Before Watchmen: Dollar Bill Reviewed

Well, as I predicted in my previous post on the subject, Before Watchmen: Dollar Bill DOESN'T suck.  It isn't brilliant, or groundbreaking, or anywhere near as good as Watchmen, but it doesn't suck.  What it does is provide a few moments of mild, if inconsequential, entertainment with an ocassionally clever script by Len Wein and typically lovely art from Steve Rude.  Hardly a ringing endorsement, to be sure, but overall Dollar Bill is a pretty good comic.

"There was Dollar Bill, originally a star college athlete from Kansas who was actually employed as an in-house super-hero by one of the major national banks, when they realized that the masked man fad made being able to brag about having a hero of your own to protect your customer's money was a very interesting publicity prospect.  Dollar Bill was one of the nicest and most straightforward men I have ever met, and the fact that he died so tragically young is something that still upsets me whenever I think about it.  While attempting to stop a raid upon one of his employer's banks, his cloak became entangled in the bank's revolving door and he was shot dead at point blank range before he could free it.  Designers employed by the bank had designed his costume for maximum publicity appeal.  If he'd designed it himself he might have left out that damned cloak and still be alive today."

 That one paragraph, from the faux-memoir of first Nite Owl Hollis Mason, "Under The Hood", which comprises the text section at the end of Chapter II of Watchmen, is the extent of the characterization or background that Alan Moore gives us for Dollar Bill, leaving quite a bit of leeway for Wein to fill in the details.  Wein begins by giving the character something Moore neglected to--a real name.  We are introduced to Bill Brady, an exceptional high school athlete who gains a football scholarship from Dartmouth, leading to eventual fame, as well as hot prospects for an eventual pro career.  All that is ended when he is injured during a game.  Bill barely graduates and finds himself living in New York with no job and no prospects until he decides to cash in on his good looks and become an actor.  When that doesn't pan out, he answers an ad placed by National Bank.  He discovers that the job would require him to play the part of National's resident protector.  His bosses eventually direct him to join the Minutemen for the publicity.  Through his interaction with his fello masked adventurers, Bill eventually comes to be the hero he was at first only playacting as.  Then, inevitably, comes his fateful encounter with that revolving door...
Wein deserves credit for not attempting to emulate the style of storytelling Moore used in Watchmen.  In fact, he makes a couple of storytelling choices that I find somewhat daring, at least for a Watchmen prequel.   The first is the lighthearted, even comedic at times, tone that he gives the story.  He invokes the old "Dewey, Cheatem and Howe" routine familiar to Car Talk listeners and Three Stooges fans and includes a scene reminiscent of those old Legion of Super-Heroes tryouts, featuring a dozen or so lame wannabe heroes, when Bill shows up to join the Minutemen.  There's nothing laugh out loud hilarious here, but there are bits that do raise a smile or a light chuckle.  That's certainly more than you get from Watchmen.  For all its virtues, and they are myriad, there just aren't a lot of yuks in Moore's graphic novel.
Even odder is Wein's choice to have Bill narrate the story in the first person from beyond the grave, which brings a sort of whimsical fantasy tone to the story that Watchmen also lacks.
Both of these choices work, however, allowing the story to stand alone, on its own merits, apart from the work that inspired it.  They also give the book a distinctly Bronze Age feel, which, I suppose, given that it was written by Len Wein, one of the writers whose work defined the Bronze Age, isn't at all surprising.
All in all, Dollar Bill is a pleasant little super-hero comic that in no way denigrates or descecrates Alan Moore's beloved and revered classic.  Given how doomed from the start the whole Before Watchmen project initially seemed, I suppose that's something of an achievement in and of itself.

Card Game

Once again, DC Comics seems to be living by the old cliche that there is no such thing as bad publicity.  The latest flap involves the authorship of a segment of the company's digital Adventures of Superman anthology.

It seems to me that Orson Scott Card; of whom, until this week, I knew nothing other than his name and the titles of some of his books that I'd never read and now likely never will; has joined the club of creative individuals, which includes Steve Ditko and Dave Sim, whose extreme and unpopular political views have overshadowed, and at times overtaken, their creative output.  In Cards case, it is his outspoken stand against gay marriage rights that has lowered him into pariahship. Thus, DC's engaging of this controversial author to script a tale of its flagship character has been met with much outrage in the world of Internet opinionating.  There is an on-line petition, although likely too late to do any other than symbolic good (yet I've signed it nonetheless), urging DC to reconsider its decision to hire Card, and a few retailers have announced their intent not to carry the print edition of the comic when it ships in May. 

When contacted by The Advocate, a spokesman for DC spewed out the following half-assed, have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too, corporate double speak statement that seems to be trying to split the difference between defending the decision to hire Card while simultaneously distancing the company from his more controversial views:

 “As content creators we steadfastly support freedom of expression, however the personal views of individuals associated with DC Comics are just that — personal views — and not those of the company itself.”

Now, I figure that someone at DC must have realized that this controversy would occur.  Thus, it seems highly likely to me that, following the above stated dictum that there is no such thing as bad publicity, the prospect of the expected outrage drawing media attention to DC and this particular comic, which is exactly what has happened, may have played some part in the decision by the company to hire Card.

As I probably was not going to anyway, this controversy and my discovery of Card's true colors hasn't influenced my decision about whether or not to purchase or read Adventures of Superman.  It has, however, pretty much wiped out whatever vestigial desire I may have harbored to read anything else the man has written.

Book Review: Doctor Who and the Keeper of Traken

In his introduction to the unofficial fan-published novelization of the Doctor Who serial "Revelation of the Daleks", author Jon Preddle states, "There are only two ways to write a Doctor Who novelisation - the proper way and the Terrance Dicks way."   I really don't know what he means by that.  After reading Dicks' official adaptation of the Fourth Doctor adventure "The Keeper of Traken," I can't tell you what exactly Preddle sees as wrong about Dicks' approach.
The story begins as the Doctor and his young companion Adric are returning to "N-Space"; the "N", I shall assume, standing for "normal"; from a parallel dimension called "E-Space"; with no indication given here just what the "E" is for; where one of the Doctor's companion's, Romana, along with the robotic dog K-9, had chosen to remain.  Immediately upon their return, the pair are diverted from their planned journey to the Doctor's homeworld of Gallifrey to the Union of Traken, a planet with a reputation as one of the most peaceful and serene in the universe, by the Keeper, the centuries old ruler of Traken. He warns the Doctor that a great evil has come to Traken in the form of an alien presence the Trakens have named the Melkur, but which is in reality an old enemy of the Doctor's, who seeks to influence the passage of power as the  ancient Keeper prepares to step down and pass on the mantle of Keeper to one of the members of the planet's ruling council.  This old enemy, who is near death, seeks to use the power of the "Source", which is, as the name implies, the source of the Keeper's power and longevity, to renew, or (big SPOILER), "regenerate", himself.
"The Keeper of Traken" was the penultimate serial in Tom Baker's seven year tenure as the Fourth Doctor.  From a continuity standpoint, it is important for the introduction of Nyssa, the daughter of one of the Traken council members, who would begin traversing time and space alongside the Doctor and Adric in the very next story,  and Tom Baker's last, "Logopolis", thus being, I suppose, more associated with the Fifth Doctor, as well re-introducing the aforementioned old foe (OK--I'll just come out and say it, spoilers be damned.  It's the Master), who would figure prominently in the next couple of story arcs.
At 124 pages; and I've read that the publisher of the Doctor Who novelizations was at the time imposing a limit of 128 pages on the length of the books; Doctor Who and the Keeper of Traken appears, although I admit that I've never seen the original serial, to be a straightforward, no-frills accounting of the events of the TV episodes.  Little time is spent introducing the reader to the main characters, although with this being, as the title page tells us, the 37th in a series of novelizations of a TV show that had by time of the book's publication in 1982 been running for nearly two decades, it can reasonably be assumed that the target audience for the novel was no doubt quite intimately familiar with the Doctor and needed no such exposition.
Keeper of Traken is a quick--you could probably devour it in a single afternoon if you weren't distracted---yet entertaining read.  I still don't know what Mr. Preddle, as quoted above, sees as deficient about Terrance Dicks style or approach. In fact, I wouldn't mind reading more Doctor Who novelizations by him--and he did write quite a few I understand.

Unfinished Business: Justice League--Generation Lost

If you've been reading this blog for some while, you may remember that a couple of years ago I was buying the bi-weekly limited series Justice League: Generation Lost and, for awhile, reading and reviewing each issue as it came out.  Eventually, I decided to set the issues aside until the series was completed, then read it all at once and review it for you at that time.  While I did read the whole series upon publication of the final issue, I failed to get around to reviewing it here.  Until now.  While I make no promises that it was in any way worth the wait, here is my long delayed review/overview of Justice League: Generation Lost.

In retrospect, the point at which I decided to put off reading the series is really the point at which I just should have stopped buying it.  Ultimately, Gen Lost turned out to be a year long waste of time and money.  Some of the individual issues were enjoyable on their own, but taken as a whole the story was a massive disappointment.

I feel like I've been the victim of a bait-and-switch scam.  I began buying  the comic because Keith Giffen was co-writing it, returning once again to the characters he'd done such great work with back in 1980's.  However, by the eighth issue, Giffen was gone, leaving co-author Judd Winick to alone to write the bulk of the series. 

I do not hate Judd Winick's writing, at least not all of it.  I really like The Adventures of Barry Ween Ween, Boy Genius, which established Winick as one of the best humor writers of the 90's.  However, when he turned his attention to super-heroes the results have been, at best, bland, and, at worst, stupid and offensive.  

One of the big problems with the story is the pacing.  While the early issues, which, not coincidentally perhaps, were the once Giffen was involved in, moved at a pleasing pace, once on his own Winick seemed to realize that he just didn't have enough plot to fill the allotted number of issues.  Thus, the series fell into a pattern of issue long huge fight scenes followed by an entire issue of the cast sitting around talking followed by another issue long fight scene, and so on.  Occasionally, he'd throw in an issue where Captain Atom would be thrown into the future, there to witness the dire consequences if Maxwell Lord should succeed in his evil scheme.

Speaking of said evil scheme---and here is where the consensus rules of blogging require that I insert the words "Spoiler Warning", though I feel no compunction about revealing the ending of a story I'm trying to dissuade you from reading anyway---that's where the story really fell down.   After an entire year of chasing Max Lord around the globe and building him up as the greatest evil since Lucifer fell, the former JLI organizer's big top secret evil master plan turns out to be building a giant robot to beat up on Wonder Woman.  My reaction to that revelation was something like, "Are you serious? That's IT?"  It was, as I said above, a massive disappointment.  Compounding the feeling of being let down was the fact that the evil giant robot was rather easily defeated. 

Overall, Justice League: Generation Lost was not worth the money I spent on it, or the time I spent reading it, or really even the time I've spent thinking about it while writing this review.

Reading the Sunday Paper

This has absolutely nothing to do with comics, but I wanted to comment on a couple of things I read in Sunday's Columbus Dispatch. 

The first is a note of a linguistic nature to one Ms. Caroline Whitacre of THE Ohio State University (that should make Gordon Gee happy), who is quoted in an article on the possible impact of the looming mandatory federal budget cuts known as sequestration:

I'm pretty sure, in fact I'm fairly positive that "cooperativity" is not an actual word, at least not in English.  
I find myself wondering if the writer of the article failed to realize this, or if she ran with the quote as she got it in the interest of journalistic integrity or objectivity or some other outmoded concept like that. (By the way, for those who may have trouble recognizing it, that last bit was sarcasm.)

On the editorial page, I was shocked, and not in the Claude Rains in Casablanca sense, but genuinely surprised, to read bow tied conservative commentator and well known baseball fan George F. Will actually endorsing unashamedly liberal Ohio senator Sherrod Brown's notion that financial institutions that might be considered "too big to fail" should be broken up.  This is clearly not easy for George.  Witness the rhetorical gymnastics he performs in order to convince his conservative readers, and perhaps himself as well, that government stepping in to break up big businesses is actually perfectly compatible with the tenets of the Grand Old Party:

"By breaking up the biggest banks, conservatives willl not be putting asunder what the free market has joined together.  Government nurtured these behemoths by weaving an improvident safety net, and by practicing crony capitalism.  Dismantling them would be a blow against government that has become too big not to fail."

Seriously, you don't often see someone bending that far backwards outside of a limbo contest.

Getting to what is ostensibly the topic of this blog, I did read the Sunday comics.  Rather than launch into yet another diatribe about the sorry state of modern newspaper comics, I'll simply state that out of over 30 strips, only one elicited so much as a snicker from me, and it wasn't Judge Parker.  It was, in fact, Agnes, by Columbus, Ohio's own Tony Cochran.

Super Sunday III: Jay's Big Day

(I actually wrote this post some time ago and was holding on to it in order to post it last Sunday as part of my sort of annual--I skipped last year altogether--"Super Sunday" feature, in which I would talk about an old Superman story while the rest of the nation was pretending to be interested in a football game that most of them were probably only watching to see the commercials.  However, when the time came, it completely slipped my mind, so, rather than wait another year, here is the Gutter Talk kind of almost annual Super Sunday post one week late:)
The other day, I was rereading Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' classic Superman tale "For The Man Who Has Everything" and, when I got to the end, I realized something about this story.  Not only is it one of The Greatest Superman Stories Ever Told (which just happens to be the name of the book I was reading it in), but it is also THE single greatest Jason Todd/Robin II story ever.
Let's face it, when you get right down to it, poor old Jason didn't really have a whole lot of shining moments in his brief career as Robin.  He was, and remains to this day, in my mind at least, a character most notable for having died.  Specifically, its the way he was killed off that made him noteworthy.  I am not, you realize, referring to the Joker savagely beating him with a crowbar then blowing him up, but to the infamous phone poll that left his fate up to the readers.  Given the way that the character was handled, or rather mishandled, in the Batman books, its perhaps fitting that his sole shining moment occurred in a Superman annual. 
Jason is the real hero of "For The Man Who Has Everything", after all.   Superman spends most of the story in a trance, and gets distracted at a crucial moment in the climactic battle with Mongul.  Wonder Woman just manages to get herself beat up.  Batman is pretty much useless.  He does manage to pry the Black Mercy off of Superman, but then ends up getting ensnared by it himself.  Therefore it is left to Jason to free Batman and face down Mongul, throwing the parasitic plant at the would be world conquerer, ensnaring him in his own trap.
Yet, after risking his life to save not just his friends but the whole damned world, Jason gets no credit or gratitude.  No "Good job, chum" from his mentor Batman; no "Uh...thanks for saving my life back there" from the guy he saved from getting pounded into pudding by an angry yellow alien. Even Dave Gibbons doesn't give the poor kid any respect.  Despite his major role in the story, Jason's barely even on the cover, mostly obscured by the UPC symbol. 

Earth 2 and Green Arrow Reviews

As promised in an earlier post, on my trip to the comic shop this past Wednesday, I picked up copies of Green Arrow #17 and Earth 2 #9 and now sit before my keyboard in order to share with you my thoughts upon them.

One thing that you get from reading monthly comics that you don't get from waiting for the inevitable trade paperback collection is the thrill of anticipation that you get when you come to the last page of a really good issue and can't wait to know what happens next.  Earth 2 has, more often than not, been providing that sensation throughout its run.  The pleasant surprise for me this week was to find myself looking forward to a new Green Arrow comic for the first time in about a decade.

As advertised, the latest issue of Earth 2 introduces the new Dr. Fate, although he apparently has not yet adopted that name.  He is not, as I sort of expected, Kent Nelson, the alter ego of the Golden Age (and pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths Earth-Two) Fate, but a young man named Khalid Ben-Hassin.  Since the story of Dr. Fate has always been rooted in a sort of pseudo-Egyptian mythology, it certainly makes sense to have the new Fate be, I presume, Egyptian.  Although I assume that the name Kent Nelson, either as a separate character or perhaps as a pseudonym for Khalid, will pop up eventually.

Anyway, we first meet him at his home when Hawkgirl pops in for a visit and it is revealed that they both received their powers at the same time.  Again, not all that surprising, as the Golden Age Hawkman was a reincarnated Egyptian prince, thus linking the  two origins now makes perfect sense.  Hawkgirl persuades Khalid to teleport over to Michigan and keep an eye on Jay Garrick, the Flash, as he goes home to visit his mother.  Needless to say, chaos ensues as Atom Smasher and Wesley Dodds and his Sandmen show up to apprehend Jay.   With Khalid's help, Jay and his mom escape, but they're really jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire as they find themselves confronted by an even greater menace.  

As I said, I am definitely looking forward to seeing how this story plays out over the coming months.

As for Green Arrow #17, I can boil down my review to just one sentence:  This is the best issue of any Green Arrow series that I've read since Mike Grell left the character's first ongoing series.  

Yes, I enjoyed the Kevin Smith written issues, but I think that your enjoyment of those really depends on how much you like Kevin Smith.   Jeff Lemire has crafted a story that can be enjoyed by any fan of the character, weaving together echoes of the character's pre-Flashpoint continuity with plot points from the Arrow TV series while taking the story in an exciting new direction.  

I picked up this issue with expectations so low as to be nonexistent, but found myself really liking it. If Lemire can sustain the level of quality storytelling on display in this issue, I won't be surprised in the future to see "The Kill Machine" ranked alongside The Longbow Hunters as one of the great Green Arrow stories.