Some months ago, I went into a wide survey of the various ways that comics creators actually make their comics.  The interaction between writer and artist was a particular focus and two main ways for putting the scripts together:

• Script first – writer delineates what’s to be on each page: number of panels, dialog, action, points-of-view, etc.
• Plot first – writer gives a general outline of the plot and the artist provides the panels to which the writer adds dialog and captions.

This week I would like to cover how the creative team on The Sheriff of Babylon does their thing.  Ironically, I don’t read the title and the material that I am presenting and analyzing is taken from the back of issue #2 of the Vertigo title The Dark & Bloody.  I can’t say why this piece got included but I am glad that it did as it is always helpful to see how someone does it.

A bit of dwerping around on the internet has revealed to me that The Sheriff of Babylon is a 8 issue limited series from Vertigo written by Tom King with art by Mitch Gerads.  Vertigo describes the comic series as:

The behind-the-scenes look covers the creation of page 7 of issue #4 and is written by Mitch Gerads.  He breaks the creation down into seven steps.

Step 1:  First he gets the script from Tom King, which provides a description of action and dialog, panel-by-panel.

Gerads makes a point of saying that the script arrives about a week before he even starts and that allows him to ‘live with it for a while’, by which he means that he reads it several times and plays the action out mentally before he starts forming them on paper.

Step 2: Gerads develops the layouts in a quick and loose fashion, which he calls ‘Mitch Gibberish’.  The idea here is to get the overall look and feel into the rest of the creative team’s hands.  Unfortunately, he doesn’t get into any back-and-forth that may exist where King or editor Jamie Rich may ask for adjustments.

Step 3:  Gerads tries to bring a sense of realism to the book since the events are based on real-life.  He, apparently does this by looking at photography of Iraq, military hardware, etc.  He also shoots photo references in which he acts out the parts (or gets help from his family – here pictured his twelve-year-old cousin Coop).

Step 4:  He says that he tweaks and arranges all of these photographs into a reference collage in Photoshop as a prelude to drawing.

Step 5:  According to Gerads, The Sheriff of Babylon is done completely digitally.  So he then turns the reference layout into a digital blue-line drawing and then covers the drawing with digital inks, resulting in a black-and-white layout.

Step 6:  Once the inks are done, Gerads hands off the pages to the color flatter, Joseph Franzzetta, who blocks in random colors so that Gerads can continue to draw.

What I believe is happening in Step 6 is that Franzzetta gets the art carefully colored with a palette that can be easily remapped to whatever Gerads want it to be.  For example, the green sky in the image above maps to the sandy colored sky in the final done in Step 7.

Step 7: Gerads does the final colors and formats it before sending it off to the printer.  Sadly, he doesn’t provide much in the way of how he formats and if formatting includes the speech balloons.

So there you have it, a quick look at how the art is done on The Sheriff of Babylon following the script-first technique.

I can’t say for sure whether I like the Image series Pretty Deadly by author/scripter Kelly Sue Deconnick and artist Emma Rios.  One some level I like it a lot but in other areas I find its low points so distracting that it is hard to remember the good parts.

Set in the Old West of the late 1800s, the series is as much fairy tale as it is a Wild, Weird West tale (a la East of West, The Sixth Gun, or the Deadlands).  It’s also constructed as a frame tale, in which the main story is about the telling of the real story by one character for the benefit of the other.

Our western version of Homer is, in fact, a dead rabbit who goes by the name of Bunny Bones.  The audience is filled with only one listener – Butterfly – who often asks questions and urges Bunny Bones to include something or skip some other thing.   There is very much a quality of a parent reading to a child in their dialog.

The outer tale opens with Butterfly asking about the day they both met; the day in which Bunny Bones escaped his earthly life and become something simultaneously more and less.  Butterfly is curious about his death and whether Bunny was afraid.

The gun-wielding little girl, as we come to know later, is Ginny, a daughter of death, and much of Bunny’s story centers around her, although she plays only a secondary role.

The bulk of Bunny’s story deals with the events that led to Ginny’s birth and the ongoing aftermath as their consequences play out.  However, the thread of the tale is tugged in the middle as Butterfly, after asking Bunny to tell him her story, urges the skeletal rabbit to skip to the other girl.

The other girl is small and dark and wears a vulture costume and has mismatched eyes.  Her name is Sissy and she’s just arrived in a western town with her hulking, ‘blind’ guardian by the name of Fox.  The pair has a strange side show that they perform for whatever change the townsfolk are willing to throw their way. In it Fox, who seems to be able to see despite his hidden eyes, stands at the rear of the stage, holding a large banner bearing the likeness of many people and events; a storyboard of sorts; with all the characters born out in Tarot Card fashion.  At the front Sissy weaves a tale, in doggerel, of the gain and loss of the wonderful woman Beauty by her jealous husband Mason.

In her yarn, Sissy tells how Mason, fearful and envious, locks Beauty up in a tower to keep her from other men.  Despite her numerous prayers and entreaties, Mason refuses to free her.  Her desperation grows until she decides death is better.  Using her own blood, Beauty begs for death; but instead being claimed by one of Death’s minions, the head man comes himself.  He is immediately taken with her and falls in love and weds her.  Together they have a child, whom Death calls Ginny.  After her birth, Death allows Beauty to depart from life, but the child, as Sissy’s ragged rhyme says,

After she’s done with the show, Sissy mingles amongst the crowd for and is soon accosted by a crafty redhead by the name of Johnny Coyote.  While outwardly he is pressing some coins into her palm, secretly he is manipulating her into stealing the Binder, a parchment or document of some importance to Death.

Fox and Sissy take a break from their journey to the next town and settle in for a night on prairie.  Sitting by the fire, Sissy idly burns the Binder and waves the flaming sheet under Foxes blind eyes.  He immediately realizes what the thing is and flees with her to the closest safe house run by a woman named Sarah.

In the meantime, Johnny, who is spending some time indulging his carnal side in the town, receives a visit from one of Death’s little helpers, a reaper who goes by the name of Big Alice.  She’s tracking down the Binder and, after forcing the information out of Johnny with a bullet placed ever so lovingly in his left thigh, she begins her pursuit.

Fox and Sissy, having rested at Sarah’s, decide to press on into the night.  But before they go, Sissy teaches the summoning song for Ginny to one of Sarah’s kids.  A good thing too, since Big Alice soon arrives with her crew and begin to take Sarah and her farm and family apart.  This ruckus stops when the rhyme is said and Ginny arrives.  Ginny soon kills the crew and destroys Big Alice, who returns to Death disembodied but otherwise, apparently no worse for wear.

Back in the town, a talking raven, by the name of Molly rouses Johnny to take action.  He soon starts his own pursuit.  Meanwhile, the pair Fox and Missy continue their flight.  Missy tells Fox of a woman she barely remembers, who gave her something – a key.  It isn’t clear at this point what significance this interlude has and, unfortunately, it doesn’t become much clear later.

Eventually Missy refuses to go any further until Fox explains what it’s all about, why they are fleeing and who is pursuing and why.  Fox reveals that he is the Mason of her story and then he tells the rest of his tale with Beauty and Death, the part she’s never heard.  He tells how, when he learned she had died that he wanted to follow her to death.  He tells of how he dug and dug and dug until he found his way into Death’s realm.  Death refused to grant Fox/Mason release and is ready to send him away when Mason becomes aware of Ginny.  He invokes his right to the child since Beauty was his wife.  Death rebuffs the claim but offers a deal:  Mason must go to a river of blood where

Once there, if he kills the beast, Death will bind Ginny to the spirit realm and Mason will live out his normal lifespan and once he has dies, Death will allow Mason to meet his wife and ask for her forgiveness.  Should Mason refuse the deal, Death will unlease Ginny on him to exact revenge for Mason’s ill treatment of her mother.

When Mason arrives at the river, he sees that the beast that is birthed is a small girl with mismatched eyes

and he refuse to slay her.  Instead he cares for her as his own.

During this revelation, rain waters swell the river next to where they are standing and a flood soon separates Fox (Mason) and Sissy.  Johnny finds her and somewhat explains the Binder.  He admits that her tricked her into stealing it but he thought she would read it and not burn it.  That is the unspoken reason why the song sung by Sarah’s boy brings Ginny out when all the times the song was sung by Sissy nothing happened.

Johnny vows to give Sissy straight answers but as he starts to explain things about her the scene changes to Death’s domain.  Like Mason before him, Death too can’t let Beauty go but her words and company are no comfort.  She tells him that she knows that each Death must live and must die and that his time as death draws to a close as his cycle is ending.  She offers him the comfort that when he dies he can join her.  But Death has other plans

At this point, it seems likely but remains categorically stated, that Sissy is the replacement and that Death’s hope in sending Mason to kill her was to prevent anyone ever becoming Death, thereby stopping the natural order of things.

The one flaw in his plans is his wayward child Ginny.  Now released, she soon tracks down Fox.  Together, they enjoy a gentle father-daughter moment wherein they try to bash each other’s brains out.   During the course of their ‘debate’, Fox begs for Ginny to spare him long enough to save Sissy.  He tries to sway her by letting her know that she had visited Sissy in her dreams (hence the mysterious key discussed above).  After a great deal of brawling, Fox is able to gain her sympathy by having her understand Sissy’s fate, and perhaps by waking Ginny’s own hostility towards Death, who keeps her mother as much a prisoner in death as Mason did in life.

Eventually, everyone reunites and heads to Death’s realm.  His guardians, the Day Maid and Night Maid, allow entrance to his realm since they recognize Sissy as the new Death ascendant

the being who reunites them again as a single entity.  Apparently the world has been torn by the machinations that Death is employing so that he may be with Beauty forever.

The rest of the tale is actually easier to summarize if not to understand.  Ginny retrieves the key from Sissy (but why?); Ginny stops Death by running him through with a sword; Death dies; Sissy takes over as the new Death in a Vulture guise and the Soul of the World (whatever that really means) is healed.

If you understand these last bits you are quite a bit better than I am.  This whole arc has a mythic, fable-like quality that has a great deal of charm.  But much of this charm is marred by poor storytelling.  The reader must interpolate between scenes or read additional information provided on the back cover just to understand character information (e.g. why Johnny knows Death, why he holds a grudge).  Most grievous is the fact that new information is place into the previous-issue summary.  Why should a reader, who has already read the previous issues, be required to read the front page summaries in order to get critical exposition?  And why does the story found in them change in subtle ways from issue to issue?  This lack of craftsmanship severely detracts from what could have been a good slice of myth.

Nonetheless there are some good bones here and perhaps Pretty Deadly will mature into a fine vehicle for storytelling.  I haven’t given up on it yet but if Volume 2 is like this one, then the cycle will end for it as well.

Dramatis Personae

Clockwise from upper left:  Fox, Sissy, Night Maid, Johnny Coyote, Sarah, Molly, Death, Day Maid, Big Alice.  In the middle are the storyteller and audience:  Bunny Bones and Butterfly.

Walk into any Barnes and Noble bookstore and you’ll find, prominently displayed on a table near the front of the store, a host of adult coloring books and supplies of brush markers.  It seems that adult coloring is a new pastime.  I’ve tried it and it is a lot of fun.  To be clear, I never gave up on coloring the old way (crayons and kids coloring books), so maybe I am biased but whatever.

At first, the only available books featured complex geometric patterns or stylized animal prints or nature scenes – you know… adult things.  Fortunately, comics publishers have been jumping on the bandwagon and one can now get coloring books with content ranging from EC’s horror line to everyone’s favorite moral reprobate: Deadpool.

All of that is well and good and I have purchased coloring books of both stripes – sober adult content and cheeky adolescent fare – and have enjoyed coloring in each kind.  Up to a point.

Of course applying crayon or marker to page has its drawbacks.  The most notable one is that the original unfilled image is lost forever once you start coloring unless you buy another copy or you photocopy, scan, or otherwise digitally reproduce the original.  Personally, I don’t want to indulge in the former and much prefer the reproduction route. But if one is going to do that, why limit oneself to what the publishers deem appropriate.  Branch out.

And so that is just what I did.  Using a smart phone (or digital camera or a scanner), some photo-editing software, and some of those DC Showcase or Marvel Essentials black-and-white reprint volumes, you can make your own custom coloring book and get started practicing as a do-it-yourself colorist.

For this post, I photographed an image from Essential Captain Marvel, Volume 2 in which Thanos first reveals that he possesses the cosmic cube.  To capture the image, I used Genius Scan on my Samsung Galaxy Note 3 (old but powerful and much beloved).  I like Genius Scan since it corrects for some curvature and rotation automatically. The page was in the middle of the volume which is a thick as an old-fashioned phone book from a mid-size city.  The raw image looked like this

I then loaded the image into the GIMP and cropped it to

The next step was to start coloring.  For this quick and dirty approach I didn’t use layers nor did I try any tools except the bucket fill.  This was a bit clumsy as certain regions that looked closed often had small gaps due to the publisher reproduction, the printing process, or the image capture.  Whatever the reason, when a small, undesired gap was present the bucket fill would sometimes over fill as in this image

At times like this, the undo (ctrl-Z) I your friend.  Repairs involve the eye-dropper (color-picker) tool and the brush.  Simply grab a gray/black from some point nearby and close the gap using the brush (soft and diffuse seems best) and color again.

Using this rather primitive process, it only took me about 10-15 minutes to color in the image to

Clearly the image needs work, especially around the crenellated chin of the Big-T.  But, all told, it didn’t turn out too bad given that layers and brushes and other sophisticated tools were totally ignored.

So there you have it – a three-fold win: 1) a fast way to create your own digital coloring books using your favorite art, 2) a new use/justification for buying the cheap B&W reprint volumes, and 3) a path to learn to be a real colorist without the need to find an artist and inker.

In this final installment of the 5-part series looking at Jonathan Hickman’s epic work on the Everything Dies storyline, I’ll be looking at what succeeded and failed.  Since it was both a commercial and a literary undertaking in the medium of comic books, I’ll be looking at three broad categories:  commercial aspects, storytelling mechanics, and story content.

Commercial Aspects

There are two major aspects to consider when judging the commercial success of the Everything Dies story:  raw sales of books and positioning for long-term viability.

In terms of raw sales of books, there is no denying that Everything Dies was a consistent success.  As expected, when both the Avengers and New Avengers titles premiered back in Dec 2012-Jan 2013, they sold at or near the top.  As time wore on, the Avengers title mostly hovered in the mid-teens and low-twenties in sale rank – although the near the end, perhaps due to fatigue, the sales began to sag.  The New Avengers title consistently lagged behind, fluctuating between the high-twenties and mid-forties.  Secret Wars consistently scored near the top with an average sales rank of 2.

In terms of positioning for future success, it is hard to argue that anyone else could have done better.  Hickman was able to adapt the storylines to handle changing situations in the movie-side of the Marvel mythos.  When both titles were launched, Marvel didn’t own the movie rights to 3 important franchises: The X-Men, The Fantastic Four, and Spider-Man.  Each of these franchises was initially downplayed in the Everything Dies storyline.  As the relationship between Marvel Studios and the others progressed, the X-Men and Spider-Man made more of an appearance.  But a large component of the Everything Dies storyline centered around Thanos and the Inhumans – properties that have a significant role to play in the MCU.   As discussed in an earlier post, the Inhumans are essentially mutants without the name and the promotion of this property over the X-Men solidifies the MCU approach (e.g. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) over the Fox Studios X-Men.

The Fantastic Four is an interesting situation.  The movie franchise is not owned by Marvel nor is it developed in conjunction with Marvel Studios.  The poor showing of the Fantastic Four (2015) movie no doubt reinforced Marvel’s desire to distance itself from its once flagship group.  This approach is poignantly summed up in an exchange between Franklin and Reed Richards at the end of Secret Wars #9.

Storytelling Mechanics

This is the one area where I would say that Hickman consistently falls short of the mark.  For every really nice thing he does there are others that detract from the success.  In the interest of ending on the positive, I’ll talk about the negative aspects first.

One of Hickman’s most used devices is the ‘Then & Now’ approach.  A few pages are presented with the what happened in the past, either as new material for the reader to digest or in flashback form.  The action then flips immediately and abruptly to the present where events happening ‘now’ are shaped by reactions and recollections from ‘then’.  Used every so often, this isn’t a bad mechanic, but Hickman over-relies on it.  Often times, there isn’t enough structure for the casual reader to note the transition.

In a storyline as complex as Everything Dies, a less haphazard mechanism should have been used.  Something as simple as changing the border style (the old rounded borders for flashbacks with appropriate captions always worked nicely) and color scheme would have worked.  When read and re-read sequentially, at one sitting, this mechanism works marginally.  But it is too daunting of a task to try to parse and piece the plot together when reading the book monthly with other titles (e.g. Infinity, Original Sin, etc.) interspersed and with no clear picture of where the whole is going.

Hickman’s other short-coming is the lack of exposition even with events progressing sequentially.  Although captions have fallen out of favor, a few well-placed ones would have been welcome.  The best example of this comes from Secret Wars #9.  As mentioned in earlier posts, the Black Panther confronts Doctor Doom with some version of the Infinity Gauntlet.  Although defeated, T’Challa provides the necessary distraction so that Reed Richards can find the Molecule Man and shut down the Doom’s ‘godhood’.   Just before Battleworld comes to an end, the Black Panther grabs one of the gems, clutches it tightly, and is whisked away.

The reader has no way of knowing which gem it was.  The official list of gems from Marvel’s database is

but as demonstrated in an earlier post, the color-coding of the gems is not consistent and so the reader is left to guess.  There are, of course, times to let the reader guess, but Hickman does it too often and with pivotal elements of the plot.

One the positive side, he does a nice job, given his page limit constraints, of touching upon elements that the reader may actually wonder about.  In over 50 years of written fantasy storeis, the Marvel Publication Universe has a vast amount of cosmic elements.  Each of these should figure into something as large as the complete and whole-sale structural rearrangement that is done in Everything Dies. Of course, there is no way for Hickman to explore each and every idea thoroughly but he does a reasonable job of at least mentioning what was tried and what failed when dealing with the incursions.  The following composite image shows how he deals with the Cosmic Cube, the universal Avatars, and the multiversal Captain Britain squad.

He also provides a nice set of symmetrical bookends to the tale.  The incursion threat begins in Wakanda in New Avengers #1 with a group of Wakandan youths on a coming of age trial.  Once he grabbed the undisclosed gem from the Infinity Gauntlet in Secret Wars #9, the Black Panther again finds himself in the Wakandan jungle where the same events play out but to a different end.  In New Avengers #1, his speech is interrupted with a rumble of rhinoceros fleeing the first incursion and the final outcome is the death of the young Wakandans at the hands of Black Swan’s group.  In Secret Wars #9, his speech is punctuated with the rumble of Wakandan rocket lifting of to space and hope.

Even the Everything Dies mantra is closed out from despair to hope.  One of the minor tweaks that Reed Richards performs in setting everything right again is to restore the ravaged face of Victor von Doom, ending the whole storyline with a note of optimism

Story Content

Overall, Hickman does well on the story content itself – particularly the logical structure and verisimilitude of his universe.  He clearly shows a love and respect for much of the source material that has come before.

While the Everything Dies epic has the three elements most able to destroy a comic story, Hickman does a good job working with two of them: alternate universes and magic.  His treatment of parallel/alternate universes is nicely done without badly undercutting the emotional content of the material.  It is easy, with an infinite number of Thors upon which to draw, to make it hard to feel for a particular instantiation of Thor.  Hickman mostly avoids the most common pitfalls by making the alternate versions different enough in both character and fate that the reader’s emotional investment isn’t undermined.  He also credibly navigates away from much of the mechanics of the end-times and focuses instead on the reactions of his characters.  In this way, he avoids the deus ex machina aspects of magic.

However, on the time travel front, the causality of his cosmology is quite a bit out of whack.  One of the crucial storylines in the Avengers is the time travel into the future of Captain America shortly after he remembers his betrayal at the hands of the Illuminati.  How the universe’s timeline/worldline can end with an incursion and yet still continue on into the future is totally unknown.  I suppose he wanted/needed to deal with the time-travel aspects of Marvel’s many stories but still it comes off as illogical and forced.  Much cleaner is his explanation for how Doom could stop the Beyonders.  The latter were constrained to move sequentially forward in time (linearly forward as is incorrectly said in the film industry).  Without going into details, Hickman simply offers this explanation for how the created can destroy the creators.  Far more satisfying than a badly-constructed time-travel plot.

The little details were a really big positive.  As mentioned above, he tries to cover all the bases for why a thing works in his universe/multiverse.  One of the most clever things he introduces is how to construct a vehicle capable of surviving when everything is destroyed – how to make the life rafts actually work.  It starts with the Beyonders assault on the Living Tribunal

which results in the Tribunal’s demise and a fragment of him ending up in each of the remaining universes.  His body forms the raw materials from which the life rafts are constructed

Finally, little bits of humor and homages are worked into the story in various places.  Two of my favorites are the clear homage to the ‘All your base are belong to us’ engrish uttered by Cyclops powered by the Phoenix force

and Amadeus Cho’s hilarious indictment of ‘the certainty in ignorance’ so common in everyday thought.

Parting Words

The Everything Dies storyline is a remarkable set of comics and fine addition to the world of literature.  It is the first real example of the epic being brought to fruition in the comic book medium and despite numerous flaws it is well worth reading.  I only hope that Marvel will make an Omnibus publication in which the story is told in is proper publication order (Avengers, New Avengers, Infinity correctly interleaved).  My congratulations to Jonathan Hickman for pulling it off.

Last week’s installment covered the Universe’s response to impending doom: the mounting of an assault on the Earth, which is the fulcrum between survival and Armageddon.  Several new groups were introduced – the Builders, the Ivory Kings, Rabum Alal, and the Black Priests – and some old favorites were cast into different roles.  The Shi’ar, Kree, Skrulls, and the rest of the star-faring races paired with the Avengers to deal with Builder’s siege while the Illuminati stayed on Earth to deal with Thanos and his Cull Obsidian.

At this point Hickman has all the major factions in the story as chessmen on the board.  But the connection between each and just who is moving which pieces is still murky.  The rest of the Avengers and New Avengers runs deal with the more personal aspects of the Everything Dies storyline.  Specific revelations put a human face to each of the factions.  The shifting allegiances and resulting clashes between individual egos add the final set of ingredients to the epic character of this tale and set the stage for the grand finale in the Secret Wars.

While there are numerous interesting character interactions, primary focus rests on these 5

• Captain America and Iron Man
• Black Panther and Namor
• Doctor Doom and Doctor Strange
• Reed Richards and Reed Richards
• Doctor Doom and Reed Richards

Captain America and Iron Man

It might be more apt to describe this interaction as the love and betrayal between two friends – Steve Rogers and Tony Stark.  Or perhaps it should be thought of as a Civil War redux, in which the core differences in their character forces them into opposite sides of an issue.  In any event, from the very beginning Hickman hints at the coming conflict between these two – conflict made much more bitter because of the great friendship they have.

In Hickman’s own words, put down at the beginning of the Avengers series:

Their differing ways of facing the incursion threat is what drives them apart.  As mentioned earlier, in Part 2 of this review, the Illuminati wiped Captain America’s memory of the threat of the incursions when he would not go along with their plan to choose ‘the lesser evil’.

Having nothing but bad dreams that hint at his maltreatment at the hands of the Illuminati, Captain America continues to regard Iron Man as a loyal friend up through the end of the Infinity cross-over event.  However, the bad dreams eventually become full-fledged memories and the good captain, gathering a host of Avengers he trusts, confronts the eccentric genius with the cover-up

This revelation, part of the kick-off of the Original Sin cross-over event,  immediately pits the Avengers against the Illuminati – friend versus friend – as both the Avengers and New Avengers series race to completion.  It culminates in a bloody hand-to-hand confrontation to the death between the two in Avengers #44, the last of the series.

Black Panther and Namor

While the events between Captain America and Iron Man were running their course in the Avengers, an even more bitter hatred was developing within the Illuminati between the Black Panther and Namor the Sub-Mariner.

As monarchs of their own empires, one might think that the conflict between T’Challa and Namor only comes about due to Wakanda and Atlantis being on the brink of war

due to the massive tsunami that Namor unleased upon Wakanda

during the conflict between the Avengers and the X-Men.  But no doubt their personalities have a lot to do with it as well.  Both are proud men, willful men and it seemed inevitable that they would clash.  In particular, Hickman portrays Namor as the one member of the Illuminati most willing to end another Earth for the sake of his own.

Their conflict and the estrangement that it brings to the Illuminati, results in Namor aligning himself with Thanos’ new group the Cabal (more details below), which has no scruples in brutally ending alternate Earths.  The sadistic pleasure that the Cabal revels in eventually turns Namor’s stomach and he finally teams up with the Black Panther to provide the crucial distraction that allows Reed Richards to defeat Doctor Doom at the end of Secret Wars.

Doctor Doom and Doctor Strange

The strangest and, perhaps most important inter-character relationship is the unlikely one between Doctor Doom and Doctor Strange.  Upon it hinges most of the Secret Wars storyline.  However, its roots are firmly planted in the events of the New Avengers.

Throughout most the events in Everything Dies, the two doctors – Doom and Strange – seem to be ill-fit.  Doctor Strange was, of course, an original member of the Illuminati, but as the group seemed to be working towards a technological solution to the incursion problem what use did they have for a sorcerer.  Likewise, even though Doctor Doom’s home country of Latveria plays host to an incursion site and he, himself, manages to hold off the Mapmakers, he is afforded no role by the Illuminati.As a result, both of them go to extraordinary means to solve the incursion problem.

The good Doctor Strange finds himself in the curious position of selling his soul for the power needed to stop the incursions once and for all.

Doing so, he then assumes the head of the Black Priests, one of the two groups who destroy worlds to prevent incursions and who were mentioned with fear and awe by Black Swan.

Doctor Doom takes a different route to power.  Using the physical evidence left behind at the Latverian incursion, Doom pieces together, using some type of spectral analysis, the frequency signature of the Mapmakers.  To his surprise, it matches the signature of the Molecule Man (aka Owen Reese), suggesting the two have the same origin. When confronted with this fact, Molecule Man launches them both into a journey through time, space, and the areas outside the multiverse.  In the first leg, the Molecule Man brings Doom to moment where the former gains his powers and explains

As soon as this alternate-universe doppleganger receives his powers, Molecule Man steps forward and murders him.  It seems that exact copies of the Molecule Man have been placed in every universe of the multiverse by the Beyonders, the Ivory Kings of Black Swan’s warnings, with the express purpose of ending all existence.

The infinite copies of Owen Reese are a multiversal bomb awaiting detonation.

But Doom is wrong, something did happen when the doppleganger died, although the reader is left to infer this rather than having it spelled-out.  When the Molecule Man killed his twin he set in motion the first premature death of a universe and started the incursion process.

The Molecule Man then brings Doom to the Library of Worlds, a place outside the normal structure of the multiverse.

The Library of Worlds serves as a base of operations where Doom can start his own religion peopled by the Black Swans.  They will call him Rabum Alal and they will serve as his hands in killing all the copies of the Molecule Man so as to stop the simultaneous destruction of the multiverse at the hands of the Beyonders.  Incidentally, the creation of the Black Swans leads to the creation of the Mapmakers and the Sidera Maris by the Beyonders so that they could determine why their grand experiment was going awry.

The Black Priests, who are another manifestation of the universe’s/multiverse’s attempt to prevent disaster are the natural enemies to both the Ivory Kings and Rabum Alal.  They eventually find the Library of Worlds

and penetrate it with Doctor Strange leading the way.  Unfortunately, it is a trap

and they are overcome by not having the air they need to articulate their magic words.

Doom captures Doctor Strange and offers him a chance to help in stopping the Beyonders.  Strange agrees and a most unexpected alliance is forged, in which they, along with the Molecule Man succeed in stopping the Beyonders.

However, by this point, the multiverse had been destroyed.  Using the powers of the Beyonders, Strange and Doom (a strange doom?) piece together a patchwork-quilt of existence

that is latter called Battleworld.

Reed Richards and Reed Richards

Only two life rafts escape the destruction of the multiverse – one from Earth-616, which is the most familiar of the Marvel Earths, and one from Earth-1610, which was the Ultimate Universe.  When Doom and Strange call Battleworld into existence, these vessels are drawn to the only reality available.  The life raft from the Earth-616 carried, amongst others, the Black Panther and Reed Richards.  The life raft from Earth-1610 carried, amongst others, the Cabal and the Maker.

The Cabal, a group of multiversal villains under the direction of Thanos, counts Black Swan, Namor, Maximus, members of the Cull Obsidian, and alternate-universe Terrax as its members.  The Maker, is an ‘evil version’ of Reed Richards from the Ultimate Universe.

Together, both Reed Richards’s seek out Doom’s power source, seeking to dethrone Doom.  They find that Molecule Man is that source.

The Maker, being truly made in the image of Machiavelli, betrays Reed in an attempt to wrest all the power for himself.  Unfortunately, he didn’t count on Molecule Man’s feelings and he is quickly devoured (literally as a pizza) to satisfy the former’s hunger.

Reed is now ready for the final showdown.

Doctor Doom and Reed Richards

In the final showdown, Reed confronts the god Doom.  Willing to hear Reeds argument that there may be a better way to fix things than backing Doom, Molecule Man is willing to sit back and see who ‘deserves’ all the power that he holds.  Reed and Victor slug it out both physically and mentally.  Reed gets the better in this test of wills when he badgers Doom into admitting that he could have done a better job with all the power at his disposal.

At this point, Owen is convinced that the best person to back is Reed.  At this point Battleworld cease to exist and Reed, vested with the power of the Beyonders, sets things right.  Using the power from the Molecule Man and the natural ability of his oldest child, Franklin, Reed recreates everything.  As explained by Valeria to her mother, Sue Storm,

Franklin (the son) dreams up and shapes each new multiverse and Reed (the father) bestows the power to make the shape a reality and Owen (the spirit) becomes the life of the new world.  A truly Trinitarian concept.

Before I draw this penultimate installment to a close, I offer the following diagram as an abbreviated attempt to show the major players in the Everything Dies storyline.

Next week, I’ll finish up with a discussion about what worked and what didn’t in Hickman’s epic.

The last column covered the basic tension in the Everything Dies storyline – namely that incursions between two universes in the Marvel multiverse pose a imminent threat to the existence of each and, ultimately, of the multiverse itself.  This threat forms the key element and the various ways in which it is dealt pose the central moral conundrum.

But every good epic needs more than a framing problem, it needs human conflict large and small.  There need to be many sides, strong loyalties and shifting allegiances, personalities working together and struggling against each other.  In Homer’s Iliad, there is often as much conflict within the Greek camp as there is between the Greeks and the Trojans.

By setting the stage with the biggest ‘save something’ scenario, Hickman provides himself with the vehicle to generate the conflict he wants.  Since the stakes are bigger than saving a group of people, a city, a planet, a galaxy, or even a universe, he can reach into any dusty corner of the Marvel publication history he likes.  In addition, since he is going to reboot the entire franchise, he can safely add new elements to the mythos without fear of being retconned.  In some sense, he is retconning the whole thing, so why worry about the last details of a string of soon-to-be-obsolete publications.

The single biggest new element is the idea of the Builders.  As discussed in Part 2, the Builders are the oldest race in the universe.

Originally content to worship the mother-maker, i.e. the universe, the Builders soon became the creators of a universe-wide system to ensure the protection and stability of the universe.  How exactly their systems mesh with the avatar-based systems involving the abstract entities – such as Eternity, Infinity, Master Order & Lord Chaos, Galactus and the Celestial, and so on – is not detailed to my knowledge.  But the universe is big and it doesn’t really matter now anyway.

What does matter is that the Alephs, Ex Nihili, and Abysii are one aspect of that system.  Another aspect is a type of planetary defense built into the fabric of the universe and set to trigger when a world becomes advanced enough.  The Ex Nihili encountered on Mars triggers that system through his origin bombs and his creation of what he described as the perfect human.  This perfect human is born speaking Builder code so it takes a while until his name can be translated.  When it is, the reader is treated to the revelation that his name is Nightmask and that he is a herald of the White Event.

In this way, Hickman is able to pull the New Universe titles into the main Marvel publication universe in a smoother way than Mark Gruenwald attempted in Quasar.  Of course, the New Universe is not complete without a Starbrand and, fortunately, soon after the introduction of Nightmask, one appears.

Unfortunately, his appearance is accompanied by a catastrophic disaster that claims the lives of thousands of people.  When the Avengers arrive, the new Star Brand is out of control and they can’t control him.  Finally, Captain Universe steps in and shocks some sense back into him.

Here is one of the themes that Hickman returns to again and again.  That the system is broken, which itself is a pale reflection of the fact that the universe is dying, that everything dies.  Against this backdrop, he then casts all the actions and motivations.

One such set of actions are a whole set of new happenings around the sites of the origin bombs.  People located with the impact radius of the bombs are transformed into new, evolved entities as the system fights to find a remedy for what ails it.  One such, poignant story is when the Canadian super-team Alpha Flight penetrate a region where an origin bomb had detonated.   Some of the team are repurposed for the new system response and the painful goodbye between Vindicator and her father is punctuated with

These smaller stories provide the human interest but, for shear action, Hickman returns to the motions of the Builders, who, sensing the demise of all that is, seek to destroy the Earth hoping that since

This reaction is not unexpected.  In addition to the incursion dynamic, the reader of the Avengers has been reminded numerous times by Captain Universe that the Earth is special.  Two such incidents are

and

And so begins the Builder war.  Despite the alliance of the Avengers with the most advance star-faring races – the Shi’ar, the Kree, the Skrulls, Spartax, the Brood, and Annihilus , the Builders are still essentially unstoppable.   The primary reason for the unprecedented coalition is that the Builders are moving from one end of the universe to the Earth and are destroying everything in their way.

Hickman makes a point to explain why such an advanced race can’t just appear near the Earth and lay waste.  The superflow, the fluid that resides between the universes, and which, I suppose, embeds the individual universes, is breaking down

The Builders are no longer capable of using it to strike wherever they wish.  A fact they lament.

And so the Builders start from where they entered the Earth-616 universe just where they were shunted out of the superflow.  There first target is Galador, of Rom the Spaceknight fame.

Captain Universe shows up to see the destruction saying that

The shock of seeing Galador fall sends Captain Universe’s human host into a type of catatonia and disables her for a while and, as a result, she is not there to stop the Builders from waging war against everything in their way.  The threat the Builders pose is enough to pull the Avengers from Earth and into space, leaving Earth effectively unguarded.  It is at this time that Thanos and his inner circle the Cull Obsidian compel their ragtag crew to assault the Earth, despite the protestations about that special place,

so that Thanos may kill the last of his children.  A fuller account can be found in the post on Thanos and Thane.

So, as the Avengers fight off-world, the Illuminati are all that is left to fend off the mad titan’s onslaught. Black Swan, her usual snarky self, derides the threat of the Builders.

Instead she speaks with awe and fear of the multiversal threats that actually accompany the incursions.  Of these, Black Swan talks cryptically about the Black Priests who destroyed her world

And the Map Makers and Sidera Maris, servants of the Ivory Kings, who she has witnessed destroy other Earths.

The Builder war comes to an end when they capture Captain Universe, Nightmask, Starbrand, Abyss, and the Ex Nihilo from Mars.  The Builders are amazed that the humans possess the sentient systems they designed, especially an Abyss, of whom all were thought lost.

But they are absolutely flabbergasted to realize that a human plays host to the mother-maker in the form of Captain Universe.

As the drama unfolds, there are two particularly pivotal events.  First, the Ex Nihili, who are in the train of the Builders, are perplexed by the presence of the last Abyss.  They ask the Martian Ex Nihilo how such a thing could be.  Abyss answers by point out that the Builders had lost their way and had given up on life

Seeing the truth of her words, the Ex Nihili unite to stop the Builders.  But even their might when married to the intergalactic alliance of the Avengers and the star-faring races proves too little.  At the end, Captain Universe wakes and confronts the Builders.

Her might brings the conflict to an end.

Back on Earth, the Illuminati are able to hold off Thanos and the Cull Obsidian until the Avengers can return.  However, the costs are high including the loss of the Inhuman city of Attilan and the virtual destruction of Wakanda.  Like the Builders war, the fight between Earth’s mightiest and Thanos’ death-seeking cult comes to an end through the intervention of an outsider.  Thane consigns his father and two members of the Cull Obsidian to a living death (see the Is Anybody Up There Listening post from Dec. 2014).

The rest of the events in both the Avengers and the New Avengers titles are designed to strip away the hidden stratagems of the Illuminati and let the entire world know that the end is nigh.  Along the way, the reader finds a variety of smaller arcs.  One such arc involves a time-travel story (the explanation for why the Time Gem didn’t shatter when the rest of the Infinity Gems did) wherein Captain America discovers what the Illuminati did to him after he used the Infinity Gauntlet.  Another involves Doctor Strange selling his soul to dark forces to gain the power he hopes will stop multiversal armageddon.  Still others involve the creation of a new type of Super Adaptoid that can move between universes, eventually joining forces with the Sidera Maris and the mining of alternate worlds for various evil Dopplegangers.

Next week I’ll review the end of both series and the whole run of Secret Wars.  Along the way, I’ll delineate the final conflicts big and small that close out this epic.

This week I resume the detailed look at Jonathan Hickman’s architecture for the Everything Dies storyline in which he orchestrated the massive end and reboot of the Marvel publication universe.  As discussed in Part 1, the genre that best fits what Hickman engineered is the epic.  Epics, by nearly universal agreement, need to be big in scope and have high-stakes outcomes and have to deal with the big questions of life.

Classic epics have dealt with the savage siege and subsequent fall of Troy in the Iliad, the long, world-encircling journey home of Odysseus in the Odyssey, and the establishment of the roots of the Roman empire in the Aeneid.  But no scope is broader than and no stakes higher than the total end of all there is.  And that is exactly what Hickman deals with in Everything Dies.

The plot is complicated, in a fashion that befits the epic, but it is possible to summarize it fairly succinctly and I’ll be doing so over the next three posts.  The central idea, which was discussed in the last column, is the fact that, for reasons mostly unknown during the bulk of the story, the multiverse is coming to a premature end.  Although published second, the New Avengers is the logical place to start.

The first tangible evidence of the coming catastrophe occurs in the African country of Wakanda.  The Black Panther is out in the Wakandan jungle observing a ‘coming of age’ ritual in which teams of young adults attempt to solve a treasure hunt.  Proud of the winning team, T’Challa approaches them and speaks to them of what the future holds.  Suddenly, a rhinoceros appears out of nowhere and nearly runs the lot of them down.  Investigating, the Black Panther soon finds himself caught up in an incursion, a multiversal collision between Earth-616 and another Earth from another universe.  As he looks up into the sky, he sees several figures fall from the other Earth and he catches his first look at a character that will dominate the storyline:  Black Swan.

Being quite ruthless, Black Swan soon orders her team to kill T’Challa and his young subjects.  In short order, only the Black Panther remains alive and while he is fighting to avenge the fallen, Black Swan takes the opportunity to destroy the second Earth, thus ending the incursion.

Taking her into custody, T’Challa summons a gathering of the Illuminati, comprised initially of Black Bolt, himself, Captain America, Doctor Strange, Iron Man, Namor the Sub-Mariner, and Reed Richards.  Their first meeting opens on the ominous observation by Reed Richards that

It becomes even more ominous when Richard explains the central dilemma of their situation.  They can either kill or be killed.  They have only eight hours to pick between the two possible outcomes.

Captain America, repulsed by the notion that the rest of the Illuminati are actually entertaining the possibility of destroying a whole planet to stay alive, argues passionately that there must be a way to get out of the dilemma without crossing that line.  Under his urging, they resolve to reassemble the Infinity Gauntlet as a way of fending off an incursion.  At first this seems like a hopeless task as the Mind Gem is missing because it was in the keeping of Charles Xavier and he was dead.  Fortunately, Xavier arranged for Hank McCoy, the Beast, to become the keeper of the gem, and soon the ranks of the Illuminati have grown by one.

Shortly after the Infinity Gauntlet has been restored, a new incursion begins.  Citing that belief in the plan is central to its success, the rest of the Illuminati insist that Captain America wield the gauntlet and fend off the end of the world.  He successfully does just that, but in the process the gems are shattered and their power lost.

(The above is a composite of the Infinity Gems from New Avengers #3 and yes the color scheme for the gems changes during the course of the issue.  I don’t know if that was an oversight or intentional, a point that I will return to later.)

Now faced with no answer but the unthinkable, the Illuminati wipe the memory of Captain America clean of all traces of the death of the multiverse and then they set on the path of building world-ending weapons of mass destruction.

Against the backdrop of this facet of the story, the Avengers title presents an unusual collaboration between Tony Stark and Steve Rogers.  Perhaps feeling guilty for what they did to Captain America, Tony Stark embraces Steve’s idea to grow the Avengers to a team truly capable of dealing with the big threats.

The first such threat is the appearance on Mars of the team of three aliens: an Aleph, an Ex Nihilo, and an Abyss.  There is considerable debate amongst the three of them as the Aleph wants the Earth destroyed while the Ex Nihilo, who has already terraformed a portion of the red planet into lush garden, would rather send origin bombs towards the Earth to transform it.

Ex Nihilo then asks Abyss her opinion.  Her response is that humans have learned to use tools and, as a result, have become dangerous creatures.  She continues by pointing out that a group of them are on the way to find the source of the origin bombs that are radically altering the Earth’s biosphere.

A short battle ensues, in which the Avengers are soundly defeated as the power of these aliens is too much for them.  As will be revealed later in the series, they are representatives of the Builders, the first race of the universe

Originally they simply worshipped the ‘mother-maker’, the universe itself.  But later they fell away and took it upon themselves to create new, universal systems of a more aggressive character that promoted evolution and change.  The Aleph is one such system.  This automaton destroyed countless worlds it judged as unworthy, but finding one worthy world, it released two entities, Ex Nihilo and Abyss, to nurture and shape it.

Bruised and battered, the alien trio sends Captain America hurtling earthward.  However, his indomitable spirit soon has him on his feet again, gathering a different team, and heading to Mars to rescue those left in the clutches of Ex Nihilo, Abyss, and Aleph. One member of the team is Captain Universe, the living embodiment of the universe, and the deity that the Builders once worshipped.  Once spotted, both Ex Nihilo and Abyss bow in worship but Aleph refuses.  Captain Universe subsequently destroys him and forbids Ex Nihilo and Abyss to destroy or transform any more inhabited worlds.  Ex Nihilo and Abyss comply and are granted permission to stay and play with Mars.

As the Avengers are leaving to return to the Earth to contend with the damage already done, Ex Nihilo can’t suppress asking a question of wonderment.

This question of what makes Earth so special is one that Hickman comes back to again and again,  Avengers can’t defeat them but they convince them to play only with Mars.

These two pieces, the incursion-driven multiversal death and the universes response to this inevitable occurrence, form the backbone of the New Avengers and Avengers titles respectively during their run.  Next week, I’ll be looking at the second stage of the tale, in which tensions mount in the Illuminati as they try to muster the will to kill an entire world, and the Builders, seeing the Earth as the lynch pin in the coming destruction, launch an all-out campaign to destroy the blue marble once and for all.  This second stage includes all the events in both titles leading up to and including the Infinity event.

Well it’s over.  It’s been a few months now since Marvel’s company-wide, total reboot of their creative universe has drawn to a close with the last installment of Secret Wars #9.  I thought it was a good time to pause, survey the new landscape, and reflect on how we got here.  Over these next four installments, I’ll be analyzing just what Jonathan Hickman, the writer and creative glue, tried to do, what the high points and the lows were, and whether or not it really came off as expected.

In this article, I want to set the stage for Hickman’s undertaking by giving an overview of what he tried to implement and the creative and commercial tensions under which he operated.  In a nutshell, Hickman attempted what could only be called comics first, true foray into the epic.  This may seem a strange thing to say since ret-cons and reboots have been fairly common on the comics scene for several decades now and mega-crossover events are nearly as common.  But I stand by this assessment since an epic is not and should not be judged solely by how large it is.  It is true that size and scope are crucial elements, but an epic must, simultaneously, also deal with the big questions in both big and small ways.  Hickman’s work on what I will call the Everything Dies storyline (the reason for which I give below) meets both criteria, albeit not always successfully.

The question of size and scope is the easiest one to understand and support, so let’s discuss this one first.  The scope of Everything Dies was unprecedented in the comics industry.  To appreciate that claim, consider that the first of these continuity cleanups, DC’s The Crisis on Infinite Earths, was a 12-issue limited series with important links to the existing titles but with a storyline comprehensible and digestible as a standalone event.  Subsequent reboots of the big two have grown even more and more complex and more cosmological with dimensions, universes, and multiverses being taken apart and put back together within most if not all of the current series, but the size and scope has always been limited to at most a year of crossover events.  What Marvel did in the Everything Dies storyline literally dwarfs everything that has come before combined.

The core Everything Dies storyline actually starts publication in starts in the winter of 2013 with launch of the twin Avengers publications Avengers and New Avengers.  Both of these titles, which were written by Jonathan Hickman and drawn and inked by a host of artist teams, ran for almost 3 full years; spanned 78 issues (plus additional ancillary tales); played host to two separate company-wide crossover events: Infinity and Original Sin (each of which brought even more issues into the fold); and eventually led into the final Secret Wars climax.

Obviously Everything Dies storyline was required to be more than a creative, literary success; it also needed to be a commercially lucrative, since it would set the stage for all future Marvel titles.  In addition, although not explicitly stated, it also needed to be done in such a fashion that allowed Marvel to downplay the X-men, Spider-Man, and Fantastic Four franchises since none of these was in the stable of Marvel Studios at the time of the publication.  As a result, the core of the tales centered on the Avengers, Inhumans, Black Panther, Doctor Strange, and the Sub-Mariner, with only bit appearances by the X-men and Spider-man.  The Fantastic Four are almost completely absent as a ‘brand’ and only Reed and Sue Richards really play a role.

Of the two of these titles, the Avengers title is more action oriented, more classic, and more wholesome.  The New Avengers is a darker and, perhaps, more interesting title.  At the core of both of them is the ethical dilemma called the Trolley Problem, which asks when is it permissible, or even imperative, to sacrifice some life so that other life may be saved.

To set the stage for this form of the dilemma, Hickman had to invent a new type of cosmology.  The following composite image, pieced together from material taken from the New Avengers, Hickman tries to explain the roots of the quandary.

The pinching together of two universes happens along the specific timelines (worldlines in the technical jargon) of their respective Earths.  Left unchecked, such an incursion destroys both universes. However, if there were a way to destroy one of the Earths, the both universes would survive as another discussion of the multiversal fate informs us

On the surface this may seem to be no different than the continuity cleanups but the Trolley Problem aspect, which is now so large as to engulf the entire published output of Marvel comics, provides a nuance not in the earlier reboots.  It is no longer a good versus evil race-against-time, but an authentic situation wherein men of good conscience can view the same set of facts from different points-of-view and take widely different actions, as a result.

Of all the infinite possible universes, the reader is, of course, privy to the events surrounding those men who live on the most familiar and beloved Earth of the Marvel universe (dubbed Earth-616).  The core characters who wrestle with this ethical conundrum are Captain America, the Sub-Mariner, the Black Panther, Doctor Strange, Hank McCoy the Beast, Reed Richards, and Tony Stark/Iron Man.  Their anger, fear, comradery, indecision, and bold actions link the huge with the small and turn what would have been an ordinary cosmic opera into a full-fledged epic.

Next week, I’ll present a careful look at the timeline of events that comprise the full story.  In third installment, I’ll be looking at the personality conflicts and revelations that make up the human element of the story.  And in the final installment, I’ll discuss what I thought worked and what didn’t in both the literary and commercial fronts.

It begins mysterious enough.  A well-dressed man, wielding a semi-automatic weapon, and wearing an Oni mask has just tracked down and murdered one of his fellow beings.  The dead body having fallen over a cliff, our assassin confirms the kill by glancing down onto the rocks below.  Satisfied that his job is done, he utters:

And so begins Unfollow, the new, ongoing Vertigo series by Williams, Dowling, and Winter.

Of course, the phrase ‘one hundred forty characters’, immediately conjures images of Twitter but one suspects that there is more.  After all, there is no evidence that the launch of Twitter was any more harmful than to cause mild damage to the diets, eyes, and familial relationships of the many programmers that made it possible.

Playing on two different meanings of ‘character’, Unfollow is really a Lord-of-the-Flies look at what happens when a rich entrepreneur, by the name of Farrell, leaves his 18-billion-dollar fortune to 140 random persons.

Rubinstein, our Japanese-faced enforcer, works for Farrell but seems to be a loose cannon.  His function is the clean up around the edges so that Farrell’s morality play can develop as planned.

The rest of the action so far (issues #1-3 are out as of this writing), is devoted to the identification of the key winners, the gathering of them to Farrell’s island (what else) and the setting of the stage.

The story focuses on five key characters:

• Dave, a stereotypical inner city kid;

• Courtney, a rich, disaffected young woman who is a perpetual thrill-seeker;

• Deacon, tough, evangelical-survivalist hybrid;

• Akira, a sexually ambiguous Japanese artist, with gentle delusions of godhood;

• and Ravan, an Iranian woman who, as BBC reporter, has just covered the public execution of a 10-year old girl and is now trying to go underground to avoid the authorities.

Some additional characters are also introduced, including an enormous Nigerian oil worker, with a propensity to violence.

Early indications point to this latter winner as the villain of the piece, at least the catalyst for violence.

After summoning the winners to his Caribbean island, Farrell addresses each of them with provocative message.  Pointing out that only 139 of the original 140 winners remain alive, Farrell goes on to say that each of them has now increased his fortune to the tune of about a million dollars.

He ends his speech by observing that should only one of them be left alive, that ‘last man standing’ would get the whole pile of cash – all he or she would have to do would be to kill the others.

On the surface, Unfollow has elements familiar to the western mind.  The creators make multiple allusions to the Golden Ticket of Willy Wonka fame.  And, no doubt, the theme of power pitting people against people reminds us of stories like The Hunger Games or Lord of the Flies.  All these elements are now blended into something new. So what’s not to love?

Well, Unfollow isn’t new.  It’s really patterned after is a fairly recent and unheralded anime called Eden of the East.  The plot is almost line-for-line the same, with Eden of the East having a good 4 or 5 years on the scene before Unfollow came out.   Now derivative isn’t a criterion for rejecting but content is.  While Unfollow has acceptable art, its characters are cookie cutter archetypes.  One can predict what each character will do, how each will behave, simply by knowing what each looks like of where each hails from.  In addition, these characters are unsympathetic (with the exception of Ravan) and the only entertainment is in seeing how the spectacle will unfold.  On this point, I doubt that Unfollow can match Eden of the East.  So with the aim of keeping my experience with Eden of the East alive and unsullied, I’ll be unfollowing Unfollow.

Well the season start of Agent Carter is underway with new adventures, new romances, and a new locale – the City of Angels.  The back-to-back one hour episodes that formed the Tuesday night’s opening showed that Marvel takes Agent Carter seriously as a tie-in to the MCU.

The action opens with a bank robbery in progress by a gang of thieves led by none other than Dottie Underwood, the demented trainee from the Black Widow program who locked horns with Peggy in Season 1.  The heist soon turns sour when Dottie discovers more than her sought-after loot when she opens the vault to find safe deposit box she was commissioned to pilfer.  Peggy was keeping the loot company and, after big knock-down, hair-pulling fight, she manages to take Dottie into custody.  And what was so important to Dottie in that box?  Why a simple label pin with a symbol similar to the re-imagined Hydra logo that has dominated the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. storyline of late (Comic Book Resources has a nice article on the link between Hydra, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Agent Carter, and the Inhumans).

The lapel pin, which resembles the image in the upper right, decorates a variety of secret-society types later in the episode, including a senatorial wannbe with a wife worthy of Lady Macbeth, and a lab that possesses a material called ‘zero matter’ that looks like the portal material that Fitz and Simmons have been learning about.

Certainly Hydra has come a long way from the shadow of James Bond inspired, S.P.E.C.T.R.E. clone that existed in the early days of Lee, Kirby, and Steranko  – and thankfully so.  That Hydra was boring and unmotivated.  The new Hydra resembles a deliciously creepy cult with really epic ambitions (and petty evils) and this change amounts to more fun.  The big question now is whether the minds behind the MCU can smoothly mesh these new faces of Hydra with the face originally presented by the Red Skull in the first Captain America movie.  Only time will tell.