This is the Marvel Comics debut of writer Daniel Way. Way always seemed to come from nowhere. Guys like David Mack, Bendis, Ed Brubaker, Greg Rucka and so on were being brought into Marvel from indie comics. Other people like Ron Zimmerman and Brett Matthews were being lured in from the bottom rungs of the Hollywood ladder. Those were the new pipelines for Marvel writers. Way came from neither. He did exactly one indie graphic novel, and that got him in with Axel Alonso. In just a couple years, he’ll be getting extremely high profile work on things like Venom, Wolverine, Deadpool, X-Men, Bullseye, Ghost Rider. Most especially Wolverine, where he will co-create Daken, Logan’s ridiculous secret child who’s an adult and inherited dad’s claws and healing ability. He has a mohawk and tribal tattoos right off the wall of the tattoo parlor, he’s a try-hard lame who inexplicably has a cult following. And “try-hard” is really the vibe I got from any Way material I sampled. Trying to be edgy and cool or whatever. But trying to be cool rarely makes you cool. We’ll see how this goes. I remember enough to know that’s Tombstone on the cover, but little else. Way is teamed with artist Leandro Fernandez, who did a little work at Marvel in the late 90s, but here begins a long tenure in comics, both at Marvel and indies. He’ll work with Greg Rucka on an indie book, and then on Greg’s Wolverine, as well as various other stuff, and eventually co-create The Old Guard with Rucka, which became a Netflix thing or something, as I recall. These issues have way too much exposition in my posts, let’s get on with it. Your boy Steve still coloring.
These guys got a lotta face. This hospital staff celebrating Tombstone having a heart attack is really random. As the medical professional wonder what to even do with a guy with unbreakable skin, Feds show up to claim him, and the staff are all-too happy to hand him over.
Edgy! About as I recalled. Tomby is subjected to some cartoonishly invasive tests and then declared fit for whatever. He is also rendered uncomfortably like a primate sometimes for what is, ostensibly, a black man. But that’s just gettin’ warmed up where the racism is concerned…
Yay. You get the feeling Way would love his bad guys to be tossing around the N-word if he could. Tombstone is remanded to gen pop, there is more racism, and implications of Tomby doing horrible things to women and dogs as other inmates threaten him. We’re having fun. The warden mentions the prison is surrounded by a field that negates superpowers. A power-draining field was something Bendis gave the cops in Powers, his indie series about cops in a world of super-characters, and then it just started showing up everywhere. Like Ursula K. Le Guin’s ansible. I don’t like the anti-powers field because it’s too easy. You’ve got a magic beam that renders ANY power off limits? A single, barely defined technology that can somehow incapacitate, say, Carnage, the Lizard, Xandu and a Z’Nox, despite the extreme difference in their abilities? That’s less believable than the powers themselves. Tombstone is shown to his cell, where he has a cellmate named “Ohnn.” I would not have known when this came out that this was the Spot, and Tombstone says he knows who he is, but doesn’t say, so I woulda been in the dark.
They are soon off to dinner, where Tombstone is sent to a different food line because he has “special dietary needs” with “the rest of the feebs,” according to the guard. “Feeb,” one of those terribly lame tuff guy words that made me dislike Fabian Nicieza back in the 90s. Then we meet this guy:
Man, Christ Claremont wouldn’t write such a ridiculous accent.
“Cray-owd.” Oh, hang on the art is about to get more racist:
Good grief.
Since when is Kangaroo like 12 ft tall??? As far as I know, Kangaroo was not dead, or even “dead.” He was last seen in this very prison, in an issue of Wolverine. Who knows? Tombstone goes to the showers alone to lure a guy into attacking him, and steals his scissors, apparently using the vaseline to put them up his butt. I paid $3 to sit through this, and now I’m sitting through it again. When he’s dragged back to his cell for killing or maiming that guy or whatever, he passes the scissors to Rocket Racer. RR tells him Kangaroo can’t read (wut) and is being instructed by, you guessed it, the Spot.
I cannot… cannot believe Rocket Racer was allowed to be drawn consistently with a fucking MONKEY FACE in 2002. I cannot believe it. We cut to Kangaroo’s gang asking if they’re going to kill Tombstone so Way can do some Komedy Business about his impenetrable accent. Then Tomby flags down his usual guard to place a bet on himself.
If there’s one thing I’m looking for in my comics, it wasn’t in this one. And I got a whole additional wannabe edgy, racist piece of shit to sit through. Happy day.