mayhap

Oliver Canning is the creepiest character outside of a straight-up horror novel.

…actually, this is a horror novel.

Not gonna lie, I'm a total sucker for cheap jokes if they're translated into Latin.

This book is mostly weird, occasionally wonderful, and about as suited for adapting into a movie as a fever dream. I literally do not see how this will work at all.

I liked [b:Little Brother|954674|Little Brother (Little Brother, #1)|Cory Doctorow|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1349673129s/954674.jpg|939584] and I really liked [b:For the Win|7241373|For the Win|Cory Doctorow|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1317793244s/7241373.jpg|7359191], so I really am quite disappointed by how disappointed I've been by Doctorow's last two YA books. His teenaged characters used to be just plausible as bright, precocious explainers; now they all come across as inexplicably arrested middle-aged adults. Stuff happens in this book, sort of, but it doesn't really go anywhere. Ugh.

Oh, and also, the free .epub version is typeset in the most ridiculous cramped way—no paragraph indentations, with only the tiniest smidgen more space between the paragraphs than between one line and another. Not to mention the parsing error in Chapter 5 that makes iBooks eat most of it with a big red error. I guess you're supposed to hack it if you actually want to read it or something.

Chaucer is my Valentine.

This book starts out okay, or at least not terribly—the staff of a upper-midwestern college town bookstore trapped in the break room and living off vending machine food while watching the zombies on the security camera is mildly amusing. However, it quickly deteriorates into a bland, generic post-apocalyptic mush which reads like it was plotted on the fly, NaNoWriMo style, and never adequately reconsidered or even considered. The "Black Earth Wives" subplot is particularly ill-thought-out and the ending is preposterous.

The best way to have a novel adapted into a graphic one is to write a book that people love and wait until one of them grows up to be a gifted sequential artist who can do it. It's a slow method, but you get much better results than a rushed cash-grab.

Premise: 3 stars. I have a thing for scenarios where people are trapped in a mundane location and have to improvise survival/escape with what they have on hand, so I'm not necessarily super picky here.

Execution: 2 stars. Dayna Lorentz claims never to have done NaNoWriMo, but this is NaNo-quality plotting and characterization all the way though. Still, I kept turning pages, because it's not like it would take long to finish, and I just wanted to get to the

Ending: 1 star. End of Book 1? Are you fucking kidding me? Also, as others have noted, the plot "twist" at the end is unsupported by the first 250 pages and the sudden introduction of an adult POV (and that of a supposed senator, to boot) is not really distinguishable from the four kids who have been narrating so far and not convincing at all.

Basically sort of actively unpleasant to read, in a way that makes me think I'm supposed to hate it so much I love it just to be contrary. However, being contrary, this just made me hate it more.

Oh Orson Scott Card, your issues with sex are visible from SPACE.

There isn't anything particularly noirish going on here — it's more like Indiana Stark. Also, while there are some cute bits in the premise, it flops hard in the follow-through.

Pros:

• Lots of interesting and dynamic panelling, making the most of the page/s (there are a bunch of two-page spreads).
  
• I know who the Silver Surfer is now! I was previously under the impression that he was a villain, so, uh, sorry, dude. He is actually pretty interesting here.
  
• Kid!Loki. Enough said.

Cons:

• Thor's face is drawn in a distractingly weird way. He looks he accidentally bashed himself in it with Mjolnir or something.
  
• Cover with movie photos is misleading.
  
• Matt Fraction's predilection for writing scenes with D/s undertones (or overtones? Possibly just tones?) here expresses itself in a kind of weird scene between Odin and Heimdall, which I'm just not as into as, say, Tony Stark/Doc Ock.

This is so bad. Not as bad as Avengers Disassembled: Iron Man, perhaps, but really really bad nonetheless.

A bunch of different people and/or things attack the Avengers, one after another. Everyone who has ever been an Avenger shows up and bands together, while the rest of the world is suddenly disenchanted with the Avengers because Tony, acting under a mysterious compulsion, called out the Latverian ambassador for being Latverian whilst he was addressing the UN.

All of this turns out to be because the Scarlet Witch is pitching an epic chaos magical hissyfit. It turns out that if a woman is so distraught by her infertility that she magics a pair of children into existence, it is not an adequate therapeutic protocol to magic them back out of existence, wipe her memory, and then hope that none of this ever comes up again. I know, right? Magical DSM should have been more specific.

There is a flashback/reprint of when Wanda and Pietro joined the Avengers: colorful, carefree days when no one realized that in the future, they could be written by Michael Bendis. Then all the Avengers reminisce for pages about their best Avenging memories. Ultimately, though, Tony says he has to shut the whole show down, because he's completely broke. Whoops.

Avengers Disassembled: Thor was actually kind of a cool story because it involved Ragnarok and it had absolutely nothing to do with the main Disassembled event, which turns out to be insanely terrible.

Tony's sub-storyline begins with some jurisdictional conflicts. The Avengers have recently become a UN concern, which means that Avengers Mansion is now sovereign territory and no longer eligible for NYC services such as trash removal. This is kind of hilarious (and educational!), but makes the Avengers look like complete dumbasses for not being aware of what the UN, in fact, is before they joined it. The Avengers have also acquired a cadre of anti-UN protestors who are even less aware, being under the impression that the UN is far more a.) sinister and b.) powerful than anything in the real or Marvel universe would justify. This is realistic enough but ultimately doesn't really go anywhere as a plot point.

Meanwhile, Tony is becoming aware of the massive, obvious conflicts of interest among his civilian, superhero and political personae, in the form of a giant, leftover killer robot lurking beneath Avengers Mansion. In spite of some wacky misunderstandings involving non-F.C.C. approved signal jammers (I know the F.C.C. is always my first concern when a killer robot is planning to destroy New York!), Tony manages to subdue the thing and learns a valuable lesson about politics: namely, that they exist. God, whatever fake president named him Secretary of Defense should have been immediately impeached or declared incapable since he was clearly either treasonous or insane.

Shortly thereafter, Tony is addressing the UN when he has a freakout in which he points out that the ambassador from Latveria is totally just sitting there like a normal ambassador, as if his country were not basically an oversized evil lair. This actually happens in the main Avengers book and is never adequately explained in this one (it turns out to be because Scarlet Witch is having a hysterical hissyfit), but it predictably does not reflect well on Tony in his Avenger, Sec'y of Defense or C.E.O. of Stark Industries capacities.

Writer John Ricketts has a massive, inexplicable and creepy hate-on for Pepper, who is mocked and humiliated in basically every single panel in which she appears. She interrupts Jan and two other women whom I can't identify snarking about Tony in the ladies' room with an over-the-top defensive speech about everything Tony's done for them, after which they snigger about how she still has a thing for Tony and her shrill voice must drive her husband nuts. When Pepper narrowly avoids getting killed by an evil dude in a rogue Iron Man suit who is wiping out the entire board of Stark Industries, her rescuers are bizarrely contemptuous, telling each other not to 'encourage' her 'babbling' and accusing her of 'listing spices now' when she introduces herself. And when she realizes that she can access a fail-safe shutdown mechanism that Tony included to end the standoff between the real and fake Iron Mans, Happy—who is supposed to be her goddamn husband!—gives her this insane anti-motivational speech about how he's never seen her throw anything but gutter balls so what makes her think she's going to make a strike? WHAT IS THIS I DON'T EVEN.

The other weirdly misogynist subplot involves Rumiko, one of Tony's exes. Their relationship, as it is presented in a series of flashbacks and reminiscing conversations, appears to have been kind of abusive in that Fifty Shades of Grey, you-two-crazy-kids-need-a-goddamn-safeword kind of way. As Rumiko describes it to her friend and/or possible personal assistant, "I humiliated him. Kissed him with alcohol on my breath. I went out of my way to tick him off, but he..." "...was whipped." "I know. He was perfect. Why did I ever leave him?" She decides to go to New York, presumably to humiliate him some more, so I suppose she was sort of asking to get promptly fridged—she gets immediately killed by fake!Iron Man, so that real!Iron Man can carry her corpse around like a mecha-pietà and angst about how it was all his fault and oh yeah she died thinking that he was the one who killed her. This is all pretty horrible, and it is a testament to how repulsive this book is that I don't even think it's the worst part.

In the end, Tony resigns as Secretary of Defense (finally!) and also claims he's going to stop being Iron Man, although if anyone actually believes that they are more naïve than a nest of newborn mice, but whatever. This is the worst comic book I have ever read. I mean, I'm sure there are plenty of comics that are at least as bad, but I have not actually read them.

Making Tony the director of S.H.I.E.L.D. was such a dumb idea. It really should have been the dumbest of the aftermath of Civil War, but then One More Day came along to redefine worst plot development in a comic book continuity ever.

Practically speaking, Tony's director status doesn't have any effect on this story, since he's out in the field Iron Manning the entire time, which is of course what we expect from Iron Man. The twin storylines hit some familiar highlights—Tony feels responsible for accidentally enabling or not being able to non-destructively disarm the villains and angsts about it—but they way they're juggled isn't great.

These four issues aren't enough to fill even the slenderest of trades, so they rounded it out with a not particularly interesting and ultimately kinda pointless one-shot from 1998. I guess it is vaguely associated thematically, since it depicts a very chilly working relationship between Iron Man and Nick Fury (who doesn't even know that Iron Man is Tony at this point, so they do the whole you-didn't-tell-Stark-but-now-you-can-tell-me dance). Fury wants Iron Man to do a little underwater salvage work, but refuses to tell him anything about the vessel, which turns out to contain some kind of human/hydra hybrid created by, you guessed it, HYDRA. The HYDRA hydra ends up slipping into a deep ocean trench, where it is presumed dead but actually alive and lurking and presumably plotting. Woo. Not one of Chuck Dixon's best efforts.

Thor hooks up with a feisty Viking girl after he saves her village! Thor makes it rain in ancient Egypt and is immortalized in a bas relief! Thor ... mopes around Oklahoma for a while until he gets his mojo back!