Comics – Page 20 – Fascination Place

This Week’s Haul

Booster Gold #9, by Geoff Johns, Jeff Katz, Dan Jurgens & Norm Rapmund (DC)
Clandestine #4 of 5, by Alan Davis & Mark Farmer (Marvel)
Guardians of the Galaxy #1, by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Paul Pelletier & Rick Magyar (Marvel)
newuniversal: shockfront #1, by Warren Ellis, Steve Kurth & Andrew Hennessy (Marvel)
The Twelve #5 of 12, by J. Michael Straczynski, Chris Weston & Garry Leach (Marvel)
B.P.R.D.: 1946 #5 of 5, by Mike Mignola, Joshua Dysart & Paul Azaceta (Dark Horse)
Project Superpowers #3 of 6, by Alex Ross, Jim Krueger & Carlos Paul (Dynamite)
Locke & Key #4 of 6, by Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodriguez (IDW)

As much as I’ve enjoyed Abnett & Lanning’s work on the Annihilation and Nova books, I’m a little skeptical of Guardians of the Galaxy. Why? Well, the premise consists of throwing together a bunch of space-based heroes – who have almost nothing in common except that they’re space-based and came together during the recent crises – under a title which used to belong to a completely unrelated team. This screams “trademark protection” to me, and while I’m sure DnA are going to give it their best shot, I have a nagging cynicism that they were basically asked by Marvel to come up with a title which fit the bill.

With that bit of negativity out of the way, the first issue is pretty good. It features the usual trial-by-fire, also setting up what I presume will be a long-term foe for the group. There are some strong and volatile personalities in the group, which could be the fulcrum for making the book work: Peter Quill (Star Lord) is probably the most qualified to lead the team in a strategic sense, but his self-doubt and lack of powers might not make him the best candidate for keeping the people in line. Especially with members like Mantis who tend to quietly pursue their own agendas.

The book’s best hope, I think, is to either have a strong underlying plot, or to juggle the relationships among its characters in a delicate manner, the latter being the key to the success of Wolfman & PÃ©rez’ New Teen Titans of years past. I think DnA could pull off either approach, but the book’s set-up will make it more of a challenge for them.

Fresh from his trial run on Nova, Paul Pelletier’s artwork is fine. Much better than the 3 issues from his brief run on Fantastic Four that I read, which looked like he was mailing it in (figuratively speaking). I’d appreciate a little more detail, but he’s certainly got the dynamic look down.

All-in-all, the first issue of Guardians is a little above average, but it will be the next 11 issues which really indicate whether it’s going to be a good one or not.

I was surprised when newuniversal abruptly halted after 6 issues. Was it a mini-series, though it wasn’t marked as such? Did it not do well and was cancelled? Did Ellis just up and leave, since he recently said of work-for-hire projects, “It’s as simple as this — if I don’t own it, I’m not going to spend my life on it”?

Apparently none of the above, since Ellis is back with a new artist on a second series, which picks up only a little while after the first one left off. It continues his edgier riff on Marvel’s old New Universe characters, and this time he’s filling in some more of the backstory and adding some more structure to what the “white event” means, which I appreciate (I always appreciate structure).

Steve Kurth has a somewhat more traditional art style than did Salvador Larroca (the first series’ artist), but he’s still got the detail and semi-photorealistic layouts, so all in all I think he’s just as good as Larroca was. Of more interest will be to see where Ellis is going with this series. I’m still a little frustrated that the final issue of Planetary hasn’t come out, even though I know he can finish lengthy projects, as he did with Transmetropolitan. So I hope newuniversal doesn’t end prematurely in the middle of the story.

This Week’s Haul

Countdown to Mystery #7 of 8, by Matthew Sturges, Chad Hardin, Dan Green, Walden Wong & Wayne Faucher, and Steve Gerber, Adam Beechen & Justiniano (DC)
Metal Men #8 of 8, by Duncan Rouleau (DC)
Avengers/Invaders #1 of 12, by Alex Ross, Jim Krueger & Steve Sadowski (Marvel)
Nova #13, by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Wellington Alves & Scott Hanna (Marvel)
The Boys #18, by Garth Ennis & Darick Robertson (Dynamite)

I feel like I should have enjoyed Metal Men a lot more than I did.

For one thing, Duncan Rouleau’s art is dynamic and imaginative, with a style not quite like anyone else I’ve seen in comics these days. The story is one of loyalty and redemption, and has a heavy time travel element. What’s not to like?

Well, the story’s also told in 19 small chapters, taking place early in the Metal Men’s career, and at several different points later on. And it’s extremely hard to follow. In addition to the cast of seven Metal Men, plus their creator, Will Magnus, the Metal Men switch bodies at some points, and they have substantially different physical appearances in different time periods. I found it to be too much effort for too little reward to try to fit all the pieces together; I would have been happier with a more linear story with a few flashbacks.

Plus there are several other mad scientists running around, and a host of other unrelated robots, for a cast of characters too large to really work. The story tries to focus on our hero Will, but it keeps drifting around and never really finds its emotional center. The conclusion made very little sense to me, but honestly I’d given up trying to figure out what the heck was going on by then.

The story is credited to Rouleau “based on ideas by Grant Morrison”, and edited by Eddie Berganza. I don’t know whether Morrison provided a story outline that was simply too ambitious, or if Rouleau bit off more than he could chew, or if Berganza should have reined him in and just didn’t, but one or more of these guys ended up making a muddle of what should have been a straightforward and fun story. It’s too bad, because it started off with a lot of promise, but just never found its footing.

Hey look, it’s yet another Alex Ross project mining the bygone days of superheroes! Avengers/Invaders sees the Invaders – Marvel’s retconned team of World War II heroes – being shunted to the present day, post-Civil War, where they’ll encounter the Avengers, especially Iron Man, still haunted by Captain America’s death. Cap, of course, is one of the Invaders. And at least two others – Bucky and the Sub-Mariner – are also still alive in the present day. Which could make for an interesting time.

Unfortunately the Ross/Krueger-written books suffer the same problem that J. Michael Straczynski’s books do: Too much reflection and dialogue, and not enough actually going on. This issue is at least focused on two different fights, one in World War II and one in the present day, which is a promising start. I bet it ends up feeling like a story that could have been told in 4 issues rather than 12, though. But it already looks better than Project Superpowers (not exactly a ringing endorsement).

Steve Sadowski’s pencils are solid, as always, but the guy could really use an inker who can bring some subtlety to his linework. I’m not sure if he inked himself here, or if the art was reproduced from his pencils, but the lines are so heavy the art sometimes looks like it was etched in wood.

As usual, it’s Nova to the rescue this week. Nova arrives at a world being devoured by Galactus, too late to try to save it from its fate, but in time to try to help evacuate its population. Some psionic entity has also shown up to sow chaos in the middle of the larger panic for its own unknown reasons. And to top it off Nova has to face down Galactus anyway, since he’s interfering with the evacuation (possibly without his own knowledge), which means the Silver Surfer gets involved. Yaybo!

Abnett & Lanning are at the top of their game here, with some witty dialogue as well as a good feel for Nova’s position. Meanwhile Willington Alves returns on pencils. He’s not Sean Chen, but I like his layouts and his use of shadows. Overall I like his work better than Paul Pelletier’s (who I guess is moving to Guardians of the Galaxy in the wake of Annihilation Conquest).

Overall, yet another nifty issue of Marvel’s best title. I hope the second year of Nova sees him establish himself with his own storylines and personal odysseys separate from the “event” crossover series. The book’s got too much promise to be slaved to editorial dictate.

This Week’s Haul

DC Universe 0, by Grant Morrison, Geoff Johns, George PÃ©rez, Doug Mahnke, Tony Daniel, Ivan Reis, Aaron Lopresti, Philip Tan, Ed Benes, Carlos Pacheco, J.G. Jones, Scott Koblish, Christian Alamy, Oclair Albert, Matt Ryan, Jeff de los Santos & Jesus Merino (DC)
Action Comics #864, by Geoff Johns, Joe Prado & Jon Sibal (DC)
Legion of Super-Heroes #41, by Jim Shooter, Aaron Lopresti & Matt Ryan (DC)
Ex Machina #36, by Brian K. Vaughan, Tony Harris & Jim Clark (DC/Wildstorm)
Glamourpuss #1, by Dave Sim (Aardvark-Vanaheim)

DC Universe 0 is the prologue to the upcoming Final Crisis, and is – sorta – the bridge from Countdown to that series. But I think Valerie D’Orazio is right when she says it’s really an ad: It’s a 50-cent advertisement for upcoming storylines in the DC universe, such as Final Crisis, “Batman R.I.P.”, and stuff I care about even less (and honestly my level of caring about those two stories isn’t very high).

This comic is basically a series of vignettes each illustrated by a different art team, with a disembodied narrator sorta tying it all together (but not really). So there’s not really a story here, just the hints of several different stories. The art is generally strong, but of course it changes every few pages. The overarching portent is that evil is somehow on the verge of winning the day over good, a notion which hearkens back to Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing, but which is too abstract to have any meaning to me as a reader.

Overall this issue feels completely unnecessary. In years gone by, other writers might have managed to cover this ground in 2 or 3 pages, but DC seems bent on drawing things out as long as possible these days. So we end up with stuff like this, which seems destined for the recycle bin.

Despite its problems, I enjoyed “Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes” enough to keep buying Action Comics for a little while, although promos for upcoming issues make me worry that it’s going to be one big event after another, which will probably drive me away.

Anyway, this issue is also a sort of introduction to Final Crisis, specifically a lead-in to the Legion of Three Worlds mini-series, which intrigues me since I’m a longtime Legion fan, having read all three of the Legions which will be involved in that series. This issue opens with Batman visiting Superman’s Fortress, where Superman is talking with Lightning Man from the Legion, reminiscing about old times. Batman and Lightning Lad get on like oil and water, especially once the bodies of two Legionnaires – who were killed in Countdown – turn up. We also briefly visit with the JSA’s Starman, who’s also a former Legionnaire.

The more I read of Geoff Johns’ writing, the more it seems like its hallmark is putting in as many nifty ideas as he can come up with – especially of the “mining DC’s past” variety – but not really plumbing any of them in depth. Mark Waid went further with the “Batman and the Legion of Super-Heroes” idea in one issue of The Brave and the Bold than Johns does here. Really, one could probably do a good 6-issue story with such an idea. So this issue ends up feeling like no less an advertisement for an upcoming series than did DC Universe 0, which is too bad, because even as a bridge between two Superman arcs, this could have been a much more insightful story than it was.

It was better than DC Universe 0, though, if for no other reason than the scene in which Lightning Man wonders aloud how Batman would have turned out had the Legion contacted him in addition to Superman back when they were teenagers.

For those who don’t know, Dave Sim is the creator/writer/artist of Cerebus, the longest-running self-published comic book in history. Originally a parody of Conan the Barbarian, Cerebus evolved to parody many aspects of popular culture, and later became a platform from which Sim proclaimed his social and political opinions at great length. The pros and cons of Cerebus are outside the scope of this review, but in short I’ll say that it produced what I think is one of the ten best graphic novels I’ve ever read (Jaka’s Story), and a whole lot of near-unreadable claptrap.

Glamourpuss is Sim’s first comic since Cerebus ended its 300-issue run in 2004.

And it is, frankly, a really bad one.

Sim is still an excellent artist: He reproduces a variety of glamour magazine photos in linework, and also reproduces many panels from the comic strip Rip Kirby. Even if the work isn’t original, it’s still impressive in its attention to detail. Sim can really draw.

Unfortunately, this is a comic book without a story. Rather than assembling a story to which he can apply his prodigious artistic skills, Sim strings together a series of unrelated panels and adds text which is nothing more than a monologue in which he discusses his intention to do a book of “cute teenaged girls in his best Al Williamson photo-realism style”, and goes on to talk at some length about his love for Alex Raymond’s and John Prentice’s art on Rip Kirby.

And boy, I couldn’t care less.

I have some interest in the analysis of comic art, to be sure, but this is little more than navel-gazing; a couple of cheap gags, but otherwise nothing really entertaining. I’d much rather read a prose piece about the strip with some key illustrations, with more historical context about Raymond, Prentice, and the strip itself. But Sim’s thoughts about his admirations for the artists and his striving to emulate them are not worth three dollars, or even the time it took to read this issue.

I keep wondering who exactly Sim’s target audience for this series is, or how long he expects it to keep going. I even wonder if he’s chuckling to himself as having ‘put one over’ on his readership. Probably not. I think this is a perfectly earnest effort to express his admiration for this art style, to have some fun flexing his artistic muscles, and figuring that there are a few thousand people out there who will find it all as interesting as he does.

And he might be right, but I’m not one of those people, and I won’t be back for a second issue (though Jog apparently will be).

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.