And here’s Nevin’s thoughts on my reply, which conclude with a question about the first Crisis (on Infinite Earths) that I really can’t answer:

Your answer made sense to me. I guess that the more DC hypes an event, the more any negative reactions will be magnified. I still think people are overreacting (especially since some seem to think that ID Crisis is leading comics in a darker direction, rather than reacting to the already-established attitudes). But, since I don’t have years of fandom under my belt, it’s probably unfair for me to decide how strongly others should feel affected by this.

I want to respond to one other thing you said:

“Women are brutalized, and their hero boyfriends (or husbands, or ex-husbands) are upset about it. What’s ground-breaking about that?”

I agree — killing off supporting characters is not groundbreaking at all. But, though the murders are obviously the catalyst for the story, I don’t think that they are supposed to be the main point. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but I think there are two fundamental issues being addressed:

1) I’m told that Marvel has been gradually eliminating secret identities from its characters. I haven’t read the comics that this has happened in, so I’m relying on what other people have told me here, but it worries me if they really are moving in that direction. Secret identities are not only a lot of fun, but it’s just not believable to me that a superhero could live a normal, open life without putting himself (or herself) and loved ones in harm’s way. I read Green Arrow’s speech about why secret identities are so important right after seeing a rumor that Spider-Man might be unmasked, and the contrast really jumped out at me. It felt like DC’s “How we are different from Marvel” Manifesto. It was a rather bloody way to get the point across, but it worked.

2) This may be a bit of a stretch, but I think ID Crisis is trying to say something about superhero ethics. You probably noticed in my last email that the moral code of a superhero is important to me. I can accept occasional lapses, but only when the characters are clear that there is a dividing line between good and evil, and they face consequences for stepping over it. Over the years, these rules have slowly eroded from many comics. I suspect that even some DC heros could have gotten a pass from their fans if they lobotomized Light in the present day rather than the past. Instead, it showed the contrast between what we accept now and what we expected then. And then, it showed us that the people who weren’t involved are horrified, and the people who were involved are still guilt-ridden. While most people seem to be seeing ID Crisis as a loosening of standards, I think it’s trying to make the traditional ethics clear again.

Of course, I could be wrong on this last point. Really wrong. I’ll have to wait until the end to see whether the heros do the right thing, or whether the villain is brutally beaten to death. (The fact that Manhunter is billed as an ID Crisis tie-in worries me.) This is probably the main thing that could change my mind about ID Crisis.

Finally, I don’t have much historical perspective here. When I casually tossed out names like Crisis On Infinite Earths, I was referring to what other people have told me about it 20 years after the fact. I don’t have any memory of how fans reacted to events like that at the time. Can you help me out here? How do people normally react to changes (big ones like the Crisis, or to individual deaths), and how have their attitudes changed as these events became just another part of history? Does this say anything about how ID Crisis will be remembered?

Here’s my response to Nevin’s e-mail, just in case anyone was curious. Because I’ve been so quiet about my thoughts on Identity Crisis. Yeah:

The most interesting thing to me about ID is how it’s serving as a prism for how people view comics, specifically mainstream superhero comics: the kind of stories they should tell, the level of violence that’s acceptable, the ways writers should or shouldn’t function when working within a shared universe. I’ve seen both objections and compliments on all of these fronts, and I think it’s due in part to the fact that DC has promoted this comic as being so seminal that people are judging it to a different set of standards than they do ongoing titles.

As you note, ID specifically references a number of Silver Age stories and heavily features defining characters of that period. In doing so, it invites comparison to the stories it references in terms of tone and characterization, and I think a lot of people are finding the disconnect too much to reconcile. Personally, most of my problems lie in terms of tone, but there are weaknesses in storytelling that bother me, too.

Generally, violence against female characters — the Women in Refrigerators or Gwen Stacy Syndrome — bothers me a great deal. I think it’s an incredibly tired storytelling device, and I’ve rarely seen it used for any compelling ongoing narrative purpose. I can’t really bring myself to give Meltzer a pass because everyone else is doing it, especially when ID is being pitched to readers as ground-breaking. Women are brutalized, and their hero boyfriends (or husbands, or ex-husbands) are upset about it. What’s ground-breaking about that? This brings my to my objections about some of Meltzer’s storytelling choices.

I thought the devices the writer used in the first issue — painting a glowing portrait of why Sue was so special, revealing her long-desired pregnancy — amounted to cheap, lazy emotional manipulation. Honestly, dozens of hack writers have pulled the same device with characters male and female in all kinds of different media. While every writer is obviously aiming for an emotional response from their readers, this is a painfully by-the-numbers way of achieving it, and it carries more than a whiff of cynicism.

Another flaw, to my way of thinking, is the character set Meltzer has used to make his point. As you note, there are only a handful of characters with public identities, which limits Meltzer’s choices. That said, it doesn’t make Ralph and Sue any better protagonists for (or victims in) this kind of story simply because they’re among the few who fit a small set of narrative demands the writer requires to make his point. To my taste, that constitutes plot-driven storytelling, and I prefer the kind that’s driven by character.

I can’t quite get past how wasteful it is to sacrifice two characters who occupied a unique niche in a fictional universe for what amounts to sensationalism. While never A-listers by any stretch of the imagination, Ralph and Sue were a rarity — a mature, mutually supportive couple who functioned equally well in comic stories (like FORMERLY KNOWN AS THE JUSTICE LEAGUE) and as straightforward adventuring sleuths (as in the last major story arc of James Robinson’s STARMAN series). Putting them in these circumstances isn’t just tonally inconsistent with their previous appearances; it’s a wasteful, cynical use of the characters to create shocking effect.

And it’s the cynicism that ultimately sealed my verdict on this title. It coyly plays up to Silver Age fandom while re-envisioning many of the elements that made them love Silver Age stories in the first place. It uses excessive violence to drive story, and it wedges characters into inconsistent roles to prove its point. (Ralph and Sue aside, Meltzer’s portrayal of Green Arrow as a proponent of secret identities is idiotic; there’s virtually no one in the DC Universe sloppier with his secrets than Green Arrow, or anyone in his circle.)

But none of that invalidates anything you’ve said or the examples you cite. Other titles do share what many believe to be ID’s flaws. Other titles *exceed* ID’s flaws by a fairly wide margin. But, again, DC has placed the book at this level — the can’t miss, “important” comic that changes everything. I’m not surprised it has people sharpening their knives, as it’s practically begged them to do so. Beyond its aims as a story, I can’t escape the conclusion that it was designed to create exactly this kind of controversy. That diminishes its value and my ability to judge it on its own merits (which might be my own failing, obviously).

I don’t know if I’ve given you anything useful at all here, but I really do appreciate your taking the time to share your thoughts with me.

I got a terrific e-mail from one Nevin Steindam regarding the hubbub over Identity Crisis, and Nevin was kind enough to allow me to post it here. Nevin has some really interesting thoughts on the controversy:

Please pardon this long letter, but after reading your blog, I thought you could help me understand why Identity Crisis has people so upset. I’ve given a lot of thought to it, and am just not as bothered by it as everyone else seems to be.

First, maybe I should explain that most of my comics experience comes from reading my father’s Silver Age DC collection when I was a kid. I’ve only started reading modern comics over the past few months. (Well, I started borrowing a lot of graphic novels from my library last year. But I was afraid of wading into continuity-heavy stories, and didn’t actually start reading standard superhero stories until early July. I’d started reading a few comic-related blogs and websites before then, so in some ways I have a pretty good background on modern comics. In other ways, I’m still just a neophyte who remembers a lot of old Superman and Batman stories.)

One day when I was younger, I remember seeing an old ad for a comic in which Lois walks in on Clark as he’s changing to Superman. My dad said he vaguely remembered that issue, but had since lost it. I asked him how Superman had gotten out of that problem, and my dad guessed that Superman just used his Super-Hypnotism to make Lois forget.

Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure that would have made a boring story. Superman probably designed a much more complicated scheme to convince Lois that his “good friend Clark” was helping out with a case. But the important thing is that I, as someone exposed only to Silver Age comics. had no trouble with the idea that Superman would change someone’s memories to protect his identity. The cavalier attitude DC took towards hypnotism and the general workings of the mind, combined with the way superheros represented absolutely trustworthy authority figures (such as the time Superboy declared Bizarro “not a living creature” and killed him) meant that something like that was no big deal. Though it may not have happened in that issue, I’d bet serious money that there was at least one time during the Silver Age in which a DC hero manipulated someone’s mind to keep them from knowing something.

So when the big shocker of ID Crisis 3 turned out to be that the JLA had made people forget about secret identities in the past, I wasn’t at all shocked. True, I think it was a big deal when, in the previous issue, the heros admitted that they had once changed someone’s personality. THAT was something that probably wouldn’t have shown up in a Silver Age story. But I was fine with the way the story presented it: Changing personalities wasn’t something they did all the time. The central idea of ID Crisis is that _one time_, the JLA was faced with a no-win situation whose resolution haunts them to this day.

If the heroes had revealed that they changed personalities as often as they changed memories, I’d have a serious problem with it. Or if they weren’t still haunted with guilt from the event, I’d be disappointed. But this was a one-time event, and the heros kept their laws of morality intact since. When I read the first two issues, I felt that they were doing an excellent job of balancing between a “more mature” story and the idealism required for the DC Universe. Compared to titles like Bloodhound or Manhunter, I don’t see how people can point to ID Crisis as the story that’s making DC comics too dark. (Ok, I realize that this is partly because Bloodhound and Manhunter are new characters without a Silver Age history to uphold. But that doesn’t ring true for me. Those titles are still set in the DC Universe, and they act as if it’s perfectly fine for vigilantes to play the role of judge, jury, and executioner. ID Crisis, in contrast, points out that stepping over the line one time, even in extenuating circumstances, is a traumatic and questionable event. I know which story I’d rather associate with my childhood comics.)

I do agree that the comics I’ve read recently are often darker than they need to be, and that they should be able to tell good stories that appeal to adults and children. But if comics are going to be cleaned up, I’d suggest starting with the sickening crap like Manhunter, not Identity Crisis. (On the other hand, I don’t think that there’s any reason for all comics to be child-friendly. I’m enjoying Bloodhound so far. I just think that the authors should show enough restraint to only make comics “edgy” when it helps the story. And under that guideline, I suppose ID Crisis is debatable, but isn’t absurdly dark.)

It’s not just Bloodhound and Manhunter that have surprised me with their cavalier attitude towards violence and people’s rights. When I read last month’s issue of She-Hulk (The Big Picture, part 1), I was shocked by the fact that a superhero would capture a villain and say that the police “can send her to Abu Gharib for all I care”. I practically put the comic down right then. That a “hero” would casually wish that on anybody (especially a minor!) conveyed to me a much more fundamental disregard for Silver Age idealism than the single lapse that is causing so many repercussions for the JLA.

I’ve gone through the other complaints people have about Identity Crisis, and none of them seem right for me, either. I suppose the fact that long-running characters are getting killed off could be upsetting people. But it’s not like that’s an unusual event in comics. This is minor compared to events like Crisis On Infinite Earths. Then there was the second Robin’s death, Barbara Gordon being shot and paralyzed, Hal Jordan killing all the Guardians, and so on. It’s important for comics to find a balance in which good usually wins, but the people who perpetually put their lives at risk do face consequences. I don’t see how ID Crisis breaks with the past 20 years in this sense.

It’s sexist? Well, comics have been horribly sexist for decades. I’m not saying that flippantly — it’s a serious problem, and I think it’s a shame that the market can’t support a non-sex-object female character even today. But in the few months I’ve been reading these stories, I’ve seen much worse examples of sexism than this. (Specifically, I read through the back issues of Superman/Batman, and was shocked at how Power Girl’s only “power”, as far as I could tell, was that everyone around her talked about how sexy she was. Another comic I tried was Spectacular Spider-Man #17, whose main plot was about the fact that Mary-Jane couldn’t forgive Peter for letting another woman kiss him, even though he’d fought against the woman (who had kidnapped him) until she physically beat him. A writer who serious cared about gender issues would have addressed the fact that Peter had just been through an attempted rape. Instead, we’re treated to shrewish “girl-talk” about how Peter deserves death for “cheating”.) On the other hand, Meltzer is writing about how superheros without a secret identity are putting their loved ones in danger. To make his point, he’s restrained by the characters that have already been established in the DC Universe. Admittedly, this could be my lack of knowledge, but I don’t know of any male loved ones who would apply. The Elongated Man and The Atom are the only two DC heros I know of with a public identity, and unless The Atom has a son or a gay lover that I don’t know about, Meltzer had no choice. (Though if a child got killed in his ex-wife’s place, I don’t think that would calm down the critics who say this story is too dark.) The only part of the story that struck me as sexist at all is Ralph’s conversation in the first issue, in which he puts on a hard-boiled detective persona to tell the story of meeting Sue. The Ralph I remember was a lot more sensitive. But that’s a fairly minor complaint compared to Superman ordering Power Girl to use her body to control a 14-year-old boy.

I could go on, but I’ve already written more than I expected to. If you’ve actually read through this whole thing, I’m grateful. And if you could explain to me what it is about Identity Crisis that is outraging the community (preferably, it should be a fault that other currently-running series aren’t getting away with), I’d be even more grateful.

I was watching Food Network’s tribute to Julia Child last night, and it left me with some mixed emotions. Not about Child, who was a national treasure, but about the network itself.

What a strange, timid tribute that was to someone who was such a force of nature. And how odd that they praised Child without ever getting to the heart of what made her so unique and influential.

Prior to Child’s arrival, through her book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and her inaugural PBS program, The French Chef, television cookery was almost entirely recipe-based. The genre was also dependent on corporate sponsorship, for the most part.

Child was neither of those things. Classically trained at the Cordon Bleu (one of the first women to complete the male-dominated program), Child focused on techniques of cooking, the fundamentals that would serve a home cook in preparing virtually any cuisine. She also adopted the French devotion to fresh ingredients, and she was never beholden to the food industry.

I’ll admit to a certain aversion to (all right… “loathing of”) celebrity chefs like Emeril Lagasse and Wolfgang Puck. Seriously, once you’ve opened your fourth casino restaurant in Las Vegas, your credibility as a culinary innovator is pretty much dead on arrival. While I have no reason to doubt the sincerity of their regard for Child, they’re hardly the standard bearers for her brand of culinary education.

Of course, neither is Food Network, no matter how much it owes to Child for raising the standards of the genre and popularizing it. As much as Food Network does right, it does just as much badly.

Too much of their programming seems like thinly disguised advertising. Take Food Finds, Unwrapped, or The Best of… (please!) And while some of their shows offer useful, transportable techniques (Sara’s Secrets and Thirty Minute Meals, for example), some are beyond ghastly. (Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee is a hideous throwback to exactly the kind of cooking show Child was a tonic against.)

Even as a celebrity factory, the network is only marginally successful. Puck hasn’t been able to make the transition from celebrity favorite to household word, like his huckster idol Emeril. Lee is frightening, shrilly insisting every viewer’s husband and kids will love every recipe she semi-makes, reliant on the blanket assumption that everyone who cooks is a wife and mother. (Child never made that mistake throughout her career. And she never tried to suggest anyone should make their own version of an Orange Julius, either.)

Best of the recent batch is probably Paula Deen, of Paula’s Home Cooking. A queen of comfort food, she has a southern permutation of Child’s easy charm. And virtually all of Deen’s recipes start with “melt a stick of butter,” so how wrong can you go?

So maybe it’s not so surprising that Food Network would choose to focus on the cosmetics of Child’s success as opposed to the substance. They can’t quite decide how deep they want to go, so why remind everyone of how good food television can really be?

My suggestion if you want a more complex look at Child and her influence, is to pick up a copy of Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America, by Laura Shapiro. Much of the book is devoted to the evolution of the food industry and its attempts to define home cooking and the women at the stove. It’s alternately instructive and hilarious, with lots of great anecdotes of great and not-so-great moments in food marketing. Child rides in towards the end as a protector of good eating, and, boy, did America need her.

So I spent much of the weekend traveling for work, staying in a not-so-great hotel in a small, rural town. And what do I bring along as reading material?

The first two volumes of Uzumaki.

So, yeah, thanks for the recommendation, Jakala. If you’d like the chip in anything towards my therapy co-pays, that’d be great.

Seriously, this is a great horror manga, running the gamut from unsettling to terrifying and everywhere in between. I’ll post a full set of comments on it after I’ve picked up Vol. 3. (Just as a side note, I didn’t have much luck finding Vol. 1 through Books-a-Million or Amazon, but Barnes & Noble tracked it down in no time.)

It’s always fun to watch the spooky parallels between daytime soap operas and mainstream comic books.

Currently, ABC is indulging in a little bit of trash-talking while NBC’s soaps are on hiatus for the Olympics. NBC’s Days of Our Lives is in the midst of a serial-killer story where the dozen or so victims turned out not to be dead after all. Leaping on this bit of narrative legerdemain, ABC is touting its own upcoming murder story on General Hospital, insisting that when a Disney subsidiary kills characters, they stay dead, thank you very much.

In one of those weird bits of synchronicity, I saw this item on Fanboy Rampage. And I’m reminded of interviews about Avengers: Disassembled from early on, where writer Brian Bendis insisted he’d been careful to write deaths in ways that other writers could fairly easily overturn. (Honestly, that should be taken as a given at this point in both soaps and comics, so I shouldn’t snark when Bendis is up front about it.)

Both industries have so many of the same conventions and the same problems. Revolving doors to the afterlife, blindingly complicated character histories, shrinking audience, readily available and less demanding alternatives… I’m a fan of both (less of soaps lately, but I’ve been an addict in my time), and I wonder what it says about me that I’m drawn to forms of entertainment that always seem to be on the precipice of obsolescence.

Other than the obvious conclusion that I’m an equal-opportunity geek.

Love it or hate it, one of the unfortunate side effects of Identity Crisis has been the scuttling of the follow-up to the delightful mini-series, Formerly Known As The Justice League (FKATJL). Where can readers turn for something a little more lighthearted? Something clever and fun to balance out all of the Important Stories That Change Everything?

How about giving She-Hulk a try?

Admittedly, Marvel doesn’t have the greatest track record with intentionally funny comic books. Peter David has pretty much carried that banner, inserting as much humor as feasible in otherwise straightforward super-heroic outings like Captain Marvel, The Incredible Hulk, and X-Factor. John Byrne took a solid stab at the comedy niche with the second She-Hulk title.

But while Byrne gleefully tore down the wall between reader and character, current writer Dan Slott has pulled back a bit on the absurdity. Slott still takes a skewed, affectionate look at super-heroic conventions, but he does so in way that fits more easily into shared universe storytelling.

In this third She-Hulk book, Jennifer Walters, She-Hulk’s alter-ego, has gone to work for a law firm specializing in meta-human issues. The firm has made a mint off of the frequently absurd conventions of life in the Marvel Universe – industrial accidents yielding super-powers, the dead testifying at their own murder trials, a libel suit against the Daily Bugle. And Slott wrings some great gags out of the concept.

Issue #6 finds our heroine trapped in the firm’s skyscraper with dozens of miniaturized super-villains who’ve used her in a complicated plot to escape from their ironically named detention center, “The Big House.” On paper, it sounds like a story that might actually have been played straight in the Silver Age, but Slott and company go for a wide range of laughs, from a sly dialogue to hilarious sight gags.

While similar in tone and intent to FKATJL, She-Hulk benefits from a fairly significant difference. While Keith Giffen was obviously fond of his FKATJL cast, it’s doubtful that he had a whole lot of respect for them. Slott is a bit kinder to She-Hulk; while she may find herself in absurd or undignified situations, her competence as an attorney and an adventurer is never really questioned. She’s in on the joke as opposed to being the butt of it, and she approaches the madness around her with an appealing blend of self-deprecating humor and a can-do attitude.

She-Hulk seems like what a lot of readers have been asking for. It’s different from the run-of-the-mill super-hero title. It doesn’t wallow in the gloom and doom that seem to have re-emerged as a guiding principle for both Marvel and DC. It’s the exact opposite of decompressed storytelling. (Most of the arcs so far have been single-issue, and each is packed with plot, character development, and smart comedy.)

So why aren’t more people buying it? Why not fix that by giving the book a try? There’s really no bad point to pick it up, and Marvel doesn’t seem to be rushing a trade paperback to the shelves.

Yay! I get to do a shopping list that has a healthy dose of “please buy this book because if you don’t they’ll cancel it and I’ll cry” thrown in the mix:

Fallen Angel #14 starts a new story arc after two stand-alone issues. This would be a good time to jump on, I’m guessing. From everything I’ve heard, DC has no idea how to market this interesting title (or much desire). That’s too bad, as it’s got a lot going for it. My favorite aspect, I think, is the sense of place that Peter David gives his fictional setting.

She-Hulk #6 arrives with a prison full of deadly, shrunken super-villains! (I think.) Deadly, shrunken super-villains, people! Buy it! It’s fun! Can’t you tell from all the exclamation points?! (Or do they just look desperate?)

Those are the on-the-cusp books I pick up, but I also note that there are some other “praised to the skies/selling in the dumps” titles on deck that you might take a look at: Fraction #5, Plastic Man #9, and Touch #5.

Other things I’m eagerly anticipating:

Astro City Special
Birds of Prey #72
Ex Machina #3

Hm… guess that’s it. It’s not everything I’ll be buying, but it’s everything I’m excited about. I’m on the fence about DC’s new Manhunter title. I can’t get worked up over Supreme Power #12 after the glacially paced tit-fest that was #11 (a feeling that’s spilled over into the Doctor Spectrum spin-off).

Maybe there’ll be some fun manga out. I could use something mindless and gleeful.

Planetes Vol. 2 is automatically at something of a disadvantage. Vol. 1 was one of the most terrific things I’ve ever read, and I think it’s natural to wonder if subsequent chapters can hold up.

Vol. 2 almost manages it. It’s still the most thoughtful, humane science fiction I’ve ever seen. It’s still stunningly rendered by creator Makoto Yukimura. Yukimura still writes stories with elegance and depth.

But there’s something here that doesn’t work, specifically the character of Tanabe, a new recruit to the crew of interstellar garbage haulers.

Let me explain where I’m coming from. I think, in general, Yukimura has a tremendous facility with characterization. With a minimum of exposition, readers can learn a great deal about the cast of Planetes – their ambitions, their philosophies, their backgrounds, what drives them or holds them back.

Take the example of Hachimaki’s irascible father, Goro, a legendary pilot. It only takes a few short, comic sketches to delineate his nature, circumstances, and belief system. Then, there’s Dr. Locksmith, the driving force behind the pending mission to Jupiter. His chilling response to a lethal accident paints a surprisingly layered picture of a complex and powerful figure. Or Hakimu, one of Hachimaki’s rivals for a spot on the crew of the Jupiter mission, who makes an immediate and mysterious impression.

Then, there’s Tanabe. We know little of her background prior to joining the garbage crew, though there’s no difficulty in picking up on her belief system, because she espouses it constantly. The problem, as I see it, is that we don’t know how her perspective evolved or what past circumstances made her who she is. Without that foundation, she’s little more than a Jiminy Cricket, offering unsolicited moral advice to Hachimaki. She’s more of a mouthpiece than a character.

That’s a problem, because she’s central to the driving character arc of the volume. Hachimaki, in pursuing a spot on the Jupiter mission, is becoming increasingly harsh, almost ruthless. Yukimura paints Hachimaki’s ambition as being at war with his humanity, and it’s a fascinating internal conflict.

Tanabe is on humanity’s side, arguing strenuously in favor of love and compassion. She isn’t wrong, but she barely knows Hachimaki to be able to judge him, and readers barely know her. Consequently, the arguments seem hollow. Tanabe could just as easily be reading her spiel from a self-help manual, and it’s easy to identify with Hachimaki’s annoyance. And with other characters presenting different sides of the argument much more organically, Tanabe often seems superfluous.

Still, the evolution of Hachimaki’s world view is fascinating to watch. It’s shaped alternately by events, observation, and interaction with the people around him. In the process, Yukimura creates a fascinating palate of coexisting philosophies. Why do people go into space? Why do they risk their lives? Why do they decide to come back? The answers are all deeply personal, making for rich storytelling.

Another wonderful aspect of Planetes is the scale of its science fiction. It doesn’t demand a great deal of suspension of disbelief from its readers, choosing instead to logically extrapolate human progress into outer space from where we are now. It’s easy enough to imagine space exploration reaching this point some 70 years in the future. That level of believability allows the manga to focus on character, which is almost always its greatest strength.

Wow! So, is Marvel willing to let anything be a surprise any more? First, they let most of Avengers 500 be posted on the web almost a month before publication. Now, they’ve released the cover of New Avengers 1, giving away most of the line-up.

Spoilers ho!

Bendis certainly wasn’t kidding when he said that he isn’t JLA-ing the Avengers. In fact, it seems to have gone from “Earth’s Mightiest Heroes” to “Bendis’s Favorite Heroes… Plus Some Guys We Had To Put In To Keep Their Solo Titles Afloat… Plus Sentry.”

Cap and Iron Man aside, the choices are either promising or bizarre, depending on what Bendis intends to do in terms of the guiding principles he establishes for the series. (Obviously, the old tone and modus operandi are out the window, or Vision wouldn’t be puking up villains.) And since I can’t resist the cry of the inner fanboy, let’s take a look at what we’ve got here.

Spider-Woman: The Jessica Drew Spider-Woman, no less, who happens to be my favorite of the arachnettes. (I never read Byrne’s short-lived book about the third in the line, but I’m fairly sure I would have hated her.) Jessica’s got a rather strange history with the team. She kind of hates them (on behalf of close friend Carol Danvers, though Carol got over it) and dismissed them “frat boys” in an issue of Alias, but they’ve saved her life and offered her membership in the past. Just judging by the cover, shiny optimism isn’t the defining tone of the book, so she’ll probably fit in fairly well. Hope she doesn’t end up being “the girl,” though.

Luke Cage: Hm. The guy who found the Defenders too confining is joining the Avengers? And he’s always seemed fairly resistant to conventional super-heroics. (Again, it’s possible that the set-up will be much different and looser under Bendis.) Still, I like Luke a lot, and I generally like the way Bendis writes him. His presence should make for some fairly interesting character dynamics.

Spider-Man: Sorry about the echo, but set-up will determine whether he works or not. He’s left the group in the past, finding them too high-profile and demanding, but it’s entirely possible those conditions will change. Still, there’s some disconnect between my perception of hard-luck Spidey and what I think of as the shiny, sanctioned Avengers. We’ll see. As with Cage, I like Bendis’s take on Spidey well enough.

Sentry: I skipped the mini-series that introduced the character in 2000, so I’m not quite sure how to react. I was always under the impression, though, that the character was intended to function as an allegory more than any kind of ongoing addition to the Marvel Universe. Any opinions on the mini? Is it worth a look? (Just on its own merits; I’m not seriously thinking about doing homework reading for New Avengers, so put down your butterfly nets.)

Wolverine: “I always knew this day would come, and now that it’s here, I feel strangely… serene.” Quinn Morgendorffer.