A Month of Wednesdays: May 2022

 BOUGHT:

Batman: The Dark Knight Detective Vol. 6 (DC Comics) This book collects Detective Comics #622-633 from 1990-1991, a time of transition for the title, occurring during a long stretch in which there wouldn't be a real, steady creative team for some time after the departure of the Alan Grant/Norm Breyfogle team, although Marv Wolfman and Peter Milligan write most of what's contained in this volume.

The highlight of these issues is probably the first story collected, #622-624's arc written by John Ostrander and drawn by Flint Henry and Mike McKone, although the issues are probably most noteworthy for their covers, by the great Dick Sprang. Someone has started publishing an unauthorized Batman comic book, and the fanciful version of the character is far darker than the real thing, a devil from hell who fights crime on Earth as a way to redeem itself after it rebelled against God. Large portions of the issue are given over to the comic within the comic, featuring Henry's art, while McKone draws the "real" world portions, in which a killer seemingly inspired by the comic takes a machete to those he deems criminals, signing his name "Batman." 

It's a pretty great story with a pretty cool, Elseworlds-like comic-within-the comic, and it seems like it would have been befitting of an early trade collection back in the day, not unlike The Many Deaths of The Batman received.

This run of comics also included #627, which was the six-hundredth appearance of Batman within the pages of the book. To celebrate, #627 featured a painted cover by Norm Breyfogle, a reprint of the original Batman story, "The Case of The Criminal Syndicate," and two "cover" versions of the story, one by the team of Marv Wolfman, Jim Aparo and Mike DeCarlo, another by Alan Grant, Breyfogle and Steve Mitchell. Here, the reprint of the original is left out, leaving just the two "cover" stories. 

The Wolfman/Aparo/DeCarlo team are also responsible for three other issues, including the introduction of Abattoir, the return of the Electrocutioner (or a Electrocutioner; this one says he's different from the original and, indeed, looks nothing like the one that would appear in 1992's Tec arc, "Electric City") and another match-up with Abattoir. 

Peter Milligan takes over with issue #629, and the book gets predictably weird and, honestly, rather un-Batman-like, with more focus on the supernatural and the superheroic than the street-level, vigilante action that preceded it. 

In "The Hungry Grass", penciled by Aparo, who would draw all but the last of the Milligan entries, an impossible string of tragedies and crimes afflicts the city, and it's up to Batman to trace Milligan's literary inspiration to stop them. That's followed by a tale of a gangland assassin who is super-persuasive and who is being hunted by bi-racial Siamese twin killers, another of a Holocaust survivor-turned-mystic who creates a golem to protect a Gotham ethnic neighborhood from white supremacists and, finally, Tom Mandrake takes over art chores on a done-in-one in which Bruce Wayne discovers he's not really Batman, a story with a twist ending an a mutant with psychic powers.

There's a rather unsettled, almost anthology-like feel to this particular volume, given the number of short stories and the changes in creators, but it's a fine book filled with some pretty great Batman stories, including some of the weirder cases the Dark Knight has ever tackled.

I'm assuming there will be a few more volumes of Dark Knight Detective in the future, as "Knightfall" won't hit the title until #659. Looking at the next ten issues or so, it looks like the next volume would resemble this one in terms of the number of creators and short stories, with Kelly Puckett, Louise Simonson, Peter Milligan and Alan Grant all scripting stories, taking us right up to the aforementioned three-part Chuck Dixon/Tom Lyle "Electric City" arc. There are a couple of crossovers in here, including "The Idiot Root", "The Return of Scarface" and "Destroyer," but those first two were collected in this series sister series, The Caped Crusader. 

Infinite Frontier (DC) Hoo boy, I'm not sure why I bought this one. Well, that's not true. I know why I bought it. I bought it because I like the Alan Scott and Obsidian characters an awful lot, and they were billed as being a major part of the storyline; see, they are right there on the cover along with some other characters I have had some affection for in the past, like Roy Harper and Agent Cameron Chase of the DEO. 

But there's just...a lot going on here, and it seems written not just for those who are interested in what changed and what didn't after the events of Death Metal, but for those that found the idea of shifting continuity in and of itself of interest, and want to continue to see it not settled but constantly churning. (We now know this leads fairly directly into DC's next big crossover event series, Dark Crisis). 

So this collects Infinite Frontier #0, which set-up the post-Death Metal DCU and previewed many of the storylines and series that would immediately follow, some of which (like Green Lantern) have since ended and are seemingly no longer relevant to the discussion. 

That's followed by Infinite Frontier: Secret Files #1, which is premised as DEO Director Bones listening to various tapes and reading various files made by Chase detailing the various characters who would appear in Infinite Frontier #1-#6 in short stories by various creators, making for something along the lines of a program disguised as a short story anthology. These characters, by the way, are Earth-23's President Superman, a resurrected Roy Harper, Obsidian and a similarly resurrected Jade (although I didn't know she was dead? I thought she and Obsidian just stopped existing during The New 52?), "The Totality" (a group of heroes and villains assembled by J'onn J'onnz to keep an eye on multiversal threats), Psycho Pirate and Bones himself. 

Then, about 140 pages into the book, the story starts for real, with Infinite Frontier #1, a story involving a secret deal made between Bones and other powers throughout the multiverse to essentially buy their freedom from future multiversal problems, to which certain characters that aren't "supposed" to exist anymore are sacrificed. 

It involves Justice Incarnate, the Flashpoint Batman, Darkseid, The Flash Barry Allen in a giant hamster wheel, a new, legacy-filled version of a the JSA and Roy Harper with a Black Lantern ring, and it ends with a couple of revelations, like Darkseid proclaiming the coming of the Great Darkness and The Flash discovering "Multiverse-2," which Pariah explains, is "what came before...destroyed by the Anti-Monitor in the first crisis."

It's all so exhausting. What I want more than more multiversal shenanigans and continuity re-shuffling is just a status quo. Death Metal and the #0 issue of this series seemed to promise that, but crises are, apparently, never-ending. The period between 1986 and 2005, between Crisis on Infinite Earth and  Infinite Crisis, in which continuity was more-or-less settled, the occasional Donna Troy and Zero Hour aside, doesn't seem like something DC is striving for, or even interested in anymore. It's a shame, as the constant crises certainly appeal to a certain type of fan, but at the exclusion of all other potential fans. 

Me, I just want to get off the merry-go-round at some point.

There are almost 25 artists involved in this book, making for an inconsistent work, but the art is generally excellent, and I wouldn't say any particular page is badly done. It's just, like the plotting, a lot.  . 

BORROWED:

Pinball: A Graphic History of the Silver Ball (First Second) I'd be lying if I said Jon Chad's thorough and engrossing history of pinball answered everything I ever wanted to know about pinball, but only because I never had any interest in pinball, and thus didn't really have any burning desire to know any facts about it.

I say that because I want you to realize how effective the book is; despite my general lack of enthusiasm for the subject, it was still a fascinating read, one detailing the arc of history of the game through several highs and lows to what now seems to be a happy ending of sorts.

I was particularly interested with the idea of pinball as a medium, something that comes up when the idea of telling a particular story through a pinball game arises, and in seeing how chad translates the particulars of the game into the medium of comics, often using colorful, geometric shapes emanating from the case to imply the sounds and flashing lights of the game.

Regardless of your interest in pinball, I'd highly recommend this book, which left me wanting to seek out the nearest pinball machine.

The story is followed by about 17 pages of tips on playing, the anatomy of a pinball machine and an extensive glossary of terms. 

Robin Vol. 1: The Lazarus Tournament (DC Comics) Robin Damian Wayne gets another shot at a solo title, this one with a very particular premise: He's participating in an Enter The Dragon-style tournament on a remote island, orchestrated by the so-called League of Lazarus, a heretofore unheard of third group that used to serve Ra's al Ghul (alongside the League of Assassins and the League of Shadows).They splintered away from serving Ra's, however, and now have their own, mysterious agenda. Solving that mystery is what draws Damian to the tournament.

It's a fight-to-the-death affair, although there's a weird caveat: Everyone who is killed in the tournament is brought back to life the first two times they are killed. If they continue to participate and are killed a third time, they are left for dead (Damian, for his part, has his heart torn out of his body by new character Flatline almost immediately upon landing on the island, and is immediately resurrected; this is not Damian's first death, of course). 

Writer Joshua WIlliamson and artist Gleb Melnikkov populate the island with plenty of familiar faces as well as a few new creations (like Flatline), digging fairly deep to come up with pre-existent killers and fighters for the tournament. One of these is former Green Arrow Conner Hawke, whose continuity is, at this point, murky, to say the least (he didn't exist during The New 52; post-Death Metal, the New 52 seems no longer to have existed, so I think everything is restored more-or-less to where it was in 2011, right?). 

Conner, who is ever only referred to as "Hawke", sometimes in a big, logo-like font, seems to be more-or-less like his old self, although he's working with the League of Shadows for some reason that's never articulated, something about them being there for him when no one else was.

Damian's a pretty fun character, and Williamson writes him as well as anybody else has so far. And I've always been a fan of Connor Hawke's, so I'm glad to see him back in some capacity, even if an ongoing Robin book seems like an odd place for him to turn up after so long. I'm not so sure how long Williamson can keep the tournament plot going and have it be effectively dramatic; it is so far a pretty chaotic affair, with fights seemingly happening all them time all over the island (Maybe it's a little like Fortnite? Is this at all like Fortnite?)

A tighter structure and greater focus on it might have made for a more suspenseful read, but then, it can be hard to wring too much suspense out of certain kinds of superhero comics these days. It's not as if there's any chance that Damian is going to be killed off, of course; it's such a remote possibility that the rules of the tournament are written around that fact. I suppose there's a greater deal of suspense in whether or not Damian will kill for real—meaning killing someone who won't be immediately resurrected—and returning to the al Ghul side of his family, rather than the no-killing Batman side. 

To go with the new title, Damian also gets a new Robin costume. It's a solid design, but it seems to stray a bit too far from the original Robin costume's color scheme, replacing the traditional red, yellow and green with a lot of gray and black, with just red highlights here and there and yellow on the inside of his cape. Perhaps this is a temporary look, though, and if he reconnects with his father and returns to Gotham, he'll take up a more traditional-looking Robin costume. 

REVIEWED:

Bite Sized Archie (Archie Comics) Archie, Jughead and company star in an online gag strip, one seemingly targeted at online readers so directly that several jokes are simply comics versions of popular memes. More here. 

Bug Scouts: Out in the Wild! (Scholastic) I've long been a fan of  illustrator Mike Lowery's rough, dashed-off looking artwork, and now here's a whole graphic novel of it! More here.  

Godzilla: Monsters & Protectors—Rise Up! (IDW Publishing) IDW's kid-friendly new Godzilla comic is hardly essential reading, even for fans of the big guy, but it's not bad either. More here. 

Tails of the Super-Pets (DC Comics) Krypto! Streaky! Comet! Beppo! Ace! Proty! Kangas! All are featured in this collection of crazy-ass Silver Age comics, although it's the super-pets in red capes, the ones that eventually coalesce into the Legion of Super-Pets, who get the lion's share of the attention. It's not as complete as I'd like, and it's definitely not a collection I personally woulda put together if I wanted to hype young readers up for the upcoming super-pets film, but it is a lot of fun. More here.