Elektra by Greg Rucka Ultimate Collection (with various artists)

I'm going to try to be quick with this one: it's very much not my thing in multiple ways, and I read it to sample both what my old college buddy Rucka has been doing and what mainstream Marvel comics are like. The answer, in both cases, is: still things I'm not all that interested in, and which I do not enjoy, which is totally fine.

Elektra by Greg Rucka Ultimate Collection collects more than a year of the title comic about the ninja super-assassin, issues 7-22 from just over a decade ago. The art is by a whole lot of different people, most of which was in styles I found actively off-putting. (Worst: Greg Horn, whose glossy photorealism seemingly only comes at the expense of composition and energy and movement and human body proportions. Best: Carlos Meglia, with two great cartoony issues full of zip and vigor. Everyone else was variously muddy and dull and generically gritty, to my eye.)

This is the kind of comic that aggressively insists that it's nothing like superheroes as it features an unstoppable overpowered killing machine wearing a silly unfeasible costume and fighting against magic ninjas. I have never found any part of that argument compelling. And the fact that the overall plotline here is, more or less, "maybe, Elektra, spending your life murdering people for money in job lots is not the greatest thing you could possibly be doing" adds to that great-power-great-responsibility hoo-ha.

Anyway, Elektra is the world's greatest assassin, who kills people in that stripper costume she's wearing on the cover (and often other clothes; she's an equal-opportunity murderess) in various inventive ways and, at this point, was completely separate from the regular Marvel Universe so she could be grimmer and grittier. Although the trained-by-good-and-then-evil-ninjas thing, and the whole she-was-dead-for-a-while-but-got-better deal, are still baked into her backstory on a molecular level.

These are crime stories about a globetrotting international assassin, and they are never as fun and thrilling as that phrase makes them sound. As usual, Rucka focuses on the mental trauma his characters face, and Elektra has been brainwashed so many times it's a wonder she can cross the street without a Boy Scout. They are largely "about" the kind of serious "issues" that superhero comics get into when they're feeling expansive: life's purpose and meaning, how glorious and intoxicating it is to murder a whole lot of people, the difficulty of maintaining a steady clientele in the international-assassin business, and so on.

I'm already running on too long, and getting too snarky: the stories here are solid of their kind, but they're very tough-guy stories, in the old paperback thriller mode. It is nice to see that Marvel can publish stories in which people in funny costumes kill each other, instead of just punch each other through buildings and then take each other to super-jail, I guess.

This sequence of stories seems to have largely been Rucka trying to reset from "Elektra kills people for money and is a total badass about it" to "Elektra feels bad about having killed lots of people and might possibly be looking to do Good Things to redress her karmic balance," but the moment of reset, if I'm right, is at the very end of this book. So I don't know if it stuck, and frankly I don't care enough to investigate.