Some Comic Book Reviews

Gotten a little behind. News of impending layoff, a car accident and subsequent health dealings and a few days off to spend Valentine’s Day with the one I love can do that to a person. Well, the Hallmark holiday has come and gone, I’m mostly recovered, got a new car and still face an uncertain future on the job front in a couple of months. Hey, here’s a thought. Instead of worrying about immigrant labor taking menial and blue collar jobs while still putting some money back into our economy (they still gotta live and eat while here), how about doing something about all of those jobs being sent overseas to third world countries. Far more Americans are actually losing jobs to outsourcing than laborers being brought in to clean Wal-mart in the pre-dawn hours.

THE SPIRIT #14. A new creative team comes aboard, Aragones, Evanier, Ploog and Farmer. The results… it’s an OK book. It’s actually more akin to the type of book I would expect when someone announces they are bringing back a character like Will Eisner’s Spirit. Stylistically, it’s more akin to Eisner’s work which unfortunately means it’s devoid of any real life because the story is really about capturing the spirit of the creator and not the spirit of the character, the Spirit himself. Darwyn Cooke had taken the character and combined the retro charm and some stylistic flourishes of Eisner and merged them with his own style and storytelling creating a piece of Fusion Jazz in comicbook fun. Whereas this is more of a college band doing a cover tune and just succeeding with it mostly.

ZORRO #1. Like Dynamite’s SUPERPOWERS, there’s a painted look to the comic that I feel sadly undercuts the artwork. It’s a pretty book, but the artist, Francesco Francavilla is capable of such lush linework it seems a shame to lose it. http://www.francescofrancavilla.com/

Like THE SPIRIT, the end result of the book is one of being merely OK. While it’s giving us the origin and background of the character, it does so through flashback and narrative so we still see the title character in action (which they didn’t do with the Lone Ranger book which is why I didn’t get it, I’m sick of monthlies that are written solely for the Trade Collection in mind).

However, I hope that they paid some serious royalties to Isabella Allende as it makes heavy use of her over-hyped novel. Maybe not “over-hyped” since that implies that it was heavily hyped. It just seemed that those that read it loved it whereas I thought it was good but nothing really special. She romanticized the Indians too much in contrasting them with the evils of civilized men. Plus, making Zorro being truly part-Indian weakens the character a bit. His empathy now stems not from just a sense of justice and right & wrong, but partially because he's one of them. He has a vested reason to care. It’s subtle, but I think it’s also very significant as it changes the character’s basic motivation.

I’m not really sure why there needs to be a big focus on the origin story anyways. The concept of Zorro is fairly simple to understand and thanks to movies and such, people already understand the basic nature of the character. A little bit to establish the context and status quo and take us directly into the actual stories. And give him back his mustache! It’s better than no Zorro comic, but if you haven’t read them, I’d recommend going to the store and through the back issues for Topps’ version done by Don McGregor (which he continued as a gorgeous daily newspaper strip that also has been collected).

BRAVE AND THE BOLD #10: This comic keeps getting better and better. Although why they are replacing Perez on the book in what’s the final issue to the current story arc makes no sense, even as much as I love the work of incoming artist Jerry Ordway. At least it’s an artist of a comparable style and skill.

Here it’s still Perez and continuing the story of the classic Challengers of the Unknown reading the Book of Destiny serving as framing stories of various team-ups. We have Superman traveling to the past and teaming up with the Silent Knight and a slightly more recent past as Aquaman teams up with the newly formed Teen Titans on the day of his wedding to Mera. The book deftly shows why Perez is a natural for this title as he is able to draw superheroes, knights, a dragon, kid sidekicks in an underwater environment and make it all work wonderfully. Waid gets credit for actually making me laugh with a comment by Green Arrow about why Speedy wasn’t present.

Waid also makes me groan though with the Silent Knight giving his last name as “Kent”. It’s just too cutesy. Not to mention, wasn’t the Silent Knight one of the Hawk God avatars and thus according to Geoff Johns’ cosmology, a reincarnated Carter Hall? It’s one of the big problems with DCU right now, their continuity is totally screwed up, this time just rebooting and changing things arbitrarily such as the Doom Patrol, the past Justice League membership (again), the various books with different versions of Teen Titans. B&B seems to embrace that convoluted continuity as we have the original Challengers of the Unknown (though Red was wiped out of all existence a reboot or two ago), the current Doom Patrol makeup, but the old Metal Men who have also been recently rebooted if I got the gist of Will Magnus’ involvement in the mega-crossover last year and the current mini-series. So, ignore all the stupid retcons and such and just read this title. It’s more fun anyway, better written and drawn than about anything else put out by DC right now.

The Twelve #2. A good second issue. I only had a few quibbles. Such as why does Captain Wonder's chin look so humongous when he's not wearing the mask but more square jawed generic when he is wearing it? It's just plain distracting. We really don't see anything about Fiery Mask, Laughing Mask, Witness, or Mr. E. That's a pretty large chunk of the cast. Reading a bit about Mr. E's golden-age stories, he strikes me as being far more interesting a character than he's been played as here. He had a vampire as an arch villain! Bringing Electro into the compound makes zero sense in context of the story other than JMS needs him to be there.

Have to wonder about the timing of the narration as well. We know that it's the Phantom Reporter looking back to the early days out, but it implies that he's still ignorant of Vietnam and television especially if he's aware that the Rockman's people had never been discovered. JMS seems to not be able to keep PR's narration sound logically as if it's being done in the present, after the fact that he and the others have returned to active duty and not revealing too much when talking about the events happening in the recent past, so depending on the scene PR sounds as if he's narrating just as it happens. Instead of his narration being fully in the present after the end of the story, it reads as if it’s only in the present of whatever scene is being presented. That’s bad writing. Also, with PR’s job and background, it's a bit hard to bite that he's still out of the loop and having that hard of a time adjusting. The fact that there are still newspapers and such, he'd easily find a job regardless of the loss of "sources". Technology has changed, but a reporter’s job wouldn’t be that different.

My biggest quibble is the main plotline isn't delved into at all, despite it being the final climactic page of the first issue and the first page of this one. Will probably read fine in trade format, but a little frustrating in the monthly. It’s coitus interruptus of comic book storytelling.

However, JMS totally delivers on the heroes out of time bit and looking into different characters. The Captain Wonder scene was completely natural and organic and very powerful. It defines for us the type of man that he is and is heartbreaking in its pathos. I liked in seeing the hints of the Black Widow's dark background. And we feel a bit for Rockman. I hope his origin stays in place though (I don’t really care for mentally ill superheroes). Sure, in today’s context it is a bit fanciful, but this is the Marvel Universe after all. We know there are undersea and underground kingdoms and such. One more isn’t really a stretch.

FANTASTIC COMICS: Erik Larsen had this to say about his book:

And yeah, you may have seen "The Twelve" and maybe even "Superpowers," but this is another animal entirely.

This isn’t a depressing “everything has turned to crap and look how old, tired and silly looking these characters are” story -- we’ve seen those tepid tales time and time again ever since Alan Moore trotted out Marvel Man. This isn’t some pale imitation of an Alan Moore story -- it's an upbeat, energetic “look how cool these characters are and can be” type of thing.

Unfortunately, he’s wrong and this really didn’t live up to its potential. Overall, it was more pastiche than anything else, full of cutesy and slightly mocking elements in its attempts to be lighthearted. A big indicator of where it went wrong is the fact that it chose to mimic the bad paper and printing of 25-60 years ago with rough paper and out of register printing. See, right there it’s not about the story-telling and the characters, it’s about Artifact creation. It’s not about embracing cool characters and looking at what the creators did right in those days and telling stories that live up to that but looking at what was limiting and wrong, the parts you make fun of now that things have advanced past that. And, it’s trying to recreate an experience not through the story itself but through the physicality of the product. This prevents the art and writing to really deliver the story because the product itself is part of the story and as such the whole point is to be aware of the fact that it’s not real but a fake.

The individual stories are a hodge podge themselves. Larsen’s Samson tale illustrates the weaknesses of Larsen as a writer as it’s mostly just fluff mocking the idea of kid sidekicks. I’ve not read SAVAGE DRAGON in some time, but here his artwork looks rushed despite the powerful cover. Captain Kidd and the Golden Knight are the two of the most obscure heroes here, but their stories are also the best of the lot with only a few cutesy groaners. Yank Wilson starts off well, but denigrates into being more cutesy over-the-top parody than an action story. Stardust is an essay disguised as a story in that it’s more or less “about” something than a story in and of itself. Flip Falcon is interesting but it also is an exercise in completely re-inventing the character into something drastically different. Space Smith reads as a chapter in an ongoing story that’s completely pastiche and low on substance. Sub Saunders is appropriately 90% in German in that it makes the text of the story as indecipherable as the hideous artwork.


THE PHANTOM #16. Another book that has been getting better and better lately. The artwork and storytelling has settled into a decent consistency. A couple of story arcs are being tied together, telling a moving opening chapter to the next arc. One thing I liked with the recent issues is they are finally bringing something to the Phantom that was solely needed: villains worthy of the character. When superheroes were starting out, there was a tendancy for the flashy heroes to have a bit more mundane foes. The more mundane the hero though, the flashier his villains were, as if there was only so much un-reality they could put on the page. Eventually, supervillains become more and more prevalent as the public became used to the idea of super-characters and wanted to see adversaries worthy of the heroes, not just situations requiring Superman to bust down a wall (thus, a shift towards the story being about conflict and jeopardy and not just a display of ability). Eventually, Holmes had a Moriarty.

For some reason, the Phantom never really caught up. While he’s been in print for decades in both strips and comic books, his foes seemed to get increasingly mundane. The only fanciful stuff about the Phantom seemed to be the Phantom himself. He needs stories and adversaries that are as colorful as he is. I’m not calling for superpowers, aliens, and true supernatural elements to be brought in, but I am saying I wouldn’t be adverse to seeing a little of the larger-than-life sense of those things to be injected alongside the stories of real concerns of Africa and the jungles.

Also, of interest in this book are two of the ads of upcoming comics by Moonstone. One, the return of Captain Action! As a big Gil Kane fan, there’s a lot this series is going to have to live up to, but I’m hoping for a fun book. And Chuck Dixon is returning to a classic character he helped re-introduce people to 20 years ago: Airboy! A little pet peeve as the ad is a bit misleading that if you aren’t aware of the fact you might assume that Chuck CREATED Airboy himself and not just updated the character for the 80’s.

Steve Gerber Passes away

It's pretty much all over the comics news sites that Steve Gerber passed away. I'm not really going to attempt an obit or retrospective of his career. There are better informed people than me that can do that. This is more about how it affects me personally. For a great retrospective look at his career, I'd suggest going to
http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/steve_gerber_1947_2008/

Steve Gerber's writing was probably always about 5 years ahead of me. His work was often personal and literate and I was always just a little too young to really get into it. I loved the Defenders, but I only read them sporadically in those pre-comic book shop days and I'm probably more familiar with David Kraft's run than Gerber's. I liked the design of Omega, but he was a bit too enigmatic for me. Howard the Duck was too far out there for me to get the satire at that young age (and I'm really a superhero guy at heart). It was probably Man-Thing that struck the most resonating chord with me. As far as I know, all teen-agers feel a bit of that isolation and one-of-a-kindness that permeated the character, feeling like if you could only make people really see you and not just your exterior. My first exposure to Man-Thing was in one of those comics that came with records (had a few of those) which was a retelling of issue #5 about a sad clown that commits suicide. A powerful story with wonderful art by Ploog. By the time he did SLUDGE for Malibu, I was more aware of him as a writer and as the creator of that Man-Thing story and excited to read Gerber's new series.


I sympathized with his causes that lead to DESTROYER DUCK and I still do. I'm not naive about companies and copyright ownership and such. But, it does irk me to see the company bring in other creators to work on a fringe title like Omega, the Unknown (or at DC, Black Lightning) when the people that actually created the characters and concepts are available and willing to work on the characters. And I've read that a big reason why we don't see Marvel really doing anything with the Malibu properties are the contracts that Malibu had with the creators of the series that gave them a certain amount of control. I would have loved to have read an Omega, the Unknown comic as done by Gerber.

Strangely, it's probably his work in animation that I most enjoyed and I was completely unaware that he was behind the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS and THUNDARR THE BARBARIAN cartoons. As with the comic DESTROYER DUCK, I was more familiar with Jack Kirby's involvement than I was Gerber's. G.I. Joe and Transformers, I was a little too old by the time those came around to really enjoy, a reversal of his comic book work.

Gerber passed away from complications to Pulmonary Fibrosis, which is a scarring of lung tissue that as it spreads you irrreversibly lose that much of the lung's ability to function. Doctors don't really know the causes of it. While Gerber was a longtime smoker, there is no direct link between smoking and Pulmonary Fibrosis. It definitely wouldn't have helped him combat it or the effects as he'd already be started off with reduced lung capacity. http://www.pulmonaryfibrosis.org/ipf.htm

My own father had developed Pulmonary Fibrosis. He'd given up smoking a decade earlier. Doctors postulated the cause to be viral, a result from either when he had been seriously sick a year earlier or the medication from that. Fighting the illness took a toll. He was on steroids to fight the progress of the scarring and even went in for surgery which was botched and left him with even less lung capacity, to the point that he had to keep an oxygen tank handy. When it looked like he had gotten that under control, they discovered a lung cancer. Whether it was linked to the fibrosis or not was undetermined, the cancer could have just been masked by it. But, it was a fight that he couldn't win. He wasn't even 50.

My heart goes out to Gerber's family. I know a little of what they faced and I have the utmost respect for the man and what he tried to accomplish in standing up to the companies and championing creator rights. A fight still going on, not just in comics but with the writers' strike in Hollywood. God Bless.

SUPERPOWERS!

I just got the book last night so I hadn't been able to comment. I saw the pencils by Sadowski and how good they looked, but this painted finished product didn't look good at all. Especially disappointing is the two page spread where Samson was painted purple! The paints over Kaluba's sections didn't look as bad, maybe because he uses a finer sketchier line than Sadowski's bold linework where it and the painted colors seemed to fight each other. Which really was a shame because Sadowski made such a point to get costumes and the looks correct. Subsequent issues are going to feature redesigns by Alex Ross even though most of the characters don't really need them.

Ok, here's the basic plot of the first issue, what you may consider SPOILERS will be contained, so skip it if you hadn't read it already. Basically, in the days of WWII, the Fighting Yank, Black Terror, original Blue Beetle and the Flame are sitting in on an invasion plan. They are told a story that says there might be some mystical reasonings behind the Death Camps and the Fighting Yank needs to retrieve an artifact, the source of all evil, Pandora's Box. The other heroes dismiss this mystical mumbo jumbo. After the success of that mission, he is shown the evil spirits that exist in the world because of the box (really a Grecian Urn) and he's told they need to be put back as well as "hope" in order to save the world. However, when he tries to convince the other heroes, they don't believe him and have a hard time even believing that he talks to a ghost (his Revolutionary War ancestor from whose cloak he draws his powers). So, he secretly hunts many of the heroes one by one and captures them in the urn, filling it with hope. In the present day, moments from dying of old age, he's visited by an "American Spirit" telling him that he's been duped and he must set it right!

See, this really doesn't make any internal sense, it falls down in the area of the plot vs. the characters and characterization. It's almost the exact same trap that James Robinson's GOLDEN AGE falls into. A big reason that particular story works is that it conveniently ignores the mystics. While it supposedly has every post-crisis DC golden-age hero in it, there is no Dr. Occult, Dr. Fate, Spectre, Zatarra, etc, because the final battle has to be a physical one. The only really powerful mystic hero is Johnny Thunder and he's denigrated as a character. It's the internal illogic of teaming up Dr. Thirteen with the Phantom Stranger and having him constantly not believe in magic. He comes off as a putz. Stories and characters in superhero comics fall flat when they dismiss magic out of hand despite serving on superhero teams with the likes of Dr. Fate and Dr. Strange and fight magicians as well as aliens and the such. I had recently read a golden-age JSA story where Hawkman and the team tried to rationalize magic even though he's a reincarnation of an Egyptian prince! When a character is in a full-blown superhero universe, sometimes having them act as someone reasonably would in the real world is actually very unrealistic in the context of their world.

The conceit of this story is that pretty much all golden-age characters exist on one earth. However, in the story context characters have trouble believing in the Fighting Yank's story and are all about being rational, when the said group he's talking to includes the Flame and Green Lama whose very backgrounds are in the mystical/philosophical. The Flame and Flame Girl actually have superpowers based on the Flame's mystical training. The big invasion we see Phantasmo, Golden Lad, Cat-man, Amazing Man and Man of War, all whose abilities are based on magic. Likewise a few others are scattered through the book, and by the conceit of the book we can safely assume even more. It can be logical that these heroes that haven't all worked together much and some of the science based ones might have trouble with the mumbo-jumbo, but not the way it's set up here. Here, his story is being dismissed by characters who would know better. The basic dilemma of the issue just doesn't make sense with the characters involved. It felt completely forced.

Now, for those who aren't as well versed in the Golden-age heroes as myself, let me give you a bit of annotations for who's in the book. Go find your copy, I'll wait.

Ready? Good.

Page 1, panel 3. Old Bruce Carter III who will be revealed as having been the Fighting Yank. panel 4, the American Spirit. This is a new character created for the story.

Page 4. A wonderful painting of the Fighting Yank as he appeared in Nedor comics. That bit of work is actually by Ross.

Page 5, panel 1. Black Terror, the original Blue Beetle (both heroes got powers through chemicals), the Fighting Yank, the Green Lama, and the Flame. The latter two heroes studied in the mystical capital of the world, Tibet. As the Green Lama had a very inconsistent career as a superhero so it's unclear at this point what abilities he may or may not have here. The Flame has the mystical ability to control fire and appear and disappear through the tiniest amount of flame.

Page 8, The Fighting Yank talks about his ghost ancestor. In the original comics he was visited by the ghost of his ancestor, the first Bruce Carter, who tells him where to find a cloak. While wearing the cloak he has superstrength and is invulnerable to bullets. The ghost can also manifest itself to take a direct hand in saving his life, usually once per story.

Page 14, panel 1. Black Terror and sidekick Tim (also called once Kid Terror), Samson & Davey, the original Dare-Devil (called in this story Devil or Death Defying Devil), Pyroman (whose powers are electrical not fire in nature), the Flame and Flame Girl (whom the Flame had given duplicate powers of his), Blue Beetle and possibly his junior side-kick Sparky with his back to us. I'd never seen his side-kick and cannot really tell anything from the back of the head. Behind the Flames, Green Lama and the Face (a non-powered hero who wears a fright mask to scare his foes), and behind them, Dynamic Man and Dynamic Boy (though that looks to be the wrong Dynamic Boy costume, that of the kid hero that WASN'T Dynamic Man's brother and partner).

Page 16, from the back towards the front: the Hood, striped cape possibly belongs to the Eagle, Silver Streak (another mystically based hero, he had died and was brought back to life by an Indian fakir with a penchant for race cars in order to hunt down his killer), Samson, Dare-devil, Fighting Yank, Blue Beetle, a cape with stars could belong to several characters, and the Flame. The Flame here is shown with his body flaming a little. Over time the character went from just controlling flames and using a flame gun to actually being able to make his whole body be engulfed in flames.

Page 17: Samson, unknown patriotic hero with blue boots with a white star, Flash Lightning (also Lash Lightning or just Lightning) and Lightning Girl, the Arrow and the Fighting Yank

Page 18: from the back, it's Green Giant fighting the Claw, Airman and Green Lama flying side by side, Captain Battle is the patriotic hero below to the left and American Crusader to his right going across the center spread. The ground forces are Tim, Black Terror, American Eagle, and Cat-man.

Page 19 Phantasmo and Golden-Lad are two more giants fighting the Claw, the Owl flying by them, Boy King with a sword and standing in the hands of his Giant (an animated stone statue or golemn). Flying is Magno, Captain Future shooting lightning bolts. And on the ground here is a blonde Amazing Man, Man of Flint, Hydroman, Dare-Devil, Man of War, and a purple Samson.

Page 21, panel 2. Ok, here we see this is definitely the Green Lama as done by Mac Raboy thus with Superman-esque powers. So, he gains vast superpowers by saying a mystic phrase yet he has trouble believing in Pandora's Box or that it should at least bear looking into?
Panel 3. That's American Eagle with his back to us. He has superstrength, invulnerability and can fly, so why we just see Samson leaping into the air? And that's the Arrow again with the bow.

Page 22: Yarko in the back row or another turbaned/tuxedo mystic hero. Man of Flint and the Target on the second row, and the Dart, Arrow and Flame Girl on the front row. The Dart was an ancient Roman that made it to the present due to a fight with an ancient sorcerer. To the right of the grave, Dare-devil, Fighting Yank and the Green Lama on the front row, cannot make out who is behind them.

Page 23: Panel 1, The Black Terror. Panel 2, Pyroman. Panel 3, the Face (it's the effect of the urn that's doing that to his mask, not any natural powers it has). Panel 4, Miss Masque (to be called Masquerade in subsequent issues). Panel 5, a boomerang of Dare-Devil's.

Page 24: The man with goggles is Skyman, the crowned boy beneath is Boy King. Red hooded guy is more than likely the Arrow, the boy with the multi-colored crest and red mask is Rainbow boy, Kitten with the cat ears, the Liberator in the star spangled shirt. Not sure about the boy in blue with a V on his chest, Raven is the guy in purple. The star-masked guy is more than likely Captain Courageous, possibly American Eagle in the small panel beneath him. The little square overlapping the Raven's, I have no idea. And that looks like the Green Lama below that but we know the Green Lama wasn't one of the ones taken.

Page 25: Getting Alex Ross designs and re-designs. The face in blue is a completely redesigned Scarab and at the bottom we see Frankenstein monsters/soldiers along the lines of Dick Briefer's version of the Frankenstein monster of the 40's (whom the Green Lama and other denizens of PRIZE COMICS fought on one occasion.

Page 28, In limbo we see several of the big guns we've already seen. A small figure next to Miss Masque, that's the Owl. The men in the otherwise identical red, yellow, and blue costumes are the Target and the Targeteers.

Heroes of the American Spirit: Captain Red Blazer and side-kick Sparky are the flying ones. MLJ/Archie's the Shield is behind them and a silhouette of Captain America. The man with the eyepatch is Captain Battle, the one with the star on his forehead is probably the Conqueror. The hero flying off to our left is probably Captain V (there were a couple with similar looks), the one flying to the right, too generic to make out. The man with the star mask is again Captain Courageous and the one with the eagle on his chest is natually the Eagle. Uncle Sam is up front and center.