Gutter Talk

Power Pack Holiday Special (1992)

2011-12-25T18:47:00.000-05:00

(Yea, I know it's been a while since I posted, and after the New Year I plan to resume my look at Firestorm as if nothing happened. For now, here's a Christmas Day look at a holiday themed book from the House of Ideas.)

In 1991, one year after the end of the original Power Pack series, Marvel published the Power Pack Holiday Special. For the most part, this was one of those "Holiday" comics that qualifies as a Christmas issue simply because it was published in December. Of the three stories in this issue, only one really has anything to do with the holiday.

The lead story reunites series creators Louise Simonson and June Brigman for a story that seems to serve mainly to tie up all the dangling plotlines left when the series ended. Thus, this is not a story for the uninitiated, like myself. Simonson does a pretty decent job of filling in the gaps for any new readers who might have picked this up by mistake. However, I didn't really understand what was going on until I went back and read a couple of the older issues.

From what I can gather, when the series ended, the Power children's father had gained superpowers himself, the revelation of her children's powers had caused their mother to go into a catatonic stupor, and oldest child Alex had been transformed into one of the aliens who gave the children their powers in the first place.

Or so it seemed.

The story opens with the family traveling to the home planet of those aliens, the Kyrellians, where the truth of these changes is revealed. As they near the planet, the children discover that what they thought were their parents and older brother were actually duplicates made of something called pseudoplasm. The doppelgangers were created by an evil Kyrellian called the Technocrat, who resents the Powers for leading his people to a new world where they no longer need his technological expertise. Technocrat has allied himself with the Pack's old enemy, Maraud, queen mother of the Snarks. The rest of the story follows the groups efforts to rescue their real parents and brother and defeat Technocrat and Maraud.

During the course of the series, the kids' had switched superpowers a couple of times, and now they find that they can swap powers at will. This effect proves to only temporary, and at story's end the children all have their original powers. Also, despite all that has happened, the Power Pack's parents still don't know about their kids' super-heroic identities, thanks to a so-called "mind-lock" implanted by the Kyrellians which allows the adults to accept such strange events without question.

Thus, the story also effectively hits the reset button on the series, wiping out almost all of the changes that occurred during the course of the series and giving future writers a clean slate when the series would eventually be revived.

There is at least a mention of Christmas, as the family returns to Earth and sees the giant Christmas tree in New York City, and realize that they've arrived home in time for the holiday.

The second story, by Mindy Newell and Steve Buccellato, doesn't even make that much of a nod toward the season. If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say this was an inventory story that Marvel decided to finally publish while they could. It's a pretty routine tale of teen angst with Julie Power pining over a boy who barely notices that she's alive.

The third story, featuring Jack Power and some of the earliest work by current Amazing Spider-Man writer Dan Slott, is the only one that could really be called a Christmas story. Jack conspires to reunite his teacher with her family for Christmas in order to get out of a test. It's a cute little story, but I can't really buy the basic premise. I find it hard to believe that even the meanest, most embittered, old maid of a school teacher would make a student take a test on Christmas Day.

As a farewell to the original Power Pack series, this special works well. As a Christmas themed comic book, and a stand alone issue, it fails to make the grade.

Focus on Firestorm: Firestorm #1 (1978)

2011-10-15T09:46:00.000-04:00

The germ of a notion that eventually evolved into the character we know as Firestorm struck writer Gerry Conway, he claims, during his run as the author of Marvel's The Amazing Spider-Man. What if, Conway wondered, it had Flash Thompson, the football star, rather than Peter Parker, the science nerd, who had gotten super-powers? He filed the notion away in the back of his mind until several years later when he found himself working at DC, where, in late 1977, it found expression in the debut issue of Firestorm.

That issue's origin tale, "Make Way for Firestorm," opens with a colorfully clad figure whose head appears to be on fire reveling in his new found super-powers before heading off to confront the bad guys responsible for turning him into the creature he had become. From there we fade into the obligatory flashback and meet Ronnie Raymond, new student at Bradley High, on his first day at his new school, where he meets two other students who will become the backbone of the books supporting cast, Cliff Carmichael and Doreen Day. Completing the role reversal, Conway makes Cliff, the class brain, the bully, belittling Ronnie's intelligence and making him look foolish in class.

With his insecurities about fitting in at his new school, his attempts to impress Doreen, and hints of problems at home, Ronnie actually seems to have more in common with Peter Parker than Flash Thompson. Perhaps that was the point that Conway was making; that all of us, jock and brain alike, have the same insecurities and problems.

Nobel Prize winning physicist Dr. Martin Stein certainly has his share of problems when we meet him. He has just designed and built the world's first fully automated nuclear power plant, but the machinations of his disgraced former assistant, Danton Black, who sues Stein, claiming that Martin stole his ideas for the plant, threaten to keep the facility from going on line as scheduled.

Meanwhile, Ronnie gets the fool notion in his head that joining a group, headed by a shady looking guy named Eddie Earhart, protesting the new nuclear plant will somehow make Doreen like him. It turns out, however, that the protesters have a little more on there mind than carrying signs. In fact, Ronnie hooks up with them just in time for Earhart to decide to use him as the fall guy for their plan to blow up the new power plant.

Events move quickly from this point as our cast converges. Stein decides to defy the court order and activate the reactor early, even as Ronnie and Earhart's group arrive and Danton Black sneaks back into what he believes to be an empty facility to sneak a peak at Stein's plans for the reactor.

Earhart knocks out Ronnie and the Professor, set their bomb, and flee. Ronnie wakes up and attempts to drag the still unconscious Stein to safety, but doesn't get to far before the dynamite explodes, just as Black arrives.

This being a comic book, getting caught in a nuclear explosion, rather than killing the trio, turns out to be a good thing. Ronnie and Stein find themselves merged into the super-powered being whom Ronnie decides to call Firestorm, while Black will return in future issues as the super-villain Multiplex. (With a name like Multiplex, it sort of seems like his evil schemes should involve forcing small one or two screen movie theaters out of business, doesn't it?)

As much as I love Conway's writing, I've always thought of his work on Firestorm as one of his weaker efforts. Perhaps that because I first encountered the character late in his run on The Fury of Firestorm and he might have been a little burned out and running out of ideas. However, Firestorm #1 is a good, solid super-hero origin tale. There are certainly a lot of good and original ideas in this debut issue. The characters powers of matter transmutation are something that hadn't been seen before in super-hero comics, as is the idea of the hero being a merger of two people. Even more interesting, is the concept that, because he was unconscious at the time of the initial merger, Stein doesn't remember anything that happens while he's part of Firestorm and, at first, has no idea what happens during his mysterious "blackouts."

The weakest part of the issue, for me, can be summed up in one word: Milgrom. I've never been a big fan of Al's work, and he's very inconsistent in this issue. Some panels look better than any I've seen from him, while others are just awful. Still, he tells the story well enough. He also came up with a nice costume design and you've got to love the awesomely bad late 70's facial hair on Cliff Carmichael and Eddie Earhart.

Of course, as we all know, 1978 was not a good time to launch a new super-hero comic, no matter how original or innovative. Four issues after this promising debut, Firestorm would run smack dab into the infamous DC Implosion. The Nuclear Man didn't spend too long in Comic Book Limbo, however. Conway, who was also the writer of DC's premier super-hero team book, Justice League of America, soon drafted him into that group. Shortly thereafter, Firestorm would return to solo adventures as a back-up feature in Flash and eventually earn another shot at his own monthly comic.

I'll take a look at the first issue of that series, The Fury of Firestorm, in my next post.

Potpourri for 1000, Alex (A Hodge-Podge of Seemingly Unconnected Random Thoughts)

2011-10-09T10:02:00.001-04:00

Here are a few things that have been on my mind over the past few days.

A couple of weeks ago, I asked the rhetorical question, "What does Sheldon Cooper (of The Big Bang Theory) think of DC's New 52?" That was meant as a joke, but, having a fairly mindless job that allows me to ponder such things as I perform my menial tasks, I found myself thinking more about the question and coming up with a partial answer. Sheldon strikes me as someone who doesn't deal well with any sort of change, so I assume that he was quite distressed by the initial announcement. However, as Green Lantern seems to be his favorite character, he was most likely at least partially reassured by the fact that that character's continuity has escaped the reboot essentially unaltered.

Speaking of Big Bang Theory, I was watching an older episode in which Leonard states that he has 2600 comic books in his apartment. For a serious geek of Leonard's age, that number actually seems kind of small to me. Perhaps he was referring to the comics that he actually keeps at home, with the bulk of his collection stored elsewhere.

Moving on, then, based on what I've read so far, it seems to me that DC's relaunch isn't so much a bold step forward into a new future for comics as a giant leap backwards to about the early 80's. Co-publisher Dan DiDio has apparently recently announced that Crisis On Infinite Earths and all subsequent "Crisis-level" events never occurred. The upcoming Justice Society series will be set on Earth-2. The Huntress may once again be the daughter of that parallel world's Batman. On Earth-1, if that's what they're calling it, Barbara Gordon is Batgirl again and Supergirl is once again Superman's Kryptonian cousin (although that retro move actually occurred a few years ago). Over in Superman, Morgan Edge looks like he will once again be a major supporting player and there are hints that Clark Kent may once again be taking a job as a TV news anchor sometime in the near future. Edge is now a bald, goateed African-American man, but other than that minor cosmetic change, he appears to be the same character who was a thorn in Kent's side throughout the Bronze Age. Now, if Clark were dating his childhood friend Lana Lang, who was also his co-anchor on the nightly newscast, then it would be 1983 in Metropolis all over again.

I can only fervently hope that DiDio's revelation that all stories with the word "Crisis" in the title never happened includes Identity Crisis. If any story ever needed to be negated by editorial fiat, it's that one. I would love to see Ralph Dibny show up alive somewhere with his girlfriend Sue Dearborn. With the apparent exception of Buddy Baker, it seems that super-heroes aren't allowed to be married in the new DCU. Most famously, the marriage of Clark and Lois Kent has been retconned into oblivion, while in Flash, Barry Allen isn't even dating Iris West anymore. But, as far as I'm concerned, they don't need to be married as long as they're alive.

By the way, it sort of reveals what a huge geek I am that I actually know Sue Dibny's maiden name, doesn't it?

I've found myself wondering if, in this new continuity, Batman has yet caught up with the killer of Thomas and Martha Wayne. In the pre-COIE continuity, Batman found Joe Chill fairly early in his career, and, though the details changed, in the post-Crisis DCU he also encountered Chill fairly early. However, after the DC Universe was destroyed and restructured for the second time in Zero Hour, it was decided that not only had Batman never found his parents' killer, but it wasn't even Joe Chill. I was unaware of the change, though, until I read "Public Enemies," Jeph Loeb's first storyline in Superman/Batman. The change was undone soon after "Public Enemies" in what was basically a throwaway line of dialogue toward the end of Infinite Crisis. Now, with the latest restructuring of the DC Universe in the wake of Flashpoint, the issue may once again be up in the air.

I recently ran across this old interview on-line in which Denny O'Neil, editor of the Bat books at the time, defends the initial continuity change thusly: "It was done because we thought that Batman's motivations--and therefore his saga--are stronger if he never learns who killed his parents."

I have to disagree with Mr. O'Neil here. To me, it makes Batman a stronger, and saner, character if he discovered and caught the Waynes' killer and still continued being Batman. He becomes less of a revenge driven psycho and more the public spirited crimefighter that I feel he was meant to be. Bruce Wayne's being Batman, after all, isn't really about finding his parents' killer, or revenge, but about making sure that no one else ever has to go through the ordeal that he did. It's about helping other people, not making Bruce Wayne feel better.

Finally, it appears that DC may not hate me as much as I'd initially thought. They are sort of giving me a Christmas present. As of December's issue #4, J.T. Krul will no longer be writing Green Arrow. He cites some mysterious new project as the reason for his leaving, but I honestly don't care as long as he's gone. The new writers will be Keith Giffen and Dan Jurgens, who will continue as penciller with George Perez inking.

I still have a few reservations. I'm assuming that Giffen and Jurgens' working relationship will be similar to that of Giffen and other collaborators, with Keith plotting and Dan writing the dialogue. Unfortunately, dialogue is, to me, the weakest of Jurgens many weak points as a writer. Also, from what I've read, it seems that the Green Arrow of this new series isn't quite the same character I fell in love with back in the 70's. Apparently, he's closer to the character as portrayed on TV in Smallville than the O'Neil/Adams version. I only saw a couple of episodes with Green Arrow in them, but I wasn't exactly thrilled with their depiction of one of my favorite characters. Still, I do plan on picking up Green Arrow #4 the first week in December (provided that it stays on schedule) and I will, of course, report my impressions to you here on this blog.

Well, it certainly feels good to get all that off my chest. Now, I've got some old Firestorm comics to re-read so that I can tell you all about them.

Talk to you later.

Action Comics #2 Reviewed

2011-10-07T17:06:00.000-04:00

Heed my words, children, for here lies wisdom.

In the dark days before the Great Reboot great uncertainly lay over the legions of fandom and there was upon them much wailing and gnashing of teeth. To them in these days the prophet did speak, and spake he thus: "...Grant Morrison will be writing Action Comics and that's going to kick ass." And lo, did it come to pass that in the first week of the second month of the Great Reboot were the words of the prophet fulfilled, for, verily, the second issue of Action doth ROCK! And throughout the land of the fanboy there was much rejoicing.

Can I get an AMEN, brothers and sisters?!

Ahem...Sorry. I really don't know what came over me.

You might get the idea from that outburst above that I kind of liked Action Comics #2 just a little bit. You would, of course, not be wrong. With this issue, Action begins to live up to the awesome potential inherent in the combination of the names "Grant Morrison" and "Superman," and the end of the issue indicates that it's only going to get better in the months ahead.

Truly, the best parts of the issue, at least for veteran Superman readers, are the hints dropped about future plot developments. Storywise, "Superman In Chains" is pretty simple and straightforward. At the end of last issue, you may recall, a trap set by Luthor and General Lane had succeeded in capturing Superman. As #2 begins, he is being held in a top secret military facility and "interrogated" (a polite way of saying "tortured") by Luthor. It really isn't such a spoiler to say that he escapes. He may not be as powerful as he's been depicted in the past, but he IS Superman after all. Along the way we encounter a couple of "new" characters whose names will be familiar to those versed in the old continuity, a Dr. Irons--John Henry, I presume--and Sgt. John Corben. Though we know, or think we know, what's going to happen to them, the fun will be in seeing how Grant gets them there. When we last see Corben, he looks about ready to don a high tech battlesuit and take on Superman in an attempt to impress Lois Lane. On top of all that, the issue ends with a shot of a menacing looking spaceship that I'm assuming--'cause Grant isn't telling just yet--belongs to none other than Brainiac.
Action #2 is a fast paced and exciting story in its own right, and promises even more excitement to come. It's pretty much every thing a good super-hero comic should be.

Superman #1 Reviewed

2011-10-06T20:08:00.000-04:00

For me, it really doesn't take a lot to make a decent Superman story. Just give me Kal-El flying around and throwing a few super punches, battling a ludicrous super-villain or a giant monster, and I'm good. On that count, the new Superman #1 delivers. The first few pages move quickly to establish the Man of Steel's new post-Flashpoint status quo before getting into the meat of the issue, which is Superman's battle with a giant creature made of living fire.

If DC really wants to appeal to non-fanboys with the New 52, it would behoove them to have an entry level title that the casual reader can pick up every now and then and get a satisfying single issue reading experience. If this debut issue is any indication, Superman might just be that title. This would be appropriate, since everyone knows who Superman is. He's not only DC's most famous character, but one of the most recognizable fictional characters in all of literature. Therefore, you don't really need to spend a lot of time introducing the characters to new readers. If you were in a comics shop about to pick up your first ever comic book, wouldn't you be more likely to go for a character you already know from movies and TV?

This issue, more than any other of the New 52 titles I've read, is very accessible and new reader friendly. There are subplots and hints of things to come, including a possible crossover with Stormwatch, but it ultimately delivers a complete single issue story with everything the reader needs to know to enjoy and understand the story contained within the story itself.

Visually, the book is an interesting hybrid. Writer George Perez does breakdowns, and the storytelling, with multiple small panels on almost every page, is pure Perez. It's dense, but never confusing. The pencil and ink art by Jesus Merino looks like an accomplished Jim Lee impersonation. Actually, I like Merino's art better than Lee's.

All in all, this is a good start to the Man of Steel's new adventures.

Focus On Batgirl: Batgirl #1--Must There Be A Batgirl?

2011-10-05T16:26:00.001-04:00

This is not going to be a review so much as a dismissal of this comic. I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about the artistic merits of Batgirl #1. It's basically a fairly good comic. The art by Ardian Syaf is nice. The foreshortening on Batgirl's leg on the splash page looks a little off to me, but otherwise it's a lovely looking book. It's also well written, but then I'd expect no less from Gail Simone, although this really isn't her best work.

The biggest flaw of this comic, as far as I'm concerned, is that it fails to make a compelling case for why there needs to be a Batgirl in the DC Universe and why it needs to be Barbara Gordon. Given the controversy surrounding Barbara Gordon's return to action, I really think that this is something they needed to do. This story, in fact, accomplishes just the opposite, pointing out why it was a mistake to bring back the Barbara Gordon version of Batgirl.
I can understand DC's reasoning for reinstating Barbara as Batgirl, though I can't say that I agree with it. Much like they did a few years ago with Supergirl, following several not all that successful attempts to introduce a new version of the character, they finally decided to go back to the original. Then there's the company's perhaps somewhat fanciful notion that the new 52 will bring in readers outside of their core demographic of middle aged fanboys. To that larger public, due to the 60's Batman TV series and, to a lesser extent, recent animated outings Batman: The Animated Series and The Batman, Barbara Gordon is Batgirl and Batgirl is Barbara Gordon. However, the fact remains that Barbara Gordon as Oracle was a unique and interesting character who filled a niche within the DC Universe at large, not just the Batman titles, while Barbara Gordon as Batgirl is just another chick in a batsuit, especially in the current DCU.
Simone even refers to this in the story when someone that Batgirl has just rescued says, "Bless you, Batwoman." Maybe that was meant to be a joke, but to me it just serves to underscore the redundancy of Batgirl in a world where you've got not just Batwoman, but the Huntress, not to mention Batman himself as well as Robin, Red Robin and Nightwing.
Compounding the problem is that the characterization of Batgirl in this first issue seems to be picking up the doubt plagued and uncertain heroine from 1988's Batgirl Special. She freezes, flashing back to the Joker's shooting her, when a gun is pointed at her right where the Clown Prince of Crime's bullet landed. This is certainly understandable given what Barbara's gone through, but not the kind of behavior you want in a costumed crimefighter.
This review is a tad less than timely. The second issue of this series is due to hit comic shops today. I'll be heading over to the Laughing Ogre shortly after I post this. I'm going to get the new issues of Action Comics and OMAC, but I'll be giving Batgirl #2 a pass. As I said at the outset, overall the first issue is a decent enough comic, but one that ultimately fails to justify its own existence, at least to my satisfaction.

Focus On Batgirl: "The Last Batgirl Story" (Batgirl Special #1; 1988)

2011-10-04T16:25:00.000-04:00

The decision to retire Batgirl seems to have been made as early as 1985. Her brief appearance in Crisis On Infinite Earths #4 shows her questioning her own role as a hero even as she watches Supergirl save a plane load of people from the encroaching anti-matter cloud. This portrayal was taken to the extreme in the Batgirl Special that formally ended her crimefighting career, for the time being at least. When writer Barbara Randall named this story "The Last Batgirl Story" she wasn't kidding around. The last page of the story is followed by a house ad for The Killing Joke, the Alan Moore penned tale that left Barbara Gordon in a wheelchair for the next twenty-three years and paved the way for her career as Oracle.
"The Last Batgirl Story" opens with a flashback to Batgirl's encounter with a hired killer known as Cormorant. It was Cormorant's attempt on her life that forced Barbara to confront her own mortality and realize that she could get killed playing super-hero, bringing on the self-doubt and uncertainty that plagued her. Flashing forward to the present, a man is murdered in the Gotham City Library where Barbara works and she becomes convinced, on the flimsiest of evidence, that Cormorant is the killer. Her obscession with Cormorant blinds her to mounting evidence that the real murderer is a female serial killer, dubbed "Slash" by the media, who is targeting men who've committed crimes against women. At the same time, she's afraid to confront Cormorant. Meanwhile, childhood friend Marcy, having deduced that Barbara is Batgirl, shows up hoping to convince Babs to hang up the cape. She agrees to do so, but only after closing the books on the Cormorant case.
When she finally does confront her nemesis, she's about to get herself killed for real when Slash shows up because Cormorant just happened to be next on her list of intended victims. Batgirl is reduced to little more than a spectator as Slash and Cormorant, with an assist from Cormorant's abused spouse, take each other out. Nonetheless, Cormorant is finally captured and Barbara keeps her promise to retire from crimefighting.
The reason I didn't enjoy this story has little to do with its actual quality. It's well written and features nice early work by artist Barry Kitson. (from a survey of Kitson's credits at the Comic Book Data Base, it appears that this was his first work in American comics.) My problem is with the portrayal of the title character. Batgirl is shown as confused, willfully blind, inept and ultimately useless. If the intent was to make the reader agree with Barbara's decision to stop being Batgirl, then it was successful. The Batgirl of this story isn't the type of super-hero I really care to read about, and Barbara did herself, Gotham and comics readers a favor by packing it in.

Focus On Batgirl: "Enter Batgirl; Exit Penguin"

2011-10-03T15:36:00.000-04:00

You might say that Batgirl is the Cousin Oliver of the DC Universe. You might say so, that is, if you're an incurable smart-ass with a freakishly extensive knowledge of old TV shows. If you're me, in other words, and thank whatever gods you may worship that you're not. In the mid-60's, the Batman TV series kicked off a phenomenon that came to be called "Batmania", bringing renewed interest and popularity to DC's Batman comics and rescuing them from the brink of cancellation. However, as it embarked on a third season, the TV series itself teetered on the edge of that very precipice. So they did what many ailing series did in their waning years, they added a new character, just as, several years later, Robbie Rist as Cousin Oliver joined the cast of The Brady Bunch in its final season. Though, and I promise this is my final Cousin Oliver reference for this post, I never understood just who that character was meant to appeal to, the logic of bringing in Batgirl is inescapable. The girls in the audience got a role model to identify with, and the boys didn't have to wait for a Catwoman appearance to have a spandex clad hottie to ogle.
"Enter Batgirl; Exit Penguin", Batman's third season premiere, opens to a typical day in Gotham City, as the Dynamic Duo return from rounding up Catwoman yet again and change back to their civilian identities of Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson for a night at the opera with Commissioner Gordon, Chief O'Hara and the Commissioner's daughter, Barbara. The TV show, by the way, actually bothered to come up with an explanation for why we hadn't seen or heard of Barbara Gordon before this. It seems that she'd been off at college for the past four years. She must have taken some time off after high school, as Yvonne Craig, the actress portraying Barbara, was thirty years old at the time.
Next we meet Barbara herself, heading home from her job at the Gotham Public Library to prepare herself for the aforementioned night at the opera when she is kidnapped by the Penguin and held captive in an empty apartment right next to her very own. The Penguin's latest somewhat ill thought out scheme is to force Barbara to marry him, thus making him the police commissioner's son-in-law and thus, or so he believes, above the law.
Pengy sends two of his henchmen out to snatch a minister to perform the ritual, and they happen to find pick one who happens to be having tea with Batman's butler Alfred, who tells the goons that he's the minister and gets nabbed in the real reverend's place. Alfred is locked in the bedroom of the vacant apartment, where he sees Barbara climbing out the window in order to go back to her place and change to Batgirl, thus learning her secret identity.
Summoned by an emergency signal activated through a switch hidden in Alfred's belt buckle, the Dynamic Duo arrive on the scene and are just as surprised as the Penguin and his gang when a third caped crime fighter shows up. Penguin and his henchmen are seemingly defeated, after which Batgirl disappears. However, Penguin recovers and overcomes Batman and Robin, then packs up the Caped Crusaders, Alfred, and a dummy that they take for an unconscious Barbara Gordon and head off for their alternate hideout.
To make a long story short, if it isn't already too late, Barbara breaks out the Batgirl-cycle, trails the bad guys to their new lair, frees Batman and Robin and helps them defeat Penguin and swears Alfred to secrecy regarding her secret identity.
Despite the bad rap it has among comics fans for making a laughing stock out of their beloved hero, viewed objectively, Batman is actually a really well done TV show, and "Enter Batgirl; Exit Penguin" is one of its better episodes. Due to declining ratings, the series, which had aired twice a week, was cut back to one episode a week for its final season, yet this episode delivers just as much fun and excitement as a typical two-parter, without all the extraneous silliness. The highlight of the half-hour, as it should be, is Yvonne Craig's performance as Batgirl. She perfectly portrays a young, sexy female crime fighter who does what she does not because of some trauma in her childhood, but because it's fun. Lou Grant would hate her, because, by God, she's got some spunk. Burgess Meredith's typically over the top performance as the Penguin, a role he seems to have been born to play, is also worth mentioning, and Commissioner Gordon's love and concern for his daughter give Neil Hamilton something other to play than a confused and buffoonish caricature.
The addition of Batgirl may not have saved Batman from its eventual cancellation, but creatively, she was quite a shot in the arm for the series.

'Tec Support: "The Million Dollar Debut of Batgirl!" (Focus On Batgirl)

2011-10-02T09:24:00.001-04:00

Created by a trio of comics legends, editor Julius Schwartz, writer Gardner Fox and artist Carmine Infantino, at the behest of Batman TV series producer William Dozier, who was looking for a female character to appeal to that segment of the TV audience, the new--and "real", as we're told in a caption--Batgirl (there had been a previous character called Bat-Girl in the late 50's and early 60's) met the comics reading public in the January 1967 issue of Detective Comics, #359, in a story entitled "The Million Dollar Debut of Batgirl!" The introduction of Batgirl, incidentally, was not the first change made in the comics to accomodate the TV series. One of Schwartz's first moves on assuming editorship of the Batman books was to kill off Bruce Wayne's butler, Alfred. However, he and Fox were compelled to bring the character back to life when the producers wanted to include him in the show.
The story moves quickly, giving us just a two panel introduction to Barbara Gordon, the previously unseen and unmentioned librarian daughter of Gotham City Police Commissioner James Gordon, before she dons her Batgirl costume and is off to the Policeman's Masqerade Ball. Setting off for the ball, Barbara thinks that "...tonight will be the highlight of my life!" She's right, of course, but not quite in the way she was thinking of. A funny thing happens on the way to the party, when she sees Killer Moth's minions attempting to put the snatch on "...Daddy's millionaire friend" Bruce Wayne. Proving that "clothes make the woman," she leaps into action to save Wayne, allowing the millionaire to slip away and change to Batman. The Caped Crusader ends up having to rescue Batgirl while Killer Moth escapes. Her costume messed up in the fight, Batgirl tells Batman she won't be going to the masqerade after all, but holds back on telling him her name, despite thinking to herself that this might be both Batgirl's "...debut and farewell appearance..."
She soon finds, however, that after her brush with crimefighting, the fast paced life of the librarian just doesn't thrill her the way it used to. Then one night, Barbara goes to deliver a rare book to Bruce Wayne and sees him apparently murdered by Killer Moth. She once again goes into action as Batgirl, but soon learns that her interference has spoiled the Dynamic Duo's plans to follow Killer Moth back to his hideout. Nonetheless, it turns out, somewhat predictably, I'll admit, that despite her initial blunder, it is Batgirl whose nick of time arrival at Killer Moth's lair serves to save Batman and Robin's bacon and capture the villain.
If, as the conventional wisdom among comics fans holds, the intentionally campy tone of the TV series had infected the comics, it is not much in evidence in this issue. True, Killer Moth, with his themed henchmen Larva and Pupa, is a silly villain, and Robin spouts a couple of truly dreadful puns, while, at one point, daring to criticize Batgirl's "terrible puns." For the most part, however, "The Million Dollar Debut of Batgirl!" is a fairly straightforward, serious minded adventure story, thanks to Fox's fast-paced and witty script and Infantino's suitably dark and moody artwork.
Quite a few of the "important" stories of the Silver Age--the first appearance of the Teen Titans springs to mind--are worth reading only for their significance to comics history. Detective #359 is not one of those issues, though. "The Million Dollar Debut of Batgirl!" stands on its own, aside from its place in history, as an entertaining and fun Batman story.
In a future post, I'll take a look at Batgirl's second first appearance, in the third season premiere of the Batman TV show.

Things To Come--I Hope

2011-10-01T10:06:00.000-04:00

So, I recently ~~wasted~~ spent an entire afternoon downloading and listening to all the extant episodes of The Fire and Water Podcast, a show devoted to Aquaman and Firestorm and hosted by Rob Kelly, author of the blog The Aquaman Shrine and The Irredeemable Shag of the Firestorm Fan blog, who, by the way, has been known to check in on this blog occassionally and has left a comment or two in his wake. Anyway, there's a point in each episode where the pair tell the listener about all the other blogs and podcasts that they do on top of having jobs and families and lives outside of cyberspace. This left me feeling a little bad about not even being able to keep up one blog on anything resembling a regular basis recently. Of course, there have been "real world" events that have kept me away from the keyboard, but I think those are now under control to the point where I can devote a little more time to spouting off about the funny books for the half dozen or so people who actually care about my opinions.

Sitting on the floor beside my computer desk is a pile of comics that I want to write about and taped to the wall in front of me is a long list of topics to cover, so I've got more than enough material to carry the blog through the end of the year if I can just overcome the the forces of inertia and start writing. That's part of the reason for this post. I figure that if I tell you about some of the stuff I want to write about, I will then be obligated to actually do it. Here's just a sample of what's in the pile and on the list:

photo by Max Ink

Thanks to Jonathon Riddle, who gave me First Issue Special #4 for my birthday a few weeks ago, I now have the complete run of that quirky little Bronze Age book and hope to write about the entire series issue by issue.

I managed to lay my hands on a copy of Batgirl #1 after all. Before I get to reviewing it, however, I want to look at a handful of significant Batgirl stories, including her first appearances both in print and on the tube.

Earlier I said that I might pick up Superman #1 if I had $2.99 burning a hole in my pocket. Well, it turns out I did. Actually, it was a twenty dollar bill that I found lying on the ground in the parking lot of the office building next to where I work and which I proceeded to blow entirely on comics.

In addition to Superman, I also purchased two The Fury of Firestorm #1's. That's two different comics, by the way--the new one and the one from 1982, which I probably paid too much for because the Laughing Ogre tends to overprice their back issues, but it was found money, so what the hell--and not two copies of the same book. With that acquisition, I now have all four of Firestorm's debut issues, and plan on reviewing them in chronological order.

Dark Horse recently released a trade paperback collecting all fifteen issues of John Arcudi and Doug Mahnke's Major Bummer, originally published by DC in the late 90's. I didn't buy it, in part because I didn't really have thirty dollars to spend on a comic book right then, but mainly because a few days before it was released I had found nine of the fifteen issues in the clearance boxes at Half-Price Books for a quarter apiece and subsequently tracked down the remaining six for a buck each at Packrat Comics. Thus, I managed to acquire the contents of a thirty dollar trade paperback for $8.25, which, even if I never get around to writing the review, I just felt like bragging about.

Also, even though it's now almost two months since their release, there are still a couple of the DC Retroactive one-shots that I'd like to write about.

If you actually see the list I wrote of above, you'd see that what I've described is just the tip of the iceberg. Therefore, it's time to quit yapping about what I plan to do and actually do it.

Talk to you all soon.

What Would Sheldon Think

2011-09-20T21:08:00.000-04:00

Thursday night on CBS is the fifth season premiere of The Big Bang Theory. Last season, as you may know, ended with Raj and Penny getting drunk and sleeping together. This will, it most likely goes without saying, result in comical complications and hilarity, as is its wont in such circumstances, will undoubtably ensue. Of course, if not handled right, fans may one day look back at this as the moment that BBT "jumped the shark."

All that aside, however, what I'm really curious about is this: What does Sheldon think about DC's "New 52"?

Calling BS on DC

2011-09-19T14:41:00.003-04:00

A few weeks ago, in a Comics Shop News cover story on DC's New 52 that pretty much just regurgitated the company's press releases, I ran across this little gem of particularly egregious self-serving corporate double speak attempting to rationalize the decision to restart their two longest running titles with new first issues: "Counting issue numbers is focusing on the past, not the future." Now, it struck me that if the editorial poobahs at DC really believed the swill that their public relations hacks apparently expect the average drooling fanboy to swallow whole without questions, then why are they even bothering to number the new series? If issue numbers really are as irrelevant as they say, then why not, instead of 52 new #1s, simply put out 52 new "November 2011" issues? If they really want to shake things up and usher in a new age of comics, then why not just eliminate issue numbers altogether? This would drastically alter not only the new comics market, but the secondary collectors and back issue scene as well. Just as DC's previous launches and relaunches of its super-hero books have ushered in the the beginnings and/or endings of the various historical ages of comics; with Action Comics #1 and the debut of Superman ushering in the Golden Age, the second Flash's first appearance in Showcase #4 heralding the arrival of the Silver Age, and the conclusion of Crisis On Infinite Earths sounding the death knell of the Bronze Age; so is there potential, most likely doomed, sadly, to remain unrealized, for the latest relaunch to truly change the landscape of American comics.

Of course, it doesn't seem as if DC is really all that interested in changing things quite that much. In fact, the whole relaunch, rather than being the harbinger of a bold new era in the industry, seems pretty much like business as usual. I read an article somewhere on-line, and I wish I could remember where so that I could link to it, that referred to the 90s and the first decade of the new millennium as the "Age of Reiteration," marked by the two major publishers endlessly revising, revamping, rebooting, reconfiguring, relaunching, and rejiggering their tried and true, shop worn old wares. The DC relaunch just might, therefore, in spite of itself usher in a new era by virtue of being the logical and inevitable end result of that process, thus forcing the publishers to find new methods to temporarily increase interest in the same old super-hero tripe.

I doubt it, however. The comics industry is in a rut. "Business as usual" has kept the comics industry's head just barely above water for the past quarter century. The so-called "Modern Age" of comics has lingered like a bad odor since the mid-80's, longer than any of the previous ages, and the publishers seem to lack the vision to come up with a truly viable alternative to the old ways. This probably isn't the last renumbering we'll see. Despite all of DC's vociferous protestations that they in no way ever intend to revert to the old numbering, I can't imagine that in about eight years they'll be able to resist hyping the 1000th issue of Action Comics.

Random Thoughts on the DC Relaunch at the Halfway Point

2011-09-18T08:50:00.001-04:00

DC is only half way through the rollout of their New 52, but I think that as far as I'm concerned, it's over. The only titles that I was really interested in checking out, because of the involvement of Grant Morrison and Keith Giffen, two of my favorite creators, came out the first week.

I'll admit to being a little curious about Blackhawks. I've always liked the Blackhawk concept, and I'm kind of wondering how DC has brought it back into the modern DC Universe and what the connection, if any, is between this new series and the classic World War II team. Still, I think I'm going to wait until the reviews are in before I decide whether or not to pick up an issue.

Maybe if I've got three bucks burning a whole in my pocket in a couple of weeks, I'll spend it on Superman #1 to check out the present day new incarnation of the Man of Steel and how it compares to the version in Action Comics.

I'd actually considered buying Green Arrow #1, even though, being written by J.T. Krul, I knew that it was going to suck, simply because I have every other Green Arrow #1 that DC has published over the past thirty years. Fortunately, however, I came to my senses in time.

I flipped through Hawk & Dove #1, and promptly put it back on the shelf. There may be a decent story somewhere under Rob Liefeld's art, but I have no desire to find out. Liefeld's drawings are....well, they're Liefeld's drawings. If you like his work--and the fact that he continues to get work attests that he must still have some fans out there somewhere--then you'll like it in Hawk & Dove. If you have taste, then you won't.

I'd already decided, because of Krul writing it, that I was going to pass on Captain Atom, and this preview of the first issue confirms for me that I've made the right choice. Apparently, Krul has never actually read a Captain Atom comic before. He has, however, seemingly read quite a bit of Firestorm, as that is who he seems to think he's writing. Not only is Captain Atom drawn with Firestorm-like flames popping out of the top of his head, but on the second page of the preview, in the course of battling an erupting volcano, Krul has Cap transmute the lava into snow. Since when can Captain Atom transmute matter? Since NEVER, that's since when, because he isn't friggin' Firestorm. The new DCU already has a Firestorm comic, and it doesn't really need another, especially not one written by J.T. Krul.

I did decide to check out the new Batgirl, based on Gail Simone's writing it, but by the time I went back to the Laughing Ogre to pick up a copy, they were sold out of it and several other New 52 books. I suppose this bodes well for the success of the relaunch. I wonder, though, who's buying these books. Is it the new and/or lapsed readers that DC hopes to attract or is it just the same folks who come to the Ogre week in and week out? More importantly, how many of the people who snapped up those first issues are going to buy subsequent releases?

If DC is really hoping to attract new readers to comics, then I think that redesigning Superman's costume might have been a bad idea. Not only is the new look kind of hideous, but won't people who know Superman only from his appearances in other media be expecting him to look like the guy they've seen on TV? It also occurs to me that this theoretical new reader might be slightly confused by the presence on the stands of both a Batgirl and a Batwoman comic.

There's one thing I'm wondering about future developments in OMAC that I didn't mention in my post on the first issue. I'm curious to see if the presence of Mokkari deep in the bowels of Cadmus means that OMAC is going to come into conflict with Darkseid. Now I don't think Mokkari had any connection with Apokolips in his previous incarnation, when Jerry Ordway brought him into The Adventures of Superman in the 90's, but the character was introduced in Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen by Jack Kirby in the early 70's as a servant of Darkseid. I also hope his partner Simyan shows up sometime as well.

Anyway, to wrap up this rambling and disjointed post, I'll be sticking with Action Comics and OMAC for a while, so for me the relaunch was pretty much a wash. I was buying two DC books before the change, and I'll still be buying two DC books, just different ones. It's basically a case of the more things change, the more they stay the same.

OMAC #1 Reviewed

2011-09-15T17:13:00.000-04:00

Prior to OMAC #1, the only other comic written by Dan DiDio that I'd read was the Metal Men feature in Wednesday Comics a couple of years ago. It was alright. The sequence of events made sense and the characters acted in character. That may seem like damning with faint praise, but that minimal standard appears to be setting the bar too high for some writers. (Yes, I'm looking at you, Brad Meltzer and J.T. Krul.) Of course, given the rather ambiguous, Lee/Kirby-esque credit of "Story and Art by" DiDio and Keith Giffen, I'm inclined to believe that the lion's share of the credit for OMAC being as good as it is lies with Giffen.
Giffen's involvement in the project is what led me to pick up this issue. I've always been a fan of his work, and I really like his current art style. Here he manages to evoke OMAC's creator Jack Kirby while remaining unmistakably and uniquely Giffen.
The story, "Office Management Amidst Chaos," begins with the headquarters of genetic research firm Cadmus coming under attack by a super powered intruder who identifies himself as OMAC. As he fights his way past Cadmus security down to the top secret lower levels and his real goal, the Cadmus Mainframe computer, we get a high speed tour of the world of this new series, introducing us to the characters, concepts, settings and a few mysteries that will, we assume, be fleshed out in future issues.
The main mysteries revolve around the orbiting satellite calling itself Brother Eye. Who or what is he and what's his beef with Cadmus? And why has he chosen Cadmus employee Kevin Kho to be his champion in the guise of OMAC?
As of now, I plan to be around for awhile to see these mysteries played out. This was a good, old fashioned solid super hero action tale with great art that left me wanting more and looking forward to next issue.
One other thing I'm wondering is if Giffen and DiDio are going to keep up the conceit of having the first letters of words in the individual issue's story title spell out OMAC. I hope they do. It would be one more thing to make this series stand out from the rest of the so-called New 52.

Action Comics #1 Reviewed

2011-09-13T18:36:00.000-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, on the blog Has Boobs, Reads Comics, Jill Pantozzi posted a fan produced "commercial" for the DC Comics relaunch that featured a distressed fanboy ranting about the upcoming changes to DC history, continuity and characters. It ended with this assurance, "It's going to be okay, Guys. And remember, no matter what else happens...Grant Morrison will be writing Action Comics and that's going to kick ass."

Action Comics #1 is very good, though I don't know if I'd go so far as to say that it kicks ass. Not yet anyway, though the potential for future ass kickage is definitely there. Grant is rearing back his leg and winding up to kick some ass you could say, if you really felt like stretching that metaphor to the breaking point.

Taking place as it does in the early days of Superman's heroic career, "Superman Vs. The City of Tomorrow"lacks the epic scope and mythic grandeur of Morrison's earlier work on All-Star Superman. Instead we get a more down to earth, and, dare I say it, "realistic" take on super heroics, at least in as much as those terms can be said to apply to a man who can catch bullets in his hand.

Back in '86, on the occasion of the last major reboot of the Man of Steel, John Byrne made a lot of noise about his version of Superman being, as he wrote in his introduction to The Greatest Superman Stories Ever Told, "...closer to the Superman of Siegal and Shuster than he had been for decades," but he never quite delivered on that boast, at least to the degree that Morrison does. True to his word, Morrison presents the reader with a character who is more similar than not to the one who debuted in the first Action #1 over 70 years ago. Coming on the scene as a champion of the innocent, the oppressed and the common man, he is less super-hero than super powered vigilante. Though he's not quite as super powerful as he will someday become, and is still getting around by taking giant leaps rather than actually flying. As Clark Kent, meanwhile, he works, as he did back in the 1938 original, for editor George Taylor at the Metropolis Daily Star, a rival of the Daily Planet, where Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen work.

While Superman has for many decades been portrayed as the "establishment" super-hero, here he finds himself in conflict with the police, while the military, represented here by General Sam Lane, father of Lois, fear him enough to hire Lex Luthor to deliver the strange being to them.

The conception of Luthor as corrupt business mogul, rather than the bent on world domination run of the mill mad scientist that he debuted as back in the forties, is the one major change made by Byrne and company back in the 80's that seems to have resonated enough with fans and creators to have stuck around in this latest update of the legend. He certainly makes a fitting opponent for Morrison's vision of Superman as man of the people.

By the way, although I haven't mentioned them, there are pictures in this book. They're by Rags Morales and they're quite good.

With the new Action #1, the revised saga of the Man of Tomorrow is off to a great start, with the promise of even better to come and I plan to stick around for awhile. I hope that Morrison's exploration of Superman's early years isn't going to be confined to just this initial storyline, but that he takes the time to show us Kal-El developing into the legendary, nearly god like figure portrayed in All-Star Superman.

'Tec Support: Detective Comics #1

2011-09-11T10:33:00.000-04:00

Detective Comics #1 is, if not the worst Batman comic ever, at the very least the worst that I have ever had the deep misfortune to have read. From the laughably bad narrative captions on the first page to the repulsive image on the final page, the combination of idiotic plot, bad writing and poor art make reading this book a painful experience.
Writer/artist Tony Daniel's misguided attempt at writing a tough guy internal monologue for Batman goes awry almost immediately, lapsing into unintentional self-parody with this groaner, "His modus operandi changes with the wind....
"...and it's been windy in Gotham City."
Later, Batman delivers this gem, "I've always been in Gotham. I AM Gotham." That's actually presented as dialogue, yet Commissioner Gordon, to whom he is speaking, surprisingly neither bursts out laughing nor backs away slowly from the sort of madman who would say something insane like that.
Daniel even dishes up tired cliches such as "I own the night," and even has Batman actually think at one point, "I'm Batman." Thanks for telling us, Tony, as if by that point in the story we hadn't already figured it out for ourselves.
Why not "I'm the Goddamned Batman?" After all, it seems as if Daniel is trying to imitate Frank Miller, but the only Miller Batman comics he's actually read are All-Star Batman and Robin or maybe Spawn/Batman. At least All-Star can be read as Miller parodying the very type of Batman story he himself inspired with The Dark Knight Returns, which actually makes it somewhat less unbearably awful, but there is no hint of irony whatsoever in Daniel's deep purple prose.
Truthfully, the art isn't completely awful. The biggest flaw is that familiar characters are rendered virtually unrecognizable. Commissioner Gordon looks like he's wearing a bad wig and fake moustache, while Harvey Bullock doesn't even look human.
The issue ends with the introduction of a mysterious new villain called the Dollmaker, but, as you've probably guessed, I shall not be coming back for future issues to discover what his invariably lame criminal scheme might be.

Thoughts On A Comic I Haven't Actually Read

2011-08-06T08:09:00.001-04:00

I considered picking up DC Retroactive: The Flash--the 70's, mostly since, not owning a lot of Flash comics and none from the 70's, I figured that the reprint included, unlike the ones in the Green Lantern, Superman and Justice League volumes, would be one I didn't already have. No such luck, however. It turned out that the reprint was of DC Comics Presents #2.

This seems like an odd choice for a couple of reasons. The main one is that DCCP was a Superman book. It was DC's second and most successful attempt at creating a Superman team-up, after briefly converting World's Finest Comics to that format in the early part of the decade, and Flash was the guest star in the debut two parter. That's another reason this seems like an odd choice, as it is the conclusion of a two part story. However, back in the 70's most DC comics were written with sufficient recaps of previous issues that the story can be read and understood on its own. Finally, there's the fact that "Race to the End of Time" was written not by longtime Flash scribe Cary Bates, who wrote the new lead story, but by Martin Pasko. Of course, this sort of balances out the fact that the reprint in DC Retroactive: Superman--the 70's, accompanying a lead story by Pasko, was written by Bates.
Still, "Race to the End of Time", along with "Chase to the End of Time" in DCCP #1, is one of my favorite Superman stories by Pasko and well worth reading if you haven't already. However, I'd recommend getting the trade paperback that was released a few years ago containing all of Superman's races with the Flash, which includes both parts. (That's if you're just interested in the older tale, of course, as I note in the title of this post, I haven't actually read the new story, so I can make no recommendations as to whether its worth reading, though reviews I've read on other blogs have been quite positive.)
Bates, of course, was the logical, in fact the only, choice to write a 70's Flash story, as he wrote the character's title for the entire decade. It seems to me that when comics fans talk about long runs by writers on a single series, such as Chris Claremont's sixteen years on Uncanny X-Men or Peter David's twelve year stint on Incredible Hulk, Bates' fourteen year run on Flash is hardly ever mentioned. Perhaps that's because, unlike Claremont and David's runs, which brought their respective titles to new heights of popularity, Bates' tenure ended with the book's cancellation and the title character's death. Still, that era seems to be fondly remembered by fans today and fourteen years doing anything is an achievement worthy of some recognition.

DC Retroactive: Green Lantern--the 70's Reviewed

2011-08-03T16:36:00.000-04:00

What you are reading now is my second attempt at writing a review of DC Retroactive: Green Lantern--the 70's. I really wanted to write a positive review, but I realize that was based more on my affection for the characters and for writer Dennis O'Neil than on the story at hand, which was, to tell the truth, fairly unimpressive.

Before I get to writing about the new story, I want to waste a paragraph or two bitching about the reprint in the back of the book. When I saw what story had been selected, my first thought was, "Green Lantern #76? Again? Seriously?"

As I've noted before, "No Evil Shall Escape My Sight" has to be one of the most reprinted super-hero stories ever. It's certainly one of the most reprinted DC stories. The most recent reprint was just a couple of months ago in Showcase Presents Green Lantern Volume 5. Does DC really think that anyone who would be interested in the Retroactive books doesn't already own a copy of this story or has at least read it?

I would have preferred to see a lesser known and perhaps never before reprinted story spotlighted. Since the new story was drawn by Mike Grell, it might have been nice to see a story from the period when he was drawing the regular Green Lantern title. Actually, that would have been more appropriate as the new material is closer in tone and structure to those later issues than to the "Hard Traveling Heroes" era of social relevance drawn by Neal Adams.

In 1976, when Green Lantern was rescued from four years in limbo with issue #90, Green Arrow was still on board as cover billed co-star. However, while they shared a magazine, the two heroes quite often did not share their adventures. Instead, an issue might be comprised of two separate and unrelated stories of the two Emerald Crusaders.

Thus it is in "Nightmare Planet," with the two heroes going their separate ways for most of the issue, only getting together at the end to compare notes on their recent exploits.

Green Lantern's story has Hal Jordan coming to the aid of an alien whose ship has crashlanded in an unnamed hostile foreign country. Meanwhile, Ollie Queen pursues a disturbed young man who is trying to prove his worth, apparently to both Green Arrow and his deceased father, by shooting people close to Ollie with a bow and arrow from long range, thus supposedly proving himself the superior archer.

Despite having chronicled the character's adventures for the entire decade of the 70's, O'Neil never quite seemed comfortable writing Green Lantern. He seems far more comfortable with more "down to Earth" characters like Batman and Green Arrow. Thus its no surprise that Green Arrow portion of the issue is slightly better than the Green Lantern arc. Slightly. Just.

The big problem with both stories is their ending. The Green Lantern story seem to be attempting to convey a typically, for O'Neil, ham-fisted moral message about the savagery of the human race or something like that, but it is undercut by a ridiculous and unintentionally hilarious conclusion. Green Arrow's story starts off strong, but comes to a rather abrupt and unsatisfying stop. Perhaps if GA's story had had been given some of the pages wasted on the Green Lantern story, it might have turned into a good story.

The one good thing about the comic is the art of Mike Grell. Still, that's not enough to make DC Retroactive: Green Lantern--the 70's worth the five buck cover price.

DC Retroactive: Superman--the 70's Reviewed

2011-08-02T19:53:00.001-04:00

When I first heard about the DC Retroactive series of nostalgic one-shots, my reaction was mixed. One the one hand, the cynic in dismissed as a crass attempt by DC to exploit its core readership of aging fanboys by cashing in on their nostalgia for a simpler and better time that existed only in their collective imagination, or maybe on the pre-Crisis On Infinite Earths Earth One. That makes it somewhat ironic that DC is following this event with the launch of its "New 52" relaunch/reboot, a move that, if not specifically designed to alienate those very same aging fanboys, certainly seems to be having that effect nonetheless.

On the other hand, being one of those aging fanboys, I could no more resist a new Superman story by my favorite Superman writer, Martin Pasko, than Bill Clinton could resist a chubby intern bearing cold pizza.

If the purpose of the DC Retroactive books is, in fact, to appeal to fanboy nostalgia, then DC Retroactive: Superman--the 70's succeeds admirably. While I was reading this book, it felt as if the three decades since Pasko's original run on Superman never happened and I was a kid just discovering comics once again. Pasko successfully picks up the themes and plot threads of those Bronze Age stories to weave a new tale that can stand beside his finest work of that era.

I have a couple of minor quibbles. The first is the coloring. It's a little too "21st Century" if you get my meaning. Obviously done on computer, its full of the subtle shadings and gradations of color characteristic of modern comics. Recreating the flatter, brighter colors of Bronze Age comics, as seen in the reprint at the back of the book, would have the completed the illusion of a "lost" issue form my childhood. So would art by Curt Swan, but that was, unfortunately, impossible.

Then there's the reprint itself. I was under the impression that the DC Retroactive books would feature vintage tales written by the same scribe responsible for the new material. However, in this case we are treated to "Superman Takes A Wife" from Action Comics #484 written by Cary Bates. I'm not saying it's a bad story, quite the opposite, in fact, but it's just that I was expecting more Pasko. Since Mr. Mxyzpltk (I just amazed myself by spelling that correctly without looking at the comic) is the "villain" of the issue, I sort of expected to see a reprint of Superman #335 or #349, Pasko's previous Mxyzptlk stories. Of course, this is kind of a silly complaint coming from me, as there are very few, if any, Pasko Superman stories that I don't already own copies of. The lead story is sufficient to give readers unfamiliar with those tales a taste of what they were like.

All in all, I'd say that DC Retroactive: Superman--the 70's is definitely worth picking up.

Just Sit Right Back and You'll Hear A Tale...

2011-07-12T19:38:00.001-04:00

I believe that I can aver with a certain degree of confidence that I would be a different man today if not for Sherwood Schwartz. Who can say how I might have turned out if I had not been exposed early and often--every afternoon at either four or four thirty--to reruns of Gilligan's Island. I might even have actually made something of myself.

I wouldn't classify Gilligan's Island as a guilty pleasure, for I am not ashamed of it in the least. I offer no apology for my love of Gilligan, the Skipper and the passengers of the S.S. Minnow, nor can I really explain it. It simply is.

My affection for the show is common knowledge to readers of my on-line comic strip Wasted Potential. The strip was peppered throughout its four year run with allusions and references to Gilligan's Island. Early in the strip's run I mentioned Schwartz by name, dedicating the following installment to him for all the hours of entertainment and escape from reality that I found in his most famous, and ridiculous, creation.

(click to enlarge)

Sherwood Schwartz, creator of Gilligan's Island, The Brady Bunch, and several not so well known TV shows such as Dusty's Trail, which reunited Schwartz with Gilligan star Bob Denver and was, essentially, Gilligan's Island in the American Old West, died early this morning at the age of 94.

Not So "Indestructible"

2011-07-08T17:30:00.000-04:00

In honor of Independence Day, which I fully realize was four days ago, today I look at the Bronze Age adventures of a certain flag draped champion of America's liberties in the face of Nazi aggression during the dark days of the Second World War. I speak, of course, of none other than...

Steel--The Indestructible Man!

Those of you without an encyclopedic knowledge of the DC Universe and obscure, short-lived Bronze Age comics are probably scratching your heads and saying to yourselves, "Wha..? Who?"
Hank Heywood, the eponymous star of DC Comics' 1978 series Steel, The Indestructible Man, is perhaps best described as a cross between Steve Rogers, a.k.a. Captain America, and Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man, that is--not the professional wrestler. Accompanying his mentor, the famed biochemist Dr. Gilbert Giles, to a medical conference in Munich, Germany in the summer of 1939, Heywood becomes convinced that, despite resistance by the majority of the American public, the United States would eventually have to enter the fight against Hitler. Upon learning of the invasion of Poland, Hank acts on his convictions and enlists in the Marines. One night, he encounters minions of Nazi costumed villain Baron Death breaking into his base. In attempting to stop them he is caught in an explosion that kills the saboteurs and leaves him barely alive. Dr. Giles uses his discoveries in the field of organ transplants to rebuild Hank's shattered body, installing a steel reinforced skeleton and an artificial lung. Hank emerges from the procedure with enhanced strength and endurance. so he naturally decides to don a red, white and blue costume and take the nom de guerre "Steel" in hopes of inspiring the American people to join the fight against fascism while battling spies, saboteurs and super-villains.
The "DC Implosion," the mass cancellation of nearly half of DC's line in late 1978, was particularly unkind to writer Gerry Conway, who had three titles cancelled out from under him. Two, Steel and Firestorm, The Nuclear Man, were retired after five outings apiece, and one, The Vixen, was axed before its debut issue even went to press. Firestorm proved to have legs, enjoying a quite respectable 100 issue run after his book was revived as The Fury of Firestorm four years later after a run as a back-up feature in The Flash and his induction into the Justice League of America, which Conway was also writing at the time.
Steel, on the other hand, was most likely destined for obscurity from the outset and probably wouldn't have lasted much more than five issues even if the DC Implosion had never happened. The concept was derivative and the stories rather uninspired. Furthermore, I don't think that the zeitgeist of late 70's, post-Watergate America was right for a patriotic themed hero.
The art by Don Heck probably didn't help Steel's cause, either. I've never been a fan of Heck's, but I will admit to liking his work at Marvel in the 60's a tad more than the 80's material that was my introduction to him. By '78, whatever gifts he displayed in his Marvel output had not yet entirely deserted him, but they were edging slowly toward the door. The figures are stiff and awkward and the storytelling is unclear in spots. Older comics are often chided for having characters utter expository dialogue telling the readers exactly what is going on in the picture, but there are spots in Steel where you need that exposition to tell you what you're supposed to be looking at.
Just as he had with Firestorm, however, Conway used his position as writer of Justice League of America to rescue the Indestructible Man from comics limbo. A contempory version of the character, the grandson of the original--also named Hank Heywood, would eventually, along with Conway's other DC Implosion casualty, Vixen, join with new creations Vibe and Gypsy to form the core of what is generally referred to as the "Detroit League" following the disbanding of the original JLA. The second Steel was no more popular with readers than his grandpop had been, however, and was killed off in the final issues of the League's first series.
Now, I haven't really been following the Justice Society's recent series, but I believe I read on-line somewhere that another descendant of the senior Hank Heywood has recently taken up the mantle of Steel.
Given the characters utter failure to catch on with readers in any incarnation, it's no surprise that the '78 series has never been collected or reprinted. However, if you really want to read it, the back issues aren't hard to find and are pretty cheap. I encountered copies of Steel #1 at at least a half dozen dealers tables at the last Mid-Ohio Con and paid no more that a quarter for each of the three issues I eventually purchased. For that price, it's worth checking out at least one issue, I suppose.

Why, DC. WHY?

2011-06-27T13:47:00.026-04:00

The biggest question raised in my mind by DC's upcoming line-wide relaunch is:

WHY DOES DC HATE ME?

Okay, you're probably thinking to yourself about now that I'm ~~taking this too personally~~ being frickin' paranoid. To that I counter that if DC doesn't hate me, why, then, do they not want me to read their comics? The entire relaunch, and the list of titles that will be part of it, seems calculated to keep me away from the comics shop.

Consider that among the titles not returning in September are the only two comics that I'm currently buying on a monthly basis, Xombi and Secret Six. The latter I discovered only a couple of months ago, with the Doom Patrol crossover, but it became one of my favorite comics almost from the first page I read and I will miss it. Still, I did only start reading it with #30, so I've got the first two and a half years of the series to catch up on either through back issues or trade paperback collections.

The end of Xombi after only six issues serves to give credence to J. Caleb Mozzocco's speculation over at his blog Every Day Is Like Wednesday that the whole relaunch idea couldn't have been in the works for all that long despite the claims of DC's Unholy Trinity (Didio, Lee and Johns) that they've been planning this for a couple of years now. "After all," Caleb asks, referring to the recently concluded retelling of the history of the DCU in DC Universe: Legacies, "why bother making and publishing this comic if you knew you were going to change the history it covered anyway in about a year?" Similarly, why would they launch any new title in the spring of this year knowing that no matter well it sold or what the critical reception was that they were going to cancel it a mere six months later? Neither move seems to make much sense unless Dan Didio just woke up one day last month and said, "Hey, this brilliant idea just came to me in a dream. I gotta tell Jim and Geoff. They'll love it." (Actually, now that I think about it a little, it's far more likely that the whole fiasco was the idea of Fanboy-In-Chief Johns.)

I think this is meant to be Captain Atom

With one exception, which I'll get to later, the list of 52 titles that DC will be publishing doesn't really hold any attraction for me. True, there will be titles featuring my two favorite super-hero characters, Green Arrow and Captain Atom. Regular, or even casual, for that matter, readers of this blog are no doubt aware of my love of the Emerald Archer, to whom I have devoted two whole months worth of posts over the life of the site. I became a fan of Captain Atom back in the 80's due to his eponymous series by Cary Bates and Pat Broderick and his leading role in Justice League Europe. Unfortunately, and further proof, to my mind, at least, that the company hates me, DC has handed these characters to perhaps the worst writer they have ever employed, J.T. Krul. Krul's already been making a mess of Green Arrow's legacy for over a year now, and I can't even begin to imagine the horrible train wreck that his Captain Atom series will no doubt turn out to be. I'd venture to guess that Captain Atom's book will be among the first of the new 52 titles to go on the chopping block.

The one title that I just might consider picking up is Action Comics, which will be written by Grant Morrison. Morrison is my favorite writer in comics, and anyone who's checked out All-Star Superman knows that he can tell a hell of a story about the Man of Tomorrow. On the negative side of the equation is the announcement that Action will be one of only four of the 52 relaunched titles that will be priced at $3.99 rather than $2.99. Whatever happened to "holding the line," guys? Still, this probably means that it will have a few more pages than the other books, and it's not like I'm going to buying anything else, after all, unless its more comics from smaller publishers.

They Finally Did It: The DC Relaunch

2011-06-26T08:01:00.000-04:00


Jim Lee's Justice League

I can picture Marv Wolfman sitting at bar nursing a drink and saying to the drunken middle-aged businessman next to him for the umpteenth time, "The whole thing was my idea, y'know. I wanted to do it 25 years ago," as the man tries to ignore him and concentrate instead on how he's going to tell his wife that he has lost his job, faces indictment on multiple charges and just lost the house and kids in a poker game.

What Marv is talking about in the fictional scenario above is the news that has had the comics blogosphere abuzz with speculation for the past couple of weeks: the recent announcement by DC Comics that they are going to be re-starting their entire line with 52 new #1 issues come September. I'm coming a little late to the game, as its been at least two weeks, an eternity in cyber-space, since DC dropped this particular bombshell, but below are some of my thoughts on the news.

Wolfman did, in fact, propose such a line wide re-numbering to follow his re-alignment of the DC Universe in 1985's Crisis On Infinite Earths. As we know, DC higher ups rejected the idea at the time. In retrospect, it might have been better to go ahead and reboot the entire line at once rather than revamping each character one by one over the course of the next decade. Ultimately this practice made DC's continuity even more convoluted and confusing than it supposedly was before Crisis.

Truthfully, I didn't find DC's pre-Crisis Universe, or, rather, Multiverse, confusing at all. I was ten when I first encountered a JLA/JSA crossover and the concept of multiple Earths with different sets of heroes, and I had no trouble grasping the concept at all. I thought the Multiverse was a really cool concept. In fact, at first, I thought that eliminating it in Crisis was a really bad idea. What made me accept it was that Crisis turned out to be one of the greatest super-hero comics ever published.

Anyway, getting back to the topic at hand, since '85, DC has sort of flirted with Wolfman's idea a couple of times. In 1994, following the absolutely horrid Zero Hour crossover, they had "Zero Month" in which every DC Universe title published that month was a #0 and featured a new beginning for the characters or a re-telling of their origin or some aspect of their past. Then following the even more horrid Infinite Crisis (or, as I refer to it, Infinite Crappiness), DC pulled the "One Year Later" stunt, which, as the name suggests, jumped all the DCU titles forward in time by one year. The slightly less horrid 52 was then published to fill in the story of that missing year.

Now, of course, they have, for some reason, decided that the time is right to at last take the plunge and restart the whole kit and kaboodle from the beginning. Like the stunts mentioned above, this move is tied to a big crossover, occurring on the heels of the currently on-going Flashpoint event.

What would have been a daring and radical move had they done it back when Wolfman wanted to these days seems more like the natural progression and logical end of the trends in the comics industry since that time. Nearly every title from both major publishers has been renumbered, rebooted, revamped , reconfigured or rejiggered at least once in the past quarter century. You could probably fill a longbox just with all the various Captain America first issues alone.

Yes, if I'm going to be perfectly frank (and if I'm not, what's the point of writing a blog), rather than being the bold, visionary step that the DC Unholy Trinity of Dan Didio, Jim Lee and Geoff Johns obviously want us to see this relaunch as, the whole stunt carries about it just more than a slight stink of desperation; a last ditch effort to generate the fan interest that the actual comics themselves consistently fail to and get the non-comics reading world to pay them some atttention. DC could, as they did with Crisis, win me over by producing some really great comics. However, based on the info they've released about the 52 new titles so far, I see few chances for that to happen. I'll get into some of my thoughts about a few of the new titles in a future post.

Gene Colan: 1926-2011

2011-06-24T21:14:00.000-04:00

My mind is simply reeling at the enormity of the talent that the world of comics lost yesterday.

Gene Colan is dead.

Gene Colan self-portrait from 1967's Daredevil Annual #1

Born on September 1, 1926, Colan began working in comics at the age of 18, embarking on a career that spanned from the Golden Age into the early 21st century. His best known, and arguably flat out best, work was for Marvel in the late Silver and Bronze Ages, where he was one of the company's most prolific pencillers. If you had a complete collection of Marvel's black and white Essentials series of reprints, it would include just as much art by Colan as by Jack Kirby, if not more. He created the definitive look of Daredevil over the course of a run spanning more than eighty issues, drew every one of Tomb of Dracula's 70 issues, and made a talking cartoon waterfowl in the world of humans seem perfectly natural and believable in the pages of Howard the Duck. Among his other credits at Marvel are Sub-Mariner, Captain America, The Avengers, the short lived Howard the Duck newspaper strip, and Iron Man, which he began drawing in 1966 under the pseudonym "Adam Austin."

At DC, he re-united with Tomb of Dracula author Marv Wolfman to create Night Force, and had memorable runs on Batman and Wonder Woman.

In 1980, Colan and his collaborator on Howard the Duck , Steve Gerber, teamed up again to create one of the earliest independent graphic novels, Stewart the Rat.

Honestly, if I tried to list all of Gene Colan's many credits and accomplishments in this post, I wouldn't get any sleep tonight. (Today's post at Sequential Crush spotlights his work in the romance genre.)

Gene Colan, the man, will certainly be missed by those who knew and loved him, though his work will live on for a very long time to come.

FCBD Comics: The Mis-Adventures of Adam West/Walter Koenig's Things To Come

2011-05-20T14:29:00.000-04:00

I really don't like Free Comic Book Day "comic books" that are just samplers, offering snippets of two or three different upcoming books. These aren't comic books, they're ad brochures. They're nothing special. Comics publishers give these things away for free all year. The idea of Free Comic Book Day is to give new readers an actual comic book for free. You should give the readers a complete story. or at least a complete chapter of a story--a full issue, in other words. It doesn't have to be a brand new issue, it can be a reprint, or a "special FCBD edition" if you prefer, but it should be an entire comic.

With that critique in mind, let's look at one such ad flyer from Bluewater Comics, featuring previews of the upcoming series The Mis-Adventures of Adam West and Walter Koenig's Things To Come.

The few pages of Things To Come presented here aren't really enough to give me any idea what the book will be about or if it will be any good or not. However, the fact that this isn't one of those deals where a celebrity will lend his name to a comic and let some hack or newcomer write it but is instead actually written by the actor Walter Koenig, best known as Star Trek's Pavel Chekov, does not give me much hope that the series will be worth reading, or even readable. The examples of Mr. Koenig's writing that I have encountered in the past have been pretty dreadful. Take, for example, the episode of the animated Trek entitled "The Infinite Vulcan" which involves a giant clone of Mr. Spock. The episode is so bad that it actually makes "Spock's Brain" look like a literary masterpiece by comparison.

On the other hand, it appears that the involvement of Adam West in The Mis-Adventures of Adam West is limited to collecting the licensing fees, and that's probably for the best. The writer, Russell Dauterman, and the artist, Reed Lackey, are complete unknowns to me. The few pages presented give enough for the reader to get a pretty good idea of what the series will be about, and maybe even want to pick up the full issue if they like what they see.

The set-up involves aging actor Adam West unable to find work, or at least work that he's willing to take, in modern Hollywood and lamenting the dearth of "real" heroes in today's world. He receives a package containing a mysterious amulet which magically makes him young and presumably gives him the power to become the kind of hero he feel the world is missing. It's not a wildly original premise, but one that could make for a fun series.

I wish Bluewater had given us a few more pages of this story instead of wasting paper on Things To Come. Maybe if I've got a couple of bucks to spare come July, I might just check out the entire first issue of Adam West.

FCBD Comics: Super Dinosaur

2011-05-18T14:26:00.001-04:00

The Saturday before last, as you're most likely aware, was Free Comic Book Day. I didn't write anything about Free Comic Book Day before it happened because I have a pretty good idea who my readers are. I didn't think you needed to be told that the day was coming up or what it was all about. Now that it has come and gone, I'm going to tell you about the comics I picked up.
I've always looked at Free Comic Book Day as an opportunity to try something that I might otherwise leave on the racks at the comic shop. On the first FCBD, I picked up Oni Press's offering, a reprint of the first issue of Hopeless Savages, which has since become one of my all time favorite comics. So, I passed by the Marvel and DC offerings this year to grab some intriguing looking books from other publishers.
My favorite of these is the Super Dinosaur Origin Special published by Image and written by Robert Kirkman with art by Jason Howard. The comic chronicles the adventures of boy genius Derek Dynamo, who lives in a secret base called the Dynamo Dome at the foot of a mountain, and his best friend, the Super Dinosaur of the book's title, a genetically altered talking Tyrannosaurus Rex outfitted with a special harness that extends his tiny little T-Rex arms and also comes equipped with high tech weaponry and other super-scientific gadgets and gizmos. Together, they help Derek's father, the world famous scientist Dr. Dynamo, defend the hidden subteranean world of Inner Earth, a land where dinosaurs and only location of the revolutionary power source dubbed Dynore. The threats to Inner Earth come mostly from villain Max Maximus, Dr. Dynamo's former friend and partner who co-discovered Inner Earth and Dynore and created Super Dinosaur. Maximus intended Super Dinosaur to be a prototype for an army of Super Dinosaurs with which he would take over the world. He has also created half-human, half-dinosaur creatures called Dyno-Men to help him carry out his evil schemes.
At Packrat Comics last Saturday, a child who looked to be about ten or eleven asked one of the store's employees if Super Dinosaur was "kid friendly." After reading the book, I would answer the precocious little tyke with a resounding "Hell, YEAH!" This is a comic I would have loved when I was that kid's age, and I'm pretty darn fond of it now, too. I have always been a big fan of Jonny Quest, and Super Dinosaur evokes the feel of JQ and similar late 1960's Saturday morning adventure cartoons perfectly, except that it's better animated.
According to the ad at the back of the book, Super Dinosaur #2 goes on sale today. If you missed the free preview last Saturday, this is definitely a comic worth paying for.

The Failed Promise of Giant Size X-Men #1

2011-05-14T10:42:00.007-04:00

The latest issue of liberal political journal The American Prospect offers up an essay on the history of minority representation in American super-hero comics. Focusing mainly on Green Lantern and Captain America, two characters with big budget Hollywood blockbusters coming up in the next couple of months, author Gene Demby traces the history of minority super-heroes from John Stewart to Milestone Media to the recent criticism by narrow minded fanboys of the late Dwayne McDuffie for his inclusion of minority characters in Justice League of America, touching on Marvel's Luke Cage, and the rather embarrassing practice from the 1970's of giving all African-American heroes names with the word "Black" in them along the way.

Despite a new movie on the horizon, Demby fails to mention the X-Men. The "All-New, All-Different" Uncanny X-Men was a book that had the potential to be truly groundbreaking and history making in terms of diversity and minority representation in comics, but blew it pretty much right of the gate. The new team as presented in Giant Size X-Men #1 was a much more diverse group than had ever been seen in comics up to that point. The roster included a Japanese man (Sunfire), a Native American (Thunderbird) and a black woman (Storm). In short order, their very next appearance in Uncanny #94, as a matter of fact, Sunfire quit and went home to Japan and Thunderbird was killed off. The team still had the "international" flavor that creator and writer of Giant Size X-Men #1,Len Wein, had envisioned, with a Canadian (Wolverine), an Irishman (Banshee), a German (Nightcrawler) and a Russian (Colossus) in the group. Still, you were essentially left with a line-up consisting of a bunch of white guys (though Nightcrawler was actually blue) and Storm.

This is somewhat ironic, given how often longtime Uncanny writer Chris Claremont has been lauded for indirectly addressing racial issues by using anti-mutant prejudice as an allegory for racial bigotry. It appears, however, that he, or perhaps his editors at Marvel, shied away from the chance to tackle the subject head on.

Star Trek Actor William Campbell Dead at Age 87

2011-05-02T17:03:00.000-04:00

I was saddened to learn today that William Campbell, the actor best known, at least, I would wager, to readers of this blog, for roles in the original series Star Trek episodes "The Squire of Gothos" and "The Trouble With The Tribbles", died on Thursday. He was 87 years old.

In "The Squire of Gothos," Campbell was Trelane, the titular Squire of the planet Gothos, a seemingly omnipotent being ultimately revealed to be just a petulant child. In "Tribbles," he was flamboyant Klingon commander Koloth, a role he would reprise three decades later on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

In addition to Trek, Campbell appeared in numerous movies and TV shows during his nearly fifty year career, including co-starring with Elvis Presley in the King's motion picture debut, Love Me Tender.

According to his obit in the LA Times, Campbell was also briefly married to Judith Exner, a woman who would go on to have an affair with JFK.

Gutter Talk Will Return....Soon

2011-04-22T22:59:00.000-04:00

"Davy's on the road again,

Wearin' different clothes again.

Davy's turning handouts down

To keep his pockets clean.

All his goods are sold again.

His word's as good as gold again.

Says if you see Jean now ask her please to pity me."

-Davy's On The Road Again

Manfred Mann's Earth Band

If you've been wondering why there've been no new posts for the last week, it's because, like Davy in my favorite song by Manfred Mann's Earth Band (I actually prefer Springsteen's original version of Blinded By The Light), I am on the road again. I'm moving. I spent the better part of the week apartment hunting. I signed a lease on a new place last night, and I begin moving in tomorrow.

So, things will be in flux for a few more days, thus this blogs hiatus will continue for a little longer. I should resume posting early in May, however, so it's not like you're getting rid of me that easily.

In the meantime, here, for no reason at all, is a picture of a monkey:

Comics Related Events In Columbus, Ohio This Weekend

2011-04-14T17:13:00.001-04:00

It's quite an eventful weekend for comics fans here in the capital of Ohio with a more than full slate of comics related events taking place over the next few days.

It all kicks off tonight with the debut performance of Available Light Theatre's adaptation of the graphic novel Skyscrapers of the Midwest. Performances continue through Sunday afternoon, with additional shows next Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

Tomorrow night, Campus area coffee shop Kafe Kerouac hosts a release party for the second issue of locally produced comics anthology Nix Comics Quarterly. Ken Eppstein, publisher and writer, and several of the artists will be on hand, with original art from the issue hanging on the walls and, I believe, for sale. The event begins at 7 p.m.

All weekend, every Columbus location of discount bookstore chain Half Price Books will offer an additional 50% off their already low prices on all comic books. The Lane Avenue store has a couple or three dozen boxes of clearance comics everyday priced from 25 to 50 cents. Throw in the 50% off and you've got yourself a bargain that can't be beat.

Local cartoonist group Sunday Comics meets on the third Sunday of every month. The April meeting is this Sunday at Packrat Comics in Hilliard. Meetings are open to anyone with an interest in comics.

Meanwhile, tonight through Saturday, comics of a different sort, the stand-up variety, are on display as Wild Goose Creative hosts the second annual Columbus Comedy Festival.

Bye, Bye, Booster

2011-04-14T14:39:00.009-04:00

Yesterday, I bought my last issue of Booster Gold for the foreseeable future. That's because, just shy of a year after coming on to the book, writers Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis are leaving. Beginning next issue, Booster's creator Dan Jurgens returns to write and draw the series.
There are a couple of reasons why I'm dropping the series. Dan Jurgens is one of them. While I did enjoy the original Booster Gold series, I've not been too wild about most of what Jurgens has written since. His Superman was ok, though not especially memorable, but I've never been able to forgive him for Zero Hour.
There's also the fact that the next few issues of Booster will be closely tied to Flashpoint, DC's latest company wide crossover event. I'm not even remotely interested in this so-called event, and plan on avoiding it as much as I possibly can.
Sadly, Giffen and DeMatteis are being taken off of Booster just as they were beginning to hit their stride. The latest story line, involving time displaced Nazis and Booster returning to the 25th century to stand trial for the theft of the time machine that brought him to our time and the devices that gave him his powers and then meeting and battling across the timestream with a future version of himself called the Perforated Man, has been the best of their run and one of the best Booster Gold stories I've ever read.
It seems to me that while they may have been writing the character's eponymous title, Giffen and DeMatteis were never really in control of Booster Gold's destiny. The first half of their run, though fun and enjoyable, reads like they're just marking time while the really important events in Booster's life were unfolding in the limited series Justice League: Generation Lost and Time Masters: Vanishing Point. In fact, it appears that from the begininng Giffen and DeMatteis were only meant to be filling in while Jurgens went off and did Vanishing Point.
Considering the great things they did with the Booster back when they did have total control of him during the period following the cancellation of his first series when he was in the Justice League International, it's kind of a shame the pair never really got to strut their stuff on the character's own book.

Available Light Theatre Presents Skyscrapers of the Midwest

2011-04-13T16:48:00.002-04:00

Skyscrapers of the Midwest, a graphic novel by Joshua Cotter, is an odd yet haunting and affecting tale of two young boys, depicted as anthropomorphic cats, growing up in the 1980's. As he writes in his blog, Matt Slaybaugh, founder of Columbus, Ohio acting troupe Available Light Theatre, began to see the possibilities of adapting the comic for the stage shortly after first encountering it in 2008. Thus, Slaybaugh got in touch with Cotter and began the process of transforming the sequential narrative into a live theatrical experience.

The results of that process are on display beginning tomorrow night as Skyscrapers of the Midwest, the play, written and directed by Slaybaugh, begins a two weekend run at the Riffe Center's Studio Two Theatre in Downtown Columbus. Appearing in the production are Emily Bach, Acacia Duncan, Drew Eberly, Jordan Fehr, Adam Humphrey, Brant Jones, Leigh Lotocki, Elena Perantoni, and Ian Short.
When I wrote that Skyscrapers, the comic, was odd, that was by no means intended as a slight. Based on the fact that he included giant robots in the story, I get the feeling that "odd" is, at least in part, exactly what Cotter was going for. It was those same giant robots that lead me to wonder as I read the book how Matt was going to bring this story to the stage. I'm looking forward to seeing how he pulled it off. I've been told that the art of puppetry is involved.

Showtimes are tomorrow thru Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 p.m., and next Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. Select performances will be followed by what is called a Talkback. This is a feature of most Available Light productions during which Slaybaugh and the cast will discuss the show and answer questions from the audience. Talkbacks allow the audience to get a glimpse of the creative process, while at the same time giving the production company an immediate sense of the reaction to their efforts.

Available Light employs a unique "pay what you want" pricing strategy for nearly all of its productions, Skyscrapers included. This means there are no set ticket prices, allowing patrons to pay what they can afford or what they feel the show is worth. As stated on Available Light's web-site, "It’s simply a better world when we can all afford to see good shows, no matter how much cash we’ve got in our wallets on a daily basis....it’s about removing the barriers between you and great art"

Skyscrapers of the Midwest promises to be another great show from Available Light Theatre, and I strongly urge anyone in the Columbus area with an interest in either theatre or comics to head downtown this weekend or next and check it out.

Fiddling Around While Stark International Burns--Iron Man #147

2011-04-12T14:48:00.079-04:00

(Once again, I present an installment of what could be the oddest ongoing feature of any comics blog in which I review the 147th issue of a long running comic series. This time out, it's Iron Man.)

To be honest, I was never a fan of Iron Man, the book or the character. Not that I had anything especially against the guy, it's just that the basic concept of the character never quite grabbed me. Now that I think about it, I never got into Milestone's Hardware back in the mid-90's, either. I guess I just don't dig armored super-heroes all that much.

That said, however, the relatively few Iron Man tales I've read have been fairly decent. I was actually surprised by how much I enjoyed the Silver Age sagas collected as Essential Iron Man Volume Two. Of course, it didn't hurt that the majority of them were illustriously illustrated by Gene "The Dean" Colan. I still haven't gotten around to seeing the second movie, but the first one ranks in my mind among the best super-hero movies ever produced, thanks in large measure to the performance of Robert Downey, Jr. in the title role.

Furthermore, I'd heard quite a few good things, many of them from Jonathon Riddle, who lent me his copy of Iron Man #147 to read for this piece, about the David Michelinie/Bob Layton era of the title. So I was fairly certain that I wasn't going to hate this issue.

"Holocaust At High Noon" opens with a splash page image of the Golden Avenger facing off against his old foe Whiplash, now powered up and calling himself Blacklash, who has been hired by some Philadelphia mobsters to kill Iron Man's, or rather his alter-ego Tony Stark's, head of security Vic Martinelli as Martinelli himself looks on. All around them, the campus of Stark International is ablaze as a result of Iron Man's initial battle with Blacklash. Meanwhile, newly hired SI Vice President Yvette Avril, Public Relations chief Artemis Pithens, and a group of children visiting Stark International on a school field trip are trapped in the laboratory where the conflagration began.

Leaving Blacklash temporarily trapped under a pile of rubble, Shellhead flies off to deal with the flames and maybe save a life or two. Freeing himself, 'Lash realizes that Stark International is soon to be swarming with police, firemen and other authority types in addition to Iron Man, so he flees to assassinate another day.

Sure enough, the villain returns bright and early the next morning to take another crack, literally, as his weapons are electrified whips, at Martinelli. I don't think it constitutes too much of a spoiler to reveal that the character whose name is in the indicia of this magazine eventually defeats and captures Blacklash. Of course, I won't say exactly how, but the issue's cover, shown at the top of this post, does give some indication.

This issue is penciled by John Romita, Jr. with inks by Layton. However, the art doesn't quite reflect the distinctive JR, Jr. style that has grown on me over the years since I first encountered it on Uncanny X-Men. This may be at least partially because this work occurs early in Jr.'s career, though it seems to due mainly to the influence of Layton's finishes. The art more closely resembles the work by Layton that I've seen in other comics. Either way, it's a polished, professional product that tells the story clearly and effectively, which what you want in a comic, especially one heavy on action.

That's certainly what Iron Man #147 is. Basically, it's an all-fight issue, but, overall, a pretty good one. I said at the outset that I expected to like this issue, and I wasn't proven wrong. With a good balance of action, characterization, and even a flash of humor when appropriate, "Holocaust At High Noon" is near textbook example of the kind of comic that Marvel did best during the tenure of editor-in-chief Jim Shooter in the late 70's and 80's.

* * * * * * * * * *

By the way, if you're an Iron Man fan, and I know at least one of my readers is, check out the three part series of posts from last year about the "Demon In A Bottle" story line at the blog Bronze Age Babies:

'Tec Support: The Seeds of "Knightfall"--Detective Comics #480

2011-04-11T14:49:00.033-04:00

While notable for being one of the first two Batman stories drawn by the late Don Newton (Batman #305 hit the stands that same month), "The Perfect Fighting Machine" from Detective Comics #480 is, in truth, an entertaining but rather unremarkable tale. According to writer Dennis O'Neil, however, this obscure little story helped spawn one of the biggest event story lines of the 1990's. Within the pages of 'Tec #480 lie the seeds of "Knightfall."
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me tell you about the story first.
The tale begins in medias res, with Batman already locked in a life or death struggle with a silent, hulking brute who appears to be kicking the living crap out of him. As he's getting tossed around, Bats thinks, "He's creaming me...and I don't even know his name!" As the taciturn killer is strangling him, Batman decides it's a good time to try and make friends. He chokes out the words, "Wh-Who are you?", cuing the inevitable flashback.
In the next panel, we are taken back in time six weeks to find a homely, fat schlub being harassed by a trio of young punks who break his calculator and make him drop his ice cream cone. Slinking away in tears, he is befriended by a stranger identifying himself as Ivan Angst, who offers to buy the poor kid a new ice cream cone. Angst is soon revealed to the reader as the leader of a terrorist organization known as Mercenaries, Incorporated, whom Batman has been after for several weeks.
While Batman is bedridden with a fever of 104 degrees, Angst, with all purpose mad scientist Dr. Moon, begins the process of transforming the poor nerd he befriended into a the "perfect fighting machine" of the story's title through a series of surgeries and hormone treatments which render him super strong, nearly invulnerable, and unable to feel pain. Moon later refers to him as a "gork," which, the doctor explains, is "...medical slang for a living, breathing vegetable!" Angst has plans to create an army of such perfect soldiers. When the process is complete, he decides to test his prototype against the "perfect opponent," the Batman, and issues a challenge to the Caped Crusader via a classified ad in the Gotham newspaper. Despite not being fully recovered from his illness, Batman accepts the challenge, and the story shifts back to the present where Batman is still struggling to survive the relentless onslaught of Angst's perfect soldier.
Just as he's about to deliver the killing blow, the would be assassin falters and collapses. Moon declares, "As I feared! The strain was too great! His whole system is collapsing! Not being able to feel pain, he didn't realize anything was wrong--until it was too late!" The dying giant turns to the one man he believed to be his friend, Ivan Angst. But Angst, calling him "...an experiment--that failed!", refuses. Enraged, the "gork" turns on Angst as the cowardly Dr. Moon flees. Batman attempts to pull him off Angst, but he fails. The "perfect fighting machine" kills Angst before dieing himself, with neither Batman nor the reader ever having learned his name.
Back in 1993, while the "Knightfall" story line was running in Batman and Detective Comics, Dennis O'Neil, then editor of the Batman titles, and Julius Schwartz, editor of 'Tec at the time #480 was published, were in Columbus as guests at the annual SF con Marcon. They also did a signing at the now out of business local comics shop Central City Comics that Saturday. I got my friend Dave Alkire to give me a ride out to the shop, and gave him my copy (I've long since aquired another) of 'Tec #480 so he'd have something for O'Neil and Schwartz to sign. When Dave handed O'Neil the book, the writer told us a little story about it.

Denny hadn't felt that the seventeen pages allotted to him for this story had given him sufficient space to fully explore the premise. Thus, he eventually returned to the idea, reworking it and expanding it. This new story was called "Venom," which appeared as issues #16-20 of Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight in 1991.
"Venom," of course, introduced the titular strength enhancing drug, which was later used by the villain Bane, the prime mover behind the events of "Knightfall." This story eventually gave us Jean-Paul Valley, a.k.a. Azrael, as the replacement Batman after Bane break's Bruce Wayne's back.
So, "The Perfect Fighting Machine," a little known seventeen page story from the late 70's, is indirectly responsible for giving us not only this:

...but this, as well:

Furthermore, the success of "Knightfall" may have had a hand in inspiring such later abominations as "Emerald Twilight," the story that introduced Kyle Rayner as the new Green Lantern even as it transformed Hal Jordan in a cosmic powered mass murderer. (The latter is the abominable part. I actually liked Kyle as GL.)

Despite all that, I still like "The Perfect Fighting Machine." In fact, I like it even more knowing the unheralded role it played in comics history. I say "unheralded" because, other than hearing it from Dennis O'Neil himself, I've never come across this info in any comics magazine or on the web. For all I know, I may be first person, even after all this time, to write about this.
That's kind of cool, actually, if it's true.

Size Matters--Or Does It?

2011-04-10T10:57:00.016-04:00

While I was composing yesterday's post about the first Mini-Comics Day event, I began to think that maybe it was finally time to address an issue raised in one of the comments on the first of my series of posts about the comics of the 1990's way back in February of last year. The question is "What exactly is a 'mini-comic'?", and the answer is more complicated than you might suppose.
Felicity Walker led off a rather lengthy response to my essay with:

"Until now my understanding was that mini-comics referred to a specific format--4½×5½ inches, i.e. a letter-sized page folded into eight pages--and not to the smaller print run. I guess it could be both."

In fact, it can be, and is, both.
In general, it strikes me that how a person defines the term mini-comic, or, for that matter, small press, depends on their relationship to the small press comics community.
Having published a few small press comics over the years, the size based definition of a mini-comic is the one that I've usually held to. I've found that it is also the one preferred by many of the other cartoonists I know who actually produce mini-comics or other types of small press comics.
No less an authority than Matt Feazell, creator of The Amazing Cynicalman and the master of mini-comics, stated during a panel at the Underground Publishing Conference in Bowling Green, Ohio in June of 2000, and I'm paraphrasing here because it was eleven years ago and I wasn't taking notes, that a mini-comic was 4 x 5.5 inches and a small press comic was anything not distributed by Diamond.
The mini-comic is, therefore, just one among a full range of formats of small press comics. For example, a 5.5 x 8 inch book, the size of a standard sheet of typing paper folded in half, is generally referred to as a digest. Comics printed on 8.5 x 14 inch, or legal size, paper are, quite naturally, known as legal size. 8.5 x 11 inch books, be they made either by folding a few 11 x 17 inch sheets in half or by stapling a bunch of 8.5 x 11 pieces of paper together at the left edge, are full sized. Comics smaller that 4 x 5.5 inches are generally called micro comics. Then, of course, there's the standard comic book size of approximately 6.5 x 10 inches.

Max Ink among small press comics in many formats, including minis

To those outside the world of small press and mini-comics publishers, that is the majority of the comics buying and reading population, however, "small press" has come to indicate the smaller publishers of standard sized comic books, including many lucky enough to be handled by Diamond Distribution. "Mini-comic," on the other hand, to the world at large refers to any homemade, photocopied, and hand stapled comic, regardless of size. Since this blog is aimed at that larger public of comics fans, it is this sense of the term mini-comic that I used when discussing the small press comics of the 90's. In insider terms, most of the small press comics I discussed weren't actually mini-comics at all, but were published in the digest format.
In conclusion, it would seem that perhaps the answer to the question "What is a 'mini-comic'?" isn't that complicated after all. I guess what everything I've said above really boils down to is "It depends on who you are."

Oh, By the Way--Today Was Mini-Comics Day

2011-04-09T19:31:00.001-04:00

Today is, or more accurately, I suppose, since it is early evening in the Eastern Time Zone of the United States as I'm sitting down at my keyboard to type this and I'll probably spend about an hour writing and revising this post, was the first ever Mini-Comics Day. The idea for Mini-Comics Day originated with The International Cartoonist Conspiracy. Based on what I've been able to gather from their web-site, the Conspiracy appears to be a somewhat loosely knit organization of cartoonists group in several cities with the seminal Conspiracy cell originating in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The event is somewhat akin to the more established 24 Hour Comic Day, in that the idea is to create a finished comic in the space of a day or less. There are a few key differences. First, the comic can be of any length. Many mini-comics are just eight pages. Perhaps the most important difference is that participants in Mini-Comics Day are expected to not only write and draw their comic, but publish it as well. To successfully complete the challenge, you have to run off a few copies. The number of copies is left up to each individual artist.

Several years before the Cartoonist Conspiracay came up with the idea of Mini-Comics Day, I actually did this. One day in 2001, just for my own amusement on a day off, I was doing some drawings of various character types with captions giving their name and a brief description, and when I'd completed about a dozen of them, I decided to put them together into a small book. So I came up with a title, Timmy's Guide To Life, Timmy being one of the first drawings in the series; then did a couple more portraits to fill out the book and a front and back cover. By four o'clock that afternoon, I'd pasted up the book and made about twenty copies. Later, I did a larger print run and offered the book as a freebie at S.P.A.C.E. or any other comics shows. I find it interesting that this little book produced on the spur of the moment turned out to be one of the most well recieved and popular things I've ever done. This year being Timmy's tenth anniversary, I probably should do another print run sometime soon.

Several comics shops across the country, as well as in other lands such as Brazil, Indonesia, and the United Kingdom, sponsored Mini-Comics Day event. There was, however, no such event held here in Columbus, Ohio. Which is surprising given the sheer number of cartoonists that this city is home to, many of whom have been publishing their own mini-comics for several years. The city also hosts S.P.A.C.E., which, by the way and in case you didn't know, stands for Small Press and Alternative Comics Expo. Many past attendees (though, as I searched the web just now I was unable to find an example, but I know I've read this somewhere) have cited S.PA.C.E. as one of the few small press shows that still prominently features mini-comics. Perhaps, if Mini-Comics Day becomes the annual event that its originators envision, there will be a Columbus event next year. Maybe I'll even try to organize it myself.

"We Tease Him A Lot, 'Cause We've Got Him On The Spot..."

2011-04-08T16:59:00.000-04:00

Around the middle of 1975, DC unveiled its DCTV line, consisting of a quartet of comics tieing in to television series then currently airing. The four titles were Shazam!, Isis, SuperFriends, and Welcome Back, Kotter.

Of these, Kotter seems to me the oddest for DC at that point in time. The others are more logical choices. With Shazam!, it was simply a case of re-branding an already existing title. Isis was a made-for-TV super-heroine created as a companion to Shazam! on CBS' Saturday morning line-up. The SuperFriends comic was based on an animated show that was, in turn, loosely based on a DC comic, Justice League of America. DC was a little slow out of the gate with SuperFriends. By 1975, it had been two years since new episodes of the series had been produced. The extant episodes, however, had been run over and over on Saturday mornings by ABC, and new episodes would appear within a few months.

On the other hand, Kotter just doesn't really fit into the DC line of 1975. True, the company had published 109 issues of The Adventures of Bob Hope and 124 of The Adventures of Jerry Lewis (the first 40 as The Adventures of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis). However, those titles had disappeared with the passing of the Silver Age at the dawn of the decade. Humor was, for the most part, notably absent from DC's Bronze Age publishing strategy. So were adaptations of TV shows. Those were mostly the province of Charlton, whose 70's offerings included comic books based on The Six Million Dollar Man, Space: 1999, and Emergency!, and Gold Key, who continued to churn out god-awful Star Trek comics, as well as other TV inspired comics. I'd really like to know what went on behinds the scenes that led to DC pursuing the Kotter license.

The debut issue's story, "So Long, Kotter!", concerned the efforts of the Sweat Hogs to convince Kotter to remain as their teacher at his alma mater, James Buchanan High, after the school board approves his request for a transfer. The art by Jack Sparling and Bob Oksner finds a sweet spot between portraiture and caricature that effectively captures not only the actors' likenesses, but the personalities of their characters as well. The backgrounds are a bit sparse and lacking in detail, but, then, so were the show's low budget sets. Elliot S! Maggin, best known for his work on Superman, here proved himself one of the rare super-hero writers actually capable of writing humor. He turned in an amusing, though not laugh out loud funny, script that nicely recreated the feel of a typical Kotter episode.

Maggin and Sparling did not remain with the title past the second issue. Subsequent stories were written by the likes of Tony Isabella, Mark Evanier, Bob Toomey and Scott Edelman and drawn by Ric Estrada and Oksner.

The first issue is the only one that I currently own. I picked it up for a quarter at Mid-Ohio Con this past October. Back in the day, as the kids say now, I also picked up #'s 3, 6 and 7. The third issue had Kotter competing for the Sweat Hogs' affection and respect with Vinnie Barbarino's mobster uncle. In #6, the Sweat Hogs somehow find themselves babysitting an elephant. I seem to recall a scene where they attempt to bathe the pachyderm by running her through a carwash. "Camp Waterloo" from issue seven featured the Sweat Hogs and their teacher as counsellors at a summer camp, competing in a series of sporting events against their counterparts at a rival resort. Throw in Bill Murray and you've got Meatballs.

Apparently, comics readers of the era didn't feel that Kotter fit in with DC's line, either, as they failed to buy it. After ten issues and a tabloid sized Limited Collector's Edition, Welcome Back, Kotter, the comic book, came to an end, thus closing out one of the stranger chapters in the history of DC Comics and the Bronze Age.

A Comic I'd Like To See

2011-04-06T15:30:00.001-04:00

I was on my break from work, sitting outside smoking and reading a comic book, when I was struck by a thought that I immediately decided to share with the readers of this blog. That's what blogs are for, after all; to allow people to share any idle notion that pops into their empty heads with the entire world. Al Gore must be so proud.

Anyway, the comic I was reading was Grimjack #16. I was re-reading this issue because I finally managed to lay my hands on a copy of #17, which contains the second part of the story begun in this issue. On page two, a face drawn by Tim Truman struck me as particularly Kirby-esque. In fact, the character bore a very strong resemblance to Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth.

This observation, in turn, led me to think that a Tim Truman drawn Kamandi comic would be really cool. In fact, considering his work with various alien races in Grimjack and Hawkworld, including species of evolved hawks and lizards, I can't think of any artist better suited to render Kamandi's post-apocalyptic world of intelligent, talking apes, bears, tigers, and other animals (other than Jack Kirby himself, of course.)

Who would write this dream comic? Well, Truman himself would do fine, but I would really like to see his frequent collaborator, and one of my favorite writers, John Ostrander take a crack at the Last Boy On Earth.

The Uncollected: Xombi

2011-04-04T15:52:00.001-04:00

The first issue of the revived Xombi series gives just enough introduction to protagonist David Kim, his powers and the world he inhabits to allow readers to jump into the story at hand with a minimum of confusion. If this new series was standing independent of the original Milestone Media Xombi series of the 1990's, that might be sufficient. However, it appears that's not quite the case.

According to the Comic Book Data Base, the current story line, "The Ninth Stronghold," takes place prior to the last two pages of Xombi #21, the final issue of the previous series. Those two pages, I assume, were hastily tacked on to the issue in order to bring some sense of closure to a story that had barely even begun. Several times in the letters pages of the original series, writer John Rozum stated that he had anywhere from fifty issues to six years (the number, naturally, got larger each time he made the claim) of the series plotted out in advance. He only got to tell a fraction of the story he had envisioned, as the series lasted a mere 22 issues (#'s 0-21). It appears that he is using the title's new lease on life to pick up exactly where he left off fifteen years ago.

I think that if DC wants to insure the success of the new series, they should make some sort of effort to bring new readers, or those older fans, like myself, with short memories and who may no longer have copies of the original series on hand, up to speed on the story so far. I have, since the release of the new Xombi #1, spent several hours over the space of a week and a half digging through about a dozen boxes of back issues marked "X" in the basement of Packrat Comics, past countless unread and unwanted copies of X-Force #1 and all five variant covers of X-Men #1, to uncover most of the old Xombi series up to #17. For those without the patience or obsessiveness for such a quest, what DC should do; what they probably should, in fact, have done before the release of the new first issue; is reprint the original series in its entirety. Two trade paperback collections, containing eleven issues apiece, should be sufficient. The first would contain issues #1-11, comprising the characters origin and the first two story lines, "Silent Cathedrals" and "School of Anguish." The zero issue, while it appeared prior to #1, takes place after "School of Anguish," so it more properly belongs in the second volume, along with issues #12-21.

Xombi was my favorite of the Milestone titles back in 90's, and I'm very glad that it's back and that Rozum is getting a chance to continue David Kim's story. I hope that DC does whatever they can, not only reprinting the original series as I've suggested but making an effort to promote the series to new readers and fans of the original, in order to ensure that Rozum gets to tell the full story as he had originally intended.

Comic Book Comics # 5

2011-04-01T21:18:00.001-04:00

One of my favorite items in The Onion's look back at the 20th Century, Our Dumb Century, is an article headlined "Siegal, Shuster Sign Lucrative Publishing Contract." The piece details how Jerry Siegal and Joe Shuster signed over to DC Comics "rights to their fantastical 'Superman' character in perpetuity" for $25 and a sandwich. It's the kind of piece that almost makes you want to cry even as you're rolling on the floor laughing over it. The sad part is that it's not all that far from the truth. Siegal and Shuster received a mere $130 for the very first Superman story and all rights to the character, which has netted untold millions for the company over the last seven decades.

In Comic Book Comics #5, the most recent installment of their six issue comic book history of the comics industry, Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey detail the struggles of Siegal and Shuster, and their heirs, to gain their rightful due for creating one of the most well known and beloved fictional characters of all time. Siegal and Shuster's tale, though, is only part of an overview of the history of creator's rights and copyright disputes throughout the history of the comics industry. Van Lente and Dunlavey also cover the dispute between Jack Kirby and Marvel over rights to the characters he created for them and the return of his original artwork, the case of the Walt Disney Company versus the underground cartoonists collective calling themselves The Air Pirates, the famous court battle between DC and Fawcett over Captain Marvel and the tangled legal web that, until recently, has ensnared the rights to Marvelman/Miracleman. They also touch on the disputes between Joe Simon, Marv Wolfman and Steve Gerber and Marvel and Dan DeCarlo and Archie Comics.

Van Lente's clear, concise text provides an easily grasped introduction to these complex issues. As the artist, Dunlavey may have the harder task. He has to find a way to somehow illustrate abstract legal concepts. Fortunately, he is up to the task, with drawings that emphasize and enhance the key points of Van Lente's essay.

This is the only issue of Comic Book Comics I've read so far. I picked it up because the subject matter was on my mind after re-reading Sirius Entertainment's similarly themed Trademark & Copyright Book. However, if the rest of Van Lente and Dunlavey's history of the comics industry is as entertaining and informative as this issue, I'm definitely interested in reading more.

Green Arrow Poll Results: Everybody Loves Denny!

2011-03-31T16:43:00.001-04:00

I'm going to close the latest edition of Gutter Talk's "Green Arrow Month" with a quick review of the results of our latest poll. This time I asked you to vote for your favorite chronicler of Green Arrow's adventures. Unlike previous polls, you were allowed--nay, encouraged, even--to vote for multiple candidates.

For the most part, the results were no surprise. Due to the nature of the question this time, I expected fewer responses, as Green Arrow fans are a small subset of comics readers, and Green Arrow fans who read this blog an even smaller clique. Thus, I wasn't too disappointed to get only about a third of the number of participants this time out as I did in my last poll about movie Supermen.

I also expected Dennis O'Neil to be at or near the top of the results when all the votes were in. What did surprise me, however, is the decisiveness of his victory. O'Neil ended up with 100% of the vote. Due to the fact that multiple votes were allowed, a few other candidates, including Bob Haney, Mike W. Barr, Mike Grell and Kevin Smith, got a smattering of votes, but everyone, no matter if they voted for several candidates or just one, registered their affection for O'Neil's version of the Emerald Archer.

I guess this isn't much of a surprise after all. O'Neil did write the fondly remembered Green Lantern/Green Arrow series of the early 70's.

To some today, those stories seem dated and I've even read comments by some people saying that the only reason to read those stories anymore is for Neal Adams art. Adams art is stunning, and it is true that those stories, like any work of art, are very much of their time, and they are not without flaws. They tend to be somewhat heavy handed and often preachy, and Green Lantern often comes off seeming not just hopelessly naive, but just plain stupid. It seems as if O'Neil didn't really like Hal Jordan and he appears uncomfortable with the space opera aspect of the character, which he plays down, keeping the stories, for the most part, literally down to Earth.

It's clear, to me at least, that O'Neil was much more interested in writing Green Arrow. Oliver is the real star of the series during O'Neil's tenure, no matter what the indicia may have stated, and the real reason, in my mind, that these stories continue to be worth reading. Yet, O'Neil didn't make Ollie perfect. Witness his reaction to his ward's drug use. First, he slaps Roy around a little, then throws the kid out on the street, and convinces himself that he, as the boy's parent, was in no way responsible for his adopted child's problems, despite having pretty much abandoned him to travel around the country "looking for America." Still, Ollie somehow manages to retain our sympathy in that story. What emerges in O'Neil's stories is a flawed, but still heroic and likable character.

For my part, while I may have first seen Green Arrow on SuperFriends, it was O'Neil's GL/GA stories that began my life long love for the character.

To put it simply, O'Neil defined the modern version of Green Arrow. All who've followed him, from Elliot S! Maggin to Mike Grell to Kevin Smith, and even J.T. Krul, have merely been building on the foundation that Dennis O'Neil established.

That's it for the 2011 version of "Green Arrow Month." There was, by the way, one more Green Arrow post I was planning, comparing GA to Daredevil, but it never quite gelled when I sat down to write it. Perhaps if I can make it work, I'll present it at a later date. If I have enough ideas for more posts on GA, I might just do yet another "Green Arrow Month."

Beards and Blurbs

2011-03-29T14:27:00.029-04:00

This cover, drawn by Mike Grell for Green Lantern #94, is notable, to me, at least, for the question mark shaped cover blurb floating in the air by Green Arrow's right elbow. It reads:

"GREEN ARROW WITHOUT A BEARD? WHY?"

When I first bought this issue, as a ten year old in 1977, the blurb attracted my attention, yet while, even then, I did think it kind of an odd thing to emphasize, I didn't find anything else especially noteworthy about it at that time. Back then, I had only read a few Green Arrow stories and was unaware of the character's history, either within the fictional DC Universe or as a fictional character in the real world.
In 1977, Green Arrow had been around for 36 years. For most of that time, up until Brave and the Bold #85 in 1969, he had been clean shaven. When I look at that cover today, I'm struck by how, in such a relatively short time, the beard had become such an integral part of the character's iconography that the editors of Green Lantern thought that its absence was sufficient hook to get someone to pick up the issue. You must also take into account that back then, the comics industry was still working under the assumption that most of their readers were young children and that the readership turned over about every five years. Thus, the blurb appears to be aimed at readers such as I was at the time, that is, kids who'd recently discovered comics in general, and Green Arrow in particular, and didn't know that Oliver Queen hadn't always had that beard.
The industry, and the audience, has changed a lot in the thirty four years since this issue hit the stands. Such a blurb might not be as effective today with an older audience more aware of the histories of these characters and the fictional universes they inhabit. On the other hand, by this point in time, Ollie has had the beard for over forty years, far longer than he went without it, so its absence today would be even more noteworthy than it was in 1977, especially to long time GA fans.

The Uncollected: Green Arrow

2011-03-28T14:55:00.000-04:00

I'm going to kick off this overview of Green Arrow stories that have yet to be reprinted in trade paperback with a round up of what has been collected so far. There's actually quite a bit available in TPB or hardcover, representing a significant chunk of the character's history. There remain, however, many glaring omissions.
Green Arrow's Silver Age adventures, beginning in 1958 with the first story drawn by Jack Kirby and continuing on through the landmark The Brave and the Bold #85, which introduced GA's goatee and new Neal Adams designed costume, are gathered together in one hefty volume as Showcase Presents the Green Arrow. In addition, the Kirby drawn tales are presented in full color in the slim and affordable volume The Green Arrow by Jack Kirby.

In keeping with the current industry practice of rushing out a collected edition almost as soon as the last chapter of a story line or mini-series hits the stands, Green Arrow's most recent exploits, beginning with his resurrection by Kevin Smith in the "Quiver" story line, are all available in book form. This includes the latest retelling of his origin by Andy Diggle and Jock in Green Arrow: Year One. A collection of the first half dozen issues of the currently ongoing series is due out in the next couple of months.

Most of the "important" Green Arrow stories, that is the ones that are essential reading for an understanding of the character as he exists today, have been reprinted in at least one edition over the years. These include B&B #85, Justice League of America #75, in which he lost his fortune, and the acclaimed Dennis O'Neil/Neal Adams run on Green Lantern.

I would guess that Green Lantern #76, the first issue of the O'Neil/ Adams series, would be near the top of any list of most reprinted comic issues ever. I have owned at least three different editions of the story in various forms over the course of my comics reading and collecting career. These have included a mass market paperback reprinting issues #76 and #77, the two volume Hard Traveling Heroes trade paperback series, and the hardcover edition of The Greatest Team-Up Stories Ever Told. Other reprintings include the first issue of the 1983 deluxe format mini-series that presented the entire O'Neil/Adams run, a slipcased hardcover edition of those issues in 2000, another TPB collection in 2004, and issues of the Silver Age Classics and Millennium Edition series which re-presented landmark issues from DC Comics' history.

The story is due to be reprinted yet again next month, leading off Showcase Presents Green Lantern Volume 5. This volume will present the entire O'Neil/Adams run, after which the title was canceled; pick up with the series' revival in 1976 which carried on the series' original numbering from #90 with Green Arrow still sharing cover billing; and continue on to #100. When, or if, there is a sixth volume in this series, GA will be a major part of that tome as well, as Hal Jordan did not regain his status as solo star of his own book until #123.

The major exceptions to the reprinting of milestone story lines are the 1983 mini-series by Mike W. Barr and Trevor Von Eeden and the story in which Oliver Queen was killed. The mini-series doesn't make any significant changes to the character's status quo, and is mostly notable for being the first comic book actually titled Green Arrow, appearing some forty years after the character's debut. Still, it's a fun and entertaining superhero mystery story that certainly deserves to be represented for new readers. The actual issue in which Ollie gets blown up by terrorists is included in Green Arrow/Black Canary: For Better or For Worse, but the story line as a whole has yet to be collected.

In fact, while The Longbow Hunters has long been available in trade paperback, the ongoing series that followed it remains out of print, except for a couple of issues included in For Better or For Worse and a team-up of Connor Hawke and Kyle Rayner included in a Green Lantern collection. This includes not only the 80 issues written by Mike Grell, but the post Grell issues drawn by Jim Aparo as well as Connor Hawke's entire tenure as Green Arrow. Two other Green Arrow mini-series written by Grell, The Brave and the Bold Volume 2 and Green Arrow: The Wonder Year are also MIA.

While I believe, although I've never actually seen it, that there is an Archives edition of Golden Age Green Arrow stories, it is, if it even exists, only one volume. The majority of pre-1958 GA stories are available only to those willing to pay the undoubtedly sky high price of the original issues.
While the upcoming release of Showcase Presents Green Lantern Volume 5 is a good start, the bulk of Green Arrow's Bronze Age adventures remain in reprint limbo. This includes not only the remainder of his stint as Green Lantern's co-star, but also the back up stories from Action Comics, World's Finest Comics and Detective Comics. The major exception to this, as I noted last week, is "Night Olympics" from Detective Comics #'s 449 and 450, which, while fairly unspectacular, has merited several reprintings mostly due to the fact that it was written by Alan Moore.
Among the Action Comics stories are Mike Grell's first work on the character, which you would think would rate reprinting on that basis alone. I'm sure however, though I've not read them, that they're good stories in their own right, as they were written by Elliot S! Maggin.
Nonetheless, despite the significant omissions noted here, which I hope will one be rectified, there's still plenty of stories available in collected editions for the Green Arrow fan.

Green Arrow In Cyberspace

2011-03-27T10:48:00.000-04:00

It appears that I am not the only blogger out here in the wilds of cyber-webland with the Emerald Archer on his mind recently.

Even more obsessive than devoting two entire months to posts about a single character is dedicating an entire blog to that character. That is exactly what the blogger who signs his posts "Mac" has been doing for over three years now with The Green Arrow Guide to Revolutionary Heroism. Recent posts have reviewed the first couple of issues of the new Green Arrow monthly series and a new Green Arrow action figure based on that series.

J. Caleb Mozzocco, on his blog Every Day Is Like Wednesday, has an entire category labeled "Green Arrow Is A Dick", though it's clear from reading those posts that he harbors a certain affection for the character. The latest entry in that category was uploaded on Friday. Entitled "Green Arrow, possessive a-hole," it spotlights GA's role in Justice League of America #88, and is illustrated with scans of some nice black and white artwork, taken from the latest volume of Showcase Presents Justice League of America, by long time JLA artist Dick Dillin.

Just this morning, the blogger identifying himself only as "Earth-Two" , author of the blog DC Multiverse, offers up a brief intro to two vintage "Kings of Crime", the Clock King and the Storm King, who fought Green Arrow back in the days before he stopped shaving.

As for this blog, I've still got a couple of Green Arrow related essay to unleash on you before April Fool's Day. Tomorrow, my series "The Uncollected," which looks at comics as yet unavailable in trade paperback or hardcover reprints, continues with a look at the collections starring GA that are available and those that have yet to see the light of day.

The Evolving Origins of Green Arrow (Part Two)

2011-03-26T13:27:00.003-04:00

(The second part of my series on the various versions of Green Arrow's origin story over the past seven decades of the character's existence picks up with Mike Grell and The Longbow Hunters, the 1987 mini-series that redefined the character as an urban hunter. The first part of the series covered the Golden Age origin, Jack Kirby's Silver Age origin and Green Arrow's first mini-series from 1983. You can read that by clicking here.)
In 1987, Mike Grell crafted a new version of Green Arrow's origin for The Longbow Hunters that suited his more realistic, less super-heroic take on the character. He later expanded upon it in 1989's Secret Origins #38 and the four issue mini-series Green Arrow: The Wonder Year, published in 1992. Grell envisioned Oliver Queen as being in his early forties and having been active as Green Arrow for about two decades. Thus, The Wonder Year takes place in the turbulent presidential election year of 1972.

On a friend's yacht, enjoying what he declares to be his first vacation in six years, a drunken Oliver Queen falls overboard and finds himself the next morning on the shores of a deserted and uncharted island. In order to survive, he teaches himself to hunt and shoot a bow and arrow. Where Grell's version differs significantly from all past and future versions is that on the island, Ollie uses only regular pointed arrows. The trick arrows came later, after he had returned to civilization and adopted his Green Arrow identity.
After stumbling upon a couple of stoners who are growing pot on the island, Ollie captures them and uses their boat to return home. He turns them over to the police, but doesn't stick around because he doesn't want to get involved.
Returning to work, he finds himself increasingly bored and dissatisfied. Later, he is attending a charity masquerade ball dressed as Robin Hood, when he foils an attempted robbery. The next day, the local newspapers dub him "Green Arrow." Deciding that his little adventure had been fun, he begins his career as a costumed crime fighter, despite not being too happy with the name he's found himself saddled with by, as he puts it, "...a reporter with no sense of style."

Soon, he becomes involved with a former girlfriend who is at the center of a plot to assassinate a presidential candidate. At one point, he allows men who'd been trying to kill them to escape, despite Brianna, the ex-girlfriend, urging him to shoot them. "I'm no killer," he protests.
"You will be...someday," she retorts. "You keep carrying that bow around and sooner or later you're going to have to use it...for real." Inspired by this insight, he begins to develop his array of trick arrows.

The most recent revision of Green Arrow's origin occurred in 2007's six issue mini-series Green Arrow: Year One, written by Andy Diggle, with art by Jock. In stark contrast to Grell's somewhat more realistic and down to earth take on Ollie's beginnings, Year One is the widescreen, big budget, summer blockbuster movie version of the story. It is loud--or would be if it were a movie--action packed and exciting.

The story begins by introducing us to shallow, self centered, thrill seeking and heavy drinking young billionaire Oliver Queen. Soon, he is betrayed by his security chief Hackett, whom he had considered a friend but was actually working with drug queenpin Chien Na-Wei, aka "China White" in a scheme to steal billions from him. When Ollie tumbles to the scheme, Hackett knocks him out and tosses him off his own yacht into the ocean. As in all the other versions of the origin, Ollie finds himself on an island where he fashions a crude bow and arrows and hones his natural talent for archery in order to survive.
However, this time the island is not quite as deserted as in previous tellings. In fact, it just happens to be the headquarters of China White's whole operation. She has enslaved the native population, forcing them to grow her genetically modified opium poppies.
Armed with only a bow and a few improvised trick arrows, Ollie manages to pretty much singlehandedly take down an army of desperate criminals, destroy China White's entire operation and free the native population. The grateful natives give him the name "Auu Lanu Lau'ava," which, in their language, means, as you've probably guessed, "Green Arrow."
Improbable, even preposterous, as it is, Green Arrow: Year One is, nonetheless, the currently "official" version of the origin of Green Arrow. You can be assured, however, that in a few years, changing times or changing creative teams will dictate yet another retelling and re-imagining of Ollie's early days for yet another generation.

The Past Ain't What It Used T'Be: The Evolving Origin of Green Arrow (Part One)

2011-03-25T14:59:00.000-04:00

(NOTE: This look at the changes in Green Arrow's origin stories is another of those long rambling posts covering several decades of comics history that I have a tendency to write when I've got too much time on my hands and nothing better to do. Thus, I shall be dividing it into two parts.)

It's a bit of a cliche to speak of super hero comics as modern mythology, but you know what they say about why cliches are cliches. Central to any hero's myth is his origin story. Like the myths and legends of old, there are often many different versions of a hero's origin as is it occasionally tweaked or completely rewritten to fit the needs of the story at hand, the changing times and tastes of the readers or the approach of the current creative team to the character.

In 1992, John Byrne, writing in his editorial column "A Flame About This High" in the letters pages of John Byrne's Next Men #1, stated that "Origins are a fairly recent convention, as comics go." It is certainly true that during the Golden Age of the 1940's, many super heroes leapt right into crimefighting without stopping to explain to the reader why they did so or where their powers, if they had any, came from. Even Batman, who these days can't seem to go a single issue without flashing back to his origin, wasn't granted a backstory until several months after his initial appearance. Many characters of this period didn't last long enough to even have an origin, disappearing after just one or two outings. Green Arrow was one of the lucky ones. Not only was he was popular enough with readers to stick around, but the editors apparently considered him a sufficient drawing card to warrant his taking over the covers of More Fun Comics within months of his debut. Still, it wasn't until 1943, nearly two years after his initial appearance, that he was finally provided with an origin. This occurred in a story entitled "The Birth of the Battling Bowmen," the lead feature of More Fun Comics #89.

According to this version of events, Oliver Queen was a wealthy collector of Native American artifacts who, after his collection is destroyed in a museum fire, is told by a friend of a "gold mine" of such relics at a place called Lost Mesa. Some criminals who overhear this conversation and think it is about an actual gold mine head to Lost Mesa to get the gold before Queen can. Living on Lost Mesa are a boy named Roy Harper and his faithful Indian companion Quoag, who had been stranded there years before after a plane crash that killed Roy's father. After the criminal gang kills Quoag, Queen and Harper use their archery skills to defeat them. Queen then takes Harper in as his ward and the two decide to continue fighting crime as the Green Arrow and Speedy, taking the names from remarks made by the criminals on Lost Mesa. Prior to Crisis on Infinite Earths, this story had come to be considered the origin of the Earth-2 Green Arrow. For all I know, it may be once again, now that the Multiverse and Earth-2 have been reinstated following Infinite Crisis and 52.

Fifteen years later, Ed Herron and Jack Kirby crafted a totally different origin story in "The Green Arrow's First Case" which appeared in Adventure Comics #256. After falling overboard during a sea voyage, millionaire Oliver Queen washes up on Starfish Island, which, as the name implies, just happens to be shaped like a starfish for no reason that has anything to do with the story. While stranded there, he makes a bow and teaches himself archery in order to survive, fashioning a variety of trick arrows to help him perform various tasks. Eventually, a freighter anchors itself off shore. Swimming out to it, Oliver discovers that the crew has mutinied. After using his archery skills and trick arrows to thwart the mutineers, Ollie hitches a ride back to civilization. Upon his return, he continues using his new found mastery of archery to fight crime as the Green Arrow.

A revised version of this origin appeared as a part of a flashback sequence in the debut issue of Green Arrow's first ever eponymous mini-series in 1983 written by Mike W. Barr and illustrated by Trevor Von Eeden and Dick Giordano. When his girfriend dumps him, Oliver Queen takes a cruise to help him escape the pain of his broken heart. He gets more of an escape than he bargained for when pirates raid the ship and toss him overboard. He eventually finds himself on a deserted island where he builds himself a bow and several trick arrows and teaches himself to shoot in order to survive. Eventually, the very same pirates who stranded him there come to the island to stash the loot from their latest act of piracy. Ollie captures them using his newly developed archery skills and trick arrows. Upon returning to civilization, Oliver decides to use these skills to fight crime in Star City as the Green Arrow.

As you can see, Barr altered a few details from the Herron/Kirby story, such as changing the mutineers to pirates and making them the reason for Ollie being on the island. By the way, the island isn't given a name in this or any of the subsequent future retellings and re-imaginings of the origin and is not depicted as having any unusual or distinctive shape. The motivation for Ollie being on the ship in the first place is important in that the girl who broke his heart all those years ago naturally comes back into his life in the course of the mini-series.

(That brings us to about the halfway mark of this overwrought essay, so I'm going to give my fingers a rest from typing and pick this up later. In part two, I look at Mike Grell's take on Green Arrow's beginning and get to the current "official" version of the classic origin as related in Green Arrow: Year One.)

Sunday Comix Raffle to Benefit AFSP at S.P.A.C.E.

2011-03-21T16:06:00.000-04:00

"Every 15 minutes someone dies by suicide."

That sad statistic comes from the web-site of The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. As far as I'm concerned, once every twenty years is more than enough. In my life, I have lost two people that I have cared about to suicide. First, my childhood best friend Eric "Igor" Brown in 1991, and most recently my nephew Steve Pisarchick in 2008.

Thus, this past weekend at the 12th Annual Small Press and Alternative Comics Expo (S.P.A.C.E.), I organized a raffle at the Sunday Comix table, the proceeds of which went to the AFSP.

Before the show, I took a basket, donated by fellow Sunday Comix member Canada Keck, around the room, filling it with comics generously donated by many of the exhibitors to be the prize. Throughout the day, as well, several other artists came up to the table and added to the prize pool. By the time we finally held the drawing, the basket could no longer hold all the comics that had been donated.

Selling tickets for $2, or 12 for $10, we managed to raise $168. To that I added $32 from my own pocket to make a $200 donation to AFSP in Steve's memory.

I would like to thank everyone at the show who donated comics, all those who bought tickets, and, most of all, my fellow members of Sunday Comix, especially Canada and Max Ink, for all their help and support. I could not have pulled this off without it.

You can find more information about the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and make a donation on-line, at afsp.org.

Green Arrow Meets....Jon Sable?

2011-03-18T14:47:00.074-04:00

Well, not really. But in the story "Seattle & Die" from Green Arrow (Vol. 2) #'s 15 and 16 Ollie does encounter a character who bears many striking similarities to Mr. Sable. The story was, of course, written by Mike Grell and drawn by Ed Hannigan, Dick Giordano and Frank McLaughlin.
It seems that Oliver Queen and Dinah Lance, a.k.a. the Black Canary, just can't enjoy a nice quiet night on the town without without finding themselves smack dab in the middle of an attempted robbery. Whether its costumed crazies like the Riddler in Kevin Smith's Green Arrow (Vol. 3) #12, or a trio of garden variety street crooks as in this story, trouble just seems to find the pair wherever they go. Ollie and Dinah are attempting to enjoy the music at a Seattle blues club when said crooks appear and demand that the patrons turn over their valuables. Being who they are, our heroes leap into action to thwart the robbers. When one of them has his shotgun pointed at Oliver, a man who had been quietly drinking at the bar all night pulls his own gun and kills him and the other would be robbers. Naturally, he splits the scene before the cops arrive.
Our heroes aren't so fortunate, however, though Ollie is less than co-operative with the police. Ollie's decided to find the mysterious shooter himself and get his side of the story. Green Arrow tracks the guy to a fleabag hotel and the two share a drink and talk. However, the mystery man choses to remain an enigma and Ollie leaves without having really learned anything. As Ollie drives away, he sees an explosion coming from the mystery shooter's hotel room.
Rushing back to the room, Green Arrow encounters two men who identify themselves as Gavin and Daryl, agents of ASIO, the Australian Secret Intelligence Organization. After their quarry, aided by Ollie, escapes, the pair of agents accompany Ollie back to his place. There they tell Oliver and Dinah a story that should give anyone who's read the origin story in Jon Sable, Freelance #'s 3-6 a strong sense of deja vu.

The mystery man's name is Jake Moses. In a former life, Moses was a long jumper who had once represented the United States in the Pan American Games. In 1978, he and his new bride, fashion model Alison Gardner, travel to Africa on their honeymoon. On a photo safari, they encounter a group of rhino poachers who open fire on the safari group. Gardner along with their guide and tracker are killed and Moses is badly injured. Upon regaining consciousness, he stumbles upon the poachers and kills them. As one of the ASIO agents says,"The killin' got in 'im, and he got good at it," He becomes a mercenary who would work for anyone who could pay his price.
The story told by the ASIO agents is more or less a Reader's Digest version of Sable's origin. Moses himself is essentially a dark reflection of Jon Sable, lacking Sable's moral center or talent for writing children's literature. Also unlike Sable, Moses is driven by guilt, blaming himself for his wife's death, and increasingly turns to alcohol in an attempt to deal with it. Similar to Deadshot as written by John Ostrander in Suicide Squad, Moses appears to have a death wish, and in the story's climax makes a suicidal leap off the roof of the latest sleazy hotel that Green Arrow and the Australians had tracked him to. His fate is left ambiguous as the story ends with an image of Moses in mid-leap silhoutted by a flash of lightning.
This story leaves me wondering two things. The first is, of course, what ever did become of Jake Moses. The second is what a meeting between Green Arrow and the real Jon Sable might be like. We'll probably never get a definitive answer to either question, though it's always fun to speculate.

"Great Flaming Arrows!" Green Arrow Saves the World on Super Friends

2011-03-16T14:30:00.024-04:00

I'm not really sure when and where I first encountered Green Arrow. It may have been a battered copy of a mass market paperback reprinting of Green Lantern #76 and 77 that I bought for a dime at a flea market. However, the more I think about it, the more I think that it was probably his lone appearance, alongside Wendy, Marvin and Wonderdog, on the original SuperFriends in 1973.
Not only was the episode entitled "Gulliver's Gigantic Goof" Green Arrow's only appearance on any of the various versions of SuperFriends, but it was his only appearance on television, period, until the debut of Justice League Unlimited over three decades later in 2004. Since then, he has made numerous television appearances, both animated in JLU, The Batman and Batman: The Brave and the Bold and live action in Smallville.
Many of the so-called villains on the first incarnation of SuperFriends were not truly evil, but simply misguided. Their intentions were always noble, but their efforts to improve the human condition inevitably backfired, endangering the entire planet and requiring the intervention of the Justice League. After our heroes saved humanity they would then impart a valuable moral lesson to the impressionable youth of America.
One such well meaning scientist was Dr. Hiram Gulliver. It was his intent to alleviate world hunger and over population by shrinking everyone in the world down to a height of about two inches. Rather than proposing his plan to the governments of the world or the United Nations, he just goes ahead and starts shrinking people. In the course of attempting to stop Gulliver, the core group of SuperFriends, Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Batman and Robin, manage to get themselves shrunken and captured. It's then up to none other than Green Arrow, despite ending up shrunken himself, to save the SuperFriends and put a stop to Gulliver's scheme. First, though, he finds time to take a side trip to "Bornego," which appears to be somewhere in Africa, to rescue a pair of animal photographers from "giant" ants with the aid of his trusty trick arrows, as seen in this clip.
The voice of Green Arrow was provided by regular SuperFriends cast member Norman Alden, who also voiced Aquaman.
This one appearance doesn't really show much of the Green Arrow that I've come to know and love over the years, but obviously my eight year old self must have seen something there that appealed to me and would lead me to seek out Green Arrow's adventures in the comics. Say what you will about SuperFriends, and, truth be told, it really wasn't very good, but I apparently do owe them that.

'Tec Support: "Night Olympics" by Alan Moore and Klaus Jansen

2011-03-14T14:53:00.000-04:00

For the most part, my series of posts on Detective Comics will deal with the Batman stories, but in this special Green Arrow Month edition of 'Tec Support, I'll be taking a look at one of the back up stories starring the Emerald Archer.

Green Arrow ended his days as a third string back up feature in the pages of Detective Comics in the mid-1980's before finally graduating to his own monthly series following The Longbow Hunters. For the most part, the series was written by Joey Cavalieri, but in #'s 549 and 550, Alan Moore stepped in to contribute the two-part "Night Olympics," illustrated by Klaus Jansen. The title derives from Moore's comparison of night life in Star City to a sporting event.

The plot of the story is fairly straightforward, you might even say simple. It involves a mohawked, bow wielding punk named Pete Lomax who's decided to make a name for himself by taking out a super-hero. Thus, the first part of the story ends as gets Black Canary in his sights and fires. In part two, an enraged Green Arrow pursues and captures Lomax.

The only really interesting part of the story is the dialogue between Green Arrow and Black Canary toward the end of the part one. They are discussing the impact that the presence of super-heroes and costumed vigilantes like themselves has had on the criminal class. "We're gradually weeding out all the just-plain-average goons, gradually improving the strain..." Ollie says, "...until only the flat-out-dangerous psychos are left running around." This was a fairly new idea for 1985. Such analysis of super-hero conventions was pretty much unknown in the Bronze Age and foreshadows the full blown deconstruction of the genre that Moore would undertake in Watchmen.

Even so, "Night Olympics" is not one of Moore's better works. The prose in the captions is a particularly dark shade of purple and the sports metaphor becomes strained almost to the breaking point pretty quickly. Still, Moore's name alone is enough to make this one of the few Bronze Age Green Arrow stories to be reprinted. It appears in Across the Universe: The DC Universe Stories of Alan Moore, DC Universe: The Stories of Alan Moore (basically the same book, except it includes "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" and The Killing Joke) and Green Arrow/Black Canary: For Better or For Worse.

Green Arrow Month Poll

2011-03-13T12:43:00.000-04:00

Over to the right, at the top of the sidebar, is a rather lengthy list of names of writers who have contributed to the legend of Green Arrow from the Silver Age to today. The latest Gutter Talk poll asks you to vote for your favorite--or favorites. Yes, we're doing things a little differently this time out, and allowing you to vote for more than one option this time. So, you don't have to lie awake tonight agonizing over whether you really prefer Dennis O'Neil's characterization of the Emerald Archer to Mike Grell's. You can vote for both.

Let's take a look at the choices available:

Ed "France" Herron--main writer of Green Arrow's Silver Age adventures
Bob Haney--wrote the Emerald Archer's meetings with Batman and other heroes in The Brave and the Bold and his solo adventures in World's Finest Comics
Dennis O'Neil--defined the modern interpretation of Green Arrow in the award winning Green Lantern/Green Arrow series
Elliot S! Maggin--wrote several years worth of GA's adventures in Action Comics
Mike W. Barr--wrote Green Arrow's first mini-series
Joey Cavalieri--wrote the Green Arrow series in Detective Comics
Mike Grell--writer of Green Arrow's first ongoing monthly series
Kevin Smith--brought Oliver Queen back from the dead in the "Quiver" story line
Brad Meltzer--followed Smith's run with "The Archer's Quest"
Judd Winick--wrote most of the remainder of Green Arrow's second series and its follow-up Green Arrow/Black Canary
J. T. Krul--writer of Green Arrow's current adventures
Other-- many other talented writers, from Gerry Conway to Alan Moore, have tried their hand at Green Arrow stories over the years, and you may prefer one of them to any of the choices I've listed. If you chose this option, be sure to leave a comment and let me know who you were thinking of.

As usual, the poll will be open for seven days and I'll discuss the results here afterward.

(Also as usual, those reading this on Open Salon, click here to vote.)

Green Arrow in The Brave and the Bold (Part 5): Volume 3

2011-03-11T15:01:00.003-05:00

Back in August, when I reviewed issue #35 of the latest volume of The Brave and the Bold, I had no idea that it was the final issue. Apparently, neither did anyone else. There has been, as far as I know, no formal announcement of the book's cancellation from DC, but #36 is, as I write this, six months late. Therefore, this is, for the time being, the final installment of my series on Green Arrow's appearances in B&B.
Harking back to the early days of the original B&B's team-up format, the latest volume had no fixed co-star, instead featuring different pairings of heroes in almost every issue. Often, especially during Mark Waid's tenure as writer, there would be continued stories with different sets of heroes starring in each chapter. Green Arrow is featured in three issues out of the extant thirty-five, with a brief appearance in one more, which about matches the ratio of his appearances in the original series. In the thirty-five issues between #100 and #134 of volume one, for example, the Emerald Archer also makes four appearances.

He first shows up in volume three with #14, teamed with Deadman in a story by Mark Waid and Scott Kolins entitled "The Ghost Killers of Nanda Parbat." The two meet when Green Arrow encounters a pair of the titular "Ghost Killers", who Deadman has pursued to Star City. They are former residents of Nanda Parbat; the mystical Shangri-La hidden in Himalayas that is home to Rama Kushna, the god-like being who gave Deadman his powers and mission; who have been transformed by a demon priest called Siva Anuttara into entities similar to Deadman, except that they kill any living being they possess, after Anuttara imprisoned Rama Kushna in a magical amulet and took over Nanda Parbat. The Ghost Killers have been sent out into the world to spread Anuttara's evil and have set up a base in Star City. When the Ghost Killers attack Green Arrow, Deadman hops into his body to keep them from taking it. Still in Ollie's body, Deadman hops a plane for Nanda Parbat to confront Anuttara directly. At the border of Nanda Parbat, Green Arrow and Deadman are able to jointly control Ollie's body and attempt to destroy Anuttara's amulet with an arrow to free Rama Kushna. Anuttara easily swats the arrow aside, however. Fleeing from the Ghost Killers, Ollie and Deadman enter Rama Kushna proper, where Deadman is forced to exit Ollie's body and becomes a living being. Seemingly enraged by Deadman's delivering them right into their enemies hands, Ollie shoots Deadman, apparently killing him, and flings the body off a cliff and away from Nanda Parbat. Thus ends The Brave and the Bold #14. Green Arrow had gambled that, once outside of the magical influence of Nanda Parbat, Deadman would simply turn into a ghost again and go off to seek help. This is precisely what happens in the next issue in which Deadman recruits Nightwing and Hawkman to come back with him to Nanda Parbat, free Rama Kushna, defeat Anuttara and rescue Green Arrow.
I'm not a big fan of Mark Waid, but this is one of his more enjoyable stories. Green Arrow's a little out of his element amidst all the ghosts and demons and magical goings on, but he holds his own and his quick thinking manages to ultimately save the day.
Green Arrow next appears in issues #21 and #22, sharing cover billing with his old pal Green Lantern. However, despite being featured on the covers, he plays a relatively small role in the story, not even showing up until more than halfway through #21. These two issues comprise the second half of the four part story "Without Sin," written by David Hine and illustrated by Doug Braithwaite and Bill Reinhold. The first two parts feature GL and the Phantom Stranger and the Stranger continues to play a major role in the stories conclusion, getting more on panel time than ostensible co-star Green Arrow. My summary of these issues will focus primarily on GA's part of the story.
As "Without Sin" part three begins, GL and the Stranger are on the planet Kahlo battling an entity called the Purge who has possessed that world's Green Lantern. Purge's schtick is to travel from world to world eliminating each planet's evil by killing the entire population, which he does by possessing the planet's most powerful being, such as, say, a Green Lantern. After the Stranger banishes Purge from Orlan, the Kahloan GL, he and Hal remain on Kahlo to take care of a few loose ends. However, the Stranger senses that Cora, an autistic girl on Earth who appears to hold the key to defeating Purge, is in danger. She is in a hospital for children with birth defects caused by trials of an experimental drug called Genesin. A team of killers has been sent to destroy the hospital to eliminate any evidence of the failed experiment. The Stranger sends a psychic projection to Green Arrow, dispatching him to the hospital to try to save the children. When he arrives, the killers are already there and manage to get off a lucky shot that grazes GA's head and leaves him lying on the floor helpless as they plant a bomb in the basement.
In the conclusion, Green Arrow manages to recover in time to stop the bomb from exploding just as Hal and the Stranger arrive at the hospital for the final confrontation with the Purge. While that's going on, Green Arrow pursues and captures the squad of would be killers. I like the fact that Hine keeps Green Arrow separate for the most part from the magical and science fiction elements of the story, even though that does limit his role.
I've now covered every appearance of Green Arrow in all comic book series carrying the title The Brave and the Bold. At least those set in the mainstream DC Universe. Perhaps in the future, I'll get around to reading and reviewing the comics based on the Cartoon Network series Batman: The Brave and the Bold. Green Arrow has been a frequent guest star on the show and I'm sure he plays a major role in the comic as well. Furthermore, I'm fairly certain that some day, in the not too distant future, DC will revive the title yet again and Green Arrow is sure to be a part of it.

And Now A Word From Our Sponsor...

2011-03-09T13:42:00.001-05:00

What pops into your mind when you think about ads in comic books? If you've only started reading comics in the last decade or so, it's most likely slick full page ads for video games. But if, like me, you are a child of the Bronze Age, the images that come to mind are pages of ads for cheap novelty items, Charles Atlas bodybuilding courses and, of course, Hostess pastries. Anyone who writes about the comics of the Bronze Age will eventually have to address those ubiquitous Hostess ads. They are an essential part of what made the comics of the era so special and so fondly remembered today. In fact, I would go so far as to say that, with their outlandish stories and silly villains, these ads were basically quintessential Bronze Age comics boiled down to one page.

The ads, which ran in DC and Marvel comics for about a decade beginning in the early 70's, featured the company's super-heroes in one page adventures that inevitably involved Hostess Cupcakes, Twinkies or Fruit Pies. The hero most often would use the treats to distract the villains long enough to allow them to be captured. There were also ads that appeared in Harvey Comics featuring that company's characters, but, like the books in which they appeared, they are far less memorable.

The biggest portion of the DC ads featured the original Superfriends quartet of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Aquaman. Green Lantern, Flash, Hawkman, Batgirl and Captain Marvel starred in a couple of adventures each, and villains the Joker and Penguin even got into the act. There were also a trio of ads starring some of DC's lesser known, less popular heroes such as Red Tornado, Plastic Man, and Green Arrow.

In his adventure, presented below, GA uses Fruit Pies to distract a group of kids from the fact that they are seconds away from falling to their deaths, while he works to prevent that from happening. Then, as required by the conventions of these ads, he ends the adventure with a terrible pun.

I have no idea who might have written this ad, but it's glaringly obvious that it was drawn by Curt Swan, who did quite a few of the DC ads.

(Click on the ad to be able to read it)

We know return you to your regularly scheduled blog, already in progress.

Green Arrow in The Brave and the Bold (Part 4): Volume 2

2011-03-07T15:00:00.000-05:00

Nearly a decade after the end of the original The Brave and the Bold, DC revived the venerable title as a six issue mini-series written by Mike Grell and Mike Baron, drawn by Shea Anton Pensa and Pablo Marcos and featuring Green Arrow, the Question and the Butcher. The story has no title other than The Brave and the Bold and the individual issues are simply identified by chapter number.

GA and the Question teamed up several times during Grell's tenure, but I believe that this is the only of those meetings that Grell actually had a hand in writing. Ollie and the Butcher act as if they've met before. If you're unfamiliar with the Butcher, that's understandable. The character, created and owned by Baron, made only a handful of appearances in the early 90's. Previous to B&B vol 2, he debuted in an eponymous mini-series, then appeared in a two part illustrated text story in the pages of Ms. Tree Quarterly. Following this series, he was never seen again. He did get an entry in Who's Who, which describes him as "free lance spook" John Butcher, Lakota Indian and former Army Ranger and CIA operative.

As the story begins, Green Arrow stumbles upon a Native American separatist movement with apparent ties to the Irish Republican Army which Butcher has infiltrated. The Question becomes involved while investigating the murder of lumber baron Owen Hester, who was scalped in an apparent attempt to implicate Indians in the crime, as reporter Vic Sage. Together, the trio uncover a plot to foment a Native American uprising at a Mohawk reservation in Montreal. The man behind the plot is revealed to be part Indian British Lord Sir Arthur Youngblood, head of the conglomerate that owned Hester's company. His plan is that the uprising will cause the Canadian government to shut down the reservation, allowing him to swoop in and claim the land for a massive industrial and residential development project. Naturally, of course, Green Arrow, the Question and Butcher unravel the plot, publicly expose Youngblood's duplicity and save the reservation.
A couple of years later, in an editorial in Shaman's Tears #1, editor Mike Gold wrote :

"...perhaps we should have reconsidered that Brave and Bold series when we knew it wasn't working out. No knock on Mr. Baron; he did excellent work. The idea was a good one, but no matter how hard we tried, Grell's style and Baron's style just didn't mesh."

Though it starts off well enough, the story never does quite gel. Butcher himself says in the story, reporting back to Sage and Ollie after attempting to infiltrate and gain intelligence on the Indian uprising, that he discovered "Bits and pieces, but they don't quite make a whole," which sums up the series better than anything I could could come up with.
While Pensa does a fine job on most of the faces and figures, his backgrounds are a bit crude and blocky. I'm not a big fan of the way he draws Ollie, specifically, Ollie's beard and mustache. He uses squiggly lines that just don't look right to me. It also seems that Pensa had some trouble making deadlines. That's just conjecture, but it would explain why Pablo Marcos steps in to draw #5 and inks Pensa, who had handled the first four issues solo, on the final installment. At least in #6 Green Arrow's beard looks right.
In the time honored Brave and the Bold tradition, there are apparently some continuity issues surrounding this series. According to the DC Data Base entry for Charles Victor Szasz (a.k.a. Vic Sage or The Question), because Butcher was a creator owned character who is no longer part of the DC Universe, it is "unclear" whether the events of this story still fit into continuity.

New Web-Comic Mocks Sheen and Keane

2011-03-06T14:45:00.002-05:00

I'm taking a break from my posts on Green Arrow today to tell you about a blog I just happened upon this afternoon.
The latest media obsession to distract the nation's easily diverted collective attention from such frivolous issues as the economy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and revolution in the Middle East has been provided over the past couple of weeks by my "evil twin," Charlie Sheen. I have been referring to him that way since I discovered that he and I happen to have been born on the same day, September 3, 1965. Recently, though, he has certainly been going out of his way to live up to the "evil" part, granting interviews to several news and entertainment programs and providing them with a seemingly endless supply of bizarre, but eminently quotable, statements. Okay, maybe he's not exactly "evil." Honestly, "pathetic" is probably a better word. "Insane" certainly fits.

Sheen's recent rantings actually provide a unique challenge for the nation's comedians and satirists. How can they make Charlie's lunatic ramblings any funnier than they already are? Well, two bloggers known as Jon L. and Chris D. have managed to do just that on their blog The Sheen Family Circus by combining Sheen's mad mouthings with another pretty easy target for mockery, long running comic panel The Family Circus. They take old Circus panels and replace the original warm and fuzzy, family friendly and, frankly, not very funny captions with a quote from Sheen that perfectly suits the image. In doing so, they have crafted an original and hilarious web-comic.
It's definitely worth reading and I hope they keep it up for awhile. They've certainly got enough raw material, both in the form of Sheen's blathering and more than fifty years of Family Circus panels, for quite a lengthy run.

Green Arrow Helps "The Cop Who Lost His Nerve"

2011-03-05T09:01:00.007-05:00

When I posted about Showcase Presents Green Arrow, I dropped a reference to a story featuring a "stuffed cat arrow" and mentioned that it deserved a post of its own. My friend Mike Carroll, whom I encountered while I was leafing through that volume at the comic shop just prior to purchasing it, appeared to believe that this one six page story alone was reason enough to justify spending seventeen dollars on a five hundred page book. I wouldn't go that far. There are plenty of reasons to buy the book, many of which I covered in my previous post. However, it is one of the quirkiest and most original of Green Arrow's Silver Age adventures.

Originally published in World's Finest Comics #121, "The Cop Who Lost His Nerve" is the only Green Arrow story written by long time Flash and Green Lantern writer John Broome, and is drawn, as are the bulk of the stories in the Showcase Presents volume, by Lee Elias. Broome and Elias team to introduce us to Fred Jenkins, whom the opening caption describes as "...the top rookie on the police force--the most promising patrolman ever to walk a beat." Later, Green Arrow recognizes him as having been "...top student at the Police Academy." However, we are also told that Jenkins has "...a terrible secret" that threatens his future on the force.

Green Arrow and his ward Speedy first encounter Jenkins when they are summoned by the police, via the Arrow Signal, to deal with a robbery in progress. When they arrive, they at first conclude that their super heroic services won't be needed after all, as Jenkins has apparently captured the perpetrator. However, Jenkins becomes paralysed with fear when a cat suddenly appears seemingly out of nowhere, allowing the thief to make a break for it. Fortunately, GA and Speedy are still on the scene to capture the crook using their boomerang arrows.

After the Ace Archers deliver their prisoner into the hands of the authorities, Jenkins confesses his "terrible secret" to them. As a child, Jenkins had been badly injured and almost killed in a terrible automobile accident. Just before losing consciousness, the last sound he heard was the meowing cry of a cat. Since that time, he has had a paralyzing fear of felines.

Jenkins' revelation is overheard by a hood called Weasel. Weasel takes this information to a crook named Artie who immediately begins to plan how he can use it to his advantage. While this is taking place, back in the Arrowcave, Green Arrow is preparing a special arrow to help Officer Jenkins.

The next night, Fred comes across some suspicious looking characters carrying a sack and loitering in front of the Sports Museum after hours. When he questions them, they literally let the cat out of the bag. When the rookie officer once again becomes frozen with fear, one of the thugs grabs his gun. Just as this is occuring, GA and Speedy happen by in the Arrowcar. Suddenly, there's a loud "ME-EE-EOW" and another cat leaps out of nowhere, knocking the gun out of the crook's hand. Fred recovers from his paralysis, retrieves his firearm and aids Green Arrow and Speedy in capturing the gang.

In the next to last panel, Green Arrow is shown holding what appears to be a cat with an arrow sticking out of its butt. (...and where else but in a blog about comics would I ever get an opportunity to write a sentence like that?) He explains that the cat which attacked the crook was actually a dummy attached to an arrrow. The meowing was produced by a fluted arrow fired by Speedy. GA had reasoned that the way to cure Jenkins' fear of cats was to arrange for a cat to save his life. The logic of that sounds a little shaky to me, but it works. The story ends with the now cured rookie petting the very cat the criminal gang had sicced on him earlier.

Now retired, former police officer Fred Jenkins lives by himself in a trailer with three dozen cats and a ferret named Speedy.

Green Arrow Showcased

2011-03-04T14:48:00.003-05:00

Showcase Presents Green Arrow collects the Emerald Archer's Silver Age adventures in one five hundred thirty page black and white volume. Beginning with the first Green Arrow story illustrated by Jack Kirby, the book brings together stories from World's Finest and Adventure Comics with Green Arrow's early appearances in The Brave and the Bold with his initiation into the JLA in Justice League of America #4.

We've all heard it said that prior to his revamp in B&B #85, Green Arrow was a Batman wanna-be without much of a personality. That's true as far as it goes. Like Bruce Wayne, Oliver Queen is a millionaire with a youthful ward who fights crime along side him. All the faux-Bat accoutrements are on hand, as well, including the Arrow Cave, the Arrow Car, the Arrow Plane and the Arrow Signal. As far as the lack of personality goes, to be fair, most of these stories were only eight pages long and it is hard to squeeze a complete story and characterization into that short a space. The stories themselves tend to be formulaic and a bit repetitive. There are two separate stories in here where GA meets a circus clown who parodies the archer in his act. Of course, those stories were originally published several years apart and the writer probably never foresaw that they would end up collected in a book together.

What imagination did go into these stories seems to have been mostly directed to coming with the wide array of trick arrows that Green Arrow and Speedy, and occasionally their female counterpart Miss Arrowette, use to help them catch the bad guys. There were, of course, the ubiquitous net, and handcuff arrows as well as the infamous boxing glove arrow. Among some of the more unusual were:

cloud seeding arrow
hypnotic arrow
rain arrow
aqualung arrow
short circuit arrow
fountain pen arrow
two stage rocket arrow
tumbleweed arrow
sun arrow
antler arrow
needle arrow
baby rattle arrow
bubble gum arrow
chimney sweep arrow
salt arrow
inflatable Green Arrow and Speedy dummy arrows
combination boomerang-balloon arrow
cobweb arrow
bloodhound arrow
paintbrush arrow
anchor arrow
avalanche arrow
mummy arrow
2 way radio arrow
fire extinguisher arrow
blackout arrow

In one story, the Battlin' Bowmen take to sea equipped with an "aqua bow" and special aqua arrows that include:

octopus arrow
glowfish arrow
jellyfish arrow
electric eel arrow

Coming from Miss Arrowette's quiver are:

hairpin arrow
powder puff arrow
lotion arrow
mirror arrow
hair tint arrow
kerchief arrow
hair net arrow
bubble bath arrow
nail file arrow

Then there's the stuffed cat arrow. But that really deserves a post of its own.

In the final analysis, for what they are, which is basically short adventure stories meant to entertain kids for a few minutes, these stories really aren't bad. They also feature some pretty good art. After the Kirby issues, most of the stories are drawn by Lee Elias. Elias started his cartooning career as an assistant to Milton Caniff, and the Caniff influence is clear in the characters' faces and Elias' use of shadow. Other artists represented include original GA artist George Papp, Mike Sekowsky on the JLA issue, and Neal Adams on the groundbreaking B&B #85.

Overall, this is a volume that I would recommend to any fan of Green Arrow or Silver Age Comics in general.

Green Arrow #9

2011-03-02T13:22:00.002-05:00

In the interest of getting the unpleasant part out of the way as quickly as possible, I'm going to kick off Green Arrow Month 2 by reviewing the latest issue of the current Green Arrow monthly series. I picked up #9 last week just to see if the series was still as bad as it started out last year. Of course, I could have saved myself the three bucks by simply looking at the cover and seeing if J.T. Krul was still the writer. I'll give Krul the benefit of a doubt and concede that he may, in fact, be capable of writing a decent comic book story. It appears, however, that said story would not be one featuring Oliver Queen.

For those of you who've wisely avoided the Arrow's latest adventures, let me hit you with a little set-up before we get to the review. After killing the villain Prometheus for destroying a huge chunk of Star City at the end of Justice League: Cry for Justice, Ollie turned himself over to the authorities to stand trial. Found not guilty by a sympathetic jury of Star City residents, Ollie was nonetheless ordered by the judge to leave Star City and never return. In Brightest Day #0, a magical forest suddenly sprang up in the devastated area in the center of Star City. Defying the court order, Green Arrow returned to Star City and took up residence in the forest. Since then, he has been joined by "Knight of the Forest" Galahad, who may, or, of course, may not, be the Galahad of the Camelot legends.

As Green Arrow #9 begins, GA and Galahad have, in turn, been joined by Etrigan the Demon and Jason Blood, magically separated by the power of the forest, and the Phantom Stranger. This issue is marginally better than the first couple, but that is damning with faint praise, as the poets would say. Issues #1 and #2 were ineffably awful, whereas #9 is simply terrible.

By the way, speaking of poets, J.T. Krul is most definitely not one. His dialogue for Etrigan is clunky and has no flow or rhythm whatsoever. Maybe he should have gotten Dan Mishkin and Gary Cohn to write some limericks for the Demon, as they did in Blue Devil Summer Fun Annual #1 back in 1985. Then at least something in this issue would have been worth reading.

After spouting some lines that I suppose are meant to be cryptic but come off more as simply utterly nonsensical, the Stranger bows out. He contributes nothing and I'm not sure what the hell he was even there for. Compounding the problem is the fact that artist Diogenes Neves draws the Stranger without ears. I know that the Stranger's face is traditionally shrouded in shadow, but in Neves' rendering it doesn't just appear as if you can't see his ears, but as if he doesn't have any. In the final panel of page three, the Stranger looks like one of those grey aliens you used to see meeting with the Presidential candidates in The Weekly World News, but with a hat. Other than that, though, the art isn't all that bad. Not great, but not bad, either.

After the Stranger splits, Etrigan's evil begins to infect the forest, causing it to turn dark and attack Ollie, Blood and Galahad. As they struggle to protect the White Tree at the heart of the forest, Galahad is swallowed up by an evil tree and Arrow find himself battling giant magical spiders.

That last paragraph perfectly illustrates my whole problem not only with this issue, but this entire series so far. The premise is all wrong for Green Arrow. I could certainly see Ollie taking the Robin Hood schtick to its logical extreme and hanging out in a forest, but not a magical forest populated by demons and giant spiders. Green Arrow is a character who works best in more down to earth settings and stories. Not to mention the fact that the stories are just plain bad. I know I've said that several times over the course of this post, but it seems I just can't emphasize enough what a mess DC has made of Green Arrow over the course of the last year.

Green Arrow Month 2

2011-03-01T15:00:00.002-05:00

You might have noticed that March is upon us once again, and, just as I did last year, I am unilaterally declaring this Green Arrow Month, in which I shall post a series of entries paying tribute to the Emerald Archer.

Why am I doing this again?

Well, there are a couple of posts I meant to do last year before I kind of ran out of steam, and there are several Green Arrow comics that I've read in the intervening year that I feel are worth writing about.

Some of the topics I'll be covering in the days to come are:

Green Arrow's appearances in The Brave and the Bold volumes 2 and 3
a review of Showcase Presents Green Arrow
Alan Moore's Green Arrow story from Detective Comics #449 and 450 in 1985
Green Arrow's Hostess Fruit Pie Ad
Green Arrow meets Jon Sable...sort of
a review of the latest issue of the current Green Arrow series

We'll kick off the festivities officially tomorrow with that review of the current issue. See you then.

Dick Tracy Gets New Lease On Life at 80 Years Old

2011-02-27T09:23:00.000-05:00

Maybe you already know about this, as the announcement was made several weeks ago, but there's big news about the long running comic strip Dick Tracy. Given the trend of recent months, with a trio of long running strips; Cathy, Little Orphan Annie and Brenda Starr, Reporter; coming to an end, you probably think I'm about to write that Tracy is set to join them. (And the panel from a recent strip that I chose might reinforce that misconception.) It is true that Dick Locher, who began drawing the strip in 1983 and has been writing it since 2005, is stepping down. However, unlike Brenda Starr, which was shut down when the creative team called it quits, syndicate Tribune Media Services apparently feels that Tracy is profitable enough to warrant continuing. Thus, beginning on March 14, a new creative team will begin chronicling the adventures of America's most famous gangbuster, just in time for the strips 80th anniversary this coming October.

I can't say much about the new writer, as I'm unfamiliar with Mike Curtis. Apparently, however, he's been writing comic books for some three decades now. Though these have been, for the most part, kid's comics such as Casper, Richie Rich, and Scooby-Doo, which explains my complete lack of knowledge of him and his work.

On the other hand, I can say with a certain degree of confidence that the strip will at least look good. The new artist is comic book veteran Joe Staton, best known for his lengthy run on Green Lantern, and his own creation E-Man. Staton has said that Tracy has always been his dream job and that Tracy creator Chester Gould was a major influence on the development of his distinctive, cartoony style.

I haven't really followed Dick Tracy on a regular basis since about the time Locher began drawing it. That's not because of Locher, though I admit that I far prefer Locher's predecessor, the late Rick Fletcher. In those days before the Wild, Wild, Web changed everything, I found myself living in a town where I didn't have daily access to a paper that carried the strip. Now, of course, most of the "newspaper" strips I read are ones that my local newspaper doesn't even carry. In the case of Dick Tracy, recently I've only encountered it when Josh Fruhlinger turns his snarky attention to it over at The Comics Curmudgeon, as he, in fact, does today. I do plan to be reading starting in two weeks when Curtis and Staton's run begins.

'Til then, here's a preview image of the new team's work that's shown up around the web:

You can't really get a sense of Curtis' writing from these two panels, but, as I predicted, the characters haven't looked that good since Rick Fletcher drew them.

The Uncollected: Hawkworld

2011-02-25T14:40:00.000-05:00

I have long lamented the fact that much of John Ostrander's work for DC is currently out of print, including the two finest works of his career, Spectre and Hawkworld. I'll get to Spectre another time. Today, I'm going to focus on Hawkworld and why it deserves to be reprinted.
The Hawkworld ongoing series followed a three issue mini-series by Tim Truman, which, by the way, has been collected in a trade paperback. The monthly book was written by Ostrander, with Truman co-writing the first nine issues, wrapping up the loose ends from the mini-series. After Truman departed, Ostrander was really able to cut loose and make the series his own, producing some of his finest work up to that point in time.
Graham Nolan drew most of the first 25 issues, except for #13, drawn by Tom Mandrake, and #20, which was drawn by Gary Kwapisz. Jan Duursema drew issues #27-29, and Truman returned to illustrate the final three issues of the series.

Mike Gold was the series' initial editor, with Archie Goodwin replacing him as of #26. When Goodwin took over, the series, which had leaned more toward hard science fiction than straight super-hero stories, began to move toward a more traditionally super-heroic approach. The final storyline, while still quite good, doesn't really live up to standards set during the book's first two years.
The monthly Hawkworld series was essentially the story of citizens of a repressive, totalitarian world encountering and reacting to American society and the ideas and ideals upon which this country was founded and claims to be guided by. Following the events of the mini-series, Katar Hol, a "wingman" in the police force of the planet Thanagar, is named Thanagar's Greatest Hero for exposing his mentor B'yth, the previous holder of that title, as a criminal. He and his partner Shayera Thal are sent on what is ostensibly a diplomatic mission to the planet Earth, which has opened up a Thanagarian embassy in the wake of the Invasion crossover event. Hol's real purpose in accepting the assignment to Earth, however, is to find and capture B'yth, who escaped and fled here. The pair land in the American city of Chicago, where Shayera works with a pair of local police officers to "study Earth police methods", in the process falling in love with one of them. Katar, meanwhile, works with a Chicago museum planning an exhibition of Thanagarian artifacts while continuing his search for B'yth.
Although a case could be made that the pre-Crisis On Infinite Earths Hawkman's home of Midway City was analogous to Chicago, it seems the real reason Hawkworld was set in Chicago is the same reason so many other comics are set in New York City. Chicago is where John Ostrander lives. As a Chicago resident, he was able to bring a real sense of the essence of the city to his stories.

Hawkworld was a comic book that deserved to be controversial, and it was, but for all the wrong reasons. This revamped version of Hawkman was introduced into the current DC Universe of 1990 as a new character, thus effectively invalidating all previous appearances of the Silver Age version of the character going all the way back to The Brave and the Bold #34. This pissed a lot of people off, and they just didn't care how good the current stories were but, rather, how much they screwed up their precious continuity. There were, of course, a few continuity questions to be answered, as there always are when a character is revamped. The major ones were "If Hawkman just came to Earth now, who was the guy in the old Justice League of America?" and "If that was the Golden Age Hawkman in the JLA, as the first annual says, then who was in the Justice League International while he was trapped in Limbo endlessly reliving the Norse legend of Ragnarok, as shown in The Last Days of the Justice Society of America?"
For my part, I didn't much care about the continuity issues. I've always favored good storytelling over rigid adherence to continuity. Besides, Ostrander neatly answered all the continuity questions to my satisfaction over the course of the series.
Frankly, I'd never really been all that impressed with Hawkman prior to Hawkworld, anyway. The few stories I'd read had been, at best, bland. Ostrander was telling the best Hawkman stories ever, and if he had to toss out thirty years of forgettable stories to do so, then so be it.
Unfortunately, the flap over continuity pretty much crowded out discussion in the letters pages of the provocative ideas Ostrander was presenting in Hawkworld. That's the real reason I say that this series truly deserved to be controversial. This is one of the few comic books that not only made think, but made me question my assumptions and look at things in a new way.
When Katar first reads the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence in #3, he asks of his human companions, "Do your people have any idea of what they are really saying here? How dangerous this document is?"
I, for one, did not, at least not until I read Hawkworld. I'd honestly never really thought about it, instead taking the freedoms that Americans enjoy by virtue of these founding documents for granted. It took a comic book to make me seriously consider for the first time what the words of those documents and the principles upon which the United States of America was founded truly mean.

If that weren't enough, Ostrander managed to convey these dangerous ideas within the framework of an exciting and action packed science fiction/super-hero tale. That's harder than it looks. Many writers, such as Dennis O'Neil in Green Lantern/Green Arrow, have attempted it, but none have pulled it off as effectively as Ostrander does here. Even more amazing is that he managed to do it again in Spectre.
I have a theory as to why Hawkworld has gone unreprinted. DC has made a royal mess out of Hawkman over the past couple of decades. While not all of that can laid at the feet of Hawkworld, the roots do lie in that series. I think DC just wants to pretend the whole thing never happened. Sadly, in doing so, they are also forgetting some of the best stories they've ever published.

Tales of The Uncollected

2011-02-24T14:13:00.001-05:00

Graphic novels and trade paperback collections have been an important part of the publishing strategies of every major comics publisher for about a decade and a half now. Storylines in ongoing comics end up in trade paperback form almost as soon as the last chapter hits the shops. Meanwhile, publishers increasingly turn to the nearly endless supply of older material from the eight decade history of the comics industry in order to fill comic shop and book store shelves. Even comics that are perhaps best forgotten have been dredged up and spiffed up and re-presented in trade paperback form. Gold Key's adaptation of the original Star Trek series was, to put it mildly, awful, especially the early issues. Yet those horrors have been lovingly restored and reprinted in a series of TPBs from publisher Checker Books.

Nonetheless, despite the way it may appear, the inevitable trade paperback collection is not inevitable in all cases. Back in 1993, Malibu Comics announced the forthcoming release of a mini-series entitled The Life and Times of Forever Maelstrom through its creator owned Bravura line. It was to be Howard Chaykin's follow-up to his earlier Bravura series Power & Glory. Before it could be published, Malibu was bought up by Marvel, who, as I understand it, wanted the company not for its intellectual properties but for its patented coloring process, and the Bravura line came to an end.

We now flash forward a decade to 2003. Forever Maelstrom finally sees print as a six issues mini-series from DC, where Chaykin was working at the time on various projects that included American Century and Barnum. When I saw the first issue at a comics shop, I left it sitting there on the shelf. After all, I figured, there'd be a trade collection and I'd buy that. I'd waited ten years to read that story, I reasoned, I could wait another six months. It's seven years later, and I still have yet to read Forever Maelstrom. The "inevitable" trade paperback failed to materialize.
The news from Vertigo last month that Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's Flex Mentallo mini-series will finally be reprinted this fall after languishing for fifteen years in reprint limbo has got me thinking about other deserving comics series or storylines that have never been collected or reprinted. Many of these, I'll be writing about at length in future posts.
One that I've already written about is J.M. DeMatteis' Dr. Fate. This is one of his best works, yet has not gotten the recognition it deserves from most fans. Speaking of DeMatteis, the first five issues of Seekers Into The Mystery have been collected, but there remain ten issues of this unfortunately short-lived series that you'll have to hunt through back issue bins to read.
Of course, I really enjoy spending countless hours pawing through back issue bins and bargain boxes searching for the one or two elusive issues that will complete my collection of a given title. For me, the hunt is part of the fun of reading and collecting comics. To put in Zen terms, the journey is the destination. I realize that not everyone, however, may share that philosophy. A lot of people just want to read the story without all the bother of tracking it down. They deserve to read these great stories that have yet to be reprinted and, as things stand now, they are unfortunately missing out.
It also struck me that as central to the DC Universe as Kobra has been over the past three decades, it seems that his earliest appearances should be collected. I envision a Showcase Presents volume encompassing all his Bronze Age appearances from Kobra #1 up to Batman and the Outsiders #28, including his encounter with Ambush Bug in DC Comics Presents #81.
Among the comics I plan to write about in the future are the DC comics work of writer John Ostrander, of which less than a handful have been reprinted. The first of those posts will appear tomorrow and deal with Hawkworld.
I'd like your input as well, readers. What series that have yet to be collected do you feel are deserving of that honor, and why? I'm looking forward to reading your comments.

Trivia Challenge Answer: "We're Off...."

2011-02-21T14:12:00.000-05:00

As promised on Friday, I am back with the answer to the latest Gutter Talk Trivia Challenge. You may remember that I asked you if you could name the first co-publishing venture between Marvel and DC Comics, noting that it was not, as you might have believed, Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man, though that was, indeed, the first meeting of any of the two companies' super-heroes.
Now, without further ado, the answer is (drumroll please, Maestro.):

MGM's Marvelous Wizard of Oz

(Published in 1975--A year prior to Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man)

And now, also as promised, the not all that secret origin of this historic comic book...
Through sheer coincidence, in 1975 both DC and Marvel had a Wizard of Oz comic in the works. Marvel was planning an adaptation of L. Frank Baum's novel, while DC had acquired the rights from MGM to adapt the 1939 movie. Upon learning of DC's project, Stan Lee approached DC publisher Carmine Infantino with the idea that the two companies pool their efforts and jointly put out one book. What eventually saw print was an adaptation of the film produced by writer Roy Thomas and artist John Buscema, the team which had been set to do Marvel's comic based on the book.

The legend about this book, confirmed by Roy Thomas in an essay in the book Stan's Soapbox: The Collection, is that Buscema laid out the book entirely from memory, without a plot from Thomas, even though he hadn't seen the film for many years. Thomas claims that when he got the pages back only one or two small scenes where out of place.

Now on to the "bonus question": What is the word that means, as defined by Wiktionary, "A form of error arising from mishearing a spoken or sung phrase" (though I've actually only ever heard it used to refer to misheard song lyrics)?

The word is "mondegreen." I love the word precisely because it's so obscure and I'm really the only person I actually know who's ever heard of it.

If you're wondering how I could hear "new wastes of winter" as "new age of friendship," just listen to the song. Ian Anderson doesn't exactly enunciate all that clearly. Besides, either phrase really makes just as much sense in the context of the song, which is to say not very bloody much at all. I mean, "Titanic breaking children lost in melting crystal tears." What the hell is that supposed to mean?
Actually, if I were going to propose a serious theory, I would suppose that my brain, being unable to interpret Anderson's mumbling, filled in a phrase that fit the song's rhythm and seemed to make sense. At least as much sense as Progressive Rock lyrics ever make, anyway. For example, is there anybody who can really tell me what "Roundabout" by Yes is supposed to be about?

Honestly, though, however nonsensical "Something's On The Move" may be, I still love it. It was the first Jethro Tull song I ever heard (or, more appropriately, misheard) and thus my introduction to a truly great band.

The Funky Flap

2011-02-20T11:17:00.000-05:00

The latest minor comic related controversy on the Wild, Wild Web, as I discovered from reading the Robot 6 blog at Comic Book Resources, involves Tom Batiuk, creator of Funky Winkerbean, and his lawyers taking on a site devoted to commenting on and critiquing the strip. Blog hosting service Wordpress received a letter from Batiuk's legal representatives demanding that they take down two sites, Stuck Funky and Son of Stuck Funky, which had been re-posting the strips with original commentary. The original Stuck Funky was no longer being updated, and Son of had stepped up to continue its work.

Batiuk, in a response to a query from the Daily Cartoonist web-site, insists that he was merely acting to preserve his copyright and trademark protection. Predictably, there are some who suspect that he was motivated more by a desire to shut down a particularly vocal critic.

Of course, if Batiuk were just trying to shut the guy up, he probably wouldn't come out and say so. Still, there's no reason to doubt Batiuk's account of his motives. It all depends, as I see it, on what, if anything, happens next. Son of Stuck Funky has resurfaced with its own domain name and a slight change in format. Rather than re-posting the strip, which is what Batiuk was ostensibly objecting to, the posts now link to the strip at a site authorized to carry it. That really should end the matter. If Batiuk is, indeed, simply concerned with protecting his legal rights and not in censoring his critics, I suspect it will and no more about this matter will be heard. Even if he were more interested in just shutting this blogger up, he must realize that taking any further action would only generate more publicity, the majority of which would surely be negative. In fact, as one Daily Cartoonist commenter noted, this whole incident has mostly served to bring attention to Son of Stuck Funky. The truth of which is attested to by the fact that I'm even writing this post.

All of this has got me thinking. I've been trying to come up with ways to attract more readers to this blog. Maybe I should start a feud with Scott Adams.

Gutter Talk Trivia Challenge 2: To Celebrate The Dawning of the New Wastes of Winter

2011-02-18T14:34:00.010-05:00

It's been a while since we've done one of these trivia quizzes, and while I'm sure you haven't exactly missed it or been clamoring for another, I'm going ahead and serving up another one anyway.

Just about everyone knows that Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man, published in 1976, was the first ever meeting of super-heroes from the two largest comics publishers, DC and Marvel. It was not, however, the two companies' first co-publication. So, what was, then?

I'll let you think on that over the weekend, and I'll be back on Monday with the answer and the story behind that historic first co-publishing venture.

Now for an explanation of the title of this post. For over thirty years, from the time I first heard Jethro Tull's song "Something's On The Move," I was sure that the third line in the first verse was "To celebrate the dawning of the new age of friendship." That line seemed to be perfectly fit the subject of this post, so I decided to use it as the title. Then I went and looked up the lyrics for "Something's On The Move" on-line. Well, it turns out I'd been wrong for three decades. The line is, in fact, "To celebrate the dawning of the new wastes of winter." I couldn't use that line for my post title. It wouldn't make any sense. However, I couldn't think of anything else. So, I went with it regardless and "sense" be damned.

I'd initially planned to include a "bonus question" asking you to name the song I took this post's title from. But I just told you that and the story behind it. However, that story suggested another "bonus question."

There is a word for, as Wiktionary defines it, "A form of error arising from mishearing a spoken or sung phrase." Do you know what it is?

I do, and I'll tell you on Monday.

Did I Err?

2011-02-17T18:46:00.003-05:00

Let's be charitable and say that perhaps I overstated things a bit. Though the truth is that I'm guilty of passing on unsubstantiated rumor as fact. I should have my own show on Fox News.
Back in October, in my post entitled "Death and the Captain", I related the story that Neil Gaiman had been so angered by the use of Death of the Endless in Captain Atom #42 in 1990 that he insisted that no one could use Death or any of his Sandman characters without his express permission. Well, Brian Cronin addressed this very issue this past weekend in his latest installment of "Comic Book Legends Revealed." It turns out I got quite a bit wrong.
Whereas I was relying entirely on hearsay for my account, Cronin went straight to the source and talked to Gaiman himself. The Sandman writer denies having "laid down the law," as I put it in that earlier post, to DC, and says that he was not angry about the story. In fact, he tells Cronin that "...it wasn't a big deal." I suppose if I were to characterize Gaiman's feelings about the Captain Atom issue as related by Cronin, I would say he was "chagrined." Cronin quotes Gaiman as saying:

"I just felt it confused things — she wasn’t an 'aspect' of Death. She was Death. When one day Nekron or the Black Racer stops existing, she’ll be there to take them."

That part, at least, I got right, by the way.
Gaiman goes on to say:

"If the script or lettered comic had been run by me back then I would have noticed the continuity issues and corrected them. As it was, it wasn’t a big deal: it was a fine comic as far as it went, but it tried to shoehorn Death into DC Continuity and got it wrong. So I clarified matters in Sandman 20."

That last part is something I hadn't heard before. Gaiman's response to the story in Captain Atom was not to make unreasonable demands of DC management, but to write a story of his own in order to define and clarify Death's true nature and role in the universe. That story, entitled "Facade," appeared in Sandman #20 and is reprinted in the book Dream Country. In it, Death encounters Urania Blackwell, the Element Girl, a long forgotten supporting character from Metamorpho's Silver Age series. She is depressed and wants to die, but her elemental nature makes killing herself almost impossible. She encounters Death, who had come for the woman upstairs and heard Urania crying. Ultimately, the Sandman's sister gives the Element Girl some advice to help her attain her goal. But first, Death takes a few panels to explain just who and what she is.

My purpose in writing about Captain Atom #42 in the first place was to show that Death's recent appearance in Action Comics was not, as some were claiming, the character's first appearance in a mainstream DC Universe super-hero comic. Cronin's column actually reinforces that point by mentioning a Death cameo in Legion of Super-Heroes in 1992 that I'd been unaware of previously. LSH #38 was the issue where Keith Giffen and Tom and Mary Bierbaum blew up the Earth, so it's only logical that Death should be on hand for the festivities.

I apologize for the error. I'll try to be better at checking my facts in the future. Because I really hate to be wrong.

Superman Poll Results

2011-02-15T14:43:00.020-05:00

Voting closed yesterday on the latest Gutter Talk poll which asked readers to pick their favorite from among the various actors who've portrayed Superman in movies and TV shows over the past six decades. I'd like to thank everyone who participated and especially those who shared their opinions in the comments. A few more people took part this time than in my previous poll, which asked for readers' favorite comic by Mike Grell. Since my readership numbers have been pretty constant for the past few months, I'm guessing the increase is due to people being more familiar with Superman, at least in movies and television, than they are with Grell's work. I did have one person tell me, while the previous poll was in progress, that his favorite Grell comic was one Grell didn't do, meaning that he obviously wasn't a fan.

Among comments on the current poll was this one:

"Part of the consideration should be how each actor played the dual identity of both Superman and Clark Kent. George Reeves made for a fine Superman, but his Clark seemed a little underdeveloped. Therefore, for me, the choice would be a race between Kirk Alyn and Christopher Reeve."

On a purely objective level, I would concede that Christopher Reeve was the best at portraying the dual role of Clark Kent/Superman. Still, perhaps due to his version being the one I was exposed to first, my vote went to George Reeves. I just love the exasperated expression on his face whenever crooks would shoot at him, as if he were thinking, "Don't they ever learn?" Plus, I actually like the way he played Clark Kent, which, due to budget constraints, he did a lot more than he played Superman. Rather than an inept bumbler, Reeves portrayed Kent as a smart, competent and even tough reporter who was more than able to hold his own in the constant verbal jousting with Lois Lane.

Michael N. left this comment:

"George Reeves, but with (needless to say) better scripts."

I certainly agree with you there, Michael. Although the first two seasons, especially the first year under producer Robert Maxwell, were much better than the last four. Two things happened with the third season that effected the quality of the series. Whitney Ellsworth, who took over from Robert Maxwell in the second year, and the powers that be at DC, decided that the show should be more of a kiddie show, so the violence and darker tone of Maxwell's episodes was abandoned in favor of a more comedic flavor. Secondly, in order to ensure the show's future success in syndication, the producers decided to shoot in color. This was an expensive proposition back in the early days of TV and ate up most of the budget, leaving little for special effects or better writers.
I might add that Christopher Reeve could have benefited from better scripts in his last two outings as the Man of Steel, and they didn't have those excuses. After all, they could afford to hire Richard Pryor.

Now for the results. The winner isn't much of a surprise. As I predicted at the beginning, it was for the most part a two man race between George Reeves of the 1950's Adventures of Superman TV show and Christopher Reeve of the 1970's and 80's film franchise. Between them they garnered nearly 80% of the total votes. In the end, Christopher Reeve came out on top with a plurality of 46%.

It was nice to see that at least one person remembered Kirk Alyn, the first screen Superman. Alyn set a standard for all who've followed him to live up to. I was a little surprised at the complete lack of love, and votes, for Dean Cain of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. In my opinion, he was a pretty good Superman, and the series, especially in the first couple of seasons, wasn't bad, either. Being of a somewhat paranoid nature, I'm convinced that at least one of the two people who voted for Superman Returns' Brandon Routh did so to make me look bad, since I wrote that I didn't expect him to get any votes.

That wraps up the latest Gutter Talk poll. I'll be back with another one before too long. If you've got a burning question you'd like my readers to answer, let me know.

The Blog of Love

2011-02-14T14:36:00.002-05:00

As much as I may try to ignore it, I can not help but be reminded that today is Valentine's Day,which I remain convinced is all a vast conspiracy by the greeting card and candy industries to remind me that I HAVE NO ONE AND NO ONE LOVES ME!! Except my readers, that is. You guys love me, right?
Anyway, now that I've gotten the insane ranting portion of this post out of the way, let's get to the point. Since I wrote about a horror comic on Halloween and spent the whole month of December blathering about Christmas themed comics, you might expect me to write about an old romance comic today. However, I can't do that, because I don't read them. I can not truthfully say that I've never read one. I have. ONE. It was a reprint of the very first romance comic, 1947's Young Romance #1. Despite the fact that it was by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, I wasn't terribly impressed.
Although now that I think about, I suppose you could count Tom Beland's True Story, Swear To God as a romance comic. It's subtitle, after all, is "The True Story of a Real Life Romance." I've read several issue of that comic and absolutely love it. However, I really consider it an autobiographical comic. Besides, when I say I've only read one romance comic, I'm referring to the fictional romance story anthologies that existed from the late 1940's until the 70's.

Anyway, if you really want to read about that type of comic, you're in luck. There's a whole blog devoted to them. It's called Sequential Crush and is written by a woman named Jacque Nodell. Ms. Nodell describes her blog this way, "Sequential Crush is a blog devoted to preserving the memory of romance comic books and the creative teams that published them throughout the 1960s and 1970s."

So, if that's the kind of thing you're into, Sequential Crush is definitely worth checking out. But don't forget to surf on back here to Gutter Talk when you're done.

Elsewhere in Secret Six #30

2011-02-13T09:40:00.000-05:00

I reviewed the story in Secret Six #30 yesterday, but there are a couple of other things between the covers of that issue worth commenting on.

There's not really much I can say about the preview of Flash #9, however. Nothing in this snippet of that upcoming (at the time of Secret Six #30's release on February 2--it's out now) comic makes me want to pick it up or interests me in the upcoming Flashpoint event it foreshadows. Maybe instead of just showing the first couple of pages, these previews should present a page or two from later in the story to give the curious reader a somewhat better idea of what the story is really about without, of course, giving away any secrets or major surprises. That might make a casual reader more likely to actually buy the previewed issue.

On the positive side, as of this issue, letters columns are back. The letters printed here don't comment on past issues of Secret Six, however. This is a generic letters page labeled "DC Universe" that probably appeared in all DC books last week. Presented are a sampling of some of the first missives DC has received since announcing last month that it would be bringing letters pages back. Ian Sattler answers each letter in a sometimes chatty, sometimes snarky tone reminiscent of the classic letters columns of my youth. This little preview has served to whet my appetite for the return of letters column in earnest, which hopefully will occur in next month's comics.

The most exciting thing to me, other than the story, in this issue is the "DC Nation" column (which you can read by clicking on those words). John Rozum talks about the return of Xombi. To me, this is very good news and something that I honestly never thought would ever happen. Xombi was my favorite, and, in my opinion at least, the best, of the Milestone line of comics from the mid-90's. It was certainly the weirdest, which is the main reason I never expected to see a revival. The series' undying hero David Kim faced a succession of bizarre antagonists that wouldn't have been out of place in Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol stories. In fact, Xombi was the only title that managed to capture the feel of the early Vertigo titles for the mainstream super-hero audience. Contrast that with Vertigo's own attempt at creating an original Vertigo style super-hero comic, Scarab, which was pretty much a muddled, utterly unreadable mess.

The only disappointing thing about the announcement, from a purely fanboy perspective, is that Frazer Irving will be drawing the series. That's not to knock on Mr. Irving, whose art I'm not actually familiar with, but it would have been nice to have original series artist J.J. Birch/Joe Brozowski return for the revival. His art added a lot to the weird and creepy feel of the first series.

Maybe I'll write DC a letter and tell them that. (See how I tied it all together at the end there? Pretty slick, huh?)

Secret Six #30

2011-02-12T10:10:00.000-05:00

I can say honestly and without equivocation that Secret Six #30 is, without a doubt, the best issue of that title that I have ever read. It is also (and I'm sure you could see this "revelation" coming from five miles away on a foggy day) the only issue, so far at least, of Secret Six that I've ever read. It won't be the last.
The only reason I bought this issue is because it's the first part of a crossover with Doom Patrol. I probably could have skipped this issue. I'm sure DP writer Keith Giffen would have given me enough info that I wouldn't be totally lost if I'd opted to only buy the second part of the story. Giffen's pretty good about that actually. As it turns out, there are plenty of reasons to buy this issue other than just to get the bare bones of the plot.
Before I picked up this comic, I read a few of the reviews on-line. The general consensus out there in web land is that this issue is very good, and that Secret Six writer Gail Simone does the DP as well as Giffen. One reviewer admits to laughing out loud at several points during the issue.
So, what did I think about it? Well, it was very good, I laughed out loud a few times, and Simone does, indeed, write the Doom Patrol as well as Giffen. She even gets Ambush Bug right, which isn't easy. Even Giffen, the character's creator, hasn't always pulled it off. Bumblebee is just as useless here as she's been over in the Patrol's own book. Her big contribution to the team this issue is to get swallowed by a mutant man-fish.
Before this issue, I never would have thought Bane could be funny. But there is a hilarious scene near the beginning involving the backbreaker on a blind date. After meeting his date, he thrusts a bouquet of flowers in her face and flatly declares, "I wish to mate." The girl, Spencer, is a dancer at a super-hero themed gentlemen's club called "Superiors", which is where she and Bane meet. When she's harrassed by a drunken customer, Bane punches his face in, then asks, "Shall I snap his spine? I am unsure of the etiquette?" The date ends there, as Bane is ushered out before the cops can arrive, but Spencer tells him to call her. Not only is Bane funny, but he actually comes off somewhat sweet, innocent and naive. I certainly never would have expected that of the guy who crippled the Batman.
Then there's Deadshot. Especially after John Ostrander and Kim Yale's excellent, but very, very grim, 1988 mini-series, I wouldn't have pegged Floyd Lawton for a barrel of laughs either. However, he's got a couple of very funny lines here as well.
The story concerns a slacker kid named Eric who suddenly inherits his grandfather's fortune and criminal empire. He decides to rebuild the organization as C.R.U.S.H. (Companians Recently United to Spread Hate--a great acronym, by the way) with his gamer friends and sets out to get himself a secret headquarters inside a volcano. The volcano he has his eyes on just happens to be on Oolong Island, current home of the Doom Patrol, so he hires the Secret Six to take over the island for him.
Given the overall irreverent tone of this issue, I'm not surprised that the Secret Six appears to consist of eight members. However, I didn't recognize about half of them and it would have been nice if Simone had taken the time to introduce them to any Doom Patrol readers, like me, picking this up just for the crossover, or to introduce the Patrol to Secret Six readers who for some reason aren't reading their book.
That minor quibble aside, this was an excellent comic, and enough to make me want to read more of this series. I've already bought the six issues mini-series that preceded the current monthy and includes the first encounter between the Doom Patrol and the Secret Six, and I plan to read that this weekend. I might even check out next issue, which the blurb at the end of this one promises contains "...the most requested Secret Six story ever!" Don't know what that could be, but I am a little curious.
Personally, the story I'd most like to see is Bane and Spencer actually getting to finish their date.

For Those Who Give A Damn...

2011-02-10T19:37:00.001-05:00

...here's the latest news from Marvel Comics and my reactions to it. But first, a recap For Those Who Came In Late.

Previously...

Marvel killed off (for now) Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, in Fantastic Four #587, and announced plans to bring that title to an end (again), replacing it with a new title they were calling simply FF.

There was, I remember, much speculation down at the local comics shop the day Fantastic Four #587 came out as to just what FF might stand for. The most popular guess was "First Family." My guess was "F**k You, Fanboy!."

Well, neither of those turned out to be correct, though mine will probably end up being closer to the way things turn out over the long haul. Anyway, Marvel has announced that the former Fantastic Four shall henceforth be known as The Future Foundation. It has also been revealed the all-new, only slightly different FF will have a new member. This is to be none other than the Amazing Spider-Man, sporting a brand new costume which hopefully he'll only wear when hanging around the Richards family.

With all that Dan Slott has done over in Amazing Spider-Man to pound into the readers' heads how smart old Peter Parker is, doesn't it seem a bit redundant to have two super geniuses on the same team?

Furthermore, I, and his co-creator Stan Lee, for that matter, have always preferred Spidey as a loner, and his joining any team seems just slightly wrong for the character. Still, he has been a member of the Avengers for several years now and that hasn't work out too badly. However, having him on two teams at once stretches credibility perhaps just a little too much. Of the two teams, though, because Peter is a scientist, he seems to fit in better with the Fant...er...Future Foundation. Although the Avengers at least let him wear his own clothes to work.

Starman/Congorilla #1

2011-02-09T15:04:00.000-05:00

This comic came out last month, so I guess I'm a little late in writing about it, but I put off reading it for awhile. I was a little afraid that I wasn't going to like it. Now, if you knew me at all, you'd think that a comic starring an obscure Bronze Age character and a gorilla would be tailor made for me. However, this particular comic has close ties to the current run of Justice League of America, a comic that I'm not reading, and Justice League: Cry For Justice, a comic that, based on the reviews I've read, you couldn't pay me to read. I've seen that series compared to Identity Crisis, with many people actually saying that Cry is worse. On the other hand, even though Starman/Congorilla writer James Robinson is the same man responsible for Cry For Justice, he is also the author of the excellent Starman series from the 1990's and this one-shot features one of that series' major supporting characters. In short, I really didn't know what to expect from this comic, but I was leaning slightly toward pessimism. Starman, after all, ended a decade ago and the ink is barely dry on Cry For Justice.
Fortunately for all concerned, "Now and Then", the story in Starman/Congorilla #1, turns out to be a pretty decently entertaining comic. The story concerns the efforts of the eponymous heroes, together with Animal Man and Rex the Wonder Dog, to find a Congorilla's friend, a super-intelligent gorilla scientist named Malavar, so that Malavar can use his knowledge of other dimensions in order to free the Justice League from a giant force dome which has mysteriously appeared over Washington D.C., trapping the League and a good chunk of the city citizenry inside. That sounds a bit complicated, but "Now and Then" really boils down to a small group of heroes fighting off an army of terrorist gorillas.
As I mentioned above, there is a lot of back story behind this issue, leading to the story being heavy on expository dialogue. However, that's a lot better than Robinson just assuming we've read all the relevant past comics and throwing us into the action without any explanation and leaving us totally bewildered. With all the exposition and the way the story shifts back and forth in time between the fight with the gorilla terrorists and the events leading up to it, the story had the potential to be a confusing mess. Fortunately, however, thanks to the clear and conscise stoytelling skills of Robinson and artist Brett Booth, this doesn't happen. The story breezes along at a brisk pace and Robinson manages to make most of the expository dialogue sound perfectly natural.
In the way that this story manages to be part of the larger story of the DC Universe yet accessible to a casual reader, as well as its generally lighthearted tone and high concept, psuedo-science fiction premise, Starman/Congorilla reminds me a little of comics of the Bronze Age.

The Road Not Taken: DC Anti-Heroes

2011-02-07T20:43:00.001-05:00

I'm not really a huge fan of Firestorm, but I still occasionally check out the Firestorm Fan blog from time to time, and I'm really glad that I clicked on today's post. The blog's author, Shag, writes about a series of drawings now up for auction at Comic Link that purport to be concept drawings from the mid 80's for a never produced line of toys from Kenner that was to be called "DC Anti-Heroes." The line apparently would have consisted of three alternate, darker versions of six DC heroes: Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Firestorm, Robin and Cyborg. The three versions of each hero presented are "High Tech," "Road Warrior," and "Robotic."

Let's take a look at a couple of these drawings:

I think, and I'm not the first to observe this, that the "High Tech" version of Superman bears an uncanny resemblance to the Eradicator from the "Reign of The Supermen" storyline. Since these drawings predate that saga by about six years, it is possible that whoever designed the Eradicator could have been influenced by them. Also, now that I think about it, the "Robotic" Supes has a passing resemblance to the armor Superman donned after losing his powers in the "Krisis of the Krimson Kryptonite" storyline, which was also a few years in the future at the time these drawings were produced.

All three of these Wonder Woman drawings are among the most hideous character designs I've ever seen...

...though these Batman redesigns give them a run for their money. Chris Sims says of the "High Tech" version, "Basically, it's a 100% accurate prediction of what every comic would look like in the '90s four years before they actually happened."

The Robin redesigns are actually pretty cool, and my favorites of the bunch. However, I'm not exactly sure what's supposed to be so "High Tech" about the "High Tech" Robin.

"Robotic" Cyborg? Isn't that a bit redundant? In fact, isn't "High Tech" Cyborg as well?

Finally...

I don't have anything to say about these Firestorm drawings, but it seemed wrong to leave them out.

These concept drawings offer a fascinating look behind the scenes of the toy industry and an intriguing glimpse of what might have been. Thanks again to Shag at Firestorm Fan for bringing them to my attention.

New Gutter Talk Poll: Vote For Your Favorite Superman Actor

2011-02-07T16:17:00.000-05:00

Henry Cavill--the new Superman

Speaking of Superman, as I was in yesterday's post, I have decided that it's about time for another Gutter Talk Poll. This one was inspired by the recent announcement that Zach Snyder, director of the upcoming film Superman: Man of Steel, has found his leading man. The lucky, or perhaps unlucky, if you believe in the so-called "Superman Curse", winner of the role is Henry Cavill, a 26 year old British actor apparently best known to some for something called The Tudors, whatever the heck that is. It seems that Cavill had actually been cast to play Superman in 2006's Superman Returns, until Brian Singer came on board as director and booted him in favor of Brandon Routh.

So, over to your right, at the top of the page, you'll notice a list of previous actors who have assayed the role of the Last Son of Krypton. Your task, should you chose to accept, is to pick your favorite from among those listed.

Note that the choices are limited to those actors who have portrayed Superman, as opposed to Superboy or simply Clark Kent, in live action movies or television series. Therefore, Bud Collyer of the 1940's radio show, Tim Daly from the 1990's animated series, Gerard Christopher of the 1980's Adventures of Superboy syndicated series, and Smallville's Tom Welling, among others, were excluded from consideration.

I actually thought about leaving Brandon Routh off the list as well. I can't think of anybody who really liked Superman Returns all that much and I honestly don't expect anyone to vote for him.

In truth, I expect this poll to come down to a two man race between George Reeves and Christopher Reeve. Still, I could end up being surprised. Just maybe there are a lot of Kirk Alyn fans among my readers.

The poll will be open for the next seven days, and I'll discuss and analyze the results here sometime next week.

By the way, if you are reading this on my Open Salon site, click here to participate in the poll.