Showcase Corner - Codename: Gravedigger!

Men of War was the last of the classic DC war comics to arrive onto the comic racks. Like its kin it was an anthology which featured several characters during its run. Enemy Ace was a steady back up feature but I'll be turning my sights on him next month. Jerry Grandenetti turned in some outstanding artwork on features like Dateline: Frontline and Rosa. But the star of the show was Ulysses Hazard who was better known as Codename: Gravedigger. He got his sobering nickname in just the manner you'd expect -- he was a gravedigger who did service for the many men who fell in the line of duty. But he had that distinction because he was a black man in an army that was segregated and was redolent with the racism that brewed in the homeland. 

 

Codename: Gravedigger was the creation of David Michelinie and artist Ed Davis along with Romeo Tanghal who inked all the stories of Gravedigger in the series. Michelinie's story relates the saga of a young black man who as a boy was overcome by polio but works with a demon fury to build up his weakened body and eventually becomes a veritable powerhouse with a range of fighting skills. 

Despite these accomplishments he is relegated to support work and not given the chance to fight for his country as he'd prefer. His solution in the face of racism was to storm the Pentagon and so prove his mettle to the Undersecretary of War. He challenged the leadership to put him in the fight and so they sent him on a series of impossible missions. 

He fights in Europe against the Nazis, invades concentration camps, defends the American coastline from invasion, and rescues more than a few orphans during the war. His stories run the gamut of what one expects of a Bronze Age war comic. 

After a single issue by Arvell Jones the penciling job is given over to Dick Ayers. Eventually the scripting goes to Roger McKenzie. The stories they dream up for Gravedigger are high octane adventures in which he seems never to stop moving, 

To me at least, this seemed somewhat counter to the DC formula which seemed to focus on the time in between the fighting as much if not more than the physical combat. Perhaps it's the presence of Dick Ayers, the main man on Marvel's war comics, but this feature feels more like a Marvel book than a DC one. 

Gravedigger has that same imperviousness which Sgt. Fury and others at Marvel seem to possess as they wage the war against the enemy, and he has a tendency to mouth off quite a bit as he fights. 

The Joe Kubert covers are the most DC thing about this book aside from the back up features. 

Gravedigger fights alone for the most part, doing his best to salvage missions that seem impossible from the get-go. That he's a suicide warrior seems not to dawn on him. He just wants his chance to fight. 

His missions even come to the attention of Joseph Goebbels himself, the Nazi minister of propogranda, who goes on to become something of a main villain for Gravedigger. The fact a black man is so successful against the Nazis rubs Goebbels the wrong way indeed. 

Michilinie had begun a subplot which McKenzie continued about a wounded British officer who is recovering though he cannot walk. He is given the mission eventually of becoming Gravedigger's commanding officer though that is murky for some time. 

At some point he is replaced by a Nazi lookalike and Gravedigger not only has to unmask the villain but is charged with finding the disappeared officer named Burke. That trek leads Gravedigger into the depths of the German homeland where he must confront the horror of the camps. 

Jack C. Harris takes over the helm of the series alongside Ayers and Tanghal. If anything, the series become even more action-oriented. 

Gravedigger is joined in his fight by a trio of British soldiers who make the mag feel even more like Sgt. Fury. One of the three Brits wears a derby and another has beret, evoking Dum Dum Dugan and Percy Pinkerton. 

This little squad hangs out with Gravedigger for several issues off and on, though one never really gets the feeling their addition constitutes a permanent change. 

Gravedigger is ordered on a deadly mission in North Africa, and again his missions seem to suicide runs at best. 

This latest one though brings a permanent change to Gravedigger's face when he is wounded with a crooked scar across his face which resembles a cross, though he calls it a tombstone. Clearly there's a feeling Gravedigger needs a visual boost, though this change is rarely showcased on the covers. 

In North Africa Gravedigger is chasing some important documents, and this particular maguffin drives the plot for several issues. 

The stories while filled with action seem less and less signficant. Ulysses Hazard is more and more a cypher who fights for the sake of the fight. He bickers a bit now and again but follows through most often. 

One notable mission brings him into partnership with Mademoiselle Marie, a longtime DC war favorite. 

Truth told some of Gravedigger's missions don't really make all that much sense but as long as he's got Nazis to fight, the comic rumbles along. 

Toward the end of the run he's led to believe his Mother is dying and he's sent back to the states. This is a ruse for a bizarre Nazi plot to smuggle in doubles for loyal Americans keeping watch on the beaches for enemy incusions. Turns out his Mom is fine but Gravedigger has some fighting to do yet. 

After he single-handedly forestalls the Nazi invasion on the beaches of Atlantic City he heads back to the European front. 

One story even has Gravedigger live up to his nickname, but others end up six feet under and not Ulysses Hazard. 

One of the strangest two-parters yet has Gravedigger assigned to protect FDR. It's a wild and wacky misadventure of a war story and doesn't really have any sense of the essential realism to make a DC war story stick. It felt more like a chapter of All-Star Squadron. 

Under a George Evans cover Gravedigger completes that mission eventually with the world leaders safe and sound as we knew they would be all along. 

The series wraps up with Gravedigger taking command of Easy Company when Sgt.Rock is wounded. We get a nifty story which showcases each of the Joes of Easy as they try to take something called "Nickname Hill". Even with Easy backing him up it's clear that Gravedigger is a one-man act. The series is not nor is it especially good. Dick Ayers turns in unremarkable artwork that is inked with indifference by Tanghal -- they don't appear to be a good fit to my eye. The stories have too much of that zany feel one gets with Marvel war stories and that jars inside the illustrious DC war canon. 

Beginning tomorrow the Dojo takes a most sobering look at World War II and the Holocaust. 

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War Of The Gods!

I no doubt glimpsed his work before on small features here and there across the Marvel landscape, but the first time I remember the name George Perez registering in my consciousness was in The Avengers #141 in 1975 when the Assemblers bounded into action against the Squadron Supreme. Perez quickly established himself as the master of team comics and soon enough landed the Fab 4, off to DC and The NEW Teen Titans, and then with the regrettable passing of Dick Dillin the Justice League of America itself. I consider the Avengers issues he and Kurt Busiek put together at the end of the last century and into this one to be the last great comic book I've come across. So it was on the strength of his art that I dipped my toe into his DC crossover epic War of the Gods. 

That and the fact the mythic street brawl included and in fact featured The Son of Vulcan. When DC gifted Dick Giordano with the Charlton "Action Heroes" somehow or other Son of Vulcan was included though to my memory he was never a part of Giordano's regime. Digging up vintage SoV issues proved difficult in those pre-internet days and one of my most pleasurable comic finds was latching onto a beaten and well-foxed copy of Mysteries of Unexplored Worlds #47 (the second SoV story) in a little shop in North Carolina. It completed my set of Son of Vulcan comics and for the most part all of the Charlton heroes I spend much of the 80's wrapping up. So it was nice to see Johnny Mann get some focus in a comic at long last, even it did prove to be his swan song. 

This event was intended to do two things apparently -- celebrate Wonder Woman's fiftieth anniversary and to wrap up Perez's well-regarded tenure on the comic. He'd worked hard to make Wonder Woman both distinctive and important and had some success in that regard. But it seems that he and DC disagreed about how much ballyhoo this event warranted and then there were editorial disagreements as well. So this "War of the Gods" proved to be a war indeed and as a result not nearly as good as it ought to have been. It starts out well enough, but as with most of the art in this saga Perez was doing the covers and only laying out the art inside, so it wasn't quite as potent as it should be. Also these events require a good bit of background information, but hopefully most writers can get you around these limits. The complexities of Amazonian existence along with several pantheons of Gods made this one a real puzzler sometimes about what was going on. 

Now this collection includes the Wonder Woman issues which were part of the saga. And they are invariably weaker than the main installments, though at the time veteran readers might have been well pleased. I was just mostly confused having to deal with yet more characters with similar names and frankly similar looks. When you've seen one lovely Amazon, it appears you've seen most of them. 

And as with many of these events, the attempts to wedge in heroes like Batman and Superman feel wooden and arbitrary. 

War of the Gods tells the story of the Greek pantheon of gods battling the Roman pantheon of gods along with other sundry gods from Egypt, Africa, Europe and elsewhere. All of the classics are on tap from Enkidu to Hermes and it gets crowded, very very crowded. The villain is Circe who is trying to destroy or control the Earth or something, but frankly her motivations never made much sense really. It was just a black hat and white hat situation and that's rarely good for a story this complex. 

Characters like Lobo were fun to see since I've read almost nothing with this character. He clearly is of his time and seems like fun, but I'm not sure he was ideal for this one. Though no doubt he helped sales a little. 

And there is more than a whisper of the classic Crisis on Infinite Earths in this one too. Not only because of Perez's involvement, but because characters like Harbinger showing up for a bit of action. But you can almost feel this one coming apart at the seams as you read it. The art gets more and more fractious and more and more diverse hands participate. Some of the storytelling is suspect and at least once someone seems to have cocked up the layout of the pages, or half-pages. I can only assume this was part of the original and never corrected. 

Now Wonder Woman appears to die during this event and that's okay since she gets better pretty quickly. But I did feel it was similar to the whole Superman shebang which was to be fair still several years away. It feels in retrospect like a trial run. 

The final issue feels like a mad dash to the finish and by this time I've gotten really confused about certain details. Certain characters seem to have died that I don't remember at all. For his part Son of Vulcan does contribute in a memorable way even it did cost him all. It was high-profile exit for a hero most would regard as third-rate, though I adore him. 

The collection ends with a dewy farewell issue in which plot threads are tied off and the stage is set for a new writer to take over. Perez fell out with DC after this and went about the world of comics doing this and that for a while. It's too bad this swan song didn't have a prettier tune. 

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Black Lightning Strikes Twice!

Black Lighting Volume Two is the kind of collection of vintage comics that I love. It's a batch of Bronze Age comics, many never collected from a wide variety of titles by an even wider array of talents which happen to feature one of DC's more obscure heroes, but one who is having his day in the sun right now thanks to a new TV show. Black Lightning was a welcome addition to the exceedingly white DC universe at a time when such issues were of great moment. Things have much improved in comics as to the blend of ethnic heroes, but at the time black heroes were rare indeed.

(Not in this collection.)

Marvel had the Black Panther, Black Goliath, Storm, and most notably Luke Cage, but DC was bereft save for a little used John Stewart of Green Lantern fame, Legion of Super-Heroes member Tyroc, and the offbeat Black Racer of the New Gods. DC really needed to have a higher-profile black hero fill an incredibly obvious void in an overwhelmingly white DCU. So the call went out and they came up a concept, which by some reports was amazingly racist. Tony Isabella was called in to help that along, scrapped it and eventually came up with Jefferson Pierce, Black Lightning. Black Lightning held down his own title for eleven issues or so and then was cancelled  (along with lots of other interesting DC concepts) and became available for other duties.

It's the story of those other appearances we have in this collection.

After losing his own title, Black Lighting eventually showed up help Green Arrow in a World's Finest. The story features some juicy art by Dick Dillin and Frank McLaughlin.

That led to a brief run of solo Black Lightning stories in World's Finest, some of which did not even get a cover mention. Art was supplied by the Marshall Rogers, Rich Buckler and Romeo Tangahl.

Eventually Lighting struck in DC Comics Presents alongside Superman, an attempt to raise his profile in a nifty story with Joe Staton artwork.

Then came a memorable two-issue saga by Gerry Conway and the dandy art team of Dick Dillin and Frank McLaughlin in Justice League of America in which Black Lightning was eventually offered a gig with the team, but turned it down. I was unhappy at the time, but frankly his turning them down was of more moment than his taking them up on it after it was all said and done.

Then came a gig with Batman in The Brave and The Bold with Dick Giordano on the artwork. Black Lighting did get some dandy art, that's for sure.

The collection wraps up with Black Lightning's short run in Detective Comics, a logical enough place for the street-level hero. Despite being a denizen of Metropolis, his style was more akin to the Darknight Detective than other big-power heroes.

(Not in this collection.)

Eventually Black Lightning would join Batman as part of The Outsiders and that would be his home for quite a spell. The saga of Jefferson Pierce was certainly a peripatetic one. I'm glad that journey has now been gathered together for easy consumption. Bronze Age fans should rejoice.

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