Features// Comics@SPOnG: Marvel in Ruins

Here there be comics. Or a look at some of the bigger releases from this week, anyway. We've got Marvel Comics on ebola, Superman blowing your brain apart and totally evil superheroes...


Ruins
Marvel
Writer: Warren Ellis
Artists: Cliff Nielsen, Terese Nielsen, Chris Moeller
$4.99^†

I once described Warren Ellis as the mad prophet of comics. Having read Ruins, I've changed my mind. He will henceforth be known as the Evil, Twisted and Just Plain Wrong Genius of Comics.

Ruins is a re-presentation of a mid-'90s, largely forgotten riff on Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross's Marvels, which told the tale of the emergence of superhumanity through the eyes of photographer Phil Shelton. That series' sequel just kicked off, and so we get Ruins. It does the same thing, but what we're shown instead of an 'age of Marvels' is a twisted, diseased vision of a Marvel Universe gone wrong. In some places, Just Plain Wrong. The Hulk as a mass of tumours! The Avengers as a group of anti-American agitators! Jean Grey as a cheap, costume-wearing hooker!

In a recent Bad Signal mailshot Warren Ellis wrote, “At the time, not a lot of people seemed to get that it was a comedy, and I got a great deal of wonderful hatemail. Which made the joke even funnier to me.” I can see that – especially at a time when we'd not had nearly so many 'real world' takes on superheroes to acclimatise us to such tales.

Ellis's vision here is wonderfully dark, warped and fun. The scripting isn't quite as deft as his later work, but it still features some brilliantly-hyperbolic narrative. The painted artwork from Terese and Cliff Nielsen takes something twisted and twists it some more, lending a skewed, paranoid bleakness to Ellis's writing. The work of Chris Moeller, who took up art chores for the last few pages is undeniably good, but unfortunately doesn't capture the tone of the story quite so well as Nielsen and Nielsen. That's a small complaint, though.

For those who've been reading Warren Ellis for a while – there's some definite foreshadowing, in terms of tone and style, of his later superhero work. Planetary fans will certainly find something familiar in the investigative nature of the narrative and the warped takes on certain Marvel characters...

I'd also like to thank Marvel for printing this as a $4.99 (£3.25 at my local comic shop, not sure about yours) single issue, rather than turning it into a deluxe hardcover, padding it with extras and milking us for fifteen-odd quid.


Final Crisis: Superman Beyond 3D
DC
Writer: Grant Morrison
Penciller: Doug Manhke
$4.50^†

Hmmm... Last week, I read Final Crisis #6 (the series from which this spins), felt like my brain had been drip-fed acid and squished against a wall, then decided that that was OK and I loved it anyway.

This week, Superman Beyond has given me much the same feeling, but with double the dose and some LSD thrown in for good measure to make me a bit less forgiving. The two-part series slots into the goings-on of DC's big event, Final Crisis, and sees Big Blue whisked off to another reality to stop the arrival of a Big Bad from beyond existence. It also provides some kind of meta-narrative on the nature of story-telling, I think.