Lots to enjoy in this zany romp, full of dinosaurs, moon men, gorillas and wayward gods, but as with so many modern day Shazam/Captain Marvel stories Lots to enjoy in this zany romp, full of dinosaurs, moon men, gorillas and wayward gods, but as with so many modern day Shazam/Captain Marvel stories a faint vibe of the children’s party entertainer haunts proceedings. Obviously that’s a much better angle than trying to make Billy Batson edgy but the self-conscious jollity still grates. It doesn’t help that the plot tying the wacky action together is a bit creaky too. If you’re in the mood for a silly, energetic comic this may do the trick but Jeff Smith is still the only creator to have found a 21st century Shazam angle that works....more
Strong stuff in a brooding, Gothic vein - no pretence at resolving anything so this is all the easy, fun, set-up part, and does the “dark secrets of eStrong stuff in a brooding, Gothic vein - no pretence at resolving anything so this is all the easy, fun, set-up part, and does the “dark secrets of early Gotham” well have much more to draw up? I don’t know. But this is stylish and looks good throughout - particularly the Jim Gordon and Two-Face back-ups where the art by DaNi gets more stylised and chunky, reminding me of both Mazzuchelli (Year One is a fairly constant presence here) and John K Snyder....more
After despairing of the first book of this I realised to my horror I still had all the other ones, obviously bought in a moment of sale-driven madnessAfter despairing of the first book of this I realised to my horror I still had all the other ones, obviously bought in a moment of sale-driven madness. Fortunately Dan Abnett takes over from the second volume and gently eases his way out of the tedious cosmic entanglements set up by the series’ premise, turning it into… Dan Abnett plays his Guardians Of The Galaxy hits. A rag tag band of adventurers operating out of a space junkheap including a range of doubtfully loyal battlers and a ferocious small mammal. It’s fine! It’s an enjoyable dynamic, Jessica Cruz is probably the most readable of DC’s many Green Lanterns and she makes a good lead, the art is unshowy but not confusing. Just as with the first volume, you’ll guess where it’s all going easily enough but very much unlike the first volume you might enjoy yourself getting there. Hard to fully recommend: Abnett’s done much better and there’s a fundamental “what’s all this for?” sense of marking time between events. But credit for a surprising salvage job nonetheless....more
Riffing on something a friend said in his review, I think if you wanted an index of overall mainstream comic quality you'd probably want to peg it to Riffing on something a friend said in his review, I think if you wanted an index of overall mainstream comic quality you'd probably want to peg it to Mark Waid. He has a few high points and a few lows but in general he produces highly dependable, straightforward superhero storytelling. If the rest of the line looks bad in comparison, that's a bad sign. If his stuff doesn't stand out or feels drab, other people are probably doing something right. (If he is refusing to work for a company at all, well, you can read something into that)
Waid and Dan Mora make this a solid superhero comics experience. It's well-plotted without being clever; well-characterised without being insightful; well-drawn without being spectacular. Suffers, as stories introducing a villain often do, from the older villains being more interesting to read about than the newbie. But fundamentally there's not much wrong with this book and I had a good time without ever thinking "yes, this is a current highlight". I feel like a lot of the plaudits this one got came from fond memories of an older, apparently simpler DC Universe - most of the character versions here have stepped straight out of that 1982 style guide they're reprinting....more
One of the more inexplicable comics I've read in a while. Not in a plot sense - a bunch of extremely fringe DC characters become entangled in a caper-One of the more inexplicable comics I've read in a while. Not in a plot sense - a bunch of extremely fringe DC characters become entangled in a caper-gone-wrong with cosmic repercussions; it's all pretty legible even if you're only getting half of a drawn-out story here. But in a deeper, "why on earth does this comic exist?" sense.
I'll tell you why it seems to exist. "A 12-issue miniseries doing dark post-Crisis retcons of the FIRST ISSUE SPECIAL characters" is exactly the kind of thing DC would have published in, say, 1989, alongside Howard Chaykin's TWILIGHT and the "Second Crisis" bits of ANIMAL MAN. In fact, once you write that idea out, it feels like a mere parallel universe mishap that they *didn't* publish such a thing, a nagging omission that someone jolly well ought to correct. DANGER STREET is precisely that comic, in look, in concept, and even in execution, with laboured narrative captions offering an oh-so-80s postmodern contrast between the fairytale described and the grubby doings on-panel.
So we have the Green Team as amoral kid billionaires backstabbing each other; Starman, Manhunter and Warlord as pathetic wannabe superheroes trying to scam their way into the Justice League; Beware The Creeper as a Fox News prejudice-peddler. Other characters need less cynicism - Lady Cop gets her histrionic backstory pared away to leave her as a paper-pushing everycop trying to do right in an uncaring world. Codename Assassin and Manhunter don't need many tweaks to function in this mildly grim and slightly gritty milieu. As for the Dingbats Of Danger Street, there's no real way to darken them, so Tom King kills one of them off instead.
So it's an early 20s comic paying tribute to late 80s storytelling and vibes by means of early 70s concepts. It's fairly clever; it's not badly done; but there's an emptiness to this whole setup which makes the whole thing seem even more deeply pointless than most character revivals. What are the ideas here? What is Danger Street *about*?
For a while now people like Rob Liefeld have been publishing comics the main purpose of which seems to be to give readers who liked comics in the 90s some new things which feels just like 90s comics. Tom King appears to be fulfilling that role for the post-Crisis, late 80s era, making revisionist, highly stylised explorations of the DC universe, marinated in a post-Watchmen formalist cynicism.
From an "is this an entertaining comic?" perspective this isn't a bad thing to be doing - that era was the high point of DCs; a reasonable facsimile won't fail to be a solid page-turner, and that indeed is what Danger Street is. But it's unusually pointless - in many ways, comics never actually left the late 80s, and this studious recreation of the post-Crisis aesthetic lacks some of the kitschy pleasure comics pastiches usually offer.
But it also, inevitably, lacks the drive of that era, the way a lot of people from outside the US comics mainstream were suddenly getting to play in that mainstream, and were playing with it in the doomed expectation some of their punky IP-wrecking moves might somehow stick, or at least tell people something about the medium, genre, and universes that had comics in a headlock. Without that context, Danger Street is a story about The Green Team and Lady Cop which apparently exists mostly for readers to go, "haha they remembered The Green Team and Lady Cop". Even in 1988, that would have been a thin thing to hang a book on. Thirty-five years later, and I'm back where I started - why on earth does this comic even exist?...more
Had fun revisiting this, one of the quintessential 90s DC books (and one of the last times you could really take the piss out of Batman in-Universe). Had fun revisiting this, one of the quintessential 90s DC books (and one of the last times you could really take the piss out of Batman in-Universe). It’s the kid brother of more famous Ennis books but there’s heart to it, and it’s impressive how well Ennis and McCrea hit a groove from the beginning of the ongoing series. (The opening issue here, from the lengthy Bloodlines crossover, provides a snapshot of how much better both creators got in the 2 years or so between the titles: McCrea’s art looks crude rather than dementedly and delightfully wonky; Ennis script devolves into fat jokes as the plot runs out). By the ongoing the pair of them have a look for the book, a quickly and effectively drawn cast, and a distinctive black-comedy vibe. When you think how much worse “Tarantino in the DCU” could have been done, the quality here feels like a blessing....more
An odd one, this: the first half of it is strong, with Diana, dead after some crossover event, waking up in the wrong afterlife. Why is she in ValhallAn odd one, this: the first half of it is strong, with Diana, dead after some crossover event, waking up in the wrong afterlife. Why is she in Valhalla, who’s pulling her strings, and can the talking squirrel be trusted? Fun, intriguing, well-plotted mythological adventure with a good hook and even a romance of sorts with likeable himbo Siegfried. If this was a 4 or 5 issue storyline, it would be a very pleasant diversion.
Unfortunately, it’s a 10 issue story, and the back half is one of those tours de multiverse which modern comics fall into sometimes. The true threat is revealed (and the truer threat behind that) - both are feeble, and the comic devolves into a mess of exposition set in a white void, which kills any remaining visual dynamism in the story. (As with the Mariko Takaki run, a revolving door of artists makes this a mixed bag visually, but Travis Moore on the early issues is very good) At its best, Becky Cloonan’s writing has a crisp, refreshing pace: things happen, quickly and dramatically. A 10 issue saga really wastes that quality....more
Reign of the Supermen was good, soapy entertainment when it came out on a weekly basis, a 20-part story which built across the four Superman titles, tReign of the Supermen was good, soapy entertainment when it came out on a weekly basis, a 20-part story which built across the four Superman titles, their four individual storylines (one for each pretender Superman) gradually and effectively converging. For presumably solid commercial reasons, DC have split that 20-part story up: this is the first 8 episodes, covering the phase when each title is very much focused on an individual "Superman" with connective tissue mostly provided by Lois and Lex and their reactions to each of the four.
With hindsight it's pretty clear that the question "which is the real Superman?" is a red herring and the answer is "none of the above". Honestly even without hindsight that was fairly obvious - but the characters and storyline were engaging enough for it not to matter. Karl Kesel and Tom Grummett on Superboy, and Louise Simonson and Jon Bogdanove on Steel, pay no more than lip service to the idea that their guys might be the "real thing" - they are working hard to set up viable characters for solo spin-offs and use their issues wisely: Kesel's snotty dickhead Superboy is more readable than stoical Steel but the latter has Jon Bogdanove's outrageously hefty cartooning on its side. Roger Stern and Jackson Guice's episodes also establish their anti-heroic vigilante "Superman" and make a bit of an effort to build a mystery, which long time readers could feel at least slightly pleased at solving. But if Lois Lane is calling you a fascist it's a fair bet you aren't the guy. That leaves Dan Jurgen's cyborg Superman, whose issues are thin and repetitive, for reasons which become obvious in the final volume - Jurgens' issues were always a bit feeble, so this reader at least didn't notice anything unusual at the time.
(There are also two issues of the terrible Bloodlines crossover - the one where aliens turn random humans into new superheroes - whose inclusion here is completism of the worst kind: they kill the main story's momentum as they're extra-sized issues which deliberately can't do anything to advance the actual plot.)
There's entertainment here but as a story it's a bit of a missed opportunity. You have gestures towards the idea that these four are aspects of Superman, or what Superman would be without some positive factor or other, but it doesn't cohere thematically because the various comics are pulling at cross-purposes - two want to set up new books, two want to look like they're advancing the plot. And there's so much going on that the supporting cast strands of Funeral For A Friend - the near-death of Jon Kent; Luthor's plans; et al - are almost entirely dropped. The original way this material was collected - all 20 episodes; no Bloodlines - was a great deal more effective....more
Mariko Tamaki writes readable, entertaining, emotionally literate comics and has a solid handle on Wonder Woman herself, emphasising the slightly alooMariko Tamaki writes readable, entertaining, emotionally literate comics and has a solid handle on Wonder Woman herself, emphasising the slightly aloof, fish-out-of-water side as well as the warrior/problem-solver angle on Diana. And Mikal Janin's art is gorgeous... on the two issues he actually draws. (Naughty DC marketing department, putting his name on the cover).
But this is an 11 issue storyline which could have been half that length, and while there's an interesting theme about trauma and redemption in there, with new villain Liar Liar presented first as an irredeemable sociopath then later as a fucked-up kid, the contrast between the portrayals is extreme enough that it was hard for me to completely follow where the story wanted to take me. The art evens out, but the contrast between Janin and some of the follow-up artists is really painful.
And there's no getting around the fact that this is a Max Lord story, and outright villain Max Lord is just not as interesting or faceted a character as his 80s incarnation. Some of the best material here looks to be moving him back to something along those lines, but it doesn't stick. I guess only in modern superhero comics can you have a character's motivation being "I'm angry you killed me in a previous iteration of the universe", though....more
I keep hearing whispers that DC is Good Again and I’m keen to find out if that’s true, but it’s unfortunately also the case that its flagship events aI keep hearing whispers that DC is Good Again and I’m keen to find out if that’s true, but it’s unfortunately also the case that its flagship events are egregious bullshit. There’s an episode of Father Ted where Ted gets a new car but there’s a dent in it - he decides to tap it out but this makes a second dent appear: cut to half an hour later and the entire car is an unusable wreck. This is what DC continuity is like - one little tidy up in 1985 with the best intentions leads eventually to this farrago of nonsense in which Crisis Energy must fight Anti Crisis Energy so that the Dark Multiverse can be defeated in favour of the Omniverse and oh Jesus is that the time??
I’ve been reading this stuff for 35+ years. I am, by experience and demographics, the bullseye in the target market for DC continuity porn and I still found Death Metal barely comprehensible. I even read Scott Snyder’s terrible Justice League run, the lead in to this, except it turns out there’s another two or three comics in between - miss those and Death Metal is completely baffling. Snyder and the very capable Greg Capullo are trying to have their cake and eat it here: they’re doing a purposefully over the top version of a DC meta event full of gonzo nonsense, with the deliberately annoying Batman Who Laughs as lead baddie, but they’re also trying to get readers to invest in the idea that this time - no really! - they’re unravelling all the previous continuity snarl ups and setting up a status quo that’ll last. Riight.
The one good thing to be said about this is that Capullo does a decent job - he actually is bringing the metal while Snyder provides the progressive rock concept triple LP, and he brings some of the wilder concepts to cartoonish life: on his best day there’s a Kevin O’Neillish verve to his art. Shame what he’s drawing is such pluperfect bollocks....more
It’s nice to see Matt Wagner drawing things - his clear, simple storytelling is like a cool drink of water now and must have been even more so in the It’s nice to see Matt Wagner drawing things - his clear, simple storytelling is like a cool drink of water now and must have been even more so in the fevered atmosphere of the early 00s. Other than that, this Superman-Batman-Wonder Woman 3-hander is a victim of its own self-important framing: twenty more years of DC hammering the idea of its “Big Three” just adds to an unnecessary gravitas, an aura that we are witnessing Something Significant rather than enjoying something fun. And at its best this IS fun - it has Ra’s Al Ghul riding a jet-ski made out of nuclear missiles! - and an enjoyable tribute to the immediate post-Crisis era when Batman was even more of a dick to everyone than he usually is....more
Having read the Loebs Wonder Woman run and its very abrupt ending I thought to myself, OK, I wonder how they followed that up. And the answer is this Having read the Loebs Wonder Woman run and its very abrupt ending I thought to myself, OK, I wonder how they followed that up. And the answer is this mid-90s John Byrne run, which is a great deal worse, but is also bad in quite interesting ways.
The cliffhanger at the end of this volume involves Diana being told that she's hardening, gradually turning back into clay - if you'd followed Byrne since the 80s, you'd be forgiven for feeling the same had happened to him. Always a "back to basics" kind of writer, his approach had hardened by this point - scour the character of the encumbrance of recent continuity and fix the 'mistakes' of others, while restoring them to a basic, robust form. Destroy in order to recreate. So Wonder Woman gets a fresh start in a new location (Gateway City, a DC version of San Francisco) with a new supporting cast, the Loeb run goes almost unmentioned, and Byrne makes it clear that the internal politics of Themyscira will play no more part in his run by having Darkseid reduce the island to rubble. It feels a bit brusque but it's deck-clearing for Byrne's own vision of Wonder Woman which is...
...well, here's the problem. He's getting the character back to her essence and it honestly feels like he has no idea what that is. I don't get any sense that Byrne has a vision for Diana, her motivations, her mission, or why she exists as a character at all. In a way that's a relief - in his Fantastic Four run, Byrne had a liking for the kind of "character development" in which female characters are abused and humiliated to breaking point then 'come back stronger'. There's some of that in these stories - she spends an issue on Desaad's torture rack - but in general the problem is her passiveness as a lead character, because Byrne simply doesn't appear to have much interest in her.
It's an unusual situation: a creator determined to take a character back to basics but with no sense of what those basics might actually be*. Fortunately (for him if not us), Byrne has a fallback strategy - if in doubt, turn to Jack Kirby. Kirby didn't write or draw Wonder Woman, but he *did* fill the DC Universe with his characters, and Byrne's book is at its liveliest when he's writing Darkseid or The Demon, with Diana essentially a spectator.
On an artistic and storytelling level, Byrne is a seasoned pro and the book is an enjoyably easy read: personally I don't think Byrne inking himself looks great, and as his art's progressed since the 80s his compositions have got simpler (very effective in action scenes) but his detail work has got scratchier and fussier (maybe there really was a 90s quota of extraneous lines to fill). Still, "highly readable" should be a minimum bar to clear, not an item of praise. And it's easy to see why this run wasn't well received, waning creator star power or no, after Perez' loving re-creation of the character and Loebs' thoughtful explorations of her philosophy. Its workaday blandness stands as an indictment of the flaws and risks of the whole "essence of the character" method of comics writing, one which would become increasingly dominant at DC as the decades progressed.
*The one hint as to a wider plan we get in this volume is the introduction of a new Wonder Girl, Cassie Sandsmark, who has gone on to be 90s John Byrne's one standout contribution to wider DC continuity. In this volume she's a generic spunky kid and not a little irritating, but as with Darkseid, the book sparks into flickering life during her scenes in a way it doesn't elsewhere....more
The end of William Messner-Loebs' strange run on Wonder Woman collides with the post-Image era at DC Comics, visually and conceptually. Visually, in tThe end of William Messner-Loebs' strange run on Wonder Woman collides with the post-Image era at DC Comics, visually and conceptually. Visually, in that Mike Deodato - at this stage in his career - is very much into drawing hot babes, gnarly demons and 'roided-up musclemen. And conceptually, in that this is Wonder Woman's entry in the "switch the character for a badass new model" sweepstakes, with Diana getting replaced by bow-wielding badass Artemis for a year or so.
The stunt worked - enough that it made Deodato into a star, and it's his name that gets top billing on the cover. For a long time this was the only part of the Messner-Loebs run in print, which didn't make a lot of sense - it's very much a third act of a longer story. In the first section, Diana decides to experience Man's World from ground level, living - as much as she can - an ordinary working woman's life in Boston and dealing with street level problems (the kind Loebs always preferred to write about anyway) largely by being kind to everyone. In the second, the limits of this approach become clear as her opponents take advantage of her apparent weakness to escalate, and Diana meets their escalation with violence in turn. And this third part introduces Artemis as a character whose only approach to problem-solving is direct action and violence.
(Reading the earlier parts of the Loebs run is also useful for understanding the White Magician, the run's arch-villain, who is a male ex-superhero who used to have Boston to himself, became lazy and corrupt and who, when upstaged by a woman, reacts by completely and obsessively losing his shit. By this point we're very much in the phase where the shit has been lost.)
So both the introduction of Deodato and of Artemis work with the story Loebs was telling. Deodato's penchant for thongs and butt shots is a menace, but Loebs leans into his new artist's desire to draw big guys with big guns and has Artemis fight a succession of them, with names like The Chauvinist and The Exploiter. Loebs is making a deliberate point here and giving us a big piece of the plot jigsaw too: the problems Artemis is "dealing with" (sweatshop labour, environmental exploitation, domestic violence) aren't ones you can solve by punching a supervillain, but Artemis doesn't work like that, so the White Magician magics up bozos she CAN punch and she walks away assuming the job has been done. It's not subtle (or at least I thought it wasn't until I read some of the reviews here) but it's funny, effective, and neatly lets Loebs have his 90s artistic cake and take the piss out of it.
Loebs is also smart in how he deals with the other problem he's handed - how to make a "replacement hero" story work when the audience has surely wised up to the overall arc of these things. His solution is to pretty much ignore Artemis until the plot requires him not to. When Batman and Superman took an enforced break, the replacements got long-running solo series, so in that commercial sense, Artemis must have been something of a let-down. But the fact she's so useless as Wonder Woman is important in a plot and theme sense, and Loebs keeps the focus firmly on Diana - while Artemis is off being suckered by The Chauvinist, Diana is tangling with The Joker. It's obvious even to curious new readers who the actual star is here.
For all that, this ends up being not an entirely satisfying arc and resolution. Artemis' own personality never really settles - there's plenty of hints in the initial "The Contest" storyline where she becomes Wonder Woman that she's more than a trigger-happy idiot, but that's also what the Boston story needs her to be, so it's difficult to get too invested in her redemption arc, even if her final scenes are done well. The point about problems not being resolved by punching out musclebound dudes is undercut by the final resolution being exactly that. And there's a general sense that things are being crammed in to end the storylines by issue 100, so a really critical subplot involving Circe comes out of almost nowhere.
Worst of all, there's no real resolution for Diana. Not in a plot sense - it's obvious at the end that she can be Wonder Woman again. But Loebs has spent a three-year run exploring questions about kindness and force and their limits, and establishing a life and supporting cast for Diana on the kindness side of the equation as well as a rival and new villains on the force side. The ending is all force and fury and leaves a lot of emotional work undone: it's spectacular, but horribly rushed. A frustrating end to a run with bags of ideas and potential which often never quite realised themselves on the page....more
DC’s decision to make “legacy” one of their big brand ideas has always sat slightly oddly with their decision to reboot their entire line every ten orDC’s decision to make “legacy” one of their big brand ideas has always sat slightly oddly with their decision to reboot their entire line every ten or twenty years or so. But then maybe the two aren’t *that* hard to reconcile - just ask Geoff Johns, whose era as DC’s creative mainspring involved shuttling between rebirths and crises and whose story began with this most legacy-oriented of titles.
As a 90s DC reader I had zero interest in the JSA - everything involving them seemed like it was born out of guilt for fucking the characters over in the Crisis. So I missed the rise and relative buzz around this comic and came to it fresh. And fair play to Johns, James Robinson and David Goyer (despite his cover billing, Johns himself writes half of half the issues), this is the first modern JSA comic which feels like it isn’t an apology, and does blend older and newer versions of characters in a way that seems smooth and not like a finger-wagging lesson in how Important these guys are. I can see why it broke out from the ever vocal pre-Crisis fandom base to become something of an actual hit back in the day.
For all that, though, this is a very conservative comic. Not in the choice of characters, but in the way it uses them. It’s a meat and potatoes superhero team book of a kind that had been out of fashion probably since the early 80s - solid, threat of the month storytelling with a thin sprinkling of character work on top. From a company which had pushed the team book envelope continuously since the late 80s (from hits like the Giffen/DeMatteis JLI and the Morrison JLA to critically acclaimed work like Suicide Squad or Blood Syndicate) this is thin gruel. It’s the widescreen storytelling of JLA that JSA feels closest to, but the ideas aren’t as fresh and the character work isn’t as tight. It’s pleasant enough, I’d happily read more if I wanted late-90s comfort food, but it’s a comic with a lack of vision besides doing something with these generally ill-treated characters....more
The Speed Force is one of those quintessentially post-Crisis bits of DC Comics, a piece of storytelling architecture to help transition the company frThe Speed Force is one of those quintessentially post-Crisis bits of DC Comics, a piece of storytelling architecture to help transition the company from a world of wondrous make-believe to a shared universe with coherent systems, where everyone with superspeed had something secretly in common. I don't love these attempts to systematise the silly, and at the time the Speed Force - introduced here - felt like pointless pedantry, an attempt to push different characters into the same metaphysical uniform for no very good reason.
But it's stuck around, and good stories have been told with it, and I have to admit "Terminal Velocity" - the story that introduces it - is one of them. Not really because of the Speed Force itself - in this story, without hindsight, it's close to a MacGuffin. It's an arbitrary thing that cause something Very Bad to happen if Wally uses his power too much, which he of course has to do, and then Mark Waid simply takes the sole thing we know about the Speed Force and tears it up. And it's fine, because the story all along hasn't been about the metaphysics of running fast, but about Wally and Linda's relationship, and that story has earned a Russell T Davies style ending which has everyone cheering.
The Speed Force then mutates again, to become part of a broader metaphor for work and success in a professional couple and the stress that can put on a relationship - and then that gets mixed up in a broader story about secrets and miscommunication, which leads to a final issue starring the Scottish version of the Mirror Master, in which Grant Morrison's characterisation of him as a salt-of-the-earth good bloke who happens to do crimes is effectively used to mislead you as to what he's really up to. It's a rare 90s 'issue' story which feels more powerful now than it did then, though the ending's a bit glib (as often happens with Waid).
For the most part these later issues don't work as well - the action and the character work don't mesh as well, and while Waid has a better handle than most of his contemporaries on relationships there's a limit to how deep you can go in a 22-page monthly, so resolutions to interpersonal problems feel hurried. Also, and more seriously, the art quality drops significantly from the smoothly enjoyable Sal Larocca work on "Terminal Velocity" - there are a lot of stiff poses and weird impressions of movement, which is a bad look for a comic centered on motion.
Still, there's enough here to make me feel - again - I was too harsh on this in its day. The volume ends with an Annual - one of DC's line-wide story mandates, in this case "Year One": it's an opportunity to take stock of Wally's character growth over 8 years of his solo title, and the comic feels justifiably proud of the fact that, almost uniquely among long-running characters, he's actually had some....more
I quit on Tom King's - now long-gone - Batman saga after the previous "War Of Jokes And Riddles" sequence brought out all the worst elements of his ulI quit on Tom King's - now long-gone - Batman saga after the previous "War Of Jokes And Riddles" sequence brought out all the worst elements of his ultra-stylised writing. But I still had a few more volumes from a Comixology sale (this Batman run seems to be perpetually on sale) and finally thought "oh, I might as well..." and -
It's good. Properly good. The stuff that bugs me about King - the stylisation, and the overused Watchmen grids, and the constant pairings and parallels - are all still there. As is the suffocating feeling you get with modern DC of a once-enormous universe now compressed to the relationships between a handful of characters. But in the highlight here - a two-part story in which Bruce Wayne, Selina Kyle, Lois Lane and Clark Kent double date at a funfair - it does actually feel like these characters have relationships, that they're not just icons being moved around.
King's Batman isn't superhuman or even super-competent: he's a man who does a very weird job very well, and the people who love him know how messed up he is and work with it. In the wake of Bruce's engagement to Selina, King does a story about how his extended family loves and copes with him, and a story about how Clark loves and respects him, and finally a pair of stories about why Catwoman loves him that manage to sell the "marriage" as a workable idea.
It helps that the art is consistently excellent - I don't remember the previous volumes looking this great. Joelle Jones does a superb job with some beautiful action sequences that elevate the weakest parts of King's first story. Lee Weeks provides some gorgeously noirish, fluid action too in a style that feels Darwyn Cooke-inspired (never a bad look for Catwoman). And it's always a pleasure to read a Michael Lark story, particularly one that makes such good use of his gift for expressive faces.
While it's part 5 of an extended story, The Rules Of Engagement works fine as a stand-alone if the only thing you know is that Batman and Catwoman are engaged. If that premise sounds annoying, don't worry: I thought exactly the same on page 1 - by the end I was rooting for them. Looks like I might finish the Tom King Batman after all....more
Has anyone written a good Darkseid story since 2008? Is it even still possible? The tiger force at the heart of all things shows up here to manipulateHas anyone written a good Darkseid story since 2008? Is it even still possible? The tiger force at the heart of all things shows up here to manipulate a motley selection of DC heroes into doing something or other that will let him rebuild Apokolips. He has white on black speech bubbles to show he’s a heavy guy - nothing else about him suggests it.
Marvel and DC have been doing these “a bunch of random characters in a team” books since the 1970s; more fool me for imagining this might be one of the handful of good ones - even the fairly attractive art is soon weighed down by an overload of digital and colouring effects. Absolute junk....more
It really doesn't feel like this is 20 years old, with the main in-story tells being the adorably dinky cellphones various cops and crims use. But I gIt really doesn't feel like this is 20 years old, with the main in-story tells being the adorably dinky cellphones various cops and crims use. But I guess with hindsight you can see this as part of a mini-wave in DC (and Marvel) comics - that belief that you could use superheroes and superhero universes as a means to tell any other kind of story you wanted. It led to some disasters - notorious Hot Aunt May romance comic Trouble - but for street-level crime books the worlds of Marvel and DC were an extremely easy fit. Gotham Central is up there with Bendis' Daredevil as a terrific thriller as well as a document of a particular early-00s comics sensibility.
The hook - a police procedural in Gotham City - is so obvious it's a wonder it hadn't been done badly a half-dozen times before. But Brubaker and Rucka get exactly the right tone, keeping the world of "freaks" at enough of a distance that the weirdness of Gotham truly feels weird and has a greater impact. The biggest compliment you can give to it, given it's a 'Bat-family' book, is that there's no sense of thrill or catharsis when the Bat shows up: we see him with the same wary, frustrated eyes our lead characters do. They're aware, for instance, that a Joker incident is only likely to end one way, with a lot of people dying before Batman swoops in, and the Joker story here charts their fear, frustration and anger as that story unfolds. The skill of Rucka and Brubaker is the way the Gotham Central cast are on the margins of the incident but still at the centre of the story.
Other stories, though, touch more lightly on the setting and the Batman cast - the middle story here is a simple crime yarn with a minor Huntress appearance; and the final one has two rogues but no Bat. The "freaks" here are dangerous, but down-to-earth figures - this isn't a MARVELS style street-level comic; the aim isn't to show the distance from the superheroic or supernatural elements, but their closeness. Artist Michael Lark is the key to that - he draws solid figures with weathered faces, giving everything a weight, a shabby material presence nothing fantastic can quite escape from. His Joker, a balding man in bad make up and a garish suit, transforms the character - it's surely a model for the later cinematic takes by Ledger and Leto.
Brubaker and Rucka do their best not to romanticise police work - while the focus characters here, Renee Montoya, Crispus Allen, Maggie Sawyer at al, are a diverse bunch of 'good apples', there's plenty of corruption, arse-covering, prejudice, and line-crossing to go around and to keep Gotham Central a satisfyingly soapy page-turner. It stands up as one of the best DC series this century....more
As crossover events go, Millennium is mostly ignored, and that seems to be how DC want it. This collection is itself now ancient, with no easily availAs crossover events go, Millennium is mostly ignored, and that seems to be how DC want it. This collection is itself now ancient, with no easily available digital edition. The characters it introduced are footnotes at best, bad jokes at worst, and when its villains showed up again in Brian Bendis' recent Event Leviathan it was to widespread disappointment and bafflement. Hardly surprising that a 1987 comic is little-referenced in 2023, you might say (particularly when the DCU has shed its skin a couple of times since). But it was pretty much forgotten by 1988.
So why did a then-groundbreaking weekly event series, which launched to thunderous hype and strong sales, fail to make any impact? There's an obvious answer: it's rubbish. And, yes, in many ways Millennium is a dismal failure as a comic, and certainly as a crossover event. But those ways are almost all to do with how it was done, not what it was trying to do.
At its heart Millennium is attempting three things, all ambitious and all potentially good. First, on a technical level, it's pioneering the crossover as line-wide takeover: everything stops for a month or two to tell one over-arching story. It's an approach DC used to great effect in the 90s with things like One Million and The Final Night, and still tries now. Second, its hook is a strong one that beckons other titles into the event - someone in every DC supporting cast is a traitor, whether replaced or brainwashed. And third, Millennium has the noble goal of putting a new, ultra-diverse DC team into the marketplace - an idea which feels like it's come around again in the last 10-15 years.
But the execution - ooof. Steve Englehart plotted the event as, he claimed, a 45-part story, crossovers included - doling out important events to all the supporting books to render as they saw fit. I can believe it, since the actual Millennium series is 8 issues in which the heroes are regularly alerted to a terrible threat, rush off to battle it... and then convene the next week with the job done.
I don't think there's ever been a crossover in which so much of the action happens outside the main book, an inversion of the usual problem with tie-ins. For instance, the climactic battle in the Louisiana swamps that ends the first half is split across four titles, none of which make sense on their own even though they sync perfectly, and none of which are Millennium itself. The editorial co-ordination in Millennium is virtuosic, but in the same way a 6-minute drum solo in the middle of a pop song might be. Impressive, but you do wish they hadn't bothered.
This unusual reliance on tie-ins is partly down to the "Manhunter spy" hook, which is a great way to get comics involved in the crossover but runs into a serious issue - the spy makes their move; is beaten (or not, in the case of titles which were set to be cancelled) and that wraps up the title's involvement... except there's still a month of crossover left. Even if you read the tie-ins to get the full story, Millennium is a very front-loaded event - all the excitement is in the initial revelation of Manhunter sleeper agents (some of whom are more impressive than others - nice work getting Lana Lang on board, but Blue Beetle's guy is just one of his existing minor villains). Once those are dealt with the momentum fizzles, and the tie-ins mostly mop up the diminishing Manhunter threat while the main book turns its attention to the Chosen.
Ah yes, the Chosen. Again, there's a nice idea here: the Guardians Of The Universe have picked 10 special humans to 'evolve' and lead mankind into the next millennium - but because they're so distant from Earth, they have zero interest in our current political systems. So two of the candidates they appear to are killed by a mob or paranoid officials, and one is a white supremacist from Apartheid South Africa who is enlightened as to the nature of the cosmos, absolutely hates it, and promptly goes off to become a supervillain.
The remainder are an uncompromisingly diverse crew - a Black British woman, a middle-aged Japanese tech guy, a female Chinese worker, an Aboriginal Australian woman, a gay Peruvian dude, Green Lantern's Pacific Islander pal Tom Kalmaku and, er, Jason Woodrue the Floronic Man (because Englehart couldn't get permission to use Swamp Thing). It's a really bold set of characters, and a book using the richness of their backgrounds and exploring how they interact might have been fascinating.
Millennium is not that book. Englehart's conceptions are exciting, and sometimes that hits on the page - Celia Windward, the British character is introduced with the caption "Birmingham, FASCIST BRITAIN" which is both funny and sums up her healthy distaste for authority. But mostly the actual characters are a collection of caricatures and tropes: Celia has a dreadful phonetic Jamaican accent; Betty the Aboriginal Australian is otherworldly and connected to the dreamtime; our Chinese heroine is dutiful; and so on. Gregorio, the gay member, epitomises the problem - yes, a superhero comic with a gay main character in 1987 is groundbreaking, but awesome though his final design is, his personality is a very broadly drawn and quite ugly stereotype of a self-loathing gay man. I don't think writers should only work from their own lived experience, I know people can write effectively about lives and cultures vastly different from their own... but it's very hard to read Millennium and not think Englehart was way out of his depth with the Chosen. It's a last hurrah for his 70s style - big cosmic underpinnings to a weird, soapy surface foam of action - but it felt odd and clumsy even in 1987, let alone now.
And for a comic whose job it is to introduce us to these new characters, they really have very little to do. They are rescued; they are passive receptacles of the Guardians' "cosmic wisdom" (a whole issue of this!); at the end they transform into superheroes. But they take no active part in the story and we hardly see them interact with each other - a real missed opportunity which unfortunately seals in the sense that these are walking stereotypes, not actual people.
So Millennium is excitingly ambitious but terribly done. And yet... there's a hyperactive, cut-up brio to it that I can't help but like. Englehart's dialogue is like Jack Kirby's in a way - entirely stilted but extremely dynamic, full of little turns of phrase and panels which break off from the main action for an unexpected character beat (he is loving getting a whole DC Universe to play with, that much is obvious). And the art, by the unique team of Joe Staton and Ian Gibson, is full of movement and fun, Staton's vigorous pencils working well with Gibson's more delicate finishes. Millennium is a vibrant, pretty, upbeat comic, especially for a big crossover event. It's a failure on almost every level, artistic and technical, but it's interesting for what it tried to do - DC's Secret Wars II, except with a great deal more heart....more
Like a lot of interesting 90s DC runs, L.E.G.I.O.N. is entirely uncollected - thanks to the kind Goodreads angel who put up this fake compilation of iLike a lot of interesting 90s DC runs, L.E.G.I.O.N. is entirely uncollected - thanks to the kind Goodreads angel who put up this fake compilation of its first run.
But I'm right to say "interesting" rather than "good". LEGION (I'm not going to bother punctuating it again) might at some point *get* "good" - it was a mainstay of my pull list for a while - but this first almost-year of the run isn't there yet. For one thing it's early American work from Alan Grant and artist Barry Kitson. It doesn't feel like Grant's used to either the 22-page format or writing a team book, and these issues feel very oddly paced - some with lots happening too quickly to have much weight, then issues where almost nothing seems to happen apart from members of the cast wandering around the LEGION HQ checking in on one another. Kitson's not quite fully baked as an artist either at this point - nice big airy panels but no real flow in the storytelling and stiff figures.
It's all very much a work in progress, which might be appropriate, as that's what the story's about. If you don't know LEGION, it's the "present-day" equivalent of the Legion Of Super-Heroes, but recast as a galactic police force. The comic tends to follow the super-powered commanders of LEGION and treat them as a coherent super-team, but they and the wider organisation follow the same leader - Vril Dox, authoritarian child of the super-villain Brainiac.
Vril Dox is, not to put too fine a point on it, a fascist. He controls LEGION from its HQ on the planet Cairn, which he takes over in these issues, enforcing regime change with an army of Lobo clones (Lobo's regular presence in the comic later on during the height of his popularity is probably why it managed a 70-issue run, even during the 90s boom). The previous government was in the hands of drug cartels, which Dox feels gives him carte blanche to put the planet under new management. After an intro following up the INVASION! mini-series which introduced him and his teammates, this stretch of the comic covers the takeover of Cairn and the initial founding of LEGION.
It's easy to see why Grant was tapped to do this - who better to write a comic starring a fascist anti-hero than a man who's been writing Judge Dredd for years? But this was Dredd mostly before the era where the stories really started interrogating the fascism, and for all Grant's interest in leftist and anarchist politics, there's really not a lot of depth to LEGION here. Vril Dox's opposing forces are a totalitarian computer and then a bunch of fairly cartoonish narco-villains, and the rest of his team exists mostly to hang around and go "tut tut, this won't do at all" when Dox's schemes are revealed.
The comic would be more entertaining if said schemes seemed particularly intelligent or devious - there's real pleasure in seeing a well-laid-plan come together, especially if it's managed to hoodwink readers along the way. It would establish Dox as the kind of bastard you want to read about. But his schemes here mostly involve "Use Lobo to beat them up and then hope he doesn't kill me after". You never get the feeling you're reading about an arch-manipulator, just an arsehole lucky enough to work with a lot of stupid people.
Reading LEGION is a window on a lost comics world - one where an entire first year of a series can be devoted to setting up the premise with no existing star characters on board. But even in that world, it's surprising this survived....more