Dan Watters and Germán Peralta’s Loki series is off to a rollicking start, by blaming every “Florida Man” news headline on Loki himself.
That’s right, it’s not that Florida’s freedom of information laws give journalists easier access to information about police arrests — it’s that Loki is constantly sneaking down to the Sunshine State to get arrested for remarkable behavior.
Or, OK, maybe it’s the freedom of information thing. After all, we only have Loki’s word for it, and he 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 that our comics editor enjoyed this past week. It’s part society pages of superhero lives, part reading recommendations, part “look at 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 last edition, read this.)
Dan Watters writes really solid comics, while Germán Peralta draws the same, so it was no surprise to me that Loki #1 was a delight. I already wish there were more than four issues to this story of the God of Lies Stories.
See, Loki tried to teach frost giants how to read, and one thing lead to another and the Naglfar warship — that’s the one made out of the fingernails of the unburied dead that Loki will ride to ruin in the final Ragnarok — crashed into the world tree. Now Loki has to track down three scattered pieces of debris from the ship, before the “driftwood” made of black magic and abandoned souls causes complete havoc.
Oh, also, the comic is morosely and amusingly narrated by the collective unburied souls of the Naglfar.
This week’s Batman featured one of the more charming sequences in a main Batman comic in a very long time, as the whole bat-family responded 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, on the way, they deliberately tripped the alarm system, knowing that the only way they’d get Bruce to show up was to trick him into rushing over to defend the place.
Then they all sit down to eat and Batman starts vividly hallucinating that they’re all on fire, because he is allergic to relaxation. It’s fine. This is fine.
And here we have it, movement toward Kamala Khan’s get-out-of-death-free card, courtesy of Krakoan resurrection, which was recently opened to humans in cases of great need. The only question left is whether the process will somehow make her a mutant like she apparently is in the MCU.
I’ve not been impressed with Kamala’s whole death story, but I will say this: I’ve always liked her friendship with Cyclops. It’s one of the oddest byproducts of the period in X-Men comics during which teenage versions original X-Men were brought from the past to the present day and, among other things, hung around with present day Marvel teens. Cyclops spent some of his adolescence being best friends with Ms. Marvel, and then the adult version of him got a download of those memories from the time-displaced teen one, and now you have Cyke being one grownup that Kamala can always call in a pinch.
If Andor proved anything, it’s that fictional characters can have leftist infighting too, and this scene in which a crocodile man and a plant lady discuss green ethics and the socioeconomic considerations of environmentalism is tops in my book.