Today, Patrick, Drew, and Spencer discuss Thors 2, M.O.D.O.K. Assassin 3, Deadpool’s Secret Secret Wars 3, and Black Widow 20.

Patrick: It’s kind of a goofy week for Secret Wars: between Deadpool’s Secret Secret Wars — which may have just delivered its own punchline — and M.O.D.O.K. Assassin  — which is nothing but punchlines — and the deadpan homage to cop shows that is Thors, there’s a lot to make us smile. It’s not all shits and giggles: perhaps it’s fitting that series stuck telling stories of heroes’ Last Days would skew so dark, and issues like Black Widow 20 provide a necessary tonal balance when looking at the week in aggregate.

Thors 2

Patrick: Jason Aaron, Chris Sprouse and Goran Sudzuka’s Thors is one of the more exciting examples of mapping I’ve read in a long time. The first issue of this series was basically a procedural cop show with Thor and Battleworld specifics, but the second issue broadens that to include less-procedural cop shows. Thors 2 feels most like The Wire, delving into the toll the job actually takes on Battleworld’s peacekeepers. It’s still a series that paints the cops as the good guys (which means it’s still a series with a clear division between good and evil), but Aaron shows us some of the more reckless consequences of the Thors losing one of their own: they attack the disenfranchised populations of Battleworld, like the Hulks, the Zombies, The Vampires and the Ultrons. When the Hulks see the Thors coming and they know what to expect — an unwarranted ass-whoopin’. This is all on the heels of a Beta Ray Bill’s funeral, which is beat-for-beat and Irish Cop Wake, again as frequently depicted in The Wire.

They’re not in some funeral parlor or church or whatever — they’re in a Mead Hall. This issue even delves into the role that the disgraced former Thor has to play in this drama. It’s weirdly boilerplate stuff, but holy cow is it fun to populate all these cop-types with thors. Plus, Sprouse and Sudzuka fill every page with a staggering amount of detail, even when there are like 20 thors on a page. Drew, I know sometimes overly trope-y stories get wearying for you, so I’m curious as to whether you’re digging this or if it’s all too familiar, even through the veil of Battleworld.

Drew: My distaste for tropes has nothing on my love for The Wire, so the wake, the head-bashing to find a cop-killer, even the way they refer to Beta-Ray Bill as “a murder police” leaves me smiling. But this isn’t just a knowing homage — the fact that these are gods elevates a simple vengeance story into something much more interesting. Throw in some dramatic irony (all but the 616 Thor seem to have forgotten who Jane Foster and Donald Blake are), and you’ve got an intriguing mystery that we can’t quite see the edges of yet. What is Thor the Unworthy hiding? What does any of this have to do with Loki? It may take a while to suss this all out, but you can bet that I’m hooked in through the end of this series.

Black Widow 20

Drew: Speaking of ends of series, Black Widow 20 serves as Nathan Edmondson and Phil Noto’s farewell to Natasha. It takes us to the depths of her monstrousness, detailing not only how she killed the Comienzas, but also how she killed her own best friend, her friend’s lover — even her friend’s cat. That last one in particular illustrates how far she’s come since her Red Room days, managing to spin a positive note out of what is a decidedly depressing story.

A big part of what makes that epilogue work is how subtly Noto can display Nat’s emotions. She’s just as determined when saving folks in the present day as she is when assassinating the Comienzas, but Noto reserves a special hardness in her eyes for the moments where she’s fighting her own humanity.

In the issue’s back matter, Edmondson assures us that he and Noto will return on a series to be named later. I’m sure that series will be every bit as dazzling as this one, but with sequences like the one above, it’s hard not to wish they could stay with Nat forever.

Deadpool’s Secret Secret Wars 3

Spencer: I’m almost 100% certain that Cullen Bunn and Matteo Lolli’s Deadpool’s Secret Secret Wars mini-series was green-lit based on this one gag alone:

So it’s a shame that, at least for me, it doesn’t 100% land. Don’t get me wrong, as a joke it works like gangbusters, but I don’t fully buy Deadpool’s concern about driving the symbiote crazy. I mean, I’d buy it if this was the Deadpool who existed by the end of Duggan and Posehn’s run, a Wade Wilson who’d weathered multiple existential crises and came out far more compassionate as a result, and I even buy this Deadpool’s sorrow over Zsaji’s fate, as he’d gotten to know and care about her, but there’s a bit of a false note here when it comes to Deadpool being so concerned about something he barely realizes exists — it feels like Bunn just needed a fast reason for Wade to leave so Spidey could inherit the symbiote.

This actually sums up my experience with this issue rather well: there’s quite a few jokes and emotional moments that land surprisingly well, but the seams are also starting to show in distressing ways. For example, much of Wade’s dialogue (mainly his non-joke dialogue) reads as dated, stilted, and oddly expositional, as if this actually was a Bronze Age comic — this is strange because 1. most of Wade’s jokes rely upon the clashing tones between Wade’s modern sense of humor and the dated story, and 2. because Wade’s dialogue didn’t sound quite like this in issues 1 and 2.

The story also feels harder to follow — I’ve never read the original Secret Wars, but that didn’t make much of a difference when it came to understanding Deadpool’s Secret Secret Wars 1 & 2. With issue three, though, all the flashback sequences feel especially tangential, assembled more as a series of contextless gags than anything resembling a story, and it’s a bit disorienting. There’s still quite a bit I enjoyed about this issue as well, but I can feel the series itself heading in a distressing direction, and I hope Bunn can correct course in the remaining issues.

M.O.D.O.K Assassin

Patrick: When you’ve got a Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing acting as a story’s protagonist, there’s really only one thing we want to see him do: kill. Luckily, writer Christopher Yost, artist Amilcar Pinna and M.O.D.O.K. himself are all in staunch agreement. Knee-deep in Killville, M.O.D.O.K. and Angela Thor have an endless buffet of Guild of Assassins dudes to murder in increasingly gruesome, but never gory, ways. It’s actually remarkable well Pinna maintains the mini-series’ light-hearted tone, even has he shatters his 5th or 6th skull. There’s never any blood, which goes a long way toward letting the reader forget that we’re actually witnessing heinous acts of violence. But there are also more subtle ways of reinforcing the idea that these are characters introduced only to be killed. While we get some morally gray characters later on — like Black Widow and Elektra (weird that they’re both women?) — the trio that confronts M.O.D.O.K. and Thor is a who’s-who of disposable Spider-Man villains. Screaming Mimi, Jackolantern and Boomerang. Boomerang is my favorite, and his recent stint on Superior Foes of Spider-Man has cemented the dude as something of a perennial loser. When we finally see him impaled on a… whatever he’s impaled on, that’s sort of just the inevitable punchline to the joke Yost starting telling the character appeared on the page.

It’s also cool to see this issue placed in time with references to characters that are still alive — like Beta Ray Bill (who met his end in Thors 1) or Doctor Strange (who met is end in Secret Wars 4). I’m not normally one to give too much of a shit about continuity or anything like that, but Battleworld is starting to really come together for me as a living, changing world. And that doesn’t even mean we need to give up our colorful kill-a-thon!

Did you read some Secret Wars tie-ins that we didn’t? Sure you did! There are holes in our pull list. Holes that you’re encouraged to fill with your comments. Let’s keep talking about Secret Wars.