Young, queer, Latina … and strong enough to punch star-shaped holes in reality. America Chavez – AKA unmasked avenger Miss America – is a welcome departure from outdated superhero archetypes. Since 2015, she has enlivened Marvel’s heavyweight super-team the Ultimates with her determined, no-bull attitude and unparalleled street style (instead of the usual unchanging crimefighting costume, Chavez favours a freewheeling wardrobe of covetable shorts, hoodies and jackets united by red, white, blue, stars and stripes). Marvel has finally realised her potential as a standalone hero: this month’s America #1 launches Chavez as the headliner of her own ongoing comic series. Taking time out from team-ups, she has enrolled at Sotomayor University, an advanced campus that includes a Department of Radical Women & Intergalactic Indigenous Peoples and a Fifth Element-obsessed sorority called the Leelumultipass Phi Theta Betas. Before long, she is teleporting through time and space to ace a tricky homework paper, in the process offering a fairly definitive position on the morality of punching Nazis.
If that all sounds rather more exuberant than the usual superhero fare, it might be because of the atypical creative team behind the project. Artist Joe Quinones has previously explored some of the more absurd corners of the Marvel universe while working on the irreverent Howard the Duck series. Writer Gabby Rivera, on the other hand, is making a very high-profile comics debut. But as the young, queer Latina author of YA novel Juliet Takes a Breath, she seems indisputably qualified to plot the reality-hopping adventures of Miss America. (“I’ve always dreamt up wild, powerful and carefree superheroes that look like me and my family,” Rivera recently told the Washington Post: “Thick, brown, goofy, beautiful.”) And if there was any doubt about the fierce direction of the series, Quinones’s cover for April’s second issue is a righteous tribute to Beyoncé’s Formation video.
If you’ve seen Archer, the subversive animated series about self-involved spies, you will likely have admired its sleek 1960s-inspired design, evocative of peak Connery Bond. Archer’s art director Neal Holman has now diversified into writing comics, although Redline – his new monthly series for Oni Press – has a much scrappier and scratchier aesthetic, courtesy of artist Clayton McCormack. It’s a near-future story of exploitation, occupation and strife on a shoddily terraformed Mars, with a haphazard private army protecting the rapacious Vantage Corporation from “Dusties” (disgruntled displaced Martians). The inciting incident is an apparent terrorist bombing destroying Vantage property and personnel, a volatile situation that drags specialist Superintendent Coyle to the frontline. A pickled investigator who drops F-bombs with abandon, Coyle detects his first clue while squatting in the Martian scrub with his pants down trying to relieve his twisted innards. With blasted body parts and unpleasant fluids oozing everywhere, this is pitch-black, scatological satire disguised as a hard-boiled military conspiracy thriller. Crucially, like Archer, it’s also hilarious, while McCormack’s 2000AD-inspired art makes Mars look vast, wild and mysterious, despite all the industrial crap humankind has carelessly strewn about.
There are high-concept comics, and then there is Transformers Vs GI Joe: The Movie Adaptation, a very special one-off published this week by IDW. If you’re struggling to recall the toyetic giant-robots-against-gung-ho soldiers summer blockbuster it purports to adapt, that’s because such a movie doesn’t exist. Instead, this delirious story merely pretends that Transformers Vs GI Joe, a 13-issue comic series first published by IDW in 2014, was subsequently optioned and made into a film, with all the cuts, compromises and illogical additions that go into moulding any existing property into a Hollywood movie. Then the original co-writer and artist Tom Scioli was “hired” to write this official comics adaptation of the imaginary movie. You follow?
As a feat of conceptual backflips it feels worthy of the Turner prize, and while the super-compressed, single-issue story can sometimes read like a malfunctioning robot’s fever dream, its tone is aided by Scioli’s obsessively detailed but appealingly childlike art, referencing everything from The Silence of the Lambs to Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof. You emerge from the chaos thinking: I really want to see this movie. Bonus pages offering the behind-the-scenes scoop about the mix of practical and green-screen techniques that went into the movie’s special effects are just the absurdist cherry on top. Perhaps most impressively, the suits at Hasbro had to sign off on the whole transgressive thing, suggesting they are super-hip, oblivious or both.
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