occupation would be taking down the majority of the superheroes. If we go by Spider-Man's tale from early in the series, he wakes up during the initial attack, goes out to help, and is then captured by Owl and Hammerhead. It's hard to believe that Hawkeye's rescue comes too much later on, as Spider-Man does not appear to be malnourished or particularly weakened as they escape. So it's been, what? Days, maybe. This adds a certain ominousness and a certain immediacy to the story which I think would have brought a lot to the story if it had been played up a bit more. Ultron came and in days took over the world. It certainly makes his level of power in some ways inconceivable, which, as Lovecraft teaches us, is the best way of making your reader think of something far worse that you would ever write.

It also highlights the resourcefulness of the heroes, if we consider that they come up with a series of "solutions" pretty quickly. On the flipside, it also highlights just how quickly these characters can fall to killing as a solution. Days from paragons of justice to brutal survivalists.

We'll get back to the main story tomorrow, and then a couple more glimpses into the new world that Wolverine and Sue Richards have created. Will it be better? Worse? Time, in many senses of the word, will tell.