Uncanny X-Men #244

Uncanny X-Men #244 is the debut of everyone’s favorite firework/firecracker thrower Jubilee into the X-Universe! The story is by Chris Claremont and Marc Silvestri.

Jubilee has been causing a ruckus at the local mall with her mutant powers (this is so late 1980s it makes me sick!), causing the local mall security to call in the M Squad. Basically they are a private mutant hunting group that you call in. Instead of being pest control for mice, they hunt super humans.

Back at the X-Men’s temporary headquarters in the Australian outback, things are getting difficult for the X-Women. Mostly they just hate it there.

So Dazzler winds up convincing them that they need a day at the shopping mall to cheer them up. Things get weird with her, Storm, Psylocke and Rogue shopping and eventually going to a male revue. You read that right. What kind of shopping mall is this?

Eventually the M-Squad finds the X-Women and there’s a bit of a light scuffle between the two groups. The M-Squad are more like the Keystone Cops, and it’s up to the mutants to save everyone in the mall! As they teleport back home, Jubilee decides to join them and runs into the portal just in time.

Cyber Force #3

You all should be reading this. It’s a fun story about robots, a dystopian future with a looming apocalypse. And it’s free. Head over to Comixology right now and catch up with the series so we can talk about it.

So here we go. Everything starts coming together in this issue. Carinn and the rest of the Cyber Force characters are on the run from CDI’s forces. Through a bunch of dialogue and flashbacks, writer Marc Silvestri finally explains why Carinn and her cyber-dog Ninja are so important: the evil company pretty much wants to obliterate everything on Earth for a chance to start over again, with CDI genetically and technologically altered living things in some sort of new corporate run planet. It reminds me of a more sinister Buy N Large from the Wall-E movie. CDI is aware of Carinn knowing the full nature of their plan and she must be terminated. That’s why she was trying to find Matt Stryker and what’s left of Cyber Force in order to stop CDI. The book also ends with a bit of a bombshell, as it’s revealed that Stryker is most likely Carinn’s father.

Art on the book is by Khoi Pham. I love the way he’s able to add a heavy Silvestri influence into his own style. I never was that big of a fan of the characters during its original runs, but I’m really digging this take on Cyber Force. The one complaint I had on this issue was the dialogue. I know it’s sent in the future, but will people really making sex slang jokes from the late nineties?

Cyberforce #1-2

Top Cow’s new Kickstarter-supported Cyber Force is a lot of fun. And even better, it’s free.

Series creator Marc Silvestri teams up Top Cow’s president Matt Hawkins to bring back the these characters in a new revamped format. I guess I’m lucky going into this not remembering too much of my Cyber Force history, as they took the concept and started it from scratch.

Our story is set in the generally boring city of Pittsburgh, which has been rebuilt by the evil conglomerate CDI. Now renaming the home of the Penguins Millennium City, the company looks to have some sort of diabolical plan in motion (I assume global domination; it’s a comic book after all). They accomplished this with a secret army of hybrid human/robots. The only person who is both aware of this and can stop it is a teenage girl codenamed Velocity, the cyber enhanced daughter of CDI’s president.

The only people she can turn to are a bunch of renegade/decommissioned former CDI hybrids. The most popular of the original Cyberforcers, Ripclaw, is the first to be recruited after the company murders his wife and daughter. By the end of the second issue, the two go off to find the original Cyber Force leader Stryker, who has been hiding out with the civilians (normal people) leading a quiet life as a toll collector. The question at the end is will he go out of hiding and resume his war against the evil CDI.

The story really picks up by the second issue. The best way I can explain it is that it’s a tale of a dystopian future, like Terminator 2: Judgement Day or the worlds George Orwell created, with an evil government/authority that has little regard for its subjects and there is a counter movement bent on stopping it. What it then adds is a touch of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns with Stryker happily living a life off the grid on his own, but now he’s being provoked into getting back into life as a commando.

The story is a lot of fun and you can’t beat reading it, as it’s a free monthly installment. So if you pick this up, thank the generous people who funded the project. Eventually it’s going to be released as a hardcover and I think it’ll be a great read in that format. On the art side, Khoi Pham does a great job conjuring up his inner Silvestri.

The new Cyber Force gets a thumbs up. It’s less of a super hero comic and definitely on the science fiction end of the theme spectrum. You can check these out for free over at Comixology.

Incredible Hulk 1-2:

The Hulk is one of those characters that I rarely wind up reading. But the 2011 series by Jason Aaron featured art from Marc Silvestri. That got my attention. Having the 1990s be part of my formative years, I have a soft spot for his art and checked out the first two issues of Incredible Hulk.

Most of my Hulk reading these days have been of Red Hulk, so I jumped into this not knowing much of what the character has been up to since the World War Hulk story line finished. Apparently Doctor Doom was able to split the Hulk and Bruce Banner into two separate people. And to think we all thought he was a villain.

Hulk has been living pretty happily under the earth’s surface with the Moloids. They have a pretty sweet living arrangement; he protects them and their village from subterranean monsters. They cook the monster for him and treat him like a hero. It’s a win-win situation for everyone. Hulk grows a pretty sweet beard and dresses like a caveman now. It must be hard to find purple pants under the earth’s crust.

This happy living arrangement gets interrupted by Amanda Von Doom (Aaron takes the time to make the “no relation” joke and it is very well played) who is part of a government agency that stops rogue mad scientist types. Apparently since they’ve been separated  Banner has gone nuts, and they need someone to stop him.

While this is going on, Banner has been working on finding a way to recreate the original gamma ray incident that caused him to turn into the monster. He’s pulled one of the worst boyfriend moves ever; he tricked on-again/off-again girlfriend Betty Ross to vacation with him on a nearly deserted island, only because it had been exposed to gamma radiation. Once Betty finds that out, she rightfully becomes jealous, transforms herself into the Red She Hulk and leaps away. This scene was almost comical, as to how little of her swimsuit was left after she changed into her hulk form.

Hulk, Amanda and her forces are en route to the album where we get one of the most ridiculously awesome things I’ve ever seen in comics:  the incredible Hulk fighting mutant sharks! I’m very sure I was smiling the whole time during this part of the story.

Unfortunately, that smile was turned to a frown. Issue #2 ends with Banner getting ready to send a brigade of his own mutant animal pals to attack Subterranea and kill all of Hulk’s Moloid buddies. Sadface.

These two issues were a lot of fun to read, and I’ll be checking out what happens next. Is it because I’m a Silvestri fan? Kinda. Is it because I like books that have giant sharks? Sorta. Fear of what will inevitably happy to the Moloids and wanting to see Hulk get his revenge? Definitely.

 

Marc Silvestri: Free “Cyber Force” Comics Through Kickstarter?

So who here has checked out Kickstarter? The website is a way to get sponsorship/patronage for artistic endeavors. A bunch of comic books and comic related projects have received sponsorship from the website, most prominently Dave Sim was able to fund-raise over $60,000 for an audio/visual adaptation of Cerebus: High Society. Image Comics co-founder Marc Silvestri is taking fan-sourcing one step further with the relaunch of Cyber Force.

Cyber Force featured a team of cyborg mutant heroes, first published back in 1992 as one of the original Image Comics titles. Over the last twenty years, the characters have appeared on and off. But for the next relaunch of the series, Silvestri is turning to Kickstarter.

In the past, fans have been able to support projects they wanted through Kickstarter. It goes something like this:

1. Creator makes appeal to audience, asking for them to sponsor the project. As incentive, they give sponsors a copy of the work or some other token of appreciation.
2. Once they get the desired funding, they use said funds to pay for/support themselves while producing the project.
3. Project gets sold, creator makes money and sponsors feel they did their part.

According to the Los Angeles Times’ Hero Complex, Silvestri plans on doing something different with the Kickstarter model. He plans on using it to fund the project, then distribute it for free, both digitally and physically.

So because of that mind-set our unique plan to reintroduce Top Cow’s original launch series “Cyber Force” using Kickstarter fits right in. Kickstarter itself is a genius idea and a win-win for everybody, really. And we want to use its crowd-sourced funding in typical Top Cow fashion, meaning differently. While most everybody uses Kickstarter to fund a project in order to build it and then sell it, we at Top Cow are going to use the funds to build “Cyber Force” and give it away — for free! Plus we’re not talking just one issue but five full issues of the comic. And it won’t be free just digitally, but also as a full-color printed comic that will be available at any participating comic shop. So for people that want to read “Cyber Force” digitally — yes, including torrent sites — it’s free. And for anyone wanting to hold a traditional comic in their hands to read it — it’s still free. We figure this is a great way to reward loyal comic fans plus get new people to get onboard reading comics and see what they’ve been missing. Plus it allows fans to actually get involved in the comic making process and be part of something truly groundbreaking that will help all of us that love the genre.

 

So Silvestri and company are doing this for free. Well, sort of. The cost of making the comic, including financial compensation for the creative staff, production costs and printing distribution, is all coming from crowdsourcing. I wonder if any of the other major publishers are going to give this a try. This might be the only way we can get another Longshot mini-series. What do you think?