The Four Color Media Monitor

Salon, that insane left-wing bastion of a site, wrote about 5 comics they say we should read if we like the new TV series based on Nick Fury's law enforcement agency. 2 of them I'll say are worthy, and those would be Marvels and Astro City by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross. But the other 3 are decidedly not worth the effort. First, they cite DC's Gotham Central:

This 2003-2006 series, written by Ed Brubaker and Greg Rucka, was basically “The Wire” in Gotham, showing what a maddening, terrifying job it is to be a cop in Batman’s city. Just like in “The Wire,” you get to see the camaraderie and humor of cops and the stifling power of bureaucracy — but with supervillains like Two-Face and the Mad Hatter added to the mix.

And maybe it would've worked better if it hadn't ended up becoming an excuse for Rucka/Brubaker to turn the recurring cast member Renee Montoya into a lesbian, who later was turned into a female take on The Question. The former step was pretty contrived, and there was nothing in the past decade of her existence to back up such a pointless, politically correct move. Interestingly, when the New52 came around, this particular step was mostly discarded into the timestream, and Montoya's presence marginalized, even as the new take on Batwoman remained.

Then, they bring up Fury: My War Gone By:

This recent 12-issue series by Garth Ennis and Goran Parlov takes Marvel’s superspy away from superheroes entirely and shows his misadventures in Vietnam, Cuba and Nicaragua, working for the CIA rather than SHIELD. If you didn’t think comic books could offer a moving, detailed look at the Cold War, you’d be wrong. I’m not surprised it’s great, given Ennis’ seminal work on the Punisher and his creator-owned series “Preacher.”

And I'm not surprised Ennis filled it with subtle anti-war messages, as this gushy review on Comics Alliance reveals:

If recent revelations can teach us anything, it’s that Americans will always have a shadow behind us. Since the end of World War II, we have invested so much money and power and authority in our military-industrial complex and clandestine forces that it’s categorically absurd to believe that our privacy has been anything but compromised, our national innocence — if it ever existed — anything but forfeit. For at least the last twelve years, American soldiers have been engaged in seemingly perpetual wars across the world, while potentially every electronic conversation we’ve had has been stolen and scrutinized, and the lie we’ve been told is that it’s all been in the name of American freedom.

The truth is much worse. Like the titular character in Garth Ennis and Goran Parlov‘s just-concluded Fury MAX series, we simply love war, and we cannot stop ourselves from waging it.

Nor am I surprised they'd be so favorable to a vision that's a shameless lie. Since when do Americans really want to celebrate fighting with tanks, machine guns and grenades? Specifically, right-wing Americans? I think that's one of the biggest lies a left-wing site could possibly tell, and predictably turns its back on all the fascists, communists and jihadists who are the real lovers of war as sport. It's not that people from civilized societies want to fight wars, but that they have to, in order to save innocent lives as was done during WW1 and WW2, and to stop tyrants from setting up regimes that could end up becoming breeding grounds for chemical warfare, as in the case of Iran.

Salon goes on to recommend Brian Bendis's Powers, the series where superheroes prove surprisingly easy to take down. Another strange thing about his series is:

Like “Gotham Central,” this ongoing series (by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming) is about cops in a superhero world, but it’s a self-contained world, allowing the series to kill a superhero or two in each major arc.

As is usually the case with Bendis, the dialogue is quick and funny, never cute, and totally absorbing, while the plots are full of commentary on the superhero world as well as this world, especially our predatory media. Oeming’s art is stunning and unique: it’s somehow cartoony and noir at the same time. This is one of the most distinctive-looking comics I’ve ever read, and despite the similar concept, it’s nothing like “Gotham Central.”

But that doesn't make it any good, and Bendis's storytelling has plummeted even further since he became a leading writer for Marvel. How peculiar that Powers supposedly critiques the media, since Bendis has already long ended up pandering to it! But maybe he never intended to comment on left-wing media, though it sure is weird that Salon's writers would like it if outfits like theirs were targets of his commentary. But, I have a feeling that despite suggestions to the contrary, leftist media is not a target of his criticism, maybe because they're the ones he usually caters to. And I don't see how killing off superheroes is fun.

And these are simply not books I'd consider recommendable for anyone watching S.H.I.E.L.D on TV. I would recommend the older Fury stories from the Silver Age chronicling both his WW2 military career and the time he was appointed a senior operative for S.H.I.E.L.D, since that's where he really clicked.

Labels: dc comics, marvel comics, msm propaganda, politics