All our problems are solved apart from food, money, and somewhere to sleep

Welcome to what is apparently now my blog dedicated to posts about canceled comics from the 1980s, as today I am speaking about Marvel's Power Pack #63, a tie-in to whatever "Legacy" is - maybe it's a crossover, maybe it's a one-off event where Marvel drag their limbo properties out of the drawer to publish a copyright/trademark-affirming issue so they don't get sniped like Marvel sniped DC Comics on the Captain Marvel brand, who can really say?  I wasn't planning to buy this one as I've been repeatedly burned by the underwhelming modern appearances of the various characters, but my brother, bless his little cotton socks, took matters into his own hands and bought a copy for me, kind of like if an elderly relative hears you like Batman and buys you "that Hush comic", in that the sentiment is greatly appreciated regardless of the quality of the gift.
Power Pack, should you be unaware, are a kid superhero team pretty unique to Western comics in that they experienced largely straight-faced adventures in the dour and grimy Manhattan of the 1980s before Rudolf Guilliani cleaned the place up (not that this cleanup would stop the likes of Daredevil living in this specific time and place well into the 2000s), and weren't the bubbly, self-aware iconoclastic superhero youths we're more used to seeing in popular culture via the anime-inspired Teen Titans, the Franco-riffic Ladybug, or even other Marvel titles like Ms Marvel or Gwenpool: Power Pack were grim-faced poverty-line protagonists right out of a Steinbeck novel, though they were viewed with some bemusement by the comics-buying public of the time, who - unlike the tolerant, racially and gender-diverse open-minded metrosexual comic book readership of 2017 - were older straight white males who were a bit entitled about their hobby and didn't like characters who weren't straight white males, and preferably teenagers.  No, I don't understand that last bit, either.
Anyway, Power Pack weren't really a priority for a relaunch after their title folded with its 62nd issue, especially with their paltry hundred thousand readers (yes, I know), so apart from a miniseries in the early 2000s that was ignored by almost everyone (especially Marvel writers) they languished in comics limbo before the inevitable death blow for any comic book superteam: having the characters split off into co-starring/backing cast roles in other team books like New Warriors, Runaways, Loners, Fantastic Four, and Future Foundation.  This is a blow that comic book superteams can rarely recover from because now the characters are off acquiring continuity baggage that most editors and fans psychopathically resist disregarding, so if there's ever a reunion story down the line, all that baggage has to be incorporated or acknowledged and God help the poor comics writer who considers such things a trifling matter and not important in the greater scheme of telling an interesting or entertaining story - this is comics continuity, dammit and...
Ah, who am I kidding?  The dang thing has a big old #63 on the flipping cover, it's not like anyone can pretend continuity isn't an anchor dragging on this endevour and the story has any kind of mandate to hold up objectively AND YET... for some reason, the framing makes it clear that this is the doomed intention of writer Devin Greyson, here crafting an admittedly neat getaround for the continuity mess she's been saddled with by making the story an unreliable flashback related by Katie Power, one of the only characters from the original comic whose timeline isn't now a car crash of half-assed never-finished ideas and aimless sexual objectification.
As a fan of the comic, I of course realise that Katie is unreliable almost immediately through my encyclopedic knowledge of Power Pack, but mainly because a character in the story explicitly states she is an unreliable narrator.  Continuity-wise, she's unreliable because she seems to look up to her older brother Alex as a good superhero rather than one of the worst and most ineffective superheroes in the history of comics to the extent that his finest comics moment was when Doctor Doom backhand-slapped him until he bawled like a child, which was very, very funny to read, but, you know, probably not something you put in the scrapbook.
As an objective exercise in storytelling, I felt it suffered from none of the characters being distinctive, and even if you allow that this is because it's a tale told by a single character from their POV, we never actually establish what that narrator's character is.  What we get here is essentially an above-average inventory strip expanded to a full issue, and while there's plenty to recommend it between Marika Cresta's crisp art and Devin Greyson keeping things straight-faced and largely devoid of winks to the audience (though the aforementioned character talking about unreliable narrators briefly brings things into lampshade-hanging territory), I was ultimately disappointed in it as an addition to the characters' ongoing saga more than as a standalone.  In Greyson's defence, I totally rambled on about continuity for a few paragraphs for a reason: you need to have read a couple of dozen books just to have the full background on what's happening in this one ("Alex hasn't been seen since the reformation of the multiverse" is an actual line of exposition in this), and Marvel needed to have some confidence that someone with Greyson's experience could have told a tale worth reading that featured all the characters and could have springboarded the property into an ongoing series.
As it is, this feels like filler, and though if they ever get to a full reboot I am totally there, this has probably exhausted any lingering curiosity I might have had about where a contemporary take on the property might have gone.

I just can't stand it when good things happen to people I used to love

As we're very near the 32nd anniversary of the publication of the first issue of Marvel UK's War Cars, I thought I'd dig out my old issues to see if they were as bloody terrible as I remembered - oh sorry, anniversaries are supposed to be celebratory, aren't they?  Well when you're anniversarying a 32 year-old UK comic based on toys that in the end were never released outside Asia, maybe that just isn't possible, The Internet.
Although to be entirely fair, it's not without some positive attributes - the paper stock is not as bad as I thought it would be, and the staples are still intact after all these years.

The toys themselves had no background mythology or context for any supposed conflict or tension that would force the blue team (sports cars that transformed into robots) and the red team (dune buggies that transformed into spiders) to fight each other, so the holes had to be filled in by Marvel editorial staff and writers on the fly, who apparantly took some box art of the teams racing against a background of a nuclear explosion literally and made the story about a series of races across a post-apocalyptic Earth, so it's like Hunger Games, if Hunger Games had Transformers in it and was also Death Race.

It may surprise you to learn that there's not very much on the internet about a comic from three decades ago that no-one bought or gave a poop about, but apparently the franchise was originally called Car Wars to cash in on the cultural cache of the Star Wars name.  It was quickly retitled War Cars, however, to avoid the litigation that nearly befell the theatrically-released pilot of Battlestar Galactica (which all good nerds will know was originally called "Star Worlds" before hastily having "Saga of" added to the title to foil Lucas' vicious legal department), though the change came too late for the UK manufacturers of the toys, who had the name emblazoned on everything from box art to sticker albums, all of which had to be dumped in an English coalmine by Stadium UK, the licence-holder for the toys in the western market who went bankrupt shortly after, leaving Marvel to sell a comic based on toys no-one had heard of and most likely never would.  The villains being referred to as "reds" (in reference to the colour of their vehicles) was not unnoticed by then-popular communist Arthur Scargill (if you're under 30 and reading this, he was sort of the Russell Brand of his day), and - on top of a coalmine being closed down specifically to be used as landfill space for the toys - was taken as evidence of a campaign against trade unions, prompting him to denounce the comic in a newsletter that caused the book to be boycotted by working class families across the UK, leading to the only moment in popular culture when War Cars actually entered the mainstream, after Ben Elton made a joke that more copies of the comic were burned in the street by angry adults than were bought by joyful children.

To put it mildly, War Cars was not a hit, and copies of the comic are so rare that they often go for stupid prices on eBay.  Seriously - 32 pounds for this?  The effing thing's got dog ears and someone's already done the word search and maze puzzles, not to mention some kid's coloured-in the illustrations for the text story.

Scanned from a copy described on eBay as "near mint condition" - MY ASS - this is the first episode of the strip as it appeared in the comic, not just a whopping 4 pages of original content exclusive to the UK market, but in colour, too, so Marvel UK were clearly planning on War Cars being a major title to have made this much effort.  The reprint material typical of the time that pads out the rest of the book is stuff like Killraven and an adaptation of Planet of the Apes by European writer/artist Ernő Zórád - that was probably reprinted dozens of times in the English market by that point - which keeps the post-apocalyptic theme going, alongside overly-aggressive editorial input from the (presumably fictional) "Sargent Wheels", who despised "the reds" and seemed to be some kind of talking scooter, just in case you ever forgot it was the 1980s.
I'll see if I can dig out some more issues to scan in later blog posts, as I am pretty sure I have at the very least got all the episodes of the first story arc to hand.  I imagine it's something we can all look forward to.

a meal between breakfast and lunch most often enjoyed by childless couples and gay men

This is Just Like Me, a short story by my comics wife Lee Robson about your average common or garden murderer, which originally appeared in Accent UK's Predators graphic novel.  I'd have got Lee over to explain more about it, but he's had a sip of ale today, and is thus insensible until he's had a good night's sleep.

 "Again with the old crap, Bryan?" I hear absolutely no-one say from here in my barely-inhabited corner of the web where only spiders and loneliness dwell - does anyone even use Blogger anymore but me?  It's all Twatting updates and pictures on your Tumblegrams these days, but until I clog up the data allowance of the Blogger account - and your Google update feeds, you poor sods - with every last piece of half-baked tat I've ever drawn, it'll do me just fine.

So Ms Marvel got relaunched yet again.  It's been an eventful flip-flop act for the (original) character as Marvel Comics have to keep bringing out a book every so often under the name Ms Marvel or the trademark lapses, but on top of that they have to bring out a book called Captain Marvel every so often for the same reasons, and these two titles - apart from an entertaining Captain Marvel series in the early 00s by Peter David - have been attributed to the same character on and off depending upon what copyright the company was intent on squatting upon that week, it only being now - four decades later - that someone has cottoned on to the bright idea of just using one or other of the titles on a separate character entirely.  This being the year 2014 and because we know the Nazis were wrong, diversity was floated at some point in the round table discussion and approved because... well, because it's the year 2014/Nazis were wrong and diversity is less good manners and more common sense because there are kind of plenty of honky superheroes already and if your aim is a superhero who's different from what went before, you have to actually try something different sooner or later.

Based on issue 1, it is kind of like Runaways, only I hold out hope Ms Marvel's online fandom will not be as aggressively annoying and evangelical as Runaways fans have been for the last 12 years.  Obviously the presence of Runaways' original artist and co-creator Adrian Alphona is a factor in such an observation, but there's more to tie the two together, like the central teenage female characters, an opening scene in the first issue where the protagonist dabbles in online fanfiction based around the already-established superheroes of the Marvel universe, and the main character's idolising of superheroes that owes a great deal to Runaways cast member Victor Mancha, in what I consider the first chink in the armor as Victor Mancha is one of the most boring comics characters ever created, once spending half the pages of his Son Of Ultron one-shot taking a stroll through what looks like Detroit - he is that boring.  The new Ms Marvel is not as boring so there's victory one, though it's tempered by the character - and the book - suffering from a bit of overexplaining, but it's mostly Disney-cartoon-levels of over-expository dialogue that comes off as a touch of oversharing from someone who's given too much thought to their first world problems (locally referred to as "Gobshite Syndrome"), so it at least ties into the central theme of searching for an individual identity, albeit by leaning heavily upon the usual middle class problems like parent strife and what's expected of "a proper young lady" - again, all very Disney Princess stuff so far.
To be fair on the issue of expository dialogue, it's issue #1 and there's a lot to fit in, but then again, it kind of makes it baffling when right at the end of a book that explains everything in occasionally-cringe-inducing levels of exposition from its very first page, the central conceit of how the character actually gets her powers hinges upon events elsewhere in a Marvel crossover event that goes without explanation here, the most important part of the story so far being reduced to a shrug and a "shit happens", and I'd argue that the last page and a half is redundant storytelling that could have been dropped in favor of a little explanation away from the taken-for-granted conceit among only the dedicated white comics-reading male audience that some quarters purport the book to be an antidote to that it might be explained later, or that the book you're buying on a month-to-month basis will make much more sense if you'd only buy it as a trade collection half a year from now.
G Willow Wilson's writing is solid despite the GS mentioned, and Alphona's linework - while looser and slightly rushed-looking compared to when he's been paired with more seasoned inkers - in my opinion possesses much more character and style than before.  The colour is good, too, but maybe a little more variable and less bold that would be expected of something so heavily inspired by the storytelling and visual tropes of Western animation.

It's a decent enough first issue despite its problems, but I like that Wilson throws so much of the ethnicity and religious upbringing of the character into the first issue in order to draw some drama directly from the fact that the character hasn't had a traditional WASP background despite her immersion in American culture, and though obviously this runs the risk that you might view the characters as politically correct constructions built around a corporate mandate rather than distinct personalities, it does at least avoid the trap Geoff Johns fell into when he introduced the gun-wielding, tattooed, car-thief Muslim character whose name I have hilariously forgotten already in the pages of Green Lantern.  It's a thing that tv and movie writers do all the time where they find like maybe two whole facts about something and then use those alone as the basis for their scene-setting or character-building, and in Johns' case he had to write a story about a Muslim character with tattoos based on the design sketches approved by editorial, and sure enough if you Google "Muslims" and "tattoos" the first few results explain that tattoos are "haram" in Islam, and Johns' script had a character point to the Muslim character's ink and say "I thought tattoos were Haram in Islam?"  Basically, I am positing that writers can often betray just how far they bothered delving into the cultures they're exploring, as there wasn't much else in that story to inform the reader about the religion of the character, but with Wilson - a Muslim convert - there's arguably the beginning of a sense she might have more insight than a white male writer whose first and seemingly last stop on the research trail was a Google search that took him to Yahoo Answers (a well-named site because answers are often given by total yahoos).

"I thought that some of the metaphysical imagery was particularly effective."

Looking at this panel, Lee would ideally be stuck to elicit some negative subtext on my part about his troubling quest to become Richard Curtis, but if he can tear himself away from writing Shirley Valentine fanfic or listening to his copy of the We Will Rock You cd personally signed by his hero Ben Elton long enough, he'll probably find it.

Reading:

Alex Zalban wraps up his first major project for Marvel with the fourth issue of Thor and the Warriors Four, and all told he's done a good job with most of it, avoiding going too far into mawkishness or sentimentality to get across the stakes for the pre-teen cast as they pursue their quest to steal the youth-bestowing golden apples of Idun from the orchards of Asgard in order to help their terminally-aged grandmother dodge the coffin, but on the other hand no doubt leaving many a frustrated reader unhappy that the writer has chosen to spare the child protagonists the loss of a loved one at the finale, instead opting for the happy ending that he's advisedly chosen to avoid overselling when it comes.

And make no mistake, there's more than likely a few grumping that this child's entertainment isn't terribly gritty or full of death and ninjas being stabbed in the face, since the aging Pack fan does occasionally seem to wander into this continuity-free series for their fix (after the regular Marvel universe Power Pack became pretty much unsellable when some genius came up with the bright idea of making kid superheroes adults - removing their only selling point - and then wondering why no-one's interested in buying the books anymore), and to those aging yet still somehow adolescent fanboys I snort a hearty "PSHAW!" and return to my entertainment, happy that any lingering vestige of the moron in me who secretly longed for the book to be about kids crying over a dead granny has been thwarted.

There are some great character moments between the beginning and ending of the quest like eldest girl Julie's lateral thinking and belief in the idea of family above superheroics, though the counterpoint of eldest kid Alex's musing that "stealing is wrong" ignores that the gods may be hoping people come along and steal their stuff (ie: fire) since through that act of engagement between mortal and deity is born their continuation in our culture through myth- or if that's too heavy for the little rugrat, he could try remembering that his first act as a superhero was to nick a doomsday weapon from Uncle Sam. No-one likes a hypocrite, kiddo, even if we do keep electing them.
His realisation near the end and subsequent heroic turn feel a bit of a let-down since he's the least interesting character and it feels like he's the focus more in that he's a blue-eyed blond male rather than - despite what Thor's hammer may think otherwise - because of any inherent worthiness on his part to be the central hero of the piece when it's essentially an ensemble thing and he's not contributed much on the journey for it to suddenly to be a Hero's Journey all about him - right up until then it hasn't been that, and when it becomes that kind of story at the last, it's a leftfield twist that makes it all slightly less of a tale than it had been. Less focused, certainly, and to an extent less epic as well.
Did I mention the book looks absolutely lovely in places?

The Guruhiru art studio does an absolutely bang-up job with some great storytelling that I wouldn't normally expect of a manga/anime-inspired style, which traditionally seems to focus more on producing static poses and character sketches than sequential artwork (a consequence of most manga artists using pre-rendered backgrounds), but here it combines with a clear animated style and energy that just makes me jealous the more I look at it.
At the back, there's also a Colleen Coover short where the kids meet another Marvel mythological refugee-turned-superhero in the Mighty Hercules as he explains the relationship between theology and science, which yields one of my favorite images in a book that's already packed with great panels:

If I used an arbitrary ranking system, I'd give it a solid 174 out of a possible 182.