Comic Books – Page 18 – Fascination Place

This Week’s Haul

Countdown to Final Crisis #1 of 51 (backwards), by Paul Dini, Keith Giffen, Tom Derenick & Wayne Faucher (DC)
The Death of the New Gods #8 of 8, by Jim Starlin & Art Thibert (DC)
Fables #72, by Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham & Steve Leialoha (DC/Vertigo)
Hulk #3, by Jeph Loeb, Ed McGuinness & Dexter Vines (Marvel)
Thor #8, by J. Michael Straczynski, Marko Djurdjevic & Danny Mika (Marvel)

Finally, mercifully, Countdown comes to an end. Even worse, apparently it was originally slated to run for 52 issues, but they decided to end it with #1 rather than #0, so it only ran 51. Small loss. (I guess #0 is being replaced with next week’s DC Universe #0.)

I had thought of running through the storylines from Countdown to examine how pointless and unsatisfying they were, but Brian Hibbs has already done just that over at Savage Critics. He also discusses from a retailer’s standpoint what a mess Countdown has been for DC, and what a shambles DC’s editorial direction seems to be in after these last few years, starting with the repulsive Identity Crisis, through the pointless Infinite Crisis, the fun 52, the even-more-pointless One Year Later, now Countdown, and soon Final Crisis. (Final crisis? Yeah, right.) It’s been crossover-mania, and crossovers have always been a questionable effort at best; for the most part, these projects have done nothing but undermine the enjoyability of the characters while hanging these changes on exceedingly thin stories. The emperor not only has no clothes, he’s started to flay himself.

Anyway. Countdown didn’t even have much of a story. What little there was mostly played out in The Death of the New Gods (see below), and everything else here was completely superfluous. I wonder what the original idea behind this series was? I haven’t been impressed with Paul Dini’s comics writing, but surely his original pitch actually had some sort of point, rather than just trailing off into nothingness like this.

DC’s next weekly series will be Trinity, focusing on Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. I have fairly little interest in any of these characters; Superman is occasionally fun, but neither Batman nor Wonder Woman does much for me, especially these days when Batman is relentlessly grim and Wonder Woman is a cipher. So I’m going to skip it, even if Kurt Busiek is writing it.

For some reason, this issue takes place before Countdown #2, but was apparently intentionally published a week later. Huh?

Anyway, I probably should have guessed that this series would be little more than a side matter to Countdown, and although Jim Starlin does his best to make something worthwhile out of it – mostly by playing up the tragic figure of Mister Miracle – in the end it comes down to another stupid fight with Darkseid, who at this point might be DC’s most boring villain. A while back I speculated that this would end up being a Superman story, bearing witness to the end of the New Gods, but Superman stood on the margins in this issue and really didn’t serve much purpose.

So what’s the point? In order to get any of this to pay off, DC really has to do something major and earth-shaking, the sort of total reworking of their line which was promised back in Crisis on Infinite Earths but which never came to pass. But I think DC doesn’t have enough of a vision to pull off such a thing, to actually wrap up all of its current titles are start afresh. And it’s hard to see how doing otherwise would make this worth it.

If there’s one thing more frustrating than a status quo which never changes, it’s dangling the promise of some real change without ever following through. And that’s where I think DC is now. And so the loss of the New Gods will likely be both pointless and ephemeral; everything will likely be back to normal in a few years.

This Week’s Haul

The Brave and the Bold #12, by Mark Waid, Jerry Ordway & Bob Wiacek (DC)
Countdown to Final Crisis #2 of 52 (backwards), by Paul Dini, Sean McKeever, Keith Giffen & Scott Kolins (DC)
Salvation Run #6 of 7, by Matthew Sturges, Sean Chen & Walden Wong (DC)
Suicide Squad: Raise the Flag #8 of 8, by John Ostrander, Javier Pina & Robin Riggs (DC)
Tangent: Superman’s Reign #2 of 12, by Dan Jurgens, Jamal Ingle & Robin Riggs, and Ron Marz, Fernando Pasarin & Jesse Delperdang (DC)
Annihilation Conquest #6 of 6, by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Tom Raney & Scott Hanna (Marvel)
The Perhapanauts #1, by Todd DeZago & Craig Rousseau (Image)

The second story arc of The Brave and the Bold wraps up in disappointing fashion: George PÃ©rez left the book after #10, and while Jerry Ordway is another of my five favorite pencillers, I don’t think he works as well with the madcap adventure yarns that Mark Waid is writing here as well as PÃ©rez did. And this six-issue arc wasn’t that interesting: It involved a villain named Megistus collecting mystical artifacts in order to reshape the universe, which is not exactly a new storyline, and served to be little more than an excuse to romp randomly through the DC universe – much less interesting than the coherent single story of the first six issues. Worst of all, Megistus’ motivations are supposed to be an attempt to avoid the upcoming Final Crisis (assuming he was telling the truth, that is), which is as disappointing a tie-in as I can recall in recent memory. Sigh.

Not that it hasn’t been an enjoyable arc on some levels – there have been some good character bits and the gorgeous artwork – but it’s just not nearly as good as the first arc. I can see that Waid was trying to do something a little different, but I think a multi-character team-up book needs a tight framework in which to operate or else it just falls apart. Indeed, I think such books succeed best when a hodge-podge of characters are pulled together into a very tight, sensical story, but the loose framework of this second arc made it feel much less coherent, and thus much less enjoyable.

Two other series concluded their arc this week, with much greater success. Suicide Squad: Raise the Flag marks John Ostrander’s return to one of his more artistically successful series. The Suicide Squad is a covert government organization which forcibly recruits villains to go on missions; if they succeed, their sentences are reduced; if they fail, they probably end up dying on the mission anyway. This series picked up where the original series left off, even bringing back a character long assumed deceased. After careful set-up taking us back to the days of the earlier series, we’re also introduced to the tension between Amanda Waller, the leader of the Squad, and General Wade Eiling, an SOB who eventually had his brain transplanted into the body of an invulnerable, super-strong android.

Ostrander always made the Squad work because not only was his unflinching in killing off some of the characters – including the occasional major one – but he maintained a careful balance of distrust and respect among the main characters, both heroes and villains, and dug deeply into their motivations. Everyone here has some sort of pathology, as you might expect from people who dress up in spandex to commit or fight crimes. A couple of the heroes attached to the Squad are a little less nutty than the others – Bronze Tiger is arguably the most ‘pure’ of the heroes – but everyone has a point of view of an agenda which brings them into conflict with the others at some point.

Anyway, this story wraps up with a mission – to which Eiling is now attached as a convicted villain – going horribly wrong. Of course, this being the Squad and not the Justice League, a decidedly different form of mayhem ensues, and it all wraps up rather neatly. Nifty character bits abound, especially those involving Deadshot and the new Captain Boomerang, the writing is sharp, and the art is mostly terrific, although inker Robin Riggs pencils a few of the last pages, and they’re noticeably stiff next to those of Javier Pina.

But all things considered, this series is made of win. If it results in a new Suicide Squad ongoing series, I would totally be on board with it.

The first Annihilation series was totally awesome, and consequently was a hard act to follow. Annihilation Conquest doesn’t quite reach its heights, but it’s still a heck of a lot of fun.

Basically, the Phalanx takes over the Kree empire, seals it in an impenetrable bubble (dozens of light-years wide!) and starts infecting all beings inside with its technovirus, including Nova, Drax, Gamora, Blastaar, etc. Pockets of rebellion persist, primarily a team of misfits led by the former Star-Lord who seek to bring down the Babel Spire which is generating the field. Meanwhile Quasar – sister of the most recent Captain Marvel – find the High Evolutionary and a resurrected Adam Warlock (again?) and strives to enlist them, but the Evolutionary betrays her and puts the mind of the Phalanx’s leader – whose identity might elicit a groan from longtime Marvel readers, but seems almost obligatory to me – in Adam’s body.

In the conclusion, Nova shows up with the cavalry, Star-Lord’s team makes its last stand, and Ronan the Accuser implements his final solution to the problem of the Phalanx infestation. As grand, “last, desperate hope” climaxes go, this one is pretty good. A lot of people really loved Star-Lord’s strike force, especially Groot and Rocket Raccoon, but I enjoyed the weightier characters, such as Nova and Wraith (I wish we’d seen more of the latter). I appreciate Star-Lord as a sort of tragic hero, having lost all his powers in defending the galaxy from an insane Herald of Galactus, but I don’t think the rest of his team is a very good foil for his character. I guess we’ll see how well it works in a longer form in the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy series, though.

Overall, Marvel’s revitalization of their space characters has been a smashing success, relying on good stories, clever plotting, and well-defined characters who stay in character. The mess which is the rest of Marvel’s line of titles would do well to watch what these guys are doing, because they’re doing it right.

Comic Shop Remodel

My regular comics shop, Comics Conspiracy, closed for the weekend in order to do a major remodel – the biggest they’ve done in the 9 years I’ve been going there: They replaced the old dark red carpet with a lighter brown carpet, and rearranged the bookcases so they’re all up along the walls rather than forming little alcoves along the side of the store. As a result they were able to move the back issue bins to the middle of the room, providing much wider aisles on either side. Add a few new bookshelves and the place looks brighter and as nice as it has while I’ve been going.

The owner, Ryan, started as an employee there a couple of years before I moved to the area, and he’s been there through two previous owners. He bought the place from the last owner, Ken, last year. (Ken still comes by to work every so often, but his regular job doesn’t let him come by on Wednesdays anymore, so I rarely see him, which is too bad because Ken’s a fun guy, but that’s the way it goes, I guess.) Ken was into action figures and statues, while Ryan is more of a pure comics guy, and that’s the way he’s taking the store (though he says some action figures are still good to have to sell to kids).

(Incidentally, the store’s owner when I first started going there was the late comics writer Doug Miers. He published comics through a separate Comics Conspiracy imprint. I never really knew him, though, since he sold the store to Ken soon after I started going there.)

I remember their last really big remodel, when they moved the new comics racks from the front of the store to the back. It took me a while to realize they did it so that customers would have to walk through the store and see all the merchandise when picking up their weekly books. “Retail 101” Ryan called this when I mentioned this to him tonight.

I commented when I walked in that the place smelled like new carpet and paint – a smell I said is good for 2 months or 200 high school students, whichever comes first, since there’s a high school across the street.

The comic book market collapse of the late 90s – not to mention the economic ups and downs since then – have wreaked havoc on area comics stores, but several good ones have survived. Hopefully CC will continue to survive and prosper.

Here are some photos of the store. The guy in black in the second photo is Ryan, who was still restocking the shelves when I went by.

Comics Conspiracy remodel: Bins & recent comics

Comics Conspiracy remodel: Spinner rack & trades

I just happened to take these photos when the store was nearly empty. There were about a half-dozen people when I arrived, and a couple more showed up after I snapped these. Once in a while I go by after running errands over lunch and there are several other Apple employees also picking up their weekly fix there.

The Problem with Endless Titans Revivals

Like Valerie D’Orazio, I decided to pass on Titans #1. (Rachelle Goguen and others weren’t so lucky, apparently.)

To me, though, the interesting matter isn’t whether the book sucked or not, or why DC keeps bothering trying to revive the title so often (trademarks, if nothing else). After all, the beloved (and deservedly so) New Teen Titans from the early 1980s was itself the third attempt to do something with the Teen Titans property. So why did it succeed so brilliantly, and why have other attempts failed so badly?

It wasn’t all Marv Wolfman and George PÃ©rez, was it?

I think what Wolfman and PÃ©rez tapped into with New Teen Titans was not just a good mix of characters, it was a mix of characters all of whom were at a major point of transition in their lives. The first two attempts at a Teen Titans comic book featured characters who were teenagers and who were essentially stuck as teenagers: They were in the shadows of their mentors, and essentially unable to break free of them because, well, they were teenagers, and continued to be teenagers for quite a few years. In “real world” terms, it was because the characters weren’t really allowed by DC editorial to age until the 1970s, and it took Wolfman and PÃ©rez – creators of enough stature that they could pretty much do whatever they wanted with the characters – to take them into adulthood.

So then, in The New Teen Titans we have four established heroes who actually do break free of their mentors and establish themselves as adults:

Robin becomes Batman’s equal and adopts his own identity as Nightwing.
Wonder Girl establishes a career and gets married
Kid Flash decides he doesn’t want to be a superhero anymore and leaves the team.
Beast Boy takes on the name Changeling and has a difficult transition to adulthood as “the rich green geek”.

The other four major Titans of the Wolfman/PÃ©rez run – Starfire, Cyborg, Raven and Terra – are new characters, but are all going through their own phases of maturation, and they play off of the four established characters, making for a dynamic set of personalities who happen to be at a complicated stage of their lives. Result: Drama and character development, even without the superhero action-adventure.

The Titans revivals since then have generally featured the same characters as adults, often with new characters mixed in, but have been far less successful by any yardstick. And the reason for that, I believe, is that you just can’t take established characters – especially iconic ones – through the life-altering transition to adulthood twice. You can unmarry Wonder Girl, rename her Troia, change her costume, or whatever (and DC has done all of that and more), but she’s an adult now, and even if her life is pretty screwed up, the stories you tell about her are going to be fundamentally different than those Wolfman and PÃ©rez were able to tell.

The lesson to be learned here is that it’s not necessarily putting together the right mix of characters which makes the book work. It’s what you do with those characters that matters, not just sending them off on adventures, but illuminating them and changing and growing (or even diminishing) them in some way. The Titans books since the Wolfman/PÃ©rez days may have been rollicking superhero action yarns (I’ve read a few of them and haven’t generally found them to be awful, just kinda… there), but they didn’t have that underlying sense of lives transforming because that’s the way life is which marked The New Teen Titans. (And, to be sure, once that title finishing bringing its characters to adulthood, it slid into mediocrity pretty quickly.)

We should be glad to have had the Wolfman/PÃ©rez Titans, because they absolutely nailed what the book should have been, and produced one of the great superhero comics as a result. (And we should give them props for being great creators who had the skill to recognize how to deliver on the series’ potential.) But also because there’s never again going to be a Teen Titans series with those characters which works the same way. And it’s not entirely clear what the point of the Titans is, without that element of growing up driving it.

(Incidentally, Kid Flash was fortunate enough to be involved in another such coming-of-age storyline; after he left the Titans, he followed in his uncle’s footsteps to become the Flash, and after years of just sorta being there, Mark Waid had him make the mantle of the Flash his own in The Return of Barry Allen, which was one of the great superhero stories of the 1990s. So you can take a hero through this sort of transformative experience twice. But as in real life, it’s not the sort of thing that happens every month! Do it well, though, and you’ve produced something special.)

This Week’s Haul

Booster Gold #8, by Geoff Johns, Jeff Katz, Dan Jurgens & Norm Rapmund (DC)
Countdown to Final Crisis #3 of 52 (backwards), by Paul Dini, Sean McKeever, Keith Giffen & Freddie Williams II (DC)
Justice Society of America #14, by Geoff Johns, Alex Ross, Dale Eaglesham & Prentis Rollins (DC)
Nova #12, by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Paul Pelletier & Rick Magyar (Marvel)
Echo #2, by Terry Moore (Abstract)
B.P.R.D.: 1946 #4 of 5, by Mike Mignola, Joshua Dysart & Paul Azaceta (Dark Horse)
The Complete Peanuts 1967-1968, by Charles M. Schultz (Fantagraphics)
Locke & Key #3 of 6, by Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodriguez (IDW)

I don’t get the cover to this month’s Justice Society: It shows all our heroes either walking away (from what?) or standing around (why?) while the face of (presumably) the villain appears in the clouds in the background. But this has nothing at all to do with the issue, although its composition seems to indicate that it does! Basically it’s a typical “The heroes have been so defeated that they’re giving up” cover, the sort exemplified by the famous cover to Amazing Spider-Man #50.

Yet it has nothing at all to do with the issue, whose story goes like this:

The JSA having a meeting about who’s going to go after the very powerful Gog.
Gog shows up in their meeting room
Fight!

Anyway. It’s not so much a bad issue as a “well, let’s get this out of the way” issue. Basically, John and Ross have let us down as far as building dramatic tension and bringing it to a climax goes. In other words, regardless of where the story “They Kingdom Come” is going, it’s going there very slowly and is being boring while it’s going there.

It seems like when I have little to say about the rest of the haul, Nova always stands out and makes me smile. Nova’s quest to rid himself of the Phalanx technovirus comes to an end, and he and his allies have to face a powerful adversary. Abnett and Lanning also cleverly manage their characters, setting up expectations for how things will turn out for all of them, and then arranging things so they works out differently. This story has gone on a little too long, but Abnett & Lanning managed to pack some more stuff into it to keep it from dragging, and they managed to deliver a satisfying payoff – really exactly the opposite of how JSA is going.

And it turns out that it’s been dragged out this long because now Nova’s going to loop back to where this story started in the conclusion to Annihilation Conquest. Which might seems self-indulgent, but since both series have been plenty of fun, I don’t really mind. (This also explains why Nova’s 4-issue involvement in Annihilation Conquest last year ended so anticlimactically – it was just the set-up for this longer arc which would then tie back in to the mini-series. I guess I shoulda had more faith!)

Oh, and there’s also a hint at the end of the issue that Drax is starting to revert a little to his “big dumb destroyer” form. I wonder if he cycles from weak-but-clever to strong-and-stupid and back again every few years?

This Week’s Haul

Comic books I bought the week of 2 April 2008.

Action Comics #863, by Geoff Johns, Gary Frank & Jon Sibal (DC)
Countdown to Final Crisis #4 of 52 (backwards), by Paul Dini, Sean McKeever, Keith Giffen, Jamal Ingle & Keith Champagne (DC)
Metal Men #7 of 8, by Duncan Rouleau (DC)
Clandestine #3 of 5, by Alan Davis & Mark Farmer (Marvel)
The Twelve #4 of 12, by J. Michael Straczynski, Chris Weston & Garry Leach (Marvel)
The Boys #17, by Garth Ennis & Darick Robertson (Dynamite)
Project Superpowers #2 of 6, by Alex Ross, Jim Krueger & Carlos Paul (Dynamite)

Action Comics this week wraps up “Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes”. It’s been a strange nostalgia trip for us 70s Legion fans, starting with “The Lightning Saga” and now this one.

To summarize, as a boy Superman was recruited by the Legion – a group of teenaged heroes who live in the 30th century – to become a member, and to give him a sense of belonging to a group of his peers. However, this isn’t the Legion of his 30th century, since that’s presumably the group currently being published in Legion of Super-Heroes. Rather, this is the Legion whose adventures were published in the 1950s through the late 80s. Only in this world Karate Kid never died (instead he gets to die in Countdown to Final Crisis, but that’s another matter), and the Magic Wars never brought the 30th century to its knees, and thus the Five Years Later stories never happened. Rather, Superman grew up and stopped going to the 30th century. And the Legion grew up, too, without him.

In “The Lightning Saga” a few Legionnaires came back to the 20th century to bring the Flash back to his time. Karate Kid and Starman stayed behind. And then Brainiac 5 contacts Superman and brings him into the future to help overthrow the future Justice League, a group of former Legion rejects led by Earth-Man, who can absorb the powers of other heroes. The rejects have convinced Earth that Superman was a human like them who fought for human rights and that they should kick all the aliens off of Earth – a bummer for the Legion since they’re mostly aliens. When Superman arrives he finds that the sun has been turned red, so he loses his powers, and that other planets are preparing to stage an all-out war against the xenophobic Earth.

All of this is pretty silly, and it gets sillier in this issue, which features such elements as a complete disregard for the speed of light, and Superman gaining and losing his powers instantly depending on the sun’s color (I thought Superman acted more like a solar battery rather than the sun acting like a magic on/off switch like it did in the 1950s, but admittedly I don’t follow too closely). From a structural standpoint, it’s never clear why Superman needed to be involved in this story at all, as he has only a marginal effect on the outcome (besides throwing the final punch). Thematically he witnesses what happens when his name is used to evil purposes, but a thousand years down the line there’s not a whole lot he can do about that.

I sound like a sourpuss, but despite the continuity confusion and story silliness, I actually enjoyed the story and it was consistently near the top of my reading stack each month. Johns may have written a very loose story, but I was genuinely interested in what the heck was going on, and it features plenty of rah-rah heroism to make it actually feel good. Plus as a fan of the Legion from the 1970s, I enjoyed seeing “my” Legion back again; their backstory may not make any sense, but by-and-large they acted like the Legion I loved, and in a way that’s more important. So as self-indulgent, ultimately-meaningless stories go, it was a fun read.

I’m conflicted about penciller Gary Frank’s art. His style has evolved over the last 10 years from a clean-lined cartoonist to a strict realist, rendering his figures in careful detail. However, he’s another artist who rarely draws backgrounds, which means his panels are often missing a sense of place. The cover of this issue (at left) is a good overview of his style in all these regards, actually. Still, he does have a strong feel for facial expressions and draws some nice action scenes which keeps the story moving along. (He also draws a terrific Dawnstar.) Overall it’s a net win, although I think if he fleshed out his panels a bit more then he could move up into Dave Gibbons territory as an artist.

I guess this Legion will next pop up later this year in something called Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds, which might explain why there are all these Legions running around. Or not. Still it’ll be drawn by George PÃ©rez, and that’s enough to get me to check it out. (There’s an interview with Geoff Johns about it here.)

As I feared after last week, Countdown to Final Crisis undoes all of the ballsy moves they put in place in the last few weeks by revealing that it all happened on an alternate Earth. So Karate Kid and Una die for nothing (not that their presence in the book ever made the least sense at all), we we’re not back to the silly Dark Mary Marvel stuff, which also makes no sense.

Who thought all this was a good idea?

This Week’s Haul

Comic books I bought the week of 26 March 2008.

It’s a small, all-DC week!

All-Star Superman #10, by Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely (DC)
Countdown to Final Crisis #5 of 52 (backwards), by Paul Dini, Adam Beechen, Keith Giffen, Jim Starlin & Rodney Ramos (DC)
Countdown to Adventure #8 of 8, by Adam Beechen, Allan Goldman & Julio Ferreira, and Justin Gray, Fabrizio Fiorentino & Adam Dekraker (DC)
Legion of Super-Heroes #40, by Jim Shooter, Francis Manapul & Livesay (DC)

I’ve been trying to resist commenting on Countdown to Final Crisis until it wraps up, but I can’t resist this one: The Great Disaster arrives (a concept from Kirby’s Fourth World series from the 70s, which as I’ve said before I think are silly and forgettable at best), and it’s because a member of the Legion of Super-Heroes came back from the 31st century, decided to stay, and happened to be carrying an advanced virus (“morticoccus”) which causes humans and animals (and Kryptonians, it seems) to mutate into murderous monsters.

Huh?

There are still four issues to go, plus the inevitable Final Crisis series coming up, but this whole series makes basically no sense to me. Not only have many of the plot threads been seemingly-irrelevant to the main story, but the time travel element introduces logical difficulties which the story has made no effort to explain.

While there’s a certain fascination to watching the fall of the “real” DC Universe, and the audacity that it’s being handled in such a straightforward fashion – when the series involves time travel and parallel universes, it seems all too easy for them to write this one off in a few glib panels. While I suppose it’s remotely possible that this drek could be woven into a sensical story in the last 4 issues, it sure seems unlikely.

The best of the various Countdown-related comics has easily been Countdown to Adventure. Of course, it’s not the Countdown-related elements that I enjoyed; rather, it’s the unrelated material which is entertaining.

The Forerunner half of CtA has been completely pointless. She was a pointless character to start with, and is only more so here: A supremely-skilled combat expert and the last survivor of her race, she finds reason for being at the end of this tale, but since she’s pretty much a total cipher as far as her personality goes, that basically renders the whole thing, well, did I say pointless?

The headlining story is by far the reason to check out this series: The “mystery in space” characters from 52 – Adam Strange, Animal Man and Starfire – deal with an infection brought by them to both Earth and Rann which turns people into violent slaves of a religious demagogue named Lady Styx. It may sound silly, but it’s very much in the tradition of the Silver Age yarns from which Strange and Animal Man hail. All three characters undergo some decent character tests along the way: Strange is deposed as protector of Rann and replaced by a psychopathic fellow Earthman, leaving Strange wondering what his reason for living is, since he’s unable to support his family as a civilian. Animal Man’s marriage is strained after his year-long absence in space. He and Ellen are letting Starfire live with them until her powers return – if they ever do – and Ellen worries that her husband is thinking of leaving her for the statuesque alien babe. Of course, it all turns out all right in the end, but it was a fun read.

Adam Beechen does a good job guiding the story, and while Allan Goldman’s art is a little unpolished, it’s dynamic enough to work, and reminiscent of Norm Breyfogle at times.

I guess the characters will return in this summer’s Rann/Thanagar: Holy War, although unfortunately I find the Rann/Thanagar warfare to be pretty tedious by this point; not only is it an old idea (dating to the late 70s) but it’s addressed in little bits here and there without much sense of ever moving forward. I fear that the character bits which made CtA enjoyable will be completely lost in that series. Still, that’s no reflection on this series, which I’m almost sorry to see come to an end.

This Week’s Haul

Comic books I bought the week of 19 March 2008.

Batman: The Killing Joke HC, by Alan Moore & Brian Bolland (DC)
The Brave and the Bold #11, by Mark Waid, Jerry Ordway & Bob Wiacek (DC)
Countdown to Final Crisis #6 of 52 (backwards), by Paul Dini, Adam Beechen, Keith Giffen, Mike Norton & Jimmy Palmiotti (DC)
The Death of the New Gods #7 of 8, by Jim Starlin & Art Thibert (DC)
Ex Machina #35, by Brian K. Vaughan, Tony Harris & Jim Clark (DC/Wildstorm)
Fables #71, by Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham & Steve Leialoha (DC/Vertigo)
Sandman Mystery Theatre: The Hourman and The Python vol 6 TPB, by Matt Wagner, Steven T. Seagle, Guy Davis & Warren Pleece (DC)
Tangent: Superman’s Reign #1 of 12, by Dan Jurgens, Matthew Clark & Fernando Pasarin (DC)
Marvel Masterworks: Captain America vol 93 HC, collecting Captain America #114-124, by Stan Lee, Gene Colan, John Romita, John Buscema, Sal Buscema & Joe Sinnott (Marvel)
Thor #7, by J. Michael Straczynski, Mark Djurdjevic & Danny Miki (Marvel)
Invincible #49, by Robert Kirkman & Ryan Ottley (Image)

	Batman: The Killing Joke was arguably Alan Moore’s last really major contribution to comics, coming in 1988 which puts it right on the heels of Watchmen. Originally a “prestige format” graphic novel (which meant it was on nicer paper and was squarebound, but otherwise not much longer than your typical comic), it’s been reissued in a 20th-anniversary deluxe hardcover edition, recolored by artist Brian Bolland. It’s a very nice package. It’s a pretty good story, a hard-hitting look at the Joker’s psyche and why he acts like he does. It provides an origin of sorts for the character – a twisted variant of his Silver Age “Red Hood” origin – without committing to it. In the story, the Joker kidnaps Commissioner Gordon and cripples his daughter Barbara in order to prove a point about his sanity (or lack thereof) to Batman. The ending is perhaps a little too cute for its own good, but all-in-all it’s a good story with terrific art by Bolland. It’s told in a manner very similar to that of Watchmen with clever scene transitions and a restrained, “realistic” layout. Moore also lets some of Batman’s heroism show through, which I appreciate since I can’t stand the psychopathic character he’s become since the publication of The Dark Knight Returns. The crippling of Barbara Gordon – the Bronze Age Batgirl – has been controversial, since female characters often seem to get tortured to “prove a point” to or about the male heroes (c.f. Women in Refrigerators). Barbara’s character was rehabilitated by turning her into Oracle, the computer-savvy mastermind behind the Birds of Prey series (also providing tech support for Grant Morrison’s JLA). In isolation, the event is brutal and effective in this story; in a larger context it does feel rather clichÃ©. It’s worth noting that it’s now been nearly as long (20 years) since Barbara was crippled than the time (22 years) that she served as Batgirl. Generations of comics fans (as comics generations are measured) have grown up knowing her only as Oracle (unless they watched the Batman animated series); at what point does her current persona become her defining one? Anyway. It’s a good story, influential mainly in how it defined and changed several of its characters, less so than for its storytelling. And the art is beautiful.
	Speaking of relatively brutal comic book series, Sandman Mystery Theatre was a noir-ish detective/superhero/thriller series set in 1930s New York which ran for 70 issues in the 1990s. I picked up the first 8 issues (the first 2 story arcs) and then dropped it, mainly because I wasn’t a fan of Guy Davis’ artwork in the first arc, and I liked his replacement in the second arc even less. DC has been collecting the series in paperback form, and I was moved to pick them up and try it again. Not only does it read much better in collected form than as individual issues, but I’ve warmed to Davis’ artwork (large noses on his characters and all) and it turns out he does most of the drawing in the series. With this volume, number 6, we reach the halfway point in the series. Wesley Dodds is a rich man-about-town who is tortured by dreams of killers, and who at night puts on a gas mask and employs a gun of sleep gas of his own making and hunts down these killers, even though he’s often at odds with the police. Besides this adventure, SMT is also a romance, following Dodds and Dian Beaumont gradually falling in love and moving towards their lifelong relationship. Dian is a strong adventurous woman, a little out-of-place with the societal roles her position forces her to play. She’s also deeply conflicted about Wes’s nocturnal habits, which she’s well aware of by the time of this volume. The tentative dance the two engage in, two steps forward and one step back with each arc, is agonizing and yet delicately crafted. The adventure ain’t bad, either. The first arc in this volume features Hourman, another golden age hero, who joins with Sandman to catch some jewel thieves. Hourman’s superhuman powers are cleverly portrayed, showing them obliquely to make their full impact greater when he does something truly remarkable. The second story, The Python, is one of the more routine tales in the series, regarding some mysterious stranglings around the city. If you find run-of-the-mill superhero comics dull, but would be interested in some mystery and romance to go with the adventure, then I recommend this series. (Incidentally, there was a sequel mini-series published a year or so go, which I didn’t care for at all. It bore very little resemblance to this one in style or theme, so I don’t recommend it. A better coda to the series is a story arc of James Robinson’s excellent Starman series, collected in the volume Sand and Stars.)
	One of the more fun mini-series of the last 20 years was Tangent Comics. Tangent was created to fill a “skip week”; you see, most comics are published monthly, but comics ship every week. This means that four months each year there’s an extra week, so companies have the choice of spreading out their offerings across five weeks in those months, or producing some new material. For a little while, DC comics would publish some new material to fill the “skip week”, and the best of these was Tangent. The premise was that an entirely new world was created under the oversight of Dan Jurgens, completely unrelated to any of DC’s other properties, except that the names of the characters and places and things would be re-used in completely new contexts. So in this world The Atom was a series of Superman-like figures who descended from a man who gained powers from early A-bomb tests. His presence caused Cuba to nuke the southeastern United States in 1962, resulting in even more super-beings, as well as New Atlantis, a futuristic city built on the site of Atlanta. The original set of comics were all snapshots of this world, with insight into its past and perhaps its ultimate future and doom. It was very clever and entertaining, well-written and well-drawn. The setting was re-used a year later in a second set of titles, which were considerably less enjoyable, re-imagining the “big three” heroes Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, in each case in a rather unimaginative manner (the Wonder Woman issue was especially noxious), and some redux issues of characters from the first series. Ultimately it felt like an attempt to “cash in” on the original concept, and predictably (and deservedly) the series disappeared after this second set of issues. Now, ten years later, Tangent is back in Tangent Comics: Superman’s Reign, as one of the worlds in the new DC Multiverse (as Earth-9), and the Justice League is going to visit their world, which it turns out has been subjugated by their Superman figure, a superevolved human who I assume thinks he was doing the world a favor by taking it over and imposing his own order on it. A 12-issue series feels somehow like overkill, and integrating it with the Justice League sort of takes away some of what was special about Tangent, but it could still work out. The set-up here is pretty decent, and Matthew Clark’s got a clean line and pretty dynamic sense of layout. If writer Jurgens can get back to what made the first series fun and establish it once again as its own thing, not truly beholden to the main DC Universe, then this could be a good series. If it ends up being caught up in the Final Crisis muddle or falls apart storywise midway through, then it will probably be entirely forgettable. But I’m going in with some optimism, because my memories of the first batch of Tangent Comics still burn brightly in my mind.
	This month’s Thor wins the award for “hardest-to-spell creator names” for the month – maybe the year. Straczynski, Djurdjevic, Eliopoulos, Arbona, and even Danny Miki. Ye gads. The story is still ridiculously slow, though. This issue is mostly a flashback one, in which Odin relates a tale from his youth while Thor is visiting him in the afterlife. That’s pretty much all you need to know, since nothing’s really happened in several issues.

This Week’s Haul

Comic books I bought the week of 12 March 2008.

Booster Gold #7, by Geoff Johns, Jeff Katz, Dan Jurgens & Norm Rapmund (DC)
Countdown to Final Crisis #7 of 52 (backwards), by Paul Dini, Adam Beechen, Keith Giffen, Tom Derenick & Wayne Faucher (DC)
Countdown to Mystery #6 of 8, by Matthew Sturges & Stephen Jorge Segova, and Steve Gerber, Justiniano & Walden Wong (DC)
Salvation Run #5 of 7, by Matthew Sturges, Joe Bennett & Belardo Brabo (DC)
Suicide Squad: Raise the Flag #7 of 8, by John Ostrander, Javier Pina & Robin Riggs (DC)
Annihilation Conquest #5 of 6, by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Tom Raney & Scott Hanna (Marvel)
Nova #11, by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Paul Pelletier & Rick Magyar (Marvel)
B.P.R.D.: 1946 #3 of 5, by Mike Mignola, Joshua Dysart & Paul Azaceta (Dark Horse)
Locke & Key #2 of 6, by Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodriguez (IDW)
Atomic Robo #6 of 6, by Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener & Nic Klein (Red 5)

	Booster Gold has been pretty well received by the comics blogosphere. Although it’s a continuity-obsessed time travel yarn, it works because of its solid characterization – you know who all the characters are and they all feel distinct – and Dan Jurgens’ always-clean artwork. That said, being a continuity-obsessed time travel yarn does rather drag it down. Currently the story is wrapped up in the events of Infinite Crisis from a couple years ago, specifically the Maxwell Lord/OMAC stuff which I neither know much about, nor care. It’s the sort of book I enjoy as light reading: It doesn’t insult my intelligence, it’s basically fun, and it feels like it’s going somewhere. In a sense it’s like Geoff Johns bucking to become the new Mark Gruenwald. This may seem like faint praise, but given the legions of crappy books out there, you could do a whole lot worse. By the way, if you enjoy Booster Gold, I highly recommend you week out Justice League America #72-75, from Jurgens’ run on JLA in the “post-bwah-hah-hah” era. It’s one of the best alternate timeline stories in JLA history.
	Speaking of doing worse, Salvation Run has turned over its creative team since the first issue: Bill Willingham left after #2, turning the book over to his Jack of Fables co-writer Matthew Sturges (note: I stopped buying Jack of Fables after a year), and now Sean Chen – the reason I bought the book in the first place – has been replaced by Joe Bennett. Remarkably, the story is still fairly cohesive. Pedestrian, but cohesive. Of all the mini-series which have come out during Countdown to Final Crisis, this one’s probably the least essential.
	Speaking of Sean Chen and creative turnover, Chen was the original artist on Nova, which was awesome, but the replacements since he left have been pretty good, too. Now Paul Pelletier takes over as penciller with #11. I was a bit worried about this, since I wasn’t impressed with his work on Fantastic Four, finding it rather under-rendered, and with the impression that he took some shortcuts in drawing the faces and expressions (his Invisible Woman looked downright weird, for instance). But his art here is better than I’d feared; a little soft in the backgrounds maybe, but the figures are quite good. I suspect inker Rick Magyar has something to do with that, as he tends to bring a good feeling of texture and shading to everyone he inks, but it looks like Pelletier will be okay. Maybe he was just mailing it in on FF. Meanwhile, the current story is coming to a head, and I suspect that next issue may be the big climax. Stay tuned!
	And as for something that has nothing to do with any of that, Atomic Robo wraps up his first mini-series this month (a second one is being advertised for later this year). Having now read the whole thing, I can definitely say that this falls into the category of “pulp-oriented action-adventure, Hellboy sub-category”, which is to say, if you like Hellboy and B.P.R.D. (or, for that matter, The Perhapanauts), then you’ll like this, as it has a very similar tone and style. Even though Robo is science-based, he’s the same sort of powerful, unique smartass that Hellboy is. I imagine the creators might be a bit tired of being compared to Hellboy, but the similarity is so strong that it’s unavoidable. This issue does tie the series back to its first issue, so it wasn’t quite a series of vignettes, but it’s not a fully cohesive whole. And it’s clearly a broad instruction to the character, who’s been around for 80 years and thus has a lot of history. Although my feeling is that they could have led with a stronger, more hard-hitting story as the opener, I can live with this. I do like Scott Wegener’s artwork, though. It reminds me of Mike Mignola, but also of Michael Avon Oeming, yet it seems cleaner and more dynamic and either. If the human characters’ faces were a little more nuanced, then I could really groove on it. (Wegener seems to go for the “a few broad strokes” approach to faces.) Anyway, I’ll have higher expectations for the sequel, that it will be more than just a pulpish adventure yarn, since as I’ve said recently I’m getting kind of tired of pulpish adventure yarns. Showing how Robo has changed the world – and how the world has changed Robo – ought to be one of the central facets of a series like this. I hope the future holds some character development.

This Week’s Haul

Comic books I bought the week of 5 March 2008.

Countdown to Final Crisis #8 of 52 (backwards), by Paul Dini, Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti, Keith Giffen, Carlos Magno & Rodney Ramos (DC)
Countdown to Adventure #7 of 8, by Adam Beechen, Allan Goldman & Julio Ferreira, and Justin Gray, Fabrizio Fiorentino & Adam DeKraker (DC)
Clandestine #2 of 5, by Alan Davis & Mark Farmer (Marvel)
The Twelve #3 of 12, by J. Michael Straczynski, Chris Weston & Garry Leach (Marvel)
Echo #1, by Terry Moore (Abstract)
The End League #2, by Rick Remender, Mat Broome & Sean Parsons (Dark Horse)
The Boys #16, by Garth Ennis & Darick Robertson (Dynamite)

Terry Moore made his name in comics in the 90s with his long-running series Strangers in Paradise, which was a sort of female buddy comic with a big helping of romantic tension on the side. The original mini-series was moving and hilarious, with just the right amount of implausible lunacy to make it exciting without being ridiculous. It then launched into an ongoing series, which frankly lost me pretty quickly: The grim details of Katchoo’s past, the endless and tedious introduction of the main antagonist, it wasn’t funny, and it quickly ceased to be fun, and I stopped buying it about 12 issues in.

One thing that was just as good even when I gave up on it was Moore’s artwork, which was expressive and inventive and leaped off the page even though the page was in black and white. (Some folks love black and white artwork. I feel it’s an extremely rare artist whose work looks as good in B&I as in color. Moore is one of those few.)

Having wrapped up SiP last year, Moore is now back with Echo, whose first issue came out this week. Like – it seems – a lot of first issues these days, not a lot happens in this one; rather it’s some very broad set-up with “uncompressed” storytelling. It opens with a woman apparently test-driving a high-tech flying suit – which is somehow nuclear but looks like shiny metal – when her controllers double-cross her and hit her with missiles. The suit fragments and rains pieces onto our presumptive heroine, Julie, a photographer who, we learn, lives alone with her dog and whose husband is divorcing her. The largest remaining piece she finds attaches itself to her skin – and the issue fades out.

So, lots of questions: Who’s conducting the test? What does the suit do? What will it do to Julie? Why’s the book called Echo? Will it at all resemble the long-ago Peter B. Gillis/Kelley Jones series Chrome? (I’m almost – but not quite – the only one who remembers that series, it seems.) All things considered, it’s way too soon to tell.

Fortunately, Moore’s art is as good as it was ten years ago – maybe better. Will I like it better than I did SiP? I hope so.