Giffen's Legion Part 3: Life After The Legion--Darkness, Light and Compromise

This is the post where I actually get around to discussing the story lines of Legionnaires 3 and Legion of Super-Heroes Volume 4.  Thus, spoilers lay ahead.  Tread carefully.

The greatest thematic similarity between Legionnaires 3 and the first year of Legion of Super-Heroes Volume 4 is that they both deal with life after the Legion.   The main characters of L3 are the three founding members of the Legion of Super-Heroes; Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl and Cosmic Boy. These three had recently, for different reasons, retired from the Legion and were no longer appearing regularly in the main Legion title.  Lightning Lad and Saturn Girl had recently had a child and left to devote themselves to raising him, while Cosmic Boy had simply decided it was perhaps time to do something else with his life.  LSH v4, of course, is the infamous Five Years Later version of the Legion, in which the team had been disbanded several years before the series picked up their story.  In both cases, the former Legionnaires learn that they can never truly leave their pasts, and especially the Legion, behind.
The two stories share a similarity in tone, as well.  While Giffen is best known for his humorous works, especially Ambush Bug and Justice League International, many of his comics, most famously LSH v4, can be quite dark.  Even Justice League has its serious moments, such as the Despero story line or the story in Justice League America #26, 27 and 28 where the Blue Blue Beetle, under the control of the Queen Bee, nearly kills Max Lord.
One of the criticism leveled against a lot of the so-called "grim and gritty" comics that followed the groundbreaking work of Alan Moore on Watchmen and Frank Miller on Daredevil and The Dark Knight Returns is that they copy only the surface darkness and violence of those works while missing the elements that truly made these comics great.  Giffen's LSH v4 is often lumped in with those clueless imitators.  However, I think that Giffen got it right with his Legion stories.
One thing that people often overlook about the seminal works listed above is that amidst the darkness, these stories contain an element of hope.  Miller's "Born Again" story in Daredevil is not the story of a man's life falling apart, its the story of a man fighting to get his life back.  The story ends on a hopeful note. By the the final issue of the story line, Matt Murdock has his life back.  It may not be the life he had before, but its one he has chosen for himself and one with which he is content. The Dark Knight Returns ends with Bruce Wayne embarking on a new chapter in his life with a new, more positive attitude.  Throughout the series, Batman would think in certain situations, "This would be a good death," but the story ends with him thinking, "This will be a good LIFE."
If you ask me, if anybody failed to see the hopefulness in Miller's work, especially on Daredevil, its Brian Michael Bendis.  His acclaimed run on the character is very good, I have to admit, but it is also almost unrelentingly bleak.  He just piles the crap on top of poor Matt Murdock and climaxes his run with Murdock sitting in a jail cell. 
Forgive my tangent. I was meant to be talking about Keith Giffen's Legion of Super-Heroes, wasn't I? Ok, then, let's get back on topic. 
The Legion of Super-Heroes had always been seen as presenting a utopian view of the future.  Of course, it was far from perfect.  To paraphrase Geoff Johns from Infinite Crisis, a perfect galaxy wouldn't need a Legion of Super-Heroes.  Besides, perfection makes for boring stories, especially super-hero stories.  There was always an Earthwar, a Magic War, a Great Darkness, an evil sorcerer, or a time traveling conqueror, not to mention Khunds, Dominators and other alien races of malicious intent, to keep the Legion busy.  Yet the Legion's world of the 30th century was one of hopefulness and optimism for the future of mankind.  Hell, sometimes it takes a heaping load of optimism just to imagine the human race surviving for another century, let alone a thousand years.  The Legion presented a universe where mankind had united and stood at the center of the United Planets, an alliance of civilized, space-faring worlds.  All of the threats I noted above were external, coming from outside the peaceful UP worlds.
By the first issue of LSH v4, however, the universe of the 30th century, even the once near utopian United Planets, had become a much darker place. The United Planets has all but dissolved in the wake of a galaxy wide economic disaster, the Khunds have initiated a new campaign of conquest while at the same time former UP worlds war amongst themselves, and the government of Earth (a.k.a. Earthgov) is revealed to have been infiltrated by Dominators decades earlier.  Worst of all, what had once been the light in even the UP's darkest hours, the Legion of Super-Heroes, is no more, hounded out of existence by a campaign of harassment from the Dominator controlled Earthgov.
That all does sound pretty bleak, but there is hope.  That hope lies in a reformed Legion.  Reep Daggle, the former Chameleon Boy, and Rokk Krinn, once known as Cosmic Boy, set about re-uniting their former comrades in arms becaues they are optimistic that the Legion is needed, and that they can make a difference and be the light that turns back the darkness that has spread throughout the galaxy. 
By the end of LSH v4's first year, it looks like Reep and Rokk's dream is going to come true.  The former Legionnaires have faced down two of their deadliest foes and emerged victorious.  The Legion of Super-Heroes, at last, lives again.  While it takes place against a dark backdrop, the first year of Keith Giffen's Legion of Super-Heroes Volume 4 is, in truth, a story about hope, optimism, and the belief that the right people can make a difference in even the darkest of times.

Although taking place in the near utopian environment of the pre-economic collapse United Planets, in many ways Legionnaires 3 is a much darker story than LSH v4.  It establishes the Time Trapper as a truly formidable villain and presents the three founding Legionnaires with a very personal tragedy, the kidnapping by the Trapper of Lightning Lad and Saturn Girl's son. The series does not exactly end on a hopeful note, either.  The heroes don't defeat the villain, they simply outlast him.  The conflict only ends when the self-imposed time limit that the Trapper set on what he calls his "game" runs out and the Trapper simply sends the former Legionnaires and the child home.  Furthermore, the Trapper's soliloquy on the story's final page makes it clear that even though this battle has ended, his war with the Legion is far from over.
I guess you'd call that ending an anti-climax, and its a hallmark of Keith Giffen's work, not just on Legion, but on Justice League and even as recently as Doom Patrol.  Many times the conflicts in Giffen's stories are resolved not by a knock down drag out melee between the forces of good and evil, but by negotiation and compromise, or often by the intervention of an outside force.  In LSH v4, the re-united Legionnaires free their former comrade Mysa, once known as the White Witch, from Mordru by coming to an agreement with the wizard after he and Rokk Krinn conduct negotiations over dinner.  This is quite similar to the mutual non-aggression pact reached between the Justice League and the Queen Bee at the end of the first four issue story line in Justice League Europe.  That's not to say that LSH v4 is lacking in action.  The Legion will fight when it has to, and some villains can't be reasoned with, such as the insane mass murderer Roxxas. However, Giffen recognizes that violence isn't always the answer and sometimes it takes more strength not to fight.
I'm pretty sure that this is my last post comparing and contrasting Legionnaires 3 and Legion of Super-Heroes Volume 4.  It may not, however, be my final word on Keith Giffen and the Legion of Super-Heroes.  After all, I haven't said anything about the Legion of Substitute Heroes yet. 

Giffen's Legions Part 2: Welcome, New Readers! (...or not so much)

Before I get into today's post, I should offer a slight correction to something I wrote in part one of this series.  There are actually three full page splashes in Legion of Super-Heroes Volume 4 #12.  Yes, I have actually read the book, and do own a copy, however, I didn't look at it while I was writing the post, and the full page image of Celeste Rockfish bathed in a mysterious green light slipped my mind.  This error, though, in no way invalidates the point I was making about Giffen's use of splash pages in LHS v.4, as this "revelation" is pretty effectively telegraphed in the pages leading up to it.
To begin today's post, I invite you to join me on a journey through time, back three decades to 1985 where we will meet me as I was then.  I was quite different back then.  I hadn't yet taken up smoking, nor was I yet a coffee addict, and I was only just beginning to discover that I am not a man who can hold his liquor.  More relevant to our topic, I also was not yet the slavering obsessed comics fanboy that I would later devolve into.  I was a casual reader of super-hero comics at perhaps the last time in the history of the genre was such a thing was possible.
I knew little of the Legion of Super-Heroes.  While I was aware of the comic's existence, I didn't really know anything about the characters or the strip's then two and a half decade history.  Aside from a brief cameo in DC Comics Presents #2 and their appearance, along with every other DC hero, in Crisis On Infinite Earths, the only Legion stories I'd read were the 1977 JLA/JSA cross-over in Justice League of America #'s 147 and 148 and a 1978 issue of Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes that was part of the "Earthwar" saga.  As it was thirty years ago, I can't really say at this point what it was that motivated me to purchase the first issue of the Legionnaires 3 mini-series. I suppose, however, that having enjoyed the few Legion tales I had read, I was curious about the team and looking to learn more about them, and the first issue of this mini-series seemed a good place to start.

That, as it turned out, was a pretty accurate assessment.  Though I've still read relatively few Legion stories compared to the vast amount that have been published since 1958, of the ones that I have read L3 is probably the one that I'd recommend to someone as their first Legion comic, with the possible exception of the origin story in Superboy #147 or one of the retellings of that tale I mentioned in my post on that issue.
While the primary audience for this mini-series is obviously long time hardcore Legion fans, the series is carefully crafted to be welcoming to new readers as well.  The story can be read and understood by a reader unfamiliar with Legion history and I'd even venture to say that someone totally new to comics and unfamiliar with their language and storytelling conventions would have little problem following the action.    A knowledge of the history of the characters certainly provides a richer reading experience for those in possession of such facts, but it is hardly a prerequisite.  All the back story and information about the characters pertinent to the story at hand is laid out for the reading within the first issue.  Even the creative team's one questionable story telling choice, the decision to show three Legionnaires who are supposedly retired from active duty with the group lounging around at home and off duty in their super-heroing attire, was, as scripter Mindy Newell explains in answer to a reader in the third issue's letters column, made in the name of enhancing the reader's comprehension of the story by making recognition and identification of the characters easier.  Not only does this not make sense within the context of the story but is ultimately unnecessary due to penciler Ernie Colon's skill in rendering each character in the story in a unique and recognizable manner.  Even two characters who share similar characteristics, Cosmic Boy and Rond Vidar, and could, in the hands of a lesser artist, have been rendered almost interchangeably, stand out instead as distinct individuals.
To me, L3 stands out as a particularly well crafted example of what Colin Smith, writing about Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's work on the first Avengers #1 at his blog Too Busy Thinking About My Comics, terms the "paternalistic" approach to comic book story telling.  In this model, the creative team figuratively take the reader by the hand in order to, as Smith puts it, "guide them through a story in a highly controlled and specific sense."  Every story telling choice, from the dialogue and captions to the number,placement and size and shape of the panels to the composition of the images within those panels, is carefully calculated to enhance the reader's understanding and enjoyment of the story and produce in them the effect desired by the creative team.  To a greater or lesser extant, and with varying degrees of success, the paternalistic model was the dominant mode of comics story telling through most of the medium's history.
As far as I can tell, Legion of Super-Heroes Volume 4 represents one of the mainstream super-hero genres earliest moves away from the paternalistic approach, as well as an early flirtation with what has come to be known as decompressed story telling.
I think it may be time now for another disclaimer.  I may not be the most qualified person to talk about the issue of new reader friendliness. Personally, I don't mind a little initial confusion on jumping into a series, and a long and complicated back story usually doesn't deter me as long as the story I'm reading at the moment is understandable and enjoyable.  When I started getting into Doctor Who a couple of years ago, I found learning the show's fifty years of history to be as much fun as watching the current episodes.  With that qualification in mind, let me say that I don't find LSH v4 as impenetrable as it has acquired a reputation for being.
On the other hand, creators Keith Giffen and Tom and Mary Bierbaum certainly aren't holding our hands here, either.  They expect the reader to be a participant in the story telling process and do a little bit of work to make sense of what's going on.  As with any long running series, the long time reader has an advantage over the new reader, and that's especially true in LSH v4, although in the the letters columns, even some long time readers expressed a degree of confusion. Still, setting the beginning of this series five years after the end of the previous Legion book does serve to put both new and older readers on somewhat of an equal footing, as now neither knows the status quo.
In sharp contrast to L3's showing off duty heroes lounging around in their fighting uniforms, this series eschews super-hero costumes for at least the first twelve issues. Furthermore, the characters are referred to by their civilian identities rather than their super-hero code names. A few characters are referred to by abbreviated versions of their code names, but these are more like affectionate nicknames rather than noms de guerre, such as Brainy (Brainiac 5), Cham (Chameleon Boy, also referred to as Reep Daggle) and Vi (Shrinking Violet or Salu Digby). This is entirely appropriate in a story that begins with the Legion having been disbanded several years in the past, but this seems to have been one reason even long time readers, more familiar with the character's super-heroic names, experienced some confusion.
With overall lack of narrative captions, other than those tersely telling us what planet we're on, and establishing panels that just show background with no people along with several unattributed dialogue balloons, sometimes it can be difficult at first to figure out what's going on or who's speaking. Nonetheless, all the information the reader needs to fully understand each issue is contained within that issue.  Its just that it is not presented right up front and the readers has to piece it together for himself.
I'm a big fan of Keith Giffen's artwork, and the late 80'/early 90's is one of my favorite periods of his work.  He had synthesized his early Jack Kirby and Jim Starlin influenced style with the controversial influence of Jose Munoz to produce a style that blended cartooniness and realism in a way that particularly suited the super-hero genre.  His face and figure drawings are excellent, giving each character a recognizable individual look.  His background drawings, however, can at times be a little too busy and somewhat hard to interpret at first glance, especially when divided into multiple panels. 
In both its story and art, LSH v4 is most definitely a series that rewards, and in fact demands, repeated readings.  I find myself understanding and enjoying the story more each time I read it.
I also find that its best to read several issues  at one time, as the story does unfold rather slowly and developments in early issues do take some time to pay off.  The series would definitely benefit from being collected, but no such collected editions exist. 
 It seems that many people writing about LSH v4 experience a problem similar to the one I've been having in writing this post.  I really like the series, but the story telling approach taken by Giffen and the Bierbaums has it drawbacks as well as its pleasures and the series does take some time to get into.  In pointing this out, I may seem to be discouraging you from seeking this series out and reading it.  That however, is the exact opposite of my intent.  Legion of Super-Heroes Volume 4 is actually a series I would highly recommend. Anyone willing to be patient with the series and put the required effort into it will ultimately find it a rewarding reading experience.

Giffen's Legions: Legionnaires 3 and Legion of Super-Heroes Volume 4

If, to open this post with a reference to an obscure episode of the animated Star Trek, Keith Giffen were to be kidnapped into space and place on display in an  interplanetary zoo for the amusement of giant slug-like extra-terrestrials (which could totally happen, you know), back here on Earth he would most likely be remembered by future generations of comics readers, if indeed there are to be any, for three things: Ambush Bug, Justice League International, and The Legion of Super-Heroes.  Celebrated primarily for his artistic contributions to the series in collaboration with long time writer Paul Levitz, Giffen also wrote, along with Tom and Mary Bierbaum, the controversial and divisive "Five Years Later" version of the Legion that appeared in Volume 4 of the series beginning in 1989.
However, Giffen's first crack at writing a Legion story came some four years earlier in a largely unheralded four issue mini-series entitled Legionnaires 3, with dialogue by Mindy Newell and art by Ernie Colon and Karl Kesel.  Perhaps I should qualify that statement a bit.  L3 was Giffen's first attempt at writing a serious Legion story featuring actual Legionnaires.  He had earlier written DC Comics Presents #59, co-starring the Legion of Substitute Heroes in 1983 and 1985's Legion of Substitute Heroes Special.  These efforts were more in the spirit of Giffen's work on Ambush Bug, however.  In fact, DCCP #59 featured that character's second appearance.

In contrast to the goofiness of those stories, L3 and LSH v.4, while they do contain flashes of humor, are for the most part deadly serious, even grim, affairs.  The first year of Volume 4 is concerned with the rebuilding of the Legion several years after the team's dissolution in the wake of a galaxy wide economic collapse that has left the 30th century a much darker and more dangerous place than it had been in the previous Legion series.  In L3, retired Legionnaires Lightning Lad and Saturn Girl's baby is kidnapped by one of the Legion's deadliest foes, the Time Trapper, in as part of a plot to destroy the Legion.  This post, however, is concerned not so much with the plots of the two series, but with the story telling choices Giffen makes in each and how they compare and contrast.
Giffen drew the early issues of LSH v. 4, with inks by Al Gordon, while on L3 he is credited as plotter and "designer".  I assume this means the same thing as "breakdowns", which is how his credit on the Justice League books read, thus the story telling choices are his for the most part, with Colon and Kesel following his lead.
A hallmark of both series is their dense visual story telling.  On Volume 4, Giffen famously, or infamously, stuck to a grid of nine equal sized panels for the overwhelming majority of pages.  This, combined with the text pieces at the end of most issues, even today draws comparisons between this volume of LSH and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons Watchmen, which used similar techniques.  However, whereas Gibbons, while essentially sticking to the nine panel design, would judicially "combine" panels, eliminating the borders and gutters to create a larger uninterrupted image when it suited Moore's story, Giffen, for the most part, stuck to the grid seemingly at all costs.  Larger images, mostly establishing shots, where divided into two or three panels.  Also, ocassionally a single drawing would be reproduced across several panels.
L3 is, if anything, even more dense.  While not bound to a rigid nine panel pattern, each page is similarly packed with images.  There are very few pages with fewer than six panels, and one page in the first issue crams in a whopping thirteen panels. Unlike Volume 4, in which Giffen's nine panels were all of uniform size and shape throughout, even on pages with nine or more panels Colon gave greater emphasis to some images by varying the width of panels within the grid.  This was accomplished through the widening of certain panels to allow more to be shown while narrowing others in order to focus attention on detail.  Many pages consist of a relatively large image, running either across the top or bottom of the page or in some cases along the side, accompanied by a series of smaller panels.  While not meaning to diminish Colon's contributions to the storytelling, I'm attributing thes story telling techniques to Giffen, as perhaps communicated through his "designs."  He uses similar techniques in Legion tales of the period that he drew himself, such as the story contained in Tales of the Legion of Super-Heroes Annual #4.
The profusion of smaller panels serves to give the sporadic half and full page images, when they occur, a greater impact.  Full page splashes are not there merely to show off Colon and Kesel's beautiful art, though, make no mistake, the art in L3 is some of Colon's best super-hero work and Kesel's inks are part of the reason for that, but instead they serve to give proper emphasis to moments that are meant to shock or surprise the reader.  

While full page images are decidedly far rarer in Giffen's work on Volume 4, their impact, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, is not as great.  For the most part, the few story ending full page images serve to re-emphasize certain story points rather than to shock or reveal new information.  Most effective are the blank white pages at the end of issues #4 and 5 after the time line is shattered first by Mon-El's destruction of the Time Trapper then by Glorith's spell to restore the former time line.  The sixth issue's full page reintroduction of Jan Arrah, formerly known as Element Lad, is hardly shocking or even mildly unexpected.  After all, it is Arrah who Celeste Rockfish, Bounty and Devlin O'Ryan traveled to the dead planet Trom to find, and he is, in fact, the only living being on the planet.  Issue #12 contains two full page splashes.  The first is merely a field of stars with the words "The Legion of Super-Heroes" in the middle of the page.  This somewhat redundantly serves only to re-emphasize the point made by the previous pages nine panel exchange of dialogue between Rokk Krinn (Cosmic Boy) and Reep Daggle (Chameleon Boy) that the Legion has at long last been reborn.  The final page splash serves as a cliffhanger, emphasizing the danger that the newly introduced character Kent Shakespeare is in from the escaped villain The Persuader.  

Well, folks, it looks to me like we've got a series on our hands here.  Having said, I believe, all I have to say on the use of panel layouts in L3 and LSH v. 4, the next part will deal with the thorny issue of accessibility, or new reader friendliness.

Green Arrow Volume I: Hunter's Moon Preview

As I noted earlier, next month sees the release of Green Arrow Volume I: Hunter's Moon, the far too long overdue collection of the first six issues of the Mike Grell's Green Arrow series. Since I happen to own the issues that comprise this forthcoming trade paperback, I don't have to wait until next month to review it for you.
With the advent of Green Arrow's first ongoing series, Grell continued in the new direction that he had established for the character in the Prestige Format mini-series The Longbow Hunters.  Grell's Oliver Queen was, as editor Mike Gold termed it, an "urban hunter," who had left behind the fictional Star City for Seattle, Washington, eschewing the boxing glove arrow and other such gimmicks in favor of plain old pointy tipped shafts. Furthermore, Grell banished many traditional elements of the super-hero genre, including colorful costumed super-villains, from the book's pages.  Actually, this last wasn't all that much of a departure from tradition in Green Arrow's case.  If you look at the Silver Age adventures collected in the character's Showcase Presents volume, you'll see that his opponents were more often common street thugs, bank robbers and mobsters rather than maniacal super-villains.  Another indicator of the less, shall we say, "comic booky", for lack of a better term, direction of the book, and one that's so subtle that I didn't actually notice it until it was pointed out to me, is that nowhere in these stories is Oliver Queen actually referred to as Green Arrow.
While Grell's new approach was, for the most part, popular with readers, at  least the majority of those who took the time and trouble to write in to the letters column, there was some scattered opposition to the supposed changes that Grell had made in Ollie's character.   For my part, I consider what Grell did with Ollie not so much change as evolution.  I can plainly see how the character Grell is writing is, in fact, the same anti-establishment defender of the common man defined by Denny O'Neil over a decade and a half earlier.  Grell's version is older and more world weary, if not wiser, and with an outlook on life somewhat hardened by time and experience.
Grell structured the Green Arrow series, for the most part, as a series of two-part stories with the ocassional four parter about once every year.  Thus, Hunter's Moon, reprinting as it does six issues of the series, contains three separate stories.  It is the first of these, "Hunter's Moon," from which the volume's title is taken.
In this inauguaral two parter, a notorious child murderer is released from prison after eighteen years pending a new trial.  Somehow, despite his house arrest and constant police surveillance, he manages to get out to terrorize his sole surviving victim and the only eyewitness against him.  Ollie becomes involved when that survivor, Dr. Annie Green, turns out to be the therapist that he and Dinah Lance, a.k.a. the Black Canary, go to in order to help her deal with the trauma she experienced in The Longbow Hunters.
This story gets the new series off to a strong start, picking up on plot threads from The Longbow Hunters and cementing the new direction for Oliver Queen's adventures Grell established in that mini-series, including, most controversially, the character's newfound willingness to kill when he deemed it necessary.
The second two parter, "The Champion," begins with a top secret space shuttle exploding, causing an experimental biological weapon to fall to Earth somewhere in the vicinity of Washington state.  Oliver is recruited by agents of the Soviet Union (you remember them, right?) to find the vial containing the biological agent before the Chinese, their partners in the secret experiment, can get to it.  The Chinese have recruited to work for them the nerdy looking but nonethess deadly killer for hire introduced in The Longbow Hunters, Eddie Fyers. (Although for some reason, Grell spelled it Fyres in that series.)  While this is a good and exciting story, the premise seems more suited to Jon Sable, Freelance than to this version of Green Arrow.
The final two parter that comprises Hunter's Moon is "Gauntlet," which returns Oliver to the urban jungle to investigate a series of gay bashings that turn out to be related to a gang called the Warhogs which is attempting to expand its terrotory into Seattle.  This is a solid story that is squarely in the Denny O'Neil Green Lantern/Green Arrow tradition of putting Ollie in situations taken from the news of the day.
"Are you still?  A good guy?" Annie Green asks Oliver in the first issue.  The answer is an unqualified yes, and in Hunter's Moon, Grell has put him in three very good stories.  I definitely recommend this forthcoming volume, and hope that it sells well enough to convince DC to reprint the remainder of Grell's eighty issue run on Green Arrow. 

The Uncollected (For Now): Ostrander and Mandrake's The Spectre #'s 1-12

As reported Friday on the Collected Editions blog, next year will see the release of another trade paperback collection, The Spectre Vol. 1: Crimes and Judgments, collecting the first twelve issue story line from writer John Ostrander and artist Tom Mandrake's phenomenal 64 issue (counting #0 and an Annual) run on The Spectre, that I'm very glad is going to exist even though I don't actually need to buy it.  You see, I was one of those lucky readers who snapped up each and every issue as soon as they hit the shelves twenty years ago.  Still, I highly and enthusiastically recommend that those of you who missed out on this series the first time around and haven't yet sought out the series in back issues latch on to this collection as soon as copies become available. I only hope that the release of this volume signals that DC has finally come to their senses and plans to publish further volumes collecting the rest of the series. 

It has, after all, been, as I just stated above, more than twenty years since I picked up The Spectre #1 in October of 1992.  I kind of have a hard time grasping the concept that it has taken DC two entire decades to decide to put back in print one of the finest tales it, or any other comics publisher for that matter, has ever published.  This is especially egregious in light of the company's latter day practice of releasing instant trade or hardcover collections of the latest mediocre story lines from even the weakest of their New 52 line before the ink is even dry on the concluding chapter. True, DC did put out a similarly titled TPB, Crimes and Punishments,  in 1993, but that volume contained only the first four issues and was never followed up with further collections until now.

I will try, in the next few paragraphs, to convey just what it is about this series, and this initial story in particular, that has me gushing about it like a little girl.  I will likely fail, but don't let that deter you from checking the comic out.

The story in issues #1-12 reintroduces the Spectre in a way that is accessible to readers who, like me, were not all that terribly familiar with the character's previous adventures, wraps up a few loose ends from the previous Spectre series written by Doug Moench which had ended just over a year earlier, and weaves various elements from even further back in the Spectre's five decade history into a moving and exciting tale of vengeance and horror.  The plot involves the Spectre becoming involved in the life of Amy Beiterman, a social worker infected with the HIV virus who has become the target of the Reaver, a serial killer targeting women with AIDS.  His efforts to protect Amy are hindered by the appearance of a threat of a more cosmic nature.  Spectre's old enemy Azmodus, who first appeared in a series of Spectre issues of Showcase back in the mid-60's, appears on Earth seeking revenge on behalf of his master, the demon Shaithan.  Further complicating matters are the efforts of Spectre's erstwhile ally Madame Xanadu to usurp his power. 

The inclusion of Azmodus and Xanadu in the story is an example of something that Ostrander would continue to do throughout the series.   He seamlessly incorporated such elements from past stories, blending them with his own inventions to give the tales a sense of history that almost made it feel as if all the previous Spectre stories over the years were part of one grand narrative to which Ostrander was providing merely the latest chapter.  A  wonderful example of this is issue #24's tale, "A Small Boldness."  Here Ostrander tells the story of the Spectre's indescribably silly 1940's sidekick, known as Percival Popp the Super-Cop.  Ostrander makes the character "realistic", not by making him a "grim and gritty" overly violent stereotype, but by treating him with respect, transforming him from a cartoon into a fully rounded and sympathetic character. 

Anyway, to get back to the initial storyline, I won't give any spoilers here (well, maybe one very minor one), but I want to say that the ending of #12 affected me in a way that no other comic book story ever had up to that point in time.  Having read comics for a couple of decades up to that point, I'd seen many characters die.  But The Spectre #12 was the first time a comic book character's death had ever moved me to tears.  That, by the way, is the minor spoiler. I'm not saying who dies, although its probably obvious from my description of the plot who it is, so maybe its not such a minor spoiler.  Actually, however, this character's death is telegraphed pretty early on in the story.  It is a testament to the power of Ostrander's writing on this series  that despite knowing it was coming, I was still shocked and saddened and, as I said, moved to tears when the death actually occurred in the story.  Even more of a testimony to that power is the fact that despite the untold times that I have reread this story over the past two decades, up to and including my latest reread of #12 just a couple of days ago, those final pages never fail to have the same effect on me.

Tears may seem a pretty incongruos reaction to what could be classified as a "horror" comic.  Certainly, supernatural and horrific elements are a big part of this series and a huge factor in its appeal to some readers.  Unfettered by the approval of the Comics Code, although shunning the "For Mature Readers" label, the book certainly had its share of blood and gore.  If you're a fan of that type of thing, you will absolutely love the "Desecration" story line that commenced in #27.  For me, though, what made The Spectre so compelling was not the blood and guts, but the souls of the characters and the emotional journeys that Ostrander took every member of the book's core cast on.

That cast included not only the Spectre and Amy Beiterman, but Amy's friend police detective Nate Kane.  Nate starts out hostile to the Spectre, but that attitude thawed as the series progressed, especially after Spectre, in his human guise of Jim Corrigan, becomes Nate's partner.  In #13, Ostrander introduced into this book a character who is in my opinion the finest he has ever created, Father Richard Craemer.  Craemer was created by Ostrander for Suicide Squad, but its only once that book had been cancelled and the good Father transferred over to The Spectre that he was really given a chance to shine.

While I applaud DC for its decision to finally collect this excellent series and I think that every serious comics fan should read it, there is a reason that I'm glad that I have those original monthly issues.  The Spectre had one of the greatest letters columns ever.  Ostrander dealt with several serious and weighty topics in his stories, from relatationships to religion to politics to race, and his intelligent and thoughtful scripts inspired equally intelligent and thoughtful responses from many of his readers.  Rather than fanboy gushing about how great it was to see Azmodus appear again after nearly three decades, the letters were more likely to be about the moral and theological implications of the conflict between the Spectre and Azmodus.  Reading the letters was almost always as entertaining as reading the story that preceded them.  The excellence of The Spectre's letters column was one of the reason I missed letters columns after DC banished them in the early 2000's, although by that time The Spectre had long since finished its run.

Of course, the letters did contain a certain amount of what I termed above "fanboy gushing."  A lot of that was in praise of the art of Tom Mandrake, which I cannot conclude this post without mentioning.  Quite a few of the correspondants remarked that Mandrake seemed born to draw this series, and I have to agree.  His style was perfectly suited to the character and to Ostrander's stories, and he turned in his best art to that point throughout the run of the book. 

To be honest, when I first saw Mandrake's art on Batman back in the 80's, I didn't really like it.  I admitted as much to writer Dan Mishkin, who was at the time collaborating with Mandrake on a book called Creeps, at Mid-Ohio Con a few years ago.  He said that Mandrake really wasn't happy working on that title for a number of reasons and really wasn't putting his heart into it.  It's obvious, however, that he really enjoyed drawing  The Spectre.  

Mandrake drew nearly every issue of the series, but when there were guest artists, they were uniformly excellent.  To me, the standout was Jim Aparo's return to the character in issue #16, after illustrating the Spectre stories by Michael Fleischer in Adventure Comics in the 70's.  That issue also featured an appearance by the Phantom Stranger, another character Aparo had drawn during his early days at DC.  Its almost too bad that Ostrander couldn't have figured out a way to squeeze Batman into the story.  Aparo's pencils in that issue were inked by Kelly Jones, which at first seems an odd pairing but which, in practice, struck just the right tone for this incarnation of the Spectre.

I hope that the trade paperback collection, or, if all goes well, collections, include a gallery of the original series covers, as they were some of the best on the racks at the time, not to mention before or since.  Most every issue featured on its cover a fully painted image by one of the best artists in comics.  

I'm almost ashamed to admit that I nearly didn't collect this series.  While I enjoyed the story in issue #1, I didn't feel afterwards especially compelled to pick up the next one.  However, it was the cover of #2 that made me buy it.  It didn't glow in the dark like the first issue's cover did, nor was it chromium or 3-D or any of the other so-called "enhancements" that were all the rage at the time.  It was simply an arresting and hauntingly beautiful painting by Glenn Fabry, who was also providing cover art for Hellblazer at the time, that I simply could not walk away from after I saw it on the rack of new comics. By the time I got to the end of that issue, which concluded with police pulling the Reaver's latest victim out of a river where they also discovered the barrel in which police detective Jim Corrigan had been sealed in cement by mobsters five decades earlier, which led to his death and rebirth as the Spectre, I was hooked.  I came back for the next issue and the next sixty. The editors of The Spectre knew what many editors today have yet to discover, that the best cover enhancement was simply great art. Of course, having a great story behind that cover doesn't hurt.

I hope that, in the preceding paragraphs, I have managed to convey some sense of what made The Spectre one of the best series DC has ever published and one of my all time favorites.  If so, I hope you'll do yourself a big favor and check it out, either in trade paperback or by seeking out the back issues.

The Uncollected: Xombi

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.

The Uncollected: Green Arrow

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.  

The Uncollected: Hawkworld

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

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.