BOUGHT:
DC Finest: Plastic Man: The Origin of Plastic Man (DC Comics) I've been waiting a long time for this book. And I don't just mean since DC first announced their new DC Finest format, or the particular comics they would be collecting in them. No, I've been waiting for this book—a big, thorough, affordable collection of Jack Cole's Golden Age masterpiece—since 1999 or so, when I first encountered Cole's Plastic Man in the pages of DC's Archive Editions, $50 hardcovers that collected restored Golden Age comics.DC ended up publishing eight volumes of Plastic Man comics in the Archive Edition format and, for the longest time, those volumes were really the only way to read Cole's Plastic Man comics (Ditto for Golden Age Captain Marvel comics, which I'm hopeful will appear in a future DC Finest collection).
As this collection evinces, the feature would rather quickly evolve.
Such parameters set so early, a Plastic Man adventure could entail pretty much anything that Cole could come up with, although, for the most part, he would stick to pitting Plastic Man against gangsters and other real-world style criminals, even if these would increasingly take on silly-sounding names and their designs would get gradually more exaggerated and cartoony (just as Cole's comics would get increasingly more inventive in lay-out and rendering, and Plastic Man's powers would be stretched to new and inventive limits).
After what looks like a few sidekick try-outs—a chubby cop named Plotz who helps Plast take on Hairy Arms and an army of robots, a goofy-looking Western Union employee named Omar who helps our hero break up an Axis slave labor racket—Woozy Winks is introduced in Police #13 (about 100 pages into this collection), and he would stick around for all future Plastic Man stories.
Woozy rescues a drowning man, who introduces himself as "Zambi ze soothzayer." In thanks for saving his life, Zambi blesses Woozy with his magic: "I hereby bestow upon you the protection of nature!! From this day forth, no harm you!!"
This attracts the attention of Plastic Man, who, in his Eel identity, teams up with Woozy, but try as he might, our hero is unable to lay hands on Woozy, nature continually protecting him by, for example, sending a lightning bolt, giant hail stones or a full-grown tree sprouting from the earth to thwart Plas.
Eventually, Plastic Man guilts Woozy into turning himself in, but it turns out that, thanks to his supernatural protection, no jail can hold him, and so Plastic Man takes him on as his crime-fighting partner (At first, Woozy allies himself with Plas because he wants to get even with Eel, who Plas is inconveniently assigned to bring in, but apparently Woozy enjoys crime-fighting, as he sticks around after that story).
In modern imagination, Plastic Man is primarily thought of as a comedic character, and so it's interesting to read or re-read these earliest adventures, where that's very much not the case. Plastic is a pretty straightforward and serious superhero character (even more so than those Justice Society guys, who were more prone to jokes and quips), what comedy there is in the series coming from the funny-looking, id-driven Woozy, who plays comic relief against Plas as straight man, and, perhaps, the criminals themselves, who, as stated above, Cole depicts as more outlandish as time goes on (and many of their schemes would become more silly in set-up and presentation).
There's one story involving Native Americans, in which Plast uses grease paint to disguise himself as one of their number, part of an investigation into Chief Great Warrior, who urges his tribe to revolt against the United States while they are distracted by the war in Europe. Woozy refers to them as "red skins."
As if often the case for such war time comics, though, the worst portrayal seems reserved for the Japanese characters. In a story from Plastic Man #1, Japanese spies are after an American inventor's miraculous new camouflage, which renders anything it's sprayed on completely invisible, and they end up capturing Plas and taking him back to Japan.
Plastic Man refers to the Japanese agent Amisaki Komiwabi as a "Jap" a "Nip" and "Horse-teeth," and there are more instances of made-up characters in word balloons to denote an Asian language. While the various Japanese characters all look like unfortunate caricatures in this story, I suppose it's worth noting that, by this point in the character's comics, all of the characters look like caricatures, regardless of race, with really only Plas himself and some of the female characters drawn in a straighter, more realistic style.
And so here we get seven distinct stories from four different issues—World's Finest #18, #19 and #25, plus World's Finest 2004 Annual #1—some of which do not even feature the title characters. (If you're wondering what happened to issues #20-#24, we already read those; they were the Kingdom Come story collected in the fourth volume, which I reviewed in this column).
They are, as follows...
•"Phantom Riddles" by Waid and artist Travis Moore presents another new first meeting between the title characters (Magpie, who was the villain of John Byrne's 1986 story of the pair's first meeting, makes an appearance). This one is set "Years Ago," somewhere near the beginning of Batman's second year on the job ("I've done a lot of good this past year," Bruce Wayne tells Alfred of his vigilante career in one panel). Superman looks the same as he does in the regular World's Finest setting, but Batman's cowl here a little different, and he's yet to adopt the "new look" yellow shield around his bat-symbol.
The Riddler has reared his head again, this time leaving his riddles in "Kryptonese," which means he must be in league with someone from Krypton, which brings Superman to Gotham. Batman teams with him, revealing his secret identity in the process...but only after he reveals to Superman that he's figured out his secret identity.
Filling issues #18 and #19 of the series, it's a decent enough story, though it doesn't seem like the instant classic one would hope a story devoted to telling of such a momentous occasion to be. I liked Superman's line about his dog. I suspect this story has bearing on one that Waid was working on for the Superman titles, given an unresolved dangling plot thread.
•"The Ties That Bind" by writer Dennis Culver and artist Travis Mercer is a ten-page Metamorpho solo story, the first story from the pages of the annual, which was an anthology of such shorts. Batman and Superman (and Robin) only appear in the background of the first panel, an asterisk in an editorial box informing us that this story is set "directly after Batman/Superman: World's Finest #17 page 23 panel 5."
As Metamorpho appeared in the series previously, then (in the third volume, Elementary), he apparently earns a solo story in the annual. There's not much to it. Simon Stagg sends Rex to collect a treasure, where our hero finds himself face to face with his own estranged father, an Indiana Jones homage/parody named "Montana Mason."
•"Sting Like a Bee" by writer Stephanie Williams and artist Rosi Kampe seems like a bit of a stretch for inclusion, as I don't believe its star, future Bumblebee Karen Beecher, appeared in the Batman/Superman title at all, but was instead part of the team in World's Finest: Teen Titans (an editorial box in the first panel uses that comics' logo).
Set when she was still a little kid, the story follows Karen as she uses her various inventions—including a brand-new set of wings—to infiltrate the headquarters of a nefarious superstore that seems to be victimizing her community, not completely unlike the way real-life superstores often do.
•"Time Check" by Christopher Cantwell and Jorge Fornes is a Challengers of the Unknown story. I didn't recall the Challs actually being in World's Finest at all, but upon flipping through Elementary again, I saw they did indeed make a brief appearance, which is apparently good enough to make it into the annual. The story is very weird and jumps back and forth between their origin and a new, perilous adventure; I found it a little hard to parse, and not terribly rewarding, although I do like Fornes' art a lot, and am always happy to get more of it. •"Joker-Luthor: World's Vilest" by Waid and artist Steve Pugh is taken from issue #25 and is something of a companion to the earlier "Phantom Riddles," here purporting to detail the first meeting between Lex Luthor and The Joker.
Luthor apparently has gotten possession of a cursed manuscript leading to a magical treasure, but every expert who tries to translate it for him is driven insane in the process. So he figures he will have someone who is already insane try to translate it for him, and thus breaks The Joker out of Arkham, fits him with a bomb collar to make him compliant and then the pair set out for the treasure, a magical maguffin that grants whoever holds it their greatest wish. Its location? The Rock of Eternity. Pugh's art is as solid as always, and Waid writes the characters well, although I'm personally not so fond of the Joker/Luthor alliance being quite as adversarial as this. I've always thought of them more as...well, if not friends, per se, then genuine allies and kindred spirits, bonded by the fact that the other is the only other person on Earth who knows exactly what it's like to be the archenemy of one of the World's Finest. That's just me, though. •"IMPeriled" by Waid and co-writer Cullen Bunn and artist Edwin Galmon, which actually appeared in the annual but is shifted back a bit in the collection for clarity's sake, finds Mr. Mxyzptlk and Bat-Mite at a meeting of "The Just-Us League", which consists of various mite versions of Justice Leaguers, like Wonder Woman, Hawkman, The Flash, Metamorpho and so on (As was suggested in Alan Grant and Kevin O'Neill's 1992 Legends of the Dark Knight #38, the idea seems to be that every DC hero has a mite equivalent of their own).
The various mites all fight over whose respective hero is the best, with "Green-Mite" simultaneously championing both Green Lantern Hal Jordan and Green Arrow Olliver Queen ("Why choose?" he tells a scolding Flash-Mite, "They're both so awesome!"). I won't weigh into the mites' argument, which leads to violence and spans a few too many pages, other than to note that Green-Mite is obviously wrong, as Hal Jordan is demonstrably the worst.
The mite-on-mite violence gets much more serious when a bunch of mites of various villains show up, the Sinestro-Mite seemingly killing Green-Mite. Mxy and Bat-Mite escape as a large, hooded figure with its own unusual dialogue balloons—red type on black ovals—makes the scene, talking smack and apparently leading the bad mites on.
•Finally, the collection ends with "Impossible: Prologue," an eight-pager by the original World's Finest team of Waid and artist Dan Mora that originally appeared in issue #25. Chaos breaks out in the heroes' headquarters—like, for example, a giant, copper Abe Lincoln stepping out of Batman's giant penny to fight the suddenly alive dinosaur statue in the Batcave—and the expected mischief-makers eventually come forward. But the chaos magic wasn't their doing, Mxyzptlk explains, and Bat-Mite appears cradling the dead Green-Mite, saying they're being hunted and that Earth could be next.
It's a heck of a cliffhanger, which one imagines will be picked up on "Impossible," the series' next four-issue arc, and will therefore likely account for most of the sixth trade paperback collection. I'm not quite sure how I feel about Mora's particularly elfin, big-headed imps just yet, but I suppose I'll get a better sense of them in "Impossible" proper.
None of these are bad stories, of course, and there is certainly a lot to enjoy in this collection, but due to its fractious nature, it's the least satisfying read in the series so far.
The title story is an adaptation of an old Italian folktale, and here Mignola proves that comics is perhaps the perfect medium in which to tell these sorts of stories, stories that readers are most likely to have encountered in collections from the likes of the Brothers Grimm or Andrew Lang. The matter-of-fact statements of the magical or fantastic in such stories are doubly effective in comics, where each beat comes with a new image and in a discrete unit of time, so what might seem a little like a storytelling non sequitur in prose will here feel perfectly natural.
So, for example, in a narration box, Mignola can write, "His whole life he lived in a wooden tub in a kitchen. Then, one day--" and we see an image of the boy under discussion, seemingly interrupting the narration to directly address the reader with his announcement-like bit of dialogue, "It's time for me to go out into the world to seek my fortune."
Or, for another, the prose narration may simply state, "And that very night he was set upon by a gang of corpses," while the image shows just that, a question mark in a dialogue balloon above the boy, and some conversation between the corpses giving parallel bits of storytelling information.
In that title story, the boy Yeb is asked to go bowling with a group of undead, who challenge him: If he wins three rounds of the sport, here played with a skull for a ball and upright bones as pins, he shall have their fortune, and if he loses, well, this question is simply answered by a silent panel depicting a close-up smile of one of the corpse's.
He wins all three rounds, being awarded a handful of gold coins, then some buttons and teeth, and finally the right arm plucked off the mummified corpse of what seems to be a saint or holy man. This comes in handy when he journeys to the tower home of a group of shape-changing warlocks, who attack him in the form of giant bats (They seem to be vampires, although that word is never used in the book). Striking them with the fist of the dead holy man transforms them into piles of broken human bones.
That story is followed immediately by a creation story told by the skull-faced "Library Ghost of Castle Yarg." Then another, shorter creation story told by a talking bird (Animals talk frequently in this book, sometimes just making asides, like some birds in the title story). Then there's another folk-tale inspired adventure, this time featuring a holy man who investigates a haunted house in a far-off, exotic-looking land.
The second half of the book consists of a story involving the quest for immortality and its terrible results, an old soldier's story of his adventures with the king of a fairy-like species (which also feels like it was inspired by a folk tale or fairy story), a longer story involving a young woman who does a deal with the devil and turns into an apparent vampire and, finally, a story entitled "Lands Unknown", in which the narrators of the creation stories talk to one another, giving readers a sort of world tour of the strange and fascinating places in this new setting Mignola is building, including ruined kingdoms that prehistoric monsters patrol and a land with giant pack animals that resemble bipedal elephants with no trunks.
The connectivity of the stories is sometimes somewhat subtle, that from the title story and those that follow it seemingly limited to the staff that a religious figure in it bears to the dragon of the creation stories, for example.
Mignola writes of the origins of the setting of these tales in an afterword, in which he explains that this book came out of his retirement, when he was free to draw or paint whatever he wanted "just for fun," but realized "I love drawing comics so I'll just keep drawing comics."
He notes that he decided to "make up a whole other world" where he would set the "Bowling With Corpses" story, the exact opposite of what he normally tells people to go about world-building ("[S]tart with a character, I always say. The world will grow up around them.")
This book, then, isn't the last we'll see of these Lands Unknown, which, I suppose, will gradually become less and less unknown as Mignola tells more comics stories in the setting.
The book should particularly delight long-time fans of the creator, as it tells the sort of supernatural-tinged stories and re-told classic stories that so informed his Hellboy and other work, although here without being at all dependent on the structure of that series' ongoing internal saga.
His art is here more stripped-down and abstracted than ever before, which often works quite well with his animal, old man and supernatural characters, but doesn't fit quite so well with a few of the protagonists, like the bowling boy Yeb or the young woman who becomes a sort of vampire after dealings with the devil in "Una and The Devil." Their eyeballs ever in shadow in their sockets, the characters look even more abstract than the more lovingly detailed skulls of the corpses, ghosts and skeletons that fill the book, which often have detailed teeth and cracks in addition to their big, empty eye sockets.
After the afterword, the book includes a ten-page sketchbook section with notes from Mignola, in which we see some of the kitchens, castles, ships and bits of nature that Mignola used as settings and backgrounds throughout the preceding stories, offering some insight into how he creates and how he works.
Bowling With Corpses should obviously appeal to the many readers who are already ardent fans of Mignola's peculiar art style and storytelling impulses and interests, but, because of its standalone nature and new world, it is also a perfect book for those curious about the artist's work too.
I can't shake the feeling this book has to be winding down sooner or later—perhaps when its characters finally graduate high school and head to college—but I'm quite happy to keep reading it as long as Oda keeps making it.
True Weird Vol. 1 (Dark Horse) This book's cover sold me on it immediately, featuring as it does a Michael Avon Oeming drawing of what appears to be one a Hopkinsville goblins peering into a window. The book contains the five back-ups from Oeming and writer James Tynion IV's 2023 miniseries Blue Book, which seems to have been a comics re-telling of the Betty and Barney Hill abduction case, widely thought of as the first modern alien abduction story**, as well as seven other stories, the providence of which I am unsure of (The fine print on one of the early pages says the book "collects True Weird stories 1-10 and 12-13", suggesting they appeared somewhere else previously. Perhaps online...?)
The stories, which sadly do not include a telling of the Hopkinsville incident depicted on the cover, are, as the title suggests, on some aspect of the maybe true-ish variety of weird story. Many of them are quite famous stories likely to already be familiar to anyone with an interest in Forteana: The aforementioned legend of the green children, the Count of St. Germain, spontaneous human combustion, India's Monkey Man and the hoax of the Piltdown Man. Perhaps less well-known stories detail a woman who investigated spiritualists, an insatiable man from revolutionary France, a campfire-like story of an undead killer and an 18th century English woman executed as a witch.
While there's nothing particularly revolutionary or revelatory in True Weird, many of the stories have proved of perennial interest, and are thus likely to pique that of many readers, whether they've heard prose versions of these stories (or those like them) before or are here hearing of them for the first time.