Dan Watters and German Peralta Loki series is off to a bold start, blaming Loki himself for every “Florida Man” news headline.
That’s right, it’s not Florida’s Freedom of Information Laws giving journalists easier access to information about police arrests – it’s Loki constantly sneaking into the Sunshine State to get arrested for notable behavior.
Or, okay, maybe it’s freedom of information. After all, we only have Loki’s word for it, and him is a god of mischief.
What else is happening in the pages of our favorite comics? We’ll tell you. Welcome to Monday Funnies, Polygon’s weekly list of the books our comics editor liked last week. It’s part society pages about superhero lives, part reading advice, part “check out this cool art.” There may be some spoilers. There may not be enough context. But there will be great comics. (And if you missed the latest edition, read this.)
Image: Dan Watters, German Peralta/Marvel Comics
Dan Watters writes really solid comics, while Germán Peralta draws the same thing, so it wasn’t a surprise to me that Loki Number 1 was a delight. I wish there were more than four things in this story of the God of Lies Stories.
Loki tried to teach frost giants to read, and one thing led to another and the Naglfar warship – that is the ship made from the fingernails of the unburied dead that will drive Loki to doom in the final Ragnarok – crashed into the world tree. Now Loki must track down three scattered pieces of debris from the ship before the “driftwood” made of black magic and abandoned souls wreaks complete havoc.
Oh, also, the comic is bleakly and amusingly told by the collective unburied souls of the Naglfar.
Image: Chip Zdarsky, Belen Ortega/DC Comics
This week’s Batman featured one of the most charming sequences in a Batman main comic in a very long time, as the entire bat family reacted to Bruce coming back from a harrowing adventure and refusing to talk to anyone about it by breaking into Wayne Manor to make family breakfast. And along the way, they deliberately activated the alarm system, knowing that the only way they’d let Bruce come was to trick him into running over to defend the place.
Then they all sit down to eat and Batman begins to vividly hallucinate that they are all on fire, as he is allergic to relaxation. It is well. This is good.
Image: Gerry Duggan, Joshua Cassara/Marvel Comics
And here we have it, moving towards Kamala Khan’s card to die without dying, courtesy of the Resurrection of Krakoan, which was recently opened up to people in cases of dire need. The only question that remains is whether the process will somehow make her a mutant as she apparently is in the MCU.
I haven’t been impressed with Kamala’s entire death story, but I’ll say this: I’ve always liked her friendship with Cyclops. It’s one of the weirdest by-products of the period in X-Men comics where teenaged versions of the original X-Men were brought from past to present and hung out with contemporary Marvel teens, among other things. Cyclops spent part of his adolescence being best friends with Ms. Marvel, and then the adult version of him got a download of those time-displaced teen memories, and now you have Cyke as an adult who can always call Kamala squeezed.
Image: G. Willow Wilson, AL Kaplan/DC Comics
If Andor all proven, it is that fictional characters can also have left-wing power struggles, and this scene where a crocodile man and a plant lady discuss green ethics and the socio-economic considerations of environmentalism tops my book.