BORROWED:
The eXtra Files: The Humor Is Out There (Hyperion Avenue) After reading my first book from cartoonist Jeffrey Brown in a while (
Batman and Robin and Howard: Summer Breakdown, below), I consulted his recent-ish output and saw there were a handful of works I hadn't yet read. Given that I've been following his work for about as long as he's been working, I figured I should rectify that. This is the first of two books in this month's column on previous works from Brown, having been released in November of last year.
It is, of course, a slim, hardcover, gift book-like collection of mostly one-panel gag cartoons and occasional 2-6 panel comic strips poking gentle, affectionate fun at The X-Files, the popular drama about FBI agents investigating paranormal phenomena that ran from 1993-2002.
In other words, this is basically the creator of the Vader and Son line of books shifting his attention to another popular nerd media touchstone that he is apparently a fan of.
While I did see a handful of episodes of the X-Files when they originally aired on Fox and I did go see the1998 film (and, in the last few years, I watched the fifth season episode "Detour," a monster-of-the-week installment that references the Mothman, as part of my research into the increasingly-popular cryptid), I was not a fan or even a regular viewer of the show. During the time of its original run, I wasn't really a regular viewer of any TV at all, really. Additionally, as I've outlined elsewhere, I used to have an intense fear of aliens bordering on a phobia, and I understood they figured rather heavily in the show's mythology.
As a Jeffrey Brown guy rather than an X-Files guy, then, it's pretty safe to say that this book wasn't exactly for me, and I didn't "get" a lot of it, though I could feel many of the references and jokes as they sailed over my head. That is, I could recognize them as references to and jokes about particular elements of the show, while not being able to make exact sense of them myself.
Many of the jokes are tied to specific events from specific episodes, so much so that the majority of the entries have the name of a particular episode written at the bottom of the page in Brown's instantly recognizable handwriting (Sadly, there is no joke for "Detour," the only episode still fresh in my mind.)
A handful of others are more general, free-standing X-Files jokes that I suppose many readers will know enough about the show through pop culture osmosis to get as long as they know, for example, the basic premise of the show, and that Fox Mulder is a believer while Dana Scully is a sceptic. Or, for another, that there was obvious sexual tension between the two incredibly attractive people who played the leads (Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny, who, some 20 years after the show ended are still both incredibly attractive, and somehow seem to be getting only more so as they age...? There's an unworldly phenomenon someone should maybe investigate!), leading to fans speculating on their potential romantic entanglement.
As for an example of the standalone gags unmoored to a specific event or episode, there's the cartoon that is repeated on the back cover of the book, featuring a flying saucer lifting a cow up in some sort of tractor beam while a few diminutive gray aliens stand around looking up at it. "Now do you believe, Scully?!" Fox gestures to the scene, while Scully, her arms crossed and an eyebrow raised, responds, "I'm sure there's a plausible explanation, Mulder."
Others include Mulder earnestly investigating what is clearly a cat's hairball, or speculating that they are both trapped in a simulation, "our lives determined by the whims of some godlike writer..."
Even some of the jokes explicitly tied to the show work well enough to be enjoyed by any reader, regardless of their experience with the subject matter, as in a strip labeled "The Host", wherein law enforcement officers load some kind of bizarre monster into the back of a van while commenting how they would hate to be alone with the thing, and then the driver announces, "Welp, almost midnight! About time for me to drive this thing through some poorly-lit rural backroads all by myself!"
The artwork is clearly that of Brown, although it is somewhat unusual for the artist in that he's drawing what amounts to celebrity likenesses throughout the work, something he would seem to have very little experience with. Though his various Star Wars gag books were also based on a live-action media property and thus included "real" settings, vehicles, props and live human actors playing the characters, the Vader and Son premise meant Brown was mostly drawing Vader's expressionless masked face and little kid versions of the other characters, so, for the most part, rather than having to draw likenesses of, say, Mark Hamill or Carrie Fisher, he was instead drawing blank-faced little kid characters with hair and costuming similar to those the actors wore in those films.
Brown therefore does what I would consider a fairly remarkable job of capturing Anderson and Duchovny as they looked in the show in the '90s, doing a particularly impressive job with their moods and emotions, usually conveyed with their glancing, rolling, narrowing eyes and raised eyebrows. The other characters, like The Lone Gunmen, Robert Patrick, some FBI administrators and even all the walk-ons, look like pretty solid likeness work too. Especially from someone whose simple style wouldn't seem flexible enough to accommodate such accurate work.
For example, I've never thought Jeffrey Brown's version of Jeffrey Brown, which starred in his early "girlfriend" books and which he generally draws in the "About the Author" section of his recent work (as he also does so here), looks much of anything at all like the real Jeffrey Brown of photographs and comics convention appearances. (But then, I'm clearly not one to talk. My Caleb character is basically just my generic human character wearing the beard, glasses and clothes that the real Caleb wears.)
Anyway, I imagine this is a pretty great book for actual X-Files fans, given how much I enjoyed it while recognizing so relatively little of it.
Scrooge McDuck: The Dragon of Glasgow (Fantagraphics Books) I'm not used to having to deal with continuity issues when it comes to Disney comics, but it turns out that this new tale of Scrooge McDuck's childhood—originally created in France, and published in English for the first time by Fanta last summer—turns on a bit of trivia that will be familiar to readers of Don Rosa's seminal
Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, but caught me off-guard, given that I assumed this would be a standalone work in the way that most of the Disney comics I've read from the publisher have been (While it's not noted in the text of the back cover of the book,
the solicitation copy found online does indeed call the book "an all-new saga set in the world of Don Rosa's
Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck series").
To be fair, while the appearance of a plot point referencing Rosa's work surprised me, one's understanding or enjoyment of The Dragon of Glasgow doesn't absolutely hinge on having already read another comic, and it's easy enough to roll with (After all, I'm an experienced super-comics reader; it takes more than an allusion to unfamiliar continuity to throw me!).
The book, by French writer Joris Chamblain and Italian artist Fabrizio Petrossi, opens in the present, with Huey, Dewey and Louis putting on a play for their uncle Scrooge McDuck in his money bin. The subject? The legend of the Glasgow Dragon, some sort of sea monster sighted in Scrooge's own hometown in 1880, a good half-century before the first appearances of that more famous Scottish cryptid, the Loch Ness Monster.
After (barely) humoring the boys, Scrooge loses his temper when they start to ask him about the dragon and the little girl that reported it, seeing as how he was in Glasgow at the time, and he throws them out. It's Unca, er, Uncle Donald who suggests they go around Scrooge and write his sister, Aunt Matilda, and get the story from her.
The bulk of the rest of the book is devoted to dramatizing her letter back to the boys, telling them the story of the Glasgow Dragon.
That term, by the way, is used variously in the story. Not only is it the name assigned to the strange sea monster that appeared back in the day, but, as children, Scrooge and Matilda used to refer to the city's big coal mine by that name. Matilda used to fear it would one day gobble them up.
The story features a very young Scrooge, who Petrossi draws to resemble the nephews, save for his even-then prominent sideburns, as he and his sister and their friends run around Glasgow, often going to play in the mine (against the wishes of their parents, the mine owner, and adults in general).
One day the pair make the acquaintance of a new girl in town named Erin, who performs onstage at the local theater, and Scrooge and Erin show one another their worlds, each of which is fairly foreign to the other. Scrooge, his imagination fired by the theater, even secretly begins to rehearse with her, making his own debut as the lead in a version of "Romeo and Juliet."
The play, as a character points out, is almost too perfect for the pair, given that they end up belonging to warring families (This reveal, by the way, is the reference to continuity I mentioned).
Will Scrooge be able to patch-up his forbidden friendship with Erin, and, perhaps more urgently, save his poor mother and sister from having to resort to the mine when the family's poverty reaches a crisis point? And can he do so before he catches a boat to America, as the year in which this tale is set is also the year we learn—through his nephews—that he did so...?
Well, one can probably guess the outcome easily enough, although I must say I felt surprisingly moved by the ending, in which we return to the present and see how Scrooge ultimately reacts to the memories his nephews stirred up during their little play and their barrage of questions.
At just 56 pages, it's a rather quick read, but Chamblain gives it the overall structure and scope to make it feel like a satisfying, complete...well, graphic novel, I guess, although unlike many of the times we use that generic term, The Dragon of Glasgow truly earns it.
Petrossi's art, which is beautifully presented on huge 9.6-by-12.6-inch page format that flatters it nicely, is highly animated, the pen-and-ink characters seeming to easily glide from panel to panel, one's eyes practically chasing them around the pages. Though the basic character designs are fairly close to the standard ones for all of the characters, there's a more dynamic and stylized feel to them here, and Petrossi does a particularly impressive job of drawing a child version of Scrooge that nevertheless scans as the same person as the elderly character we're used to; though the "present" Scrooge only gets a few panels versus that of the "past" Scrooge, it's clear in their facial expressions and general attitude they are the same character with the same spirit.
The art also rewards a reader who spends time poring over the deep and detailed backgrounds, as there is often action of some sort by various animals built into it, as in the case of the cat chasing the mouse that can be seen on the cover.
The Dragon of Glasgow is a worthwhile read, not just for Disney fans or Duck comics fans, but for anyone who enjoys well-made comics. It should fit quite nicely on one's bookshelf, right next to similarly-sized imports Mickey's Craziest Adventures and Donald's Happiest Adventures.
Thor and Loki: Midgard Family Mayhem (Chronicle Books) Much of what I said of Jeffrey Brown's
The eXtra Files above holds true for this book as well. It's a slim, hardcover, gift book-like collection of cartoons and comics in which Brown shifts his attention from the
Star Wars franchise to another nerd-friendly media property to give it the
Vader and Son treatment (Here, Jack Kirby's Thor characters in particular, and the wider Marvel Cinematic Universe in general).
Also like The eXtra Files, this was released last year (in April, to be exact), originally missed by me, and now sought out to fill in some of the gaps in my reading of Brown's body of comics work.
It hews a lot closer to the Vader and Son series' model than The eXtra Files does, though, focusing as it does on recasting the protagonists as kid versions of themselves to accentuate the family dynamic that results. Here, then, the titular brothers' parents Odin and Frigga are grown-ups (as are Heimdall, Nick Fury and Skurge, each of whom appear in a single entry apiece), while Thor and Loki are little kids (as are the various Avengers characters who show up, and Thor's peers, like Sif, The Warriors Three, Jane Foster and The Enchantress).
There's a stone tablet on the first page, carved with the premise: Odin and Frigga travel across the Ten Realms to their favorite world, Midgard, with their two sons, the god of thunder and the god of mischief. The exact setting isn't necessarily important, though. Some jokes take place in Asgard, most take place on Earth, and there are even a few in other realms, but basically the "where" of a particular entry seems chosen just to serve the joke in question.
Most of these jokes involve Thor's storm powers and the abilities of, or his affection for, his magic hammer. That, or Loki causing mischief, sometimes through the use of magic powers, other times through more earthly means (Drawing a smiley face on Mjolnir with a Sharpie, for example, or tossing plastic rings around li'l Hela's elaborate head-dress).
Brown doesn't limit himself to the Thor lore of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, though, also telling comics-specific jokes (Beta Ray Bill, Neil Gaiman's Angela, Thor-as-a-frog and The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl's Ratatoskr all make appearances, though, in most instances, one need not be familiar with them to "get" the joke of the particular entry they appear in).
Curiously, Brown never seems to entirely settle on whether to take his inspiration from the Marvel Comics Universe or the Marvel Cinematic Universe, at least in terms of his design work. It's evident in the costuming of the two leads, which you can see on the cover; Brown's Thor wears his original, Jack Kirby-designed comics costume, while Loki's dressed as he was in his first few filmic appearances (He does try on the comics' Loki's longer-horned hat at one point, however).
Similarly, the costuming of the other characters appears to be chosen pretty much at random. Captain America is wearing a comics-accurate costume, as are Sif and Volstagg, while the rest of the Avengers-related characters are all wearing their Cinematic Universe duds.
This set of jokes, which are either full-page one-panel gags or short strips (and, in once, case, a two-page splash), aren't generally as strong as Brown's better Star Wars gags from previous books, perhaps because Vader and Luke's father-and-son relationship is such a potent part of those films, whereas the family dynamic of the Thor and Avengers movies aren't given as much emphasis. (Or perhaps the Star Wars material is just more cemented in my imagination, given that I grew up with those movies and their spin-offs, whereas the Thor/Avengers stuff is so much "newer" to me, the first Thor movie arriving in 2011, long after I became a grown-up...? I don't know).
It's definitely worthy of a flip-through, but it's hardly Brown's most heroic effort, even among the gags-about-pop culture-touchstones genre he's built for himself of late.
Titans: Beast World (DC Comics) I noted on social media site Bluesky* the other day that for some reason neither my local library nor any of the 39 other northeast Ohio libraries that it is in a consortium with and shares books with seem to have ordered a copy of Tom Taylor, Ivan Reis and company's
Titans: Beast World for their patrons, despite the fact that several had copies of the first volume of Taylor's
Titans run (Of which this is essentially the second volume, even if it's not labeled thusly), and despite the fact that Taylor-written books and DC super-comics seem to always end up on one of those libraries shelves.
In fact, this is the first time that I can remember not being able to find a particular DC trade I wanted to read anywhere in the consortium. I'm not sure why this is. Maybe they're just slower to order this book than I was to look for it (it was just released in August), or maybe it fell through the cracks for some other reason.
Anyway, I just found that noteworthy. Luckily, the Hoopla app, which I have access to through my library card, did carry it, which meant I was able to borrow and read it, even if I had to do so on the screen of my laptop, which is not my ideal way to read a comic book.
As for the book itself, it collects the six-issue Beast World mini-series and two tie-in issues of Titans, all written by Taylor, with pencil art by Ivan Reis, Lucas Meyer, Travis Moore and Eduardo Pansica, embellished by four different inkers and three different colorists (Despite all the chefs in the kitchen, it's remarkably visually consistent book, with everyone's individual styles hanging together well enough that, were it not for the changing credits, one might not always notice exactly when a new artists would tag in).
Though the story ended up under a different title (and an un-numbered collection) this is, as I said, basically just the next volume of Taylor's Titans run, directly following up on various plot points from the first handful of issues of the series: The Titans taking the disbanded Justice League's place as the world's premiere team of superhero protectors, Amanda Waller and her lieutenant Peacemaker rankling at this turn of events, Brother Blood now going by "Brother Eternity" and working to move humanity from the Earth it screwed-up so badly to a new world...and his possession of some sort of weird, alien parasites that mind-controls their hosts, including former Titan Garth/Tempest.
It also realizes some of the unique potential of the current iteration of the Titans that I was most eager to explore, the idea of the Titans inheriting the League's role, something I was hoping to see from the first pages of Taylor's Titans. This is their first world-threatening, gather-all-the-heroes-for-a-big-meeting-to-discuss crisis, with Nightwing universally looked to as the leader (Batman gets taken off the board fairly early in the proceedings), the various Titans getting the most focus and all the best scenes (along with a few guest-stars, most notably Batgirl/Oracle Barbara Gordon, Superman Jon Kent and Detective Chimp), and the rest of DC's currently-active heroes—Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lanterns Alan Scott and Hal Jordan, Martian Manhunter, Captain Marvel—mostly appearing in group shots, being moved around like chess pieces by Nightwing and Oracle.
It makes for a pretty effective demonstration of the Titans as grown-ups, ready to not just join the ranks of the world's greatest heroes, but to lead them. Given that they save the day, not just from the immediate threat, but the threats that cascade from its resolution, it also serves as something of a statement that the world doesn't necessarily need a Justice League, at least as long as the various super-people are willing to pitch in when they're asked to by the Titans (I understand DC's very next big crossover story, the currently being released miniseries Absolute Power, will make the opposite statement, and lead directly to Mark Waid and Dan Mora's promising looking new Justice League series, Justice League Unlimited).
I was particularly enamored by the first act or so of the book, which scans like it could have simply been an issue or two of Titans, if Taylor wanted to follow the Grant Morrison playbook of super-team comics, and presented a big, crazy threat solved by the imaginative application of super-powers.
Itt turns out that the mind-control parasites seen in Titans are the spores of the "The Necrostar," a continent-sized entity that once threatened ancient Tamaran millennium ago and ended up being imprisoned in one of Saturn's moons (Titan, naturally). If it sounds like Taylor and Reis are riffing on original Justice League enemy Starro with a creepier and more realistic take, well, they most certainly are. The Necrostar seems to be some kind of relative of Starro's and, in fact, it was Starro himself who ultimately defeated the Necrostar all those tens of millions of years ago, allowing the Tamaraneans to imprison it.
Now the Necrostar is free and headed towards earth, and Batman hatches a plan: Try to find Starro and get him to engage with his old foe again. Beast Boy has a better, though wilder plan. The shape-shifting character, who has just been demonstrated in the pages of Titans to be able to turn into giant alien monsters and to be able to spread his consciousness through multiple animals by turning into swarms of insects, will attempt his biggest transformation ever, and become a giant green star conqueror, complete with little green, face-hugging, cycloptic star-fish spores, to take on The Necrostar hand-to-hand...to-hand-to-hand-to-hand.
"LET'S GO WITH... ...GARRO," the successfully transformed Bast Boy says as he tackles the Necrostar in space, ultimately pushing it into a gigantic Boom Tube opened by Cyborg into a freezing cold part of the universe (Meanwhile, Garro's spores dive into the mouths of those infected with the Necrostar's spores and kick them out, un-possessing them. This sort of works for the purposes of keeping the fact that victims like Tempest were being mind-controlled secret, as was necessary for the earlier parts of Taylor's Titans story, but it does lack the cool visual of the one-eyed starfishes affixed to their victims' faces).
(I confess that here I missed the way Beast Boy's co-creator Bob Brown and Bruno Premiani drew him in his earliest appearances in Doom Patrol, wherein his animal transformations would all have his haircut.)
And thus the Earth is saved...but Beast World is just getting started.
A surprise attack by a "Dr. Hate," who resembles an evil version of Dr. Fate and, indeed, seems to serve the Lords of Chaos rather than Fate's Lords of Order, leaves Garro mindless, drifting in space as a huge, green Starro, while his millions of spores continue to fly around Earth, now flying into the mouths of victims and, somehow, turning them into half-human, half-animal hybrids that then go on rampages, a never-really-explained result of Beast Boy's powers and those of a star conqueror mixing, apparently.
And so the Titans and their fellow superheroes find themselves facing a new crisis: Millions of people turning into animal people, including Batman and, more troublingly, Black Adam and Power Girl, who are, of course, super-powered animal people.
While they try to find a way to stem the chaos and hopefully reverse the, um, animalification of their peers and some million more innocent victims, Amanda Waller (here in full-on supervillain mode, rather than the good-if-Machiavellian character she was originally introduced as) wants to use the crisis to take over the world from the superheroes, her plans including killing Beast Boy-as-Starro and rounding up and exterminating all of the infected animal people. (How bad is Waller here? Well, not only is she working with Peacemaker, distractingly drawn to look like John Cena on many of the pages featuring him, but she also allies herself with villains Lex Luthor and Dr. Hate, and her plans to take out Beast Boy also involve killing off an old supporting character from Mike Baron's run on The Flash in the late 1980s. It's been getting gradually harder to reconcile the modern Waller with that of the original volume of Suicide Squad).
Obviously the day will ultimately be saved, the events of this miniseries, which, again, is really just the next arc of Taylor's Titans story, seemingly leading rather directly into the next issues of Titans (Thanks, in large part, to the surprise revelation of who is under Dr. Hate's helmet), and, one imagines, the next crossover event series, Absolute Power (The very last panel of the story contains the blurbs "To Be Continued in the Pages of Titans!" and "And Amanda Waller's Quest For Order Is Just Beginning...")
I liked it well enough.
As I said, it featured the realization of what was potentially unique about this particular iteration of the Titans vs. the many others that preceded it (that is, the Titans finally coming into their own as the heirs of the Justice League), presenting them with a credible worldwide crisis story and showing how they would handle it, and how their being in control differs from the League being in charge, with the powers that be not yet ready to accept them (Here that means Waller, who speaks for the President of the United States through much of the storyline). That's something I was particularly interested in, and the opening chapter at least was the exact kind of super-comics I like: Big and crazy.
There were a few questions I had about elements of the proceedings, however, mostly stemming from my own not being up to date with the goings-on of the DC Comics line.
I didn't understand where Jon Kent's new "Electric Superman" powers came from and how they worked, for example, nor did I get why Power Girl turned into a phoenix-like firebird when she became infected with a beast spore, rather than just a regular animal-person.
Also, Roy Harper continues to be conspicuously absent from Titans comics, especially given the all-hands-on-deck nature of this particular story. In fact, Team Arrow wasn't represented in this story at all, with neither Green Arrow nor Black Canary showing up even in the biggest crowd scenes.
I guess that's what the Beast World Tour: Star City #1 tie-in, which features both Green Arrows on the cover, was for, though.
It's collected, along with the other four Beast World Tour one-shots and some other material, in the companion book Titans: Beast World Tour, which, like this book, no local library seems to have, but Hoopla does.
Maybe I'll check that out in the future to see if it answers some of my questions...
Titans: Beast World Tour (DC) Curiosity got the best of me, and I decided to check out this companion collection to Tom Taylor, Ivan Reis and company's
Titans: Beast World.
The 200-ish page book includes the five city-specific Titans: Beast World Tour one-shot anthologies—Metropolis, Gotham, Central City, Atlantis and Star City—each featuring the "family" of heroes that are based in that particular city, as well as stories from Nightwing #109 and #110 and Action Comics #1060, plus Titans: Beast World—Waller Rising #1. So that's everything with Beast World in the title, save for Titans: Beast World—Evolution #1, which simply reprints some key Beast Boy/Changeling stories from throughout Titans history, from 1966, 1982 and 2003, plus the 1985 Who's Who page for Changeling.
Titans: Beast World Tour is hardly essential reading and doesn't add anything necessary to the main story as it played out in the pages of the Titans: Beast World collection, not even in terms of depth or texture. Not even the Taylor-written story, in which Robin Damian Wayne goes missing and turns into a cat-person, necessitating a rescue from Nightwing and Superman Jon Kent, seems to offer anything of great value to the already quite tightly written main storyline. (In fact, some of these stories only complicate or actually detract from the main story).
Given the city/family set-up of most of the tie-ins, one might expect the book to be full of stories in which we see how the various heroes are dealing with the fallout of Beast Boy's plan to tackle the Starro-like Necrostar by turning into a Starro himself, an act which resulted in Earth being bombarded with green Beast Boy/Starro spores that fly into their victims' mouths and turn them into human-animal hybrids. (As to why no one ever just, like, covers their mouths throughout the crisis, none of the stories herein address that, but it seems that, like the coronavirus pandemic, masks would have gone a long way towards staving off the ill effects of this particular plague).
And to be sure there are quite a few stories that amount to little more than Character A fighting an infected Character B for a few pages, among my favorite being the Kelley Jones-drawn one in which Spoiler fights Killer Moth, who has been turned into...not a moth-man, but a cockroach-man, and the Sam Maggs and P.J. Holden story in which Batgirl Cassandra Cain stumbles upon a unique way to defeat the panther-woman that used to be The Huntress (The Gotham-based Huntress from the present, that is, not the Huntress from the future who is currently in the JSA; apparently there are two Huntresses now and they are both featured in the pages of this collection).
There are several stories that try to do different things with the premise, resulting in some odd digressions. Like, for example, the fact that the spores can apparently occasionally turn their victims into giant animal monsters, as happens to Jimmy Olsen (who naturally turns into a giant turtle man), Black Manta (a giant manta) and Black Canary (a giant black canary...wearing fishnets). Or, for another, some more plot-heavy stories, like one villain setting up an animal-person fight club for bloodthirsty audience-members to gamble on, or a set of villains experimenting on the spores and human corpses to make zombie animal-people.
The biggest departures seem to be Waller Rising one-shot by writer Chuck Brown and artist Keron Grant, and one of the two Dreamer-starring stories.
The former has very little to do with Beast World, and simply involves Waller recruiting her nephew, a psychic tracker codenamed "Deadeye", to track down and stop an extremely nebulous plan by Dr. Hate, who apparently goes rogue and temporarily pursues his own agenda during the course of the events of Beast World, attempting to sacrifice an otherwordly space called The Kingdom to the Lords of Chaos (There's no indication that this occurs at all if you just read Beast World; Dr. Hate and Waller just seem to be allies).
Along the way, Deadeye teams up with Vixen and Batwing David Zambive, while Dr. Hate makes a deal with Black Manta, and kidnaps various heroes, from the likes of Nubia to more minor characters like Dr. Mist and Freedom Beast. Even alternate Earth Suprman Val-Zod is roped in from where he was found in the Phantom Zone.
Brown never articulates exactly what he's doing through any dialogue or narration, and it's all done naturally enough that it's not at first obvious, but he assembles an all-black cast, eventually suggesting the formation of some kind of all-black DC super-team.
On the very last page of the story, Deadeye, Batwing and Vixen are talking in what is apparently Batwing's base, and there are holographic projections of what appear to be the rest of DC's black heroes; many of them are hard to make out in Grant's style, especially because they are only sketchily detailed and drawn as all electric-blue and translucent, but the likes of Steel John Henry Irons and Green Lanterns John Stewart and Joe Mullein are apparent among some of the characters from this story and some characters that might be...a Firestorm, Black Lightning's daughters, Bumblebee and maybe...is that Icon....or Bloodwynd...?
"Is it a team?" Deadeye asks, facing the collection of indistinct heroes, while Batwing chimes in, "A network?" Vixen replies with the last words of the story, "A beginning."
A later story, a semi-Jaws parody by Frank Tieri and Valentine De Landro, has Vixen and Deadeye looking to save the now-mutated Black Manta because, they say, they want him for a team they're putting together to further tick off Amanda Waller. It will be interesting to see if anything ever actually comes from this.
As for The Dreamer stories, there are two of these, both written by Nicole Maines and Steve Orlando and drawn by Fico Ossio. In the first, Dreamer's pre-cognitive powers alert her to a terrible disaster in Metropolis, which turns out to be a mutated Livewire setting off explosions through a portion of the city, and Dreamer fights and defeats her using vague, never-explained energy powers (I guess...?) while Superman Jon Kent evacuates people. It's nothing special, but it fits with the basic premise of Beast World, at least.
The follow-up? Not so much. Another Dreamer story featuring Jon Kent, it has Amanda Waller showing up on the relatively new heroine's doorstep to recruit her to tackle another precog, who seems to be an expert fighter and a former soldier of Waller's who is now threatening revenge; Waller says only Dreamer's powers can counteract his (Why she doesn't simply detonate his head if he used to be a Squad member, I don't know, really; it goes unmentioned).
The only thing this story seems to have to do with Beast World is that Waller is in it, I guess.
Although most of the stories are relatively short, and there is a much wider-than-usual variety of art styles on display, keeping things interesting, there are so many riffs on the animal hybrid fighting scenario that I thought the book really started to drag at one point (During Atlantis, specifically).
It did answer some of my questions about Beast World though, specifically what Green Arrow and Black Canary were up to during the event, and where Roy Harper was (Oliver Queen narrates that he's gone missing, likely since the events of Green Arrow Vol. 1: Reunion, reviewed in this column, events which also involved Amanda Waller, who is apparently becoming the new Darkseid, given how often she's used as the villain in recent DC stories).
No clue why Power Girl, who is on the cover in her mutated state, turned into a firebird rather than a regular bird-woman, though; maybe it would make sense if I read the recent Power Girl series...?
Anyway, if you're a fan of any of the particular families of DC heroes represented here, chances are you will find something to like in their particular section, and God knows there's enough variety in the art that there's sure to be a style you'll find particularly engaging somewhere between the covers.
Otherwise, this is a pretty skippable companion to what is actually a fairly compelling superhero crossover story.
Walt Disney's Mickey and Donald Fantastic Futures: Classic Tales with a 22nd Century Twist (Fantagraphics) I'm unsure of the exact provenance of this book, which was apparently released back in February, although I had obviously missed it at the time. (I only discovered it belatedly when I saw it listed in the back of the latest edition in Fanta's Carl Bark's Library,
Walt Disney's Donald Duck: Mystery of the Swamp, covered in
the previous column).
Though a few minutes of Googling didn't reveal its backstory, the fine print between the title pages says, "The stories in this volume were originally published in Italy," which would certainly explain all the Italian-sounding names in the table of contents. Additionally, there's a note on the same table of contents stating, "The content of this volume is presented in its entirety as first created in 2023", when I am assuming it was originally published by a Disney affiliate in Italy.
That year was a significant one for the Walt Disney Company, as that was when they celebrated their centennial, and it presumably explains the premise of this anthology's eight stories. Each is based on a classic Disney animated short, from 1935's Mickey's Fire Brigade to 1950's Trailer Horn, but the resultant homage is set a century in the future.
Though each is written by Francesco Artibani, either credited with "story" or "plot" (in the case of the latter, another writer gets a "script" credit), they are all completely independent of one another, set in a variety of different future cities (Mouseton-Mars, Mouseton-2-2, the Duckspace 1 Station, and so on).
The vision of the future offered in each is a fairly generic one...generic enough, one imagines, that it's probably not that unlike what Walt Disney and his peers probably imagined the twenty-first century to be like. You know, people in tight-fitting jumpsuits, flying cars, space stations, a colony on Mars, interplanetary travel and so on.
Each of the stories is preceded by a page labeled as "The Inspiration," which details the original cartoon short it will be loosely based on. These pages contain a few paragraphs explaining the plot of the short and often some of the historical background of its creation, including considered but discarded aspects, as well as a few stills and/or related artwork.
These prove important to the proper enjoyment of Artibani and company's reimaginings, as not only do these pages make some sense of the basic premise of each, some of which seem...odd for stories set in the far-flung future (ghost-busting in a vintage haunted house in the case of "Lonesome Ghosts in the Machine", for example, or classic fire-fighting in "Firefighters of Tomorrow"), but they also clue readers into why certain creative choices were made, like including Pete in the aforementioned ghost story or reversing Pete and Pluto's roles in "Mr. Mouse Takes a Space Trip" (a feat accomplished in part by giving Pluto a special device that translates his barking into English).
I certainly appreciated these "Inspiration" pages, as I am certainly not familiar with all of the shorts referenced, and in the case of those I have any memory at all of seeing—Trailer Horn, Thru the Mirror—that memory is fragmented and vague at best.
And so Mickey, Donald and Goofy leave for a vacation in a state-of-the-art trailer as in "Mickey's Trailer", but here it is pulled by a rover across the surface of Mars, as they leave the safety of their domed city. And instead of cleaning the insides of a giant clock tower as in "Clock Cleaners", they are tasked with cleaning a giant mecha robot. And so on.
Most of the stories star these characters as a trio—Goofy, usually used as a Mickey Mouse supporting character in the comics, doesn't get cover billing like his two pals. There are only two exceptions to the rule: "Exoplanet Trailer," in which Donald Duck seeks a relaxing vacation on a sparsely populated, forest-like planet only to be annoyed by cyborg chipmunks Chip-Y and Dale-X, and the previously mentioned "Mr. Mouse Takes a Space Trip", in which Mickey takes the space train to Jupiter, only to become entangled in an adventure that involves a pick-pocketing Pete and canine train conductor Pluto.
By far the most fun part of the book is the high quality and great variety of the art, all of which is highly stylized by its creators, which will seem quite dramatic to readers who are now used to the faithful styles of the likes of Floyd Gottfredson, Carl Barks, Don Rosa and the various "Disney Masters" Fanta has been publishing over the course of the last 13 years or so (As much variety as there is within the styles of those various creators, they all tended to stick pretty faithfully to the approved and predominant designs of the Disney characters during the time in which they were working on the books.)
Though the most essential elements of the basic designs are kept pretty much intact—the characters are all recognizable as themselves throughout—there is quite a wide variety of takes. Giovanni Rigano and Ivan Bigarella offer lush, almost painterly art that straddles the worlds of animation and classic storybook illustration, while Donald Soffriti offers what looks like a sharper, more jagged take on the 2013-2019 Mickey Mouse shorts and Palo De Lorenzi gives us a flat, modern style that looks a little like individual animation cels and a little like comics art drawn on a computer.
The characters, as mentioned, are pretty elastic from story to story, none more so than Donald, who, tends to sport a pointier, more elongated beak and more duck-like build than his more classic interpretation in some of the stories, particularly in "The Lonesome Ghosts in the Machine," where his design looks more like that of his first appearances than later ones, and "Thru The Betaverse," wherein he looks even more like the Donald of 1934 than that.
The book's cover, apparently by artist Mirka Andolfo (whose work I first saw in DC Comics: Bombshells, but who has since gone on to draw Wonder Woman, Harley Quinn, Ms. Marvel and her own creation, Sweet Paprika), doesn't really give one a sense of the contents of the book. Whether you come across it in a comics shop or in a library, I'd definitely recommend at least picking it up and flipping through it, if only to marvel at the art. (My personal favorite was Francesco D'Ippolito and Lucio De Giuseppe's "Thru the Betaverse," which finds Mickey as an anti-hacker who jumps into various virtual reality-like worlds to protect them, and then spends most of the story trying to stop a revolution in the Wonderland setting; it's drawn in a style that hearkens to the earliest animated and comics looks of the characters.)
Ardent Disney fans, particularly those who know and admire the classic animation as well as the comics interpretations, will, of course, get the most out of the book, but I'd suggest it to any fan of comics-making as a great example of visually reinterpreting classic stories and characters—and are there any more classic characters in our culture than Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck?—in one's own design an story-telling style.
REVIEWED:
Archie: The Decision #1 (Archie Comics) This is the first comic book I bought specifically so I could write a review of it in many, many years now, so I guess I also could have put it under the "BOUGHT" section of
last month's column, but as I knew the review I'd be writing would be for
Good Comics for Kids, I figured it makes more sense to include it in this section of this month's column.
This book is, of course, the one-shot special created by the unlikely pairing of writer Tom King and artist Dan Parent. Unlike other such instances of big-name creators from the world of super-comics visiting Riverdale, this isn't an exciting new take on the storied Archie franchise, but simply King offering a 20-page gag story, in the mode of the Archie Comics you may have grown up reading.
The collaboration is, I think, big enough news to warrant attention—and so I read and reviewed it—but it's not too terribly fruitful, thanks in large part to the flatness of the central joke upon which the entire story hinges. (Although I did admire King and Parent for diligently trying to fit as many Archie Comics characters into a coherent Archie story as possible; at one point while reading it I had the thought that it just might be the Batman: Hush of Archie comics.)
You can find a better structured review of the book here.
Batman and Robin and Howard: Summer Breakdown (DC Comics) If you would have told me in the early years of the new century that Chicago-based cartoonist Jeffrey Brown, whose personal, funny graphic novels
Clumsy and
Unlikely I read at the emphatic recommendation of a friend, would, within the next 20-25 years, create a large body of
Star Wars-related comics and not one but
two Batman graphic novels, I'm not sure I would have believed you. I
definitely wouldn't have had you stipulated that not only would Brown write these works, but he would also draw them in his own signature style, and the results would read more like Jeffrey Brown comics than
Star Wars or Batman comics.
And yet here we are, with Brown releasing a sequel to his fun, funny, all-ages 2001 Batman and Robin and Howard comic which, unlike most comics featuring the current Dynamic Duo, focused on their dynamic as regular kid and single dad trying his best.
In the sequel, Howard is no longer Damian's number one rival, but his best friend, and a valued member of the crime-fighting team. The new conflicts involve the presence of Damian's mom Talia al Ghul, a whole bunch of her ninjas, and a circuitous anti-Superman plot by Lex Luthor. (Oh, um, I shoulda said "Spoilers" before that last sentence, huh? Sorry. But the book has been out for over a month now; you really should have read it by now!)
As with all of DC's kid-focused original graphic novels, this is, of course, set in its own distinct continuity, one separate from that of the main line of DC Comics (These are, essentially, all Elseworlds or Imaginary stories). Which can sometimes be kinda too bad, given how strong some of them are, or what great new characters they might introduce (I could certainly imagine a version of Howard in the DCU, for example).
Despite some minor differences—Batman and Robin's costumes, Damian having a little dog named Dribble rather than big dogs Titus and Ace—most of the Batman and Robin and Howard comics have felt perfectly in-keeping with the portrayal and relationships of the "real" Batman and Robin. Still, even as I was aware of the separation between the various takes, it struck me as odd to have Damian meeting Lois Lane for the first time (Oops, spoiler again!), given his relationship with the Kents as his other best friend Jon's parents in the Super Sons and Batman and Superman books.
Anyway, if you would prefer to read an actual review of Brown's
Summer Breakdown, rather than reading me babbling about it as I am doing here, you can click over to
Good Comics for Kids.
Lion Dancers (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers) This original graphic novel from cartoonist Cai Tse was quite an interesting read. It has elements of your basic sports narrative and your basic coming-of-age story, but the specific subject matter makes it unlike any of those I've ever experienced before: Chinese lion dancing. More
here.
*Oh, I'm on Bluesky now, by the way. If you follow or followed me on Twitter—sorry, I'm not calling it "X"—then you may have noticed I stopped posting there a few months back. I couldn't in good conscience continue to participate in the site anymore, not given the politics and general grossness of the man who now owns and operates it (and seems to spend a lot of time on it, mostly boosting untrue stories). If you would like (slightly) more content from me than you get here at EDILW and GC4K, you can follow me there, where you can find me at @jcaleb.bsky.social. I'm hardly a prolific poster there either, so you haven't missed much, just some talk of a few prose books I've read, in addition to the usual links to my work.
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