Sunday, August 03, 2008

Recent Treasures

Has it really been one month since I added a word to my "weekly" comics blog? It has. But rather than waste words lamenting my lack of words in July, I will simply forge on. And what better to change the subject than a couple brief reviews of two recent favorites.

Brave and Bold 15 - Nightwing and Hawkman

I know I have written about Brave and Bold before, but I haven't written about it enough. Rather than relying on the show value of destroying a legend or the nostalgia of retelling an updated version of an old legend, this series just tells great comic stories. And once again when two or three heroes met to fight a common goal, one has the impression that in coming together one is witnessing something unusual. Yet the series is not a throw back to simplicity or comics naivite. This series is my favorite read of every month. It keeps me coming in to the comics shop.

Justice Society of America Annual #1

Earth-2 returns in this tale of Power Girl's homecoming, but from the start of her return the continuity incongruities nag at thoughtful readers.

Power Girl became a part of DC's primary Earth at the end of Crisis on Infinite Earths, when all the parallel Earths collapsed into one, along with all the other surviving Earth-2 characters. How could it be possible that she came from the Earth-2 recently reinstated in the DC Universe when it didn't exist three years ago? And if Power Girl was absent from this new Earth-2 while she lived on DC's primary Earth, why weren't the other Earth-2 heroes who lived there with her also absent from this new Earth-2?

At first it seems to be a continuity conundrum we are supposed to accept, but suddenly the story takes a surprising turn, and it turns out our vague sense of disbelief is valid. Power Girl's unease at her sudden departure from DC's primary Earth is multiplied when she discovers this Earth-2 is NOT her original home.




Saturday, July 05, 2008

Homage

In the midst of this week's Legion of Super-Heroes comic (#43), on two adjoining pages, Jim Shooter buried a tiny homage to real people who are part of the Legion's past, assistant editor E.N.B. and comic fan Rich Morrissey. This week I'd like to expand on this homage to both of these men, both deceased.

First the references. The first is on page 14. When the Science Police are attempting to examine the contents of the Legion's computer system, Brainiac 5 gives up his access code "E-N-B-31-87". The letters are E. Nelson Bridwell's initials. I can't say for sure, but I think the numbers are the year of his birth and death (1931 and 1987). I'm pretty sure about the year of death, and given my understanding of his age during the sixties, I'm pretty sure he was born around 1931.

The second reference is on the following page. A young man walks in on Brainiac 5 and introduces himself as M'rissey.

E. Nelson Bridwell was Superman editor Mort Weisinger's assistant editor for most of the sixties. Think Roy Thomas to Stan Lee, only the DC version of that. Mort Weisinger was of course the Superman editor of the fifties and sixties who with his writers crafted most of the classic Superman mythology. E.N.B. never had as prolific a writing or editing career as Roy Thomas, but he contributed to the Superman mythos and DC comics in his own way for most of his adult life. During Jim Shooter's first work on the Legion in the late sixties, E.N.B. was assistant editor and someone he would have met frequently.

E.N.B. was a bit of an odd duck. A man who remained single his entire life, and was not only a walking encyclopedia of comic book and pulp fiction, but had constructed in his own imagination genealogical and other connections between all of them. In the late sixties he wrote DC's short lived comic hero spoof comic The Inferior Five and created the original, spy-story-influenced Secret Six comic. When Mort Weisinger retired at the end of the sixties and editorial responsibility for the Superman family books was spread among the other editors, E.N.B. continued his role for multiple editors -- Jack Kirby on Jimmy Olsen, Julius Schwartz on Superman and World's Finest -- and he was given editorship on Lois Lane. For the other editors he wrote the letter's pages, and was allowed for the first time to sign them with his initials.

The departure of Mort Weisinger was pivotal for all the Superman titles. DC had been trying fresh approaches on all it's titles for a few years, but in 1970 those changes reached Superman. The stories started to reflect the social changes and clothing of the era.

In Lois Lane, E.N.B. ditched an integral aspect of the title since it's inception, the Lois Lane / Lana Lang rivalry for Superman's affections. Lana gave up and took a job in Europe, leaving Lois as Superman's undisputed love interest. Lois gave up her conniving ways and became a stronger, more capable character, a kind of feminine feminist, and a hard hitting liberal journalist.



For better for for worse, this type of story in comics was probably one of the most enduring influences on my adult political opinions.

During the seventies I became a bit of a comics letter hack. I started to write letters to the editors of my favorite comics and before long many of them were published, often in letters pages edited by E.N.B.

Toward the late seventies when I decided I wanted to write comics and submited story ideas to the editors, E.N.B. was one of the editors who responded to my submissions. I didn't sell any stories, but he often responded with encouraging words and constructive criticism.

Now Rich Morrissey was a much more of a comics letter hack. In fact he was in some ways an inspiration to me, because as the editors started publishing seriously written fan critiques of comic stories in the late sixties and early seventies, Rich's letters were routinely published in most of the DC comics I bought -- several every month. In later years Rich would say that every letter he ever wrote was published. But Rich, in fact, was more than a letter hack; Rich was what we in the seventies called a BNF (Big Name Fan). He was someone other fans knew by name, who wrote for fanzines and interviewed the pros. He along with Mike Flynn, Harry Broertjes, and Jay Zilber, created the fanzine the Legion Outpost and were in large part responsible for the re-emergence of the Legion from the back pages of Superboy into their own title again in the seventies. It was also this group of fans who tracked down Jim Shooter in the seventies, after he had abandoned comics for good, and convinced him to come back. He wrote a few stories for DC, moved on to Marvel, became editor of the entire Marvel line for many years, and the rest is history.

When the Legion Outpost began to wane, Rich Morrissey started a Legion APA (Amatuer Press Alliance). APAs are still alive today, but not many fans are aware of them. Basically they were like a comic convention in print. Anywhere from twenty-five to fifty fans joined the APA and on a monthly or bi-monthly basis they contributed self contained fanzines, mimeographed, dittoed or photocopied and sent to a central mailer who collated them all together and sent them out to all the members. The Legion APA Rich started was called LE-APA for about a year until the members renamed it Interlac after the language of the Legionnaires.

I joined Interlac in its second year and it was there that I came to know Rich better. In many ways Rich was like E.N.B., in fact of all the fans in my generation of comic readers, Rich was the one who probably got to know E.N.B the best. He also had a near encyclopedic knowledge of comics, but he had his own nerdish quirks, like the pi song he wrote, which was a seemingly endless song listing the numbers of the mathematical constant pi -- you know, 3.14 etc., etc. I never witnessed it in person, but supposedely Rich could sing it forever without failing to remember the next number in the sequence.

Unllke many fans from the seventies, Rich didn't even try to pursue a career in comics. He became a lawyer. Rich died at a young age several years ago.




Compostions


One of the hallmarks of Superman comic stories from the sixties was irony. If you had a nickel for every Superman family story in the sixties that ended with one of the main characters turning to the reader in the last panel and pondering the stories ironic ending, why you could probably buy half the Superman comics published during the sixties with those nickels, considering that the comics only cost 10, 12 or 15 cents.

Today's piece of personal comic history is just such a tale of irony, only it's not irony encapsulated within the pages of a comic book; it's irony about childhood collecting of comic books.

One of my all time favorite Superman family characters in the sixties is a rather obscure character called the Composite Superman. He only appeared twice, and although my purchases were spotty when I was a kid -- limited to one comic a week at most -- usually on Friday evening when my parents were buying groceries -- I somehow managed to buy both of those appearances.

Both of the Composite Superman stories appeared in World's Finest -- which one could argue is not really a Superman Family comic, since it co-starred Batman, but it was edited by Mort Weisinger -- Superman's editor -- so the stories and art all had a Superman feel to them.

The Composite Superman was a character who, split down the middle, looked like Superman on one side and Batman on the other side -- only his skin was green -- and I'll explain the logic of that in just a minute.

He started out as an ordinary janitor in the Superman museum. One night lightning struck miniature models of the Legion of Super Heroes through a window, bounced off the models and hit the janitor. Now it turns out the miniatures weren't just artist renderings. The Legion had made a gift of the models to Superman, and had constructed them by using a replication machine. The replication machine inadvertently replicated the Legionnaire's powers as well as their likenesses. The lightning released the powers and transmitted them electrically into the body of the janitor, imbuing him with all the powers of the Legion of Super Heroes. This arguably made him the most powerful character in comics history, and not because he would be able to simultaneously shrink to the size of an atom (Shrinking Violet), bounce around (Bouncing Boy) sub atomic structures, and munch (Matter Eater Lad) on neutrons. At the time the Legion included Superboy, Supergirl and Monel -- all of whom had Superman's powers -- so he had triple the abilities of Superman! Plus he could read minds (Saturn Girl) and was a super genius (Brainiac 5).

So basically Superman, Batman and Robin were way over matched.

I won't tell you the plot of either of the two stories, mainly because I don't remember them, and besides the stories inside the comic are not the point of this posting, but he used Chameleon Boy's powers to make himself look the way I described, and I guess he chose to have green skin as an homage to Brainiac 5.

Anyway, the first issue was one of my all time favorite comics. Like most comics I bought as a kid, I probably reread it dozens of times. But somehow, one day, it disappeared. Until on a summer day months later I found it my backyard, wrinkled and stiffened by exposure to rain, snow and weather. Kind of a sad moment, but something I recovered from. :) Also a little odd, because I don't think I took my comics outside to read as a kid.

At the end of the first issue, somehow Superman and Batman manage to take away the Composite Superman's powers, and he returns to being an ordinary janitor at the museum.

In the second appearance, basically lightning strikes the same place twice and he becomes the Composite Superman all over again. I remember being just as enamored of the second story as the first. Again the comic eventually disappeared until one day I found it in my backyard, wrinkled and weatherbeaten. These are the only two comics of mine that ever met this fate, and -- as Lois, Jimmy, Clark, Linda, Superman, Supergirl, or Superboy might think in the final panel of their comic book stories -- how ironic that two issues featuring the same favorite character should meet the same fate, considering that none of my other comics ever did.



Sunday, June 29, 2008

Magic Moments

I began to collect comic books in 1970 when I was in junior high school. As told in previous postings to this blog, I had been buying them since before I knew how to read, but the idea that collecting comics might be a hobby like collecting stamps had never occurred to me before then.

To fully appreciate the story I am about the tell, you have to understand that in Iowa in 1970 many of the things a modern collector takes for granted did not exist. There were no comic book stores, so there was virtually no place to buy back issues. Comic books were purchased at supermarkets off those squeaky wire carousels. After a few weeks on the stands they were pulled by the magazine distributor and destroyed if they weren't sold. Furthermore distribution was very spotty. When I first started collecting I visited three to five different stores that sold comics on a weekly basis just to make sure that I got every issue of the ones I collected. There may have been comic conventions, another source for purchasing back issues today, but if there were, they weren't anywhere near Cedar Rapids, the city I lived in.

It is in this particular time and place that my story, my magic moment, takes place. I was checking out the newsstand at one of the grocery stores that sold comics. It was a small store called Jack and Jill, about a fifth of the size of a modern supermarket. It was so small and the aisles were so narrow, that they had miniature shopping carts for their customers. It was a place my parents shopped every Saturday as I was growing up because they had an old fashioned meat market where the butcher cut, weighed and packaged the meat for each customer to order. You wheeled your cart up, told him what kind of meat you wanted, pointed through the glass case at the piece you wanted and he cut it for you right then.

In any case, one day in particular in the early, early seventies, I was browsing the comics on the stand and I came across five comics that didn't belong. Comics at the time cost 20 or 25 cents, These comics were 12 cents. One was a Teen Titans comic, which I knew from the issue number was several years old. I picked them up, looked inside the front cover at the indicia a the bottom of page one. They were all from 1968! How in the world did four comics from 1968 arrive on a newsstand three years later? Had someone walked in with them, set them down and forgot them? Had they road around on some magazine distributor's truck for four years hidden in the back until he unknowingly pulled them out and put them on the stand with their contemporaries? Or maybe, just maybe, I was the beneficiary of an honest-to-god space-time anomaly that had deposited four and only four periodicals from the near past in the present. And maybe if I returned to this store frequently enough, I would be its beneficiary again! Maybe next time there might be comics from a few years in the FUTURE!

For several minutes I leafed through them, not certain what to do. If they were left by someone else, maybe that person would come back to get them. If I took them, I might be stealing them. What would the checkout clerk say when she rang them up and saw they were only 12 cents. But the price of comics was completely beneath the notice of adults. She'd never notice anything at all.

So, with my palms damp, I snagged them up with the two or three other books I planned to buy that day and took them to the checkout counter. As the clerk rang them up, I mentioned that they looked old. I mentioned the date inside the cover.

"Probably just a reprint," said the woman at the cash register.

Not likely, I knew. It's true that comics publishers published reprints, but they NEVER printed exact replicas with the original indicia and all the original ads!

So I paid my 48 cents for all four, plus sales tax and walked out, my feet just an inch or so from making contact with the ground, excited at the small mysteries of my world, hopeful that they might somehow continue, but pretty certain that nothing that impossible would ever happen to me again in all my years of comic collecting.

And you know what?

Nothing nearly as magic as that ever happened to me again.

Saturday, June 21, 2008

Strange Adventures

This week Amazon shipped my preordered copy of the Adam Strange Archives, Volume 3.


How it came to be that a book I ordered three months ago, and which became generally available two months ago, was just now shipped is a story I won’t tell in this blog.
When DC first published their hardcover archive editions several decades ago I wasn’t a big fan. The early ones featured stories from the Golden Age Comics. I’m old, but not old enough to be nostalgic for the forties, and in my opinion the stories don’t wear well today. But in the last few years, as DC began releasing hardcover editions of stories from the Silver Age, I began collecting them. Particularly gems I missed during the sixties like Hawkman, the Flash, the Blue Beetle, the Doom Patrol and the Kirby stories of the Challengers of the Unknown, when I was completely focused on the Superman family.

My introduction to Adam Strange came in the early seventies when I began collecting the comics I read. DC’s science fiction anthology reprint comics were some of the first non-Superman family books I began to buy regularly. At the time DC published two: From Beyond the Unknown and Strange Adventures. Both featured wonderful written and illustrated short sci-fi stories, many written by comic writers who also wrote science fiction short stories for magazines or who wrote science fiction novels, and drawn by DC’s best artists of the fifties. I would happily place most of these stories along side the best of EC comics of the same era. Their tone is more wholesome, but they are just as imaginative and skillfully crafted.

Before it was given to editor Julius Schwartz, Strange Adventures had featured the original Deadman series, illustrated by Neal Adams. From the beginning, Julie began reprinting Adam Strange, a series he edited in the fifties. And what could be more appropriate than publishing Adam Strange in Strange Adventures?

Early in the run, Julie experimented with a couple new Adam Strange stories that he assigned to Denny O’Neil. Unfortunately, by the early seventies Gardner Fox and John Broome, the authors Julie had worked with for decades, the two men he used most frequently on all his super-hero revival books, and the men most suited to writing science fiction, had left DC and were not available to write new Adam Strange stories. Denny O’Neil wrote New Wave science fiction, stories less focused on science and plot and more focused on character and dialog. Apparently neither story sold well enough for DC to revive Adam Strange as a new series and the reprints continued for several years.

The truth was that even though the old Adam Strange stories were ten to fifteen years old, they far outclassed the new stories. They were illustrated by Carmine Infantino and Murphy Anderson, who were both at their peak, and whose pencils and inks perfectly complement each other. Even with the limited 16 color palette of “four color” comics, the artwork was uncommonly beautiful. The skies of Rann ran the gamut of soft pastels: yellow, pink, light green and blue. The desert plains stretched as wide as the page, and in the distance the horizon was usually broken by far-off fanciful futuristic spires of some Rannian city. Infantino drew Adam flying by jet-pack through the skies like he was swimming underwater.

The stories generally followed a familiar formula. In the sixties all series fiction, not just comics, but television too, adhered to formula. Think Gillian’s Island, where the story was always about trying to get off the island; or Bewitched, which was always about Samantha trying to conform to suburbia for her husband.

Adam Strange was an archeologist from Earth, who was accidentally captured by a teleportation ray, the Zeta Beam, which took him to Rann, a planet in the Alpha Centauri star system, Earth’s nearest neighbor. The Zeta Beam intersected Earth’s path at regular intervals, as the two planets aligned themselves, always in the southern hemisphere, because Alpha Centauri is only visible in the southern skies and the Zeta Beam was like light -- it traveled in a straight line. However the teleportational effects of the Zeta Beam wore off after a few days, and Adam faded back to the Earth location he had been taken from. Each time Adam arrived on Rann, the planet was faced with some terrible adversary or natural disaster. Armed with technology from Rann, and powered purely by his intelligence, wits, and logic, Adam routinely saved his adopted planet, while forging a romantic relationship with the daughter of the scientist wore invented the Zeta Beam and brought him to Rann in the first place.

Adam was perhaps one of the earliest post modern hero, in that he was acutely aware of the formulaic nature of this adventures on Rann, and because of his desire to stay on Rann with Alanna, tried to defeat it’s limitations. Julie and Gardner Fox sometimes tinkered the formula as well, having the Rann’s menace come to Earth, or starting the story with Adam’s departure from Rann.

Modern series fiction avoids formula like the plague, but however maligned it may be today, I never tire of its application. In my opinion a formula frees the author from worrying about being original in unimportant ways and allows him/her to concentrate their originality on the other areas of the plot. Think Bill Murray in “Ground Hogs Day”. Bill’s character knew certain things would happen every time the day was repeated, and that certainty freed him to experiment with his behavior in ways he could never have imagined. Authors of series fiction today spend too much energy on imagining how a character can change and not enough on telling a story.

Of course you might ask, why did I bother to buy three pricey volumes of the Adam Strange Archives when I already own the seventies reprints? I suppose that I love the series so much I simply wanted to own it in hardcover and have the excuse to read the stories again.

As much as I am glad that DC is using Adam Strange in new stories today, such as the Rann/Thannagar war series, I wish that they would recognize the qualities that made Adam Strange great -- the nobel qualities of Adam and the Rannians, and the tight science fiction plots of his early adventures.

Sunday, June 15, 2008

Skaar-ed

Skaar, Son of Hulk

I did not read much of last year's Hulk series, nor the spin-offs, and considering I find most sword based adventure stories dull, I would not normally pick up Skaar, Son of Hulk. However Ron Garney's art, so I was looking forward to this series.

Unfortunately I was disappointed. The artwork is muddy and low contrast, and the situations and characters do not offer much opportunity for Ron Garney to show off what I believe he does best, which is to wonderfully illustrate enormously muscled heroes.

After the first few pages I just skimmed the rest. I won't be buying more of this title.

Turn Turn Turn

Action 866

To everything there is a season.

The more things the change the more they stay the same.

The most villanous bottler since Dasani is back! The version of Brainiac that was responsible for stealing Kandor and keeping it in a bottle has returned to the Superman mythos. I don't know whether I found this story charming because it brings back the Brainiac I grew up with or because of Gary Frank's art.

Also revived:

  • The Steve Lombard/Clark Kent practical joke rivalry. This I could do without. It was lame in the seventies when Cary Bates and Elliot Maggin created the character. It's still lame. It also signals the return of Clark Kent as wimp.
  • Clark Kent's bangs. (Is this a nod to Brandon Routh's hairstyle in Superman returns?) In any case they remind me of the sporadic 1960s series featuring the Superman of 2965, who also wore his hair draped down over his forehead. At the time I remember thinking how handsome and mod it made him look and even deciding to wear my hair the same way.

Saturday, June 07, 2008

The Big Undo

Secret Invasion 3

Is the Tony Stark who led the majority of Marvel heroes to register during Marvel's Civil War series last year a Skrull?

I make no secret of my distaste for the Civil War story and it's effect on the Marvel universe. I think that government registration of heroes, while perhaps a realistic request, introduced to heroic fantasy one of the saddest elements of our modern, post terror-obsessed society. It tainted my escapist reading pleasure with the same poisonous paranoia I face when I read the newspaper.

If, as is hinted by the Skrull Spider Woman in this week's Secret Invasion, Tony is a Skrull, perhaps that explains the registration drive. Wouldn't registering all Earth's heroes make it easier for a Skrull invasion force to corral them all?

If so, wouldn't the removal of the false Tony Stark from influence in the Marvel Universe restore the pre-Civil War status quo?

I admit that I often go off on flights of fancy as I read fiction, seeing endings I hope I will read as I work my way through a series, and I'm usually wrong and disappointed. Still, wouldn't it be nice if I were right?

Trinity 1

Unlike DC's previous weekly series, Trinity does not rely as heavily on creation by committee. There is one writer. And the main section of every issue is drawn by one and only one penciller -- and a talented one! This makes me hopeful that perhaps there might actually be one or more cohesive stories to be told, not just a series of interwoven events. I hope this is the case.

Friday, May 30, 2008

Crisis Time

In the sixties and the eighties summer comics meant special "annual" editions of popular comics -- thicker books with 50% to 100% more pages.

In the last decade or so summer has presaged multi-part, continuity shattering, event comic series by both major publishers. Of course this year is no different. This week DC released the first issue of Final Crisis, the seven part series that promises once more to change everything.

We've learned by now that comic book change is no more radical than political change. No matter what the promises, the word "change" usually means more of the same. I don't expect that this year will be any different. Heroes will die -- until they come back to life. (What choice do the majors have but to continually resurrect their fallen heroes when EVERY comic creator working today REFUSES to create new characters for them if they cannot own their creations.)

While I find Grant Morrison's interpretation of the DC universe interesting, it troubles me to see it canonized. I don't really understand how all these plain-clothes New Gods came to walk the Earth after Jim Starlin vaporized every one of them and set the stage for a new theological dynasty just a month or two ago. I also don't know how Detective Turpin can fail to recognize Orion -- much less the odd name Kalibak, considering his fight to near death with Kalibak in the original New Gods series. I find it less than amusing that Grant has decided the Guardians have codified the crimes of the universe like the California Highway Patrol. I could hardly care less about this Society of Super-Villains uniting under Libra, especially when it includes fourth rate characters like Mirror Master (I am SO afraid). And what makes anyone think that the death of Martian Manhunter will lend any drama to the story when it happens in a single panel. Any hero deserves a more protracted death scene than that, and any writer with the least understanding of drama knows that a struggle of some sort is required if a death is to have any punch.

No matter. What will be will be. When this is all over, it will have no more lasting effect than the last big event, and DC will not feel the least bit bound to abide by its outcome, so let them kill Superman for all I care. We know they are all coming back sometime in some future reboot and comic book history will forever be as elastic and mallable as communist political history, with characters continually airbrushed in and out of the artifacts of the past.

1985
Full disclosure -- by 1985 I was an adult in my late twenties. I owned a car, a house. I was in a commited relationship and even had a loving pet who depended on me. I was knee deep in the second horrific term of President Reagan and had already lost several loved ones to AIDS. (Where do you think they GOT the name, the AIDies?) So there is absolutely no nostalgia in my soul for the innocence of the mid eighties.

Still I found Marvel's mini series, 1985, incredibly charming and I'm more than willing to give it a fair chance.

I love the focus on real people on the real Earth, and I can honestly share the astonishment and wonder of the little boy at seeing villains and heroes of his fantasy life in the flesh.

But, hey. I read comics and I am on my way to senior citizenhood. My suspension of disbelief and appreciation of fantasy is way beyond dispute.

Action 865
You know I don't give a whit for the Toyman. I generally find the re-engineering of a character's origin dull beyond comprehension. But for some reason I really enjoyed Geoff Johns' reinterpretation of who Toyman is; his explanation for other, perhaps misguided takes on the character; and even the reintroduction of Cat Grant.

(See, I told you no one and nothing dies in comics. Sooner or later it all comes back. Here is one element of the perfect example. After years of simply building upon the John Byrne re-boot of Superman, and slowly, gently re-introducing the characters and stories of the silver age, DC has almost completely returned Superman to the continuity of the late seventies. Now all we need is the re-revival of the Lois Lane/Lana Lang rivalry over Superman. Or would that be in poor taste considering that Lana knows Superman is married to Lois as Clark? Is there a Mephisto in the DC Universe?)

Saturday, May 24, 2008

Brave and Bold

Can I tell you all how much I LOVE DC's new Brave and Bold series?

I have a secret. When I settle down on the couch to read the week's comics, I sort them by how excited I am to read them. The one's I'm most excited about are As; the ones I'm less excited about are Bs; the ones I think are a bit dull and maybe buy out of habit are Cs. Then I read them in that order: The As that same night, Bs over the next few days, and Cs I may not even get to before the next week.

The Brave and the Bold is one of those comic magazines that I snarf up enthusiastically and it always makes the A pile because it is executed brilliantly.

Until recently the art was by George Perez, now Jerry Ordway, but both of them are solid artists who are excellent at telling a story, draw the human form well and create wonderful compositions on the page. They are at the top of their craft in the super suit world.

But Mark Waid's stories for this book have been even better! Mark respects each and every hero who dances across the pages of the book, understands what makes them unique and intriguing and lets them show us these traits. Plus he has strung together a dozen or so pairings - some odd, some not so odd - into a great, unified, nonstop story from the very first issue until the twelfth.

I know that Marvel Team-up used this same concept a few years back, but the stories there didn't move nearly so fast.

If excellence alone drove sales, this would be the best selling book by any company. I hope this never ends!

Saturday, May 17, 2008

Bat Lash - RIP

As I was starting to collect comics in a big way during my early teens, I had the good fortune to live in a town with a used book store that sold used comics at about half the cover price. (This was before the comic specialty stores proliferated and prices of old comics were higher than cover price.) It allowed me to reach back in time five or six years and buy magazines I'd missed during the time I was focused completely on the Superman family magazines. It allowed me to discover the wonderful experimental comics of the late sixties, especially from DC.

Bat Lash was one of those comics, and I had the further good fortune to find a complete run of the short lived series.

Mind you I have a deep aversion to the western genre because during my childhood we watched television as a family on a single black and white TV, and my father watched all the westerns -- Gunsmoke, Bonanza, the Virginian, the Texas Rangers, etc. It meant I missed the youth oriented shows of the era like Land of the Giants, Laugh-in, and Get Smart. Over the years I tired so much of the formula that I find it difficult to read or watch anything remotely like a western. (The same is true of doctor, lawyer and detective shows, which wore out their welcome in my mind in the seventies.)

What I loved about Bat Lash however was first the lovely, sketchy artwork of Nick Cardy, and second the whimsical nature of the stories. Bat didn't set out to do good. In fact he was generally no good -- self-centered and conceited. He tried to avoid trouble, but trouble kept finding him, and in the process of escaping it, he almost accidentally managed to help out a few folks around him.

I was hopeful that DC's new Bat Lash series might recapture some of that magic. After Sergio Aragones, who was responsible for much of the original tone, was involved, and John Severin was drawing it. John style is much tighter than Nick Cardy, but still he is a master and is particularly adept at westerns.

Unfortunately the six issue mini-series that finished this week is -- in constrast to the original -- leaden and dull. Six issues to tell an origin story that might have filled a few pages if told in the pace of the original series. Six issues sqaundered. Six issues and no fancy, no magic. Now Bat Lash will slip into limbo, perhaps for another forty years, perhaps forever, and the opportunity to revisit all the original fun is lost.

Can someone explain to me how it is possible in an era that in many ways prefers its entertainment to move faster and faster and constantly change, comics and television stretch out simple plots for months and years? Isn't this counterintuitive? Am I the only one who feels cheated?

Saturday, May 10, 2008

Starting Over

This blog has been inactive for too long. The difficulty has been that my time is too limited to devote to long discourses. So I've decided to take a new tack here. One posting a week about one comic published that week -- the one I find most inspiring either because I love it or I hate it.

Although I suspect I will eventually be disappointed, I'm excited for now about Marvel's Secret Invasion, despite my general dislike of stories based on suspicion of shape shifters.

When the first issue came out, and the seventies Marvel heroes climbed out of their rocket, I assumed that all of them were the real heroes, and that all the horrid things Marvel has done to these characters over the last few years could be wiped away as it is revealed that the characters we have been reading were imposters.

(One might also assume that the seventies set were the Skrulls and that they had been manufactured several years ago and kept on ice until now, when they broke free, thinking they were the real deal. But you can see I am biased against many of the transformations Marvel characters have undergone in the last few years.)

Of course now that the second issue is out, it has been revealed that while some of the seventies set may be the real heroes, some are not. So Marvel is now in position to tease us for the next few months, making us wonder which heroes will be retro-ed and which will be left in their present sad state.

As a Steve Rogers fan, my hope is that the Captain America that landed last issue will be the real deal. He, Thor and Hulk are my favorite Marvel heroes, and a Captain America that is not Steve Rogers is just a temporary and poor substitute.

(By the way, my fondness for these three is not necessarily due to the stories they have been featured in over the years. I has more to do with their potential, and I suppose their appearance. Over the coming weeks, I expect to have an opportunity to explain that in more detail.)

Considering the condition of this country today, there has never been a better time for telling Captain America stories. Since 9/11 Marvel has tended to put Steve in the role of combatting terrorist inspired antagonists, but I think they have missed the mark. I think that a Steve Rogers, who grew up during the FDR era, would be more liberal, and more likely to be alarmed by the recent actions of his government in suppressing dissent, breaking international law and violating human rights. I think he might be more likely to equate our actions to the villain he fought against during the second World War and be inspired to speak out against his own government in defense of liberty at home and abroad. I think his patriotism is more nuanced than his costume. We caught a glimmer of this during the Civil War series in his dissent against hero registration. In fact the biggest tragedy -- should the Civil War Captain America turn out to be a Skrull imposter -- would be that the amazing speech Captain America made in defense of civil liberties during CW would not have been made by Steve Rogers.

My previously mentioned dislike of stories based on suspicion of shape shifters is, in fact, due to where this story line inevitably leads. It leads to a response very much like the one our country has taken in the last seven years. It leads to fear inspired -- or perhaps only fear advantaged -- intrusions on privacy, suspicion of and intolerance for dissent. I am by no means the first to say this, but in our rush to protect our freedoms, we destroy them ourselves.

Shortly after 9/11 I saw the following quote, offered in a program that had nothing whatsoever to do with the events of the day, but so timely that I wrote it down.

"...And the art of life is to save enough from each disaster to be able to begin again in something like your old image."
Murray Kempton
“Part of Our Time”


This is America's challenge in the 21st century. We have stumbled up until now. I hope that we will pick ourselves up and correct our errors. And I hope that Steve Rogers will return to lend his voice to that cause and that course.