Wednesday, November 06, 2024

A Month of Wednesdays: October 2024

BOUGHT: 

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Reborn Vol. 9—First, Last, Always (IDW Publishing) I just so happened to read a pair of books about goth in the past few months, John Robb's The Art of Darkness: The History of Goth (Manchester University Press; 2023) and founding member of The Cure Lol Tolhurst's Goth: A History (Hachette Books; 2023). Both discussed the English rock band Sisters of Mercy, who proved quite influential in the musical genre referred to as goth (although most bands labeled such don't care to be so labeled). Their debut album was 1985's First and Last and Always

Was writer Sophie Campbell inspired by the Sisters of Mercy when choosing the sub-title for the ninth and final volume of her Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles run which, it turns out, also represents the end of the 150-issue series, which lasted from 2011 to 2024? (Don't worry, they've already relaunched with a new #1, with writer Jason Aaron now at the helm.) 

Looks like it. 

A bit of an odd synchronicity, that, as I would not have recognized the reference had I not noticed Robb's book one day at the library and decided to pick it up. 

As I mentioned, this is the end of Campbell's five-year, 49-issue, nine-volume run on the title, collecting her final six issues. These are mostly drawn by Vincenzo Federici, with some additional art by Fero Pe, Dan Duncan and Campbell herself, returning to draw a touching, wordless four-page reunion featuring the title's core cast. (Campbell also draws the final cover herself, a great piece which really should have been the cover of this collection, and she collaborates with Kevin Eastman on variant covers for the series; as I've said before, the pair constitute what is probably the ideal TMNT art team at the moment, and IDW really should find a project worthy of the team's talents to have them provide the art for...if not both write and draw it.)

Despite lots of callbacks to previous stories (signified by asterisks and editorial boxes), including several to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Armageddon Game and its tie-ins (which I didn't read),  and time travel-enabled visits to key points of IDW's TMNT history/continuity, including to the very night of the characters' origins and to the feudal Japan where their souls originally came from (before being reincarnated into their new 21st century mutant bodies), this seems like something of an odd "last" TMNT story, for either Campbell's own run or this volume of the Turtles' adventures. 

That may be because, as I mentioned when writing about it upon its release, the previous volume felt so much like an ending, with the five title characters all splitting up and going their own ways at the end. Or it may be because Armageddon Game was such a big story with such a large cast and apparent significance (it even big-footed its way into the main title, seemingly forcing this book to deal with the build-up, tying directly into it and then dealing with the fallout from it) that it may have felt like an early climax to this iteration of the TMNT franchise. (Again, I didn't read it, so I'm just guessing here.)  

Just as likely, though, it may be because this isn't so much a TMNT story as it is a Donatello story. 

Sure, the other characters all appear, but they are never together until the very last pages. The present, "real" Leonardo, along with April, helps Donatello with his magic/science experiments from their farmhouse base, and thus appears throughout the book, albeit in what is very much a supporting role. And the present Michelangelo makes a brief appearance, lasting all of several pages. The present versions of Raphael and Jennika are MIA until the reunion page at the end, however. Future versions of the other four turtles all have brief appearances during Donatello's time travel journey, but the focus is undeniably on Donatello throughout.

And what is Donatello up to? Well, using a mishmash of magic and science—computers, sigils, his warp crystal pencil, a high-tech power gauntlet and the redacted notebook of his own future self—he, April and Venus are attempting to travel through time to find his future self, who he hopes can help him with the notebook, all in an effort to stop Armaggon, a sort of time-travelling giant cosmic shark entity (Which, we learn in this volume, is actually a mutated Megalodon.)

Neither target is sitting still, however. Future Donatello is on the move through time, forcing Present Donatello to chase him, while Armaggon is apparently set on devouring Donatello at some juncture, preferably in the past before he accidentally creates Armaggon, and therefore preventing the monster's own painful existence. 

Complicating matters further, Armaggon has apparently recruited a future version of Bob, the mutant mandril who was training under Leonardo and ends up getting kicked into the time portal along with Donatello and Venus, to sabotage the experiment and drain characters of their QNA, which is...well, let's not get into all that here.

Suffice it to say this is the story of Donatello's quest to not screw up the timeline he's seemingly endangered, and it involves a lot of time jumps to the near future and a few to the more distant past, seemingly resolving the long-ish running sub-plot in which the character secretively and obsessively tries to make sense of sorcery and fix everything. 

For what it is, it's fine, although it really feels like it could have been a Donatello miniseries rather than the conclusion of the longest running Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle title and narrative of all time (For context, the original Mirage Studios volume of TMNT only lasted 63 issues, while the Archie Comics Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures lasted 72 issues). 

It of course remains disappointing that Campbell, one of modern super-comics' best artists and maybe the most gifted to ever draw Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman's creations, is relegated to writing only (as I suppose I've probably mentioned at least nine times now), rather than writing and drawing, as in the start of her run, before her appearances on art duties became more and more infrequent, and eventually trailed off altogether. 

Federici is a fine artist, though, and the book looks good and reads well throughout, the only real visual hiccup coming near the end of the book, as one of the "additional art by" creators tags in to draw a scene of Donatello and Venus travelling back in time to visit the lab where the Turtles and Splinter would soon get mutated. There Donatello is drawn with big eyes, his pupils visible through his mask (Federici has drawn his eyes all-white and pupil-less whenever masked throughout the book), making him suddenly look like the original cartoon version of Donatello rather randomly.

Never do the characters feel as alive and as real as during those last four pages, however, the ones where Campbell returns to draw Donatello stepping out of a time portal at the end of his adventure and finding and embracing his family. (The aforementioned Eastman/Campbell covers sure come close, though, pairing Campbell's superior character designs and rendering with the thick, weighty, gritty inking of Eastman that defines the characters, giving them a Mirage Studios aura.)

I'm sort of bummed to see Campbell's run ending. Her TMNT was the last serially published comic book I was reading and was then the last ongoing series I was buying regularly in trade.

I suppose I'll pick up the first volume of Aaron's relaunched TMNT when its available in trade; while I'm not as confident in his abilities as I was in Campbell's, I did enjoy his big, over-the-top and usually funny runs on Wolverine and the X-Men and The Avengers

The immediate future of the franchise seems a bit uncertain, with bad news (unconfirmed rumors about IDW's plans regarding page rates on their licensed comics that struck many professionals as laughably low) and good news (former ComicsAlliance editor Andy Khouri being named TMNT editor...although I suppose he probably prefers being known as a former DC Comics editor at this point). 

I hope, whatever happens next, we haven't seen the last of Sophie Campbell's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and, seriously IDW, get Campbell and Eastman to team-up on the art for something befitting their talents and the quality of their collaboration.


BORROWED:

Batman/Superman: World's Finest Vol 4: Return to Kingdom Come (DC Comics) Even the greatest comics artists are human, and thus capable of making mistakes. Still, I was caught off guard when I hit page five of the latest collection of the Dan Mora-drawn Batman/Superman: World's Finest—and I presume we can all agree that Mora is indeed one of the greatest comics artists, certainly within the genre of Big Two super-comics—and realized the bat-symbol on Batman's chest was...off

If you look closely, there are an extra pair of "points" on the bottom, which is the wrong style of bat-symbol for this iteration of the character, although it is a very familiarly wrong bat-symbol. Specifically, that's what the bat-symbol that adorned the suit worn by Michael Keaton in the original 1989 Batman film looked like (The filmmakers corrected it in time for the sequel, 1992's Batman Returns)

Now, the Batman of this title is indeed a past Batman. The specific year in which the events of World's Finest occur has been tough to pinpoint, but it's clearly sometime after Batman adopted his 1960s "New Look" (adding a yellow oval around his bat emblem) and sometime before Dick Grayson quit being Robin, wherever that is the current DC Universe timeline/canon (Which, perhaps, is something only Mark Waid knows at this point). 

I at first assumed the setting of the book was the modern version of the Silver Age, but since then Firestorm has appeared on-panel, so it must be around the modern equivalent of 1978. Regardless, though, Batman didn't add any points onto the bottom of his symbol in the late 1970s or '80s; the only place that particular version of the logo has ever appeared was in the film.

Assuming this might have been a clue that the Batman of the story was meant to be an alternate universe one—the first three pages of the book show The Flash Barry Allen racing through the Speed Force, with various alternate realties, be they culled from old "Imaginary Stories" or Elseworlds projects, appearing in the background—I just rolled with it. (It's a bravura sequence, by the way, and one that allows Mora to temporarily "cover" the work of other artists who did their own variations of Batman, Superman and company in various projects over the years). 

But that was not, in fact, the case. It seemed curious to me that an artist of Mora's caliber and profile would make such a mistake, but he does it every time he draws this Batman. Why would he start doing so in the fourth collection of the series, I asked myself, and then I went online to look at past covers and panels and, I saw, he didn't just start doing that; he's been drawing Batman's logo like that for the entire series now. (So the real question is, I guess, why didn't I notice it until just now?) 

It's really perplexing, and the exact sort of thing that one might think a comics editor, especially in this day and age, would notice immediately and seek to correct. I don't know; perhaps a creative choice was made by Mora and/or Waid and/or DC to use this particular version of the logo to further differentiate this Batman from other iterations (Beyond his blue and gray costume and the yellow circle, I guess), but that seems fairly unlikely.

Anyway, those seven paragraphs should be more than enough for this month's bat-symbol discourse. (Now, anyone got any opinions on Absolute Batman's logo...? Kidding!)

As the sub-title indicates, this volume of Waid and Mora's team-up title finds the former returning to his own 1996 Kingdom Come, for what I believe is the first time since the underwhelming 1998 kinda sorta sequel series/event The Kingdom (which did at least yield a pretty good Plastic Man story in Waid and Frank Quitely's The Kingdom: Offspring #1). 

It seems a rather odd choice for this particular title, set as it is sometime in DC's own now-murky past, given that Kingdom Come was set in millennial DC's near-future... which is, of course, even further in the future for these particular iterations of the characters. 

Additionally, the world of Kingdom Come that the World's Finest here visit, long since established as Earth-22 in the current mapping of the multiverse, isn't yet the familiar world of Kingdom Come, as it seems to be years before such events as Superman's retirement or Magog's killing of The Joker. So rather than the familiar world of Kingdom Come, which is teased on the cover by the appearances of some of its iconic characters, this is a visit to that world in its own past, a world on its way to becoming that of Kingdom Come. 

What does that mean, exactly? 

Well, other than the restaurant chain Planet Krypton and handful of Alex Ross' old designs filling up some group shots (Judomaster, a Boba Fett-inspired Peacemaker, the yellow and red version of Captain Atom, the post-Metal Men giant Alloy, the always-intriguing-to-me Fourth World version of Batwoman), this might as well just be another random alternate Earth, given that it says relatively little about Kingdom Come. Other than, I suppose, after all is said and done, pushing the now grown-up David—last seen in the pages of World's Finest at the end of the "Strange Visitor" arc (collected in volume two) being greeted by Gog— into the direction of becoming Magog.

That Waid has to engage with Kingdome Come/Earth-22 at all then seems only to be the result of the fact that he sent the multiverse-lost David, formerly Boy Thunder, there in the pages of "Strange Visitor."

So here we have Flash Barry Allen, exploring the multiverse as is apparently an old hobby of his, and telling Superman, Batman and Robin that he has finally found their lost ally, David/Boy Thunder. Setting them up on a "modified Cosmic Treadmill", he sends Superman and Batman to the Kingdom Come-iverse, where they experience some time displacement, appearing as phantoms in the far-flung future, after the events of Kingdom Come, where they witness their own older counterparts mourning the dead in a field full of gravestones marked with the names of superheroes. 

From there hey drift backwards to a time long before the events of Kingdom Come, but long after David first arrived on this world. David is now an adult hero going by the name "Thunderman," and he has replaced his cape and headgear with a jacket and domino mask. 

Upon meeting Superman and Batman after so long (his time), David immediately turns on his former mentors, and this world's Superman (still wearing a shield with yellow behind the red S, despite what the covers may promise, but not yet having grown out his hair, as he would in the "past" of Kingdom Come) and this world's Batman (wearing "the experimental flight suit Lucius has been working on" because a recent Mongul attack destroyed his regular wardrobe, an attack that conveniently gets him to dress more like he did in Kingdom Come) both arrive to throwdown with their alternate-earth duplicates, never stopping for a moment to think that they might be alternate-earth duplicates (Part of Gog's long-term masterplan for this world has included his keeping secret the existence of alternate realties, apparently).

Gog's full plan is eventually revealed to our heroes. Gog, looking just as he did in the pages of the 2007 JSA arc "They Kingdome Come" and seated atop a more expansive version of Metron's flying chair (complete with what looks like the Worlogog above it), has used some form of subtle mind-control to push all of this world's heroes into obeying him, even worshipping him like a god. 

David, who is transformed into Magog as part of Gog's "Asencion" plan, is to lead this army of heroes in an all-out invasion of Apokolips, a suicide mission during which Gog intends for them all to die, himself included...thus rectifying his ancient mistake of sitting out the war that killed the old gods of the Third World, allowing all but him to ascend into Valhalla. (The Old Testament! Norse mythology! Jack Kirby! There's some comic book religion for you!)

The only ones who can stop him are, of course, both worlds' World's Finest, plus their allies, who include Captain Marvel, the "Green Knight" version of Green Lantern Alan Scott, the hawk-person version of Hawkman and Wonder Woman in her Golden Eagle armor.

The stakes of the battle are super-high, Batman realizes, as Gog's mind-control may actually be the Anti-Lie Equation, so putting him in contact with Darkseid may actually doom all of reality. Of course, the heroes win, but in an unexpected way, with David, now Magog, using his powers to blow off Gog's head.

This of course leads to a stern lecture from Batman and Superman, who don't appreciate the way in which David just saved all of reality, with even Captain Marvel and Alan scolding him. David's just like, Forget it; I'll just go off and kill the Joker one day, ushering in a new age of darker heroes who appreciate the use of deadly force, eventually goading all of the world's heroes into a huge war that will kill, like, everyone...and it will be fully painted!

In an odd (but appreciated!) ending, The Spectre arrives (not wearing any underwear, like the Kingdom Come version) to give "our" Superman and Batman a brief tour of David's future and the events of Kingdom Come, allowing Superman to give the post-Kingdom Come David an inspiring pep talk that inspires him to go on to lead a whole new, post-Kingdom Come generation of heroes, most of whom looked brand-new (and Mora-designed...?) to me. 

This is probably weakest arc in the series to date, lacking as it does the world-building that made Kingdom Come so fun and, by engaging only with a past version of the world from that compelling and, let's face it, seminal story, it feels somewhat half-assed. 

Gog, Darkseid and the multiversal elements are all written as well as can be, but they also feel a bit generic, with nothing really new to say about any of the characters...if, indeed, anyone was clamoring for a new Gog story. Or even a revisit to Kingdom Come at all. (Although it's 30th anniversary is right around the corner!)

Of course, if this gets newer and younger readers to check out the Kingdom Come trade, then I suppose it will ultimately be worthwhile.

For my part, it was at least fun to get to see Mora's versions of a handful of Ross designs (in addition to all those panels of alternate realities he drew in the first few pages of the collection). I imagine he had fun making this book, and the many, many variant cover artists all seemed to enjoy getting to draw Kingdom Come characters, based on how many of them appear in the gallery at the back of the book...despite the fact that so many of those characters don't actually appear in that form in the comics themselves. 

Personally, I think it could have used more Cathedral



Fire & Ice: Welcome to Smallville
(DC)
Are Fire and Ice still viable characters? Writer Joanne Starer makes a pretty convincing argument in this six-issue miniseries, although the results come with a handful of reservations, most of which could probably have been solved if the script had gone through another draft or so.

Fire debuted in a 1979 E. Nelson Bridwell and Ramona Fradon issue of Super Friends as Green Fury, a name she would change to Green Flame as part of the Global Guardians before finally settling on Fire. Ice followed almost a decade later, being created Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis and Kevin Maguire for their beloved Justice League International run, with the character first appearing in 1988's twelfth issue, apparently as a new version of Icemaiden (She's actually a distinct character from original Global Guardians character Icemaiden, who first appeared in Super Friends in 1977, but let's not get into their tangled history here).

The pair are best known, of course, for their role in the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League run. They weren't there in the very first issues, which featured a slightly more high-profile line-up, but once they officially joined in 1988's JLI #14, they quickly became part of the core Justice League cast, and among the League's longest-serving members, hanging on through various creative team and line-up changes that followed (Ice would be killed off in 1994 crossover "Judgement Day", whereas Fire would serve on the team through Justice League America's 1996 cancellation, which made way for Grant Morrison, Howard Porter and John Dell's JLA launch).

They've been relatively little seen since leaving the Justice League orbit, though. To my knowledge, their last major appearances were in the pages of 2010 bi-weekly maxi-series Justice League: Generation Lost by writers Judd Winick and Giffen and a variety of artists. (That is, unless you count Tom King and Greg Smallwood's 2021 Human Target maxi-series, which I don't, mostly because I didn't read it, although it being a Black Label book, I'm uncertain if it counts as canon or not.) 

Unlike many of their peers, the duo never really had any notable appearances in the many cartoons, live-action television shows or feature films that have introduced so many DC comics characters to a new generation of would-be comics readers (cameos in Justice League Unlimited and, for Fire, in Batman: The Brave and The Bold, aside). 

All that time out of the spotlight is part of the hook of this title, of course, a hook that is further suggested by the sub-title. They are meant to be getting a new lease on life, moving to a new town for a fresh start, a course of action strongly suggested by Superman (Fire sees it as punishment for a screw-up, but Superman himself describes it as a vacation, "A time to relax and rebuild...I believe they call it self-care?")

The only problem with this premise is, because it's been so long since we've seen the characters in the DCU (and I barely remember anything about Generation Lost at this point), readers don't really have any sense of what they're actually taking a vacation from. What is their current status quo? Where do they live? Do they live together? What do they do, exactly? 

When we first meet them here, it's in a 10-page short story by Starer and her collaborator artist Natacha Bustos that was published in Power Girl Special #1 (It seems to be an odd choice to start a story, complete with its inciting incident, in an entirely different comic book; thankfully DC included it in the final trade collection). 

They are going into superhero action in Baltimore, with Fire grumbling about "a team of children" sending them to confront a natural disaster, apparently the children being the Titans, who, at this point, have taken the place of the disbanded Justice League. What the natural disaster is exactly isn't entirely clear, a recurring problem with these opening pages. Bustos draws huge waves pounding the Fells Point area of the city, with the heroes pulling bystanders out the way and using their powers to either freeze or evaporate the waves.

(I should perhaps note here a peculiarity about the way Bustos, who's elegant linework and somewhat abstracted, cartoonier sense of character design is a pretty perfect fit for the general comedic tone of the book. When Fire is using her powers, she is generally drawn like a naked woman on fire, basically a color-swapped, female version of Marvel's The Human Torch. Bustos, however, always draws her clothes when she's in fire mode, complete with jacket, headband and little biker gloves.)

Into these proceedings storms Baltimore local Green Lantern Guy Gardner (Ice called him, against Fire's wishes), and he proceeds to use a giant vacuum cleaner construct on one of the waves that somehow...breaks the frozen wave that Ice had created and deluges her with water...? (It's not clear exactly what happens here, or how.)

This leads to Fire and Guy battling one another, until Superman shows up to break up the fight. It is here he suggests the leads take their vacation, offering his parents' own farmhouse in Smallville ("I know the perfect place. Quiet, cozy, full of good people and mom's apple pie...").

They of course accept...sort of. ("But if we're doing this, we're doing it my way," Fire insists.) Instead of staying at the farm, they sign a 12-month lease on a downtown salon with six rooms available above it, "the only rental available in Smallville," according to L-Ron, who comes with them. For some reason that's never made clear, they decide to re-open and run the salon, rather than just living above it. They re-hire one of its old employees, endearing new character Tamarind, to do most of the actual salon work. 

While Ice takes to smalltown life, enjoying spending time with Martha Kent and her new friend Rocky Rhoades, Fire bridles at what feels like an exile and craves to re-make a name for herself. She ultimately engages in a variety of social media-driven schemes to bring supervillains to her in Smallville, ultimately gathering a bunch of them for a sort of social media reality show about rehabilitating villains by giving them work in a salon (These villains include pre-existent ones like Ambush Bug, Gentleman Ghost, Maxie Zeus and Beefeater as well as new, original ones like Smarty Pants, Lot's Wife and Gorilla Grodd's little sister Linka). 

Meanwhile, Fire and Ice have their friendship—which is at least partially built on how extremely different their personalities are from one another—severely tested, and a pair of villains with links to their past make appearances. One of these is a seemingly wendigo-inspired supernatural villain from Ice's homeland that turns people into cannibals (leading to some rather intense and violent, if mostly off-panel, content that feels somewhat jarring given the otherwise light-hearted proceedings) and a villain of sorts with ties to old JLI continuity (There's an editorial box at one point reading, "See Justice League America #34! Yes, the one from 1990.")

Despite the plot's several leaps in logic big and small that I've mentioned, and maybe trying to squeeze one too many major villain into so short a story (I think they could have done without the cannibal one, for example, which would have put greater focus on the remaining villain and made for a more streamlined storyline while excising the whole people killing and eating one another thing), Starer and Bustos' comic is a fairly fun one. 

It's fun and it's funny, with a majority of the jokes landing, especially those involving Tamarind's obliviousness to Fire's claims to fame, and the interpersonal conflicts still manage to feel consequential without ever getting too heavy. It's a story in which Martha Kent, Jimmy Olsen, Krypto the super-dog and Lobo can an all appear in and, more importantly, feel like they fit in. 

I can't say enough good things about Bustos' cartooning, which is superior. It's almost too bad that the book boasts covers by Terry and Rachel Dodson, who were probably good "gets" for DC on this series, as their covers don't remotely suggest the style or spirit of the art within, and just how good Bustos is. (This is true of all of the many covers, of course; the one exception being the entirely appropriate, perhaps even mandatory one by Kevin Maguire, doing a Fire and Ice-only riff on his iconic—and oft-riffed upon—cover to 1987's Justice Lague #1.)
Are Fire and Ice still viable? Sure they are, particularly if they star in comics like this, which keep the semi-serious, but mostly comedic take that Giffen and DeMatteis gave them during their time in the Justice League, a take that was mostly abandoned by the other Justice League creators that followed them, even as they kept Fire and Ice (and Booster Gold, Blue Beetle and Guy Gardner) around.

Fire, a former model, could probably do with a costume redesign at this point, though. Both characters have tried out new and different costumes since their early-90's heydays, of course, but Bustos here costumes them in their original JLI/JLA looks. That's probably the right call, given that much of the audience for this book was probably drawn to it by nostalgia for those years, but Fire's costume, such as it is, looks incredibly dated.

We could argue about the mini tank top that Ice wears over her spandex, which suggests 1980s aerobic craze fashion, but in general her costume looks clean and classic, the sort of Silver Age-esque look that never seems to age or grow dated.

Fire, on the other hand, wears all-green street clothes that might have been fashionable in the late '80s, but now look...well, they look like they are from the late '80s, the head band, the gloves, the belt, the short jacket over a bustier...it all looks a little too hair metal, as does her own voluminous, '80s style hairstyle (Which becomes somewhat ironic, given that she is now living above and apparently working in a hair salon).

If the heroes are to reappear in another comic by Starer and Bustos—and I would certainly read another one—Fire could definitely use a makeover during it.  


Green Arrow Vol. 2: Family First
(DC)
Rather unfortunately, writer Joshua Williamson's refers to the events of Tom King and company's 2018 series Heroes in Crisis in this collection of his Green Arrow run. You remember Heroes in Crisis, right? The miniseries in which a beloved hero commits a mass casualty event at Sanctuary, a secret mental health retreat staffed by robots that was set-up by Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman long ago, a place where heroes would regularly go, unmask, and spill all their secrets.

I say unfortunately because by linking back to that story in new narratives, it helps embed King's fairly bonkers story into mainline DCU continuity, and I was actually kind of hoping that everyone—especially DC Comics writers—would just sort of forget about Heroes in Crisis and it would therefore gradually become something of a retroactive Elseworlds or Imaginary Story. (I did not personally care for Heroes in Crisis, obviously; it is a very bad comic, although it becomes much less bad if one thinks of it as not meant to be in continuity. Here was my immediate reaction to the first issue; I swear I later read the trade and I am assuming I reviewed that on EDILW too, although I can't find it now, because I am terrible at "website".)

Not that Heroes in Crisis is a big part of the second collection Williamson's Green Arrow run, of course. As the book nears its climax, GA learns that his one-time sidekick Roy Harper, who has gone missing, is in actuality currently working for Amada Waller (So he's not dead after all, as he appeared to be at the end of the first volume! Whew!). Roy was sent to retrieve a maguffin for Waller but failed in his mission; to find Roy, GA must now take up his mission and retrieve said maguffin for Waller.

That maguffin? One of those creepy expressionless gold masks the android therapists at Sanctuary wore in Heroes in Crisis, a mask that apparently recorded and retained all the secrets it was told over the years, which is basically everything on the superhero community, from Batman's secret identity to Hal Jordan not knowing what "will" actually is

Green Arrow takes the mission, deciding he will simply figure out what to do with the mask and Waller at some point in the future (Does this play out in the pages of Absolute Power...? Now that I'm a trade reader, I'm obviously behind on the current goings-on of the DCU, but I thought I heard that Ollie was working with Waller in that book.)

If the first volume of the series was about Ollie's finding his way home after the events of Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths, this volume is about him adjusting to the DCU proper, reacting to the current status quo (Roy MIA, the JLA disbanded), reuniting with the rest of his now very extended family of heroes (Williamson has essentially retained the supporting cast of pretty much every Green Arrow run of the last 25 years, even roping in Arrowette, who doesn't really have anything to do with Oliver Queen and company aside from the fact that she also has a bow and arrow), and settling his score with Merlyn, the main villain of the early issues of the series. 

Taking both volumes together, Williamson's story is essentially one of straightening out the Green Arrow franchise for the publisher, making sure all of the related characters are properly resurrected and placed in the current status quo after years and years of other writers' stories killing them off, writing them off, rebooting them away or finding newer, narrower focuses. 

So here Ollie visits various Justice Leaguers to ask them about the team disbanding, with Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and Hal Jordan getting full scenes, while others like Hawkgirl, Martian Manhunter and Black Adam simply get one-panel cameos.

Ollie and his son Connor Hawke begin a search for the missing Roy, which involves battles with Onomatopoeia and Brick and a break-in at the now Waller-controlled Hall of Justice. They fight Roy and his team before an Arctic Justice League facility of some kind. There's a battle against hard-light holograms of the Justice League. And then there's Ollie's climactic confrontation with Merlyn, after a recounting of the two characters' history with one another. 

It's a lot, and something of a greatest hits of 21st century Green Arrow comics, setting the character and cast up for future adventures under the direction of a different writer (Despite the rather definitive feeling of the last scene in this book, it looks like Williamson will be writing the next five issues as well, so that will probably mean there will be enough new comics from him for a volume three).

It's unfortunate that Williamson doesn't have a consistent partner on this book, and instead works with a hodge-podge of different artists with differing, contrasting styles that suggests the editors went with who was available, rather than who worked well together.

There are several passages drawn by Phil Hester, who, in addition to contributing art to the previous volume, was also the artist on Kevi Smith's 2001 Green Arrow run and the Brad Meltzer arc that followed it. These are, of course, great, as Hester is a great artist, a solid draftsman with a nice, simple, individual, striking style. Here he draws the chapter with Ollie and Connor taking on Onomatopoeia and Brick (the former a Hester co-creation), as well as the seven pages detailing the Ollie/Merlyn history and a short scene set during Ollie's time on the deserted island. I kinda wish they just let Hester draw the whole thing. 

The top credited artist is Seann Izaakse, who I think was meant to be the main artist for Williamson's run, and who draws the issue where Ollie confronts Waller, and portions of several other issues. His style is fine, well in-keeping with the general look and tone of what one might call DC's current "house" style, although it doesn't sing for me in quite the same way Hester's does.

The main problem with his art, though, is there's not enough of it to establish a look for the book. Several other artists seem to help him finish a few issues/chapters, including poor Tom Derenick, whose art I quite enjoy, but who of late generally only seems to turn up to help other artists meet deadlines. 

And then there's Carmine Di Giandomenico and Trevor Hairsine, who draw the first issue of the collection, the one in which Ollie visits the empty Hall of Justice (before Waller takes over, which occurs in another book, Titans: Beast World), and then various members of the League. 

I'm just not a fan of their style. They are here colored by Romulo Fajardo Jr., and I found the work to be dark, muddled and with too many digital effects, as well as some missed opportunities to draw cool stuff, as when we see Ollie wandering League headquarters, and instead of trophies we just see generic high-tech stuff and the images of other artists' covers dropped into the background on monitors or projected holograms.

There's definitely a lot to like in this volume (and this run so far), especially if you're a fan of the characters featured, although the art style changing up every few pages or so in what is meant to be a continuing storyline is certainly an unwelcome experience.


Godzilla: War For Humanity
(IDW Publishing)
 If Jake Smith's work on this miniseries isn't the very best art to grace one of IDW's many, many comics featuring the King of the Monsters—and James Stokoe's work on 2012's Godzilla: The Half-Century War and 2015's Godzilla In Hell is hard to beat—then it at least constitutes some of the best Godzilla art we've yet seen. 

Smith's big, chunky characters and anxious, action-packed panels call to mind the work of alternative and indie comics creators more than that of the modern superhero comics artists that tends to dominate the super-comics and IP exploitation genres, and, at a glance, his cartooning seems closer to the lineage of, say, R. Crumb than that of, say, Jack Kirby. It's also full of thick, inky lines, extensive cross-hatching and even a hint of the chibi in some of the monsters' faces, giving it something of the look and feel of the comics of Godzilla's home country. 

It's a refreshing change of pace and seems like an even more radical departure from the norm when compared to some of the more recent Godzilla comics for adults, from both IDW and DC Comics, the latter of which was focused on the Warner Bros/Legendary version of the characters (IDW's Godzilla: Monster Island Summer Camp and Godzilla: Monsters & Protectors also featured some rather distinct artwork, but that was in large part due to their more distinct audience of younger readers). 

Perhaps most impressive is the way Smith renders the title character and his—well, here, its—kaiju kin. Smith's monsters look very much like giant, living, breathing monster suits, specifically those of the Showa era. It's only in the monsters' faces, their eyes and mouths, that they are drawn more lifelike and realistic than the creatures of the original cycle of the Godzilla film series; otherwise, the designs are quite faithful to the source material, to the point that they resemble the suits and marionettes come to life more than anything else.

(How faithful is Smith's design work? Well, in one panel featuring the quadrupedal Anguirus, the monster is drawn with the knees of its back legs on the ground, in the posture of a crawling baby rather than that of an actual four-legged animal; this is because, of course, that is the way that Anguirus was depicted in the films. It's not until later, when the monster curls itself up into a spiny ball to attack an opponent, that it adopts a dynamism that would have been unthinkable in one of the early films.) 

The story, by writer Andrew MacLean of Head Lopper fame (who also provides rather striking variant covers for each issue), is probably best described as serviceable. 

He engages with ideas of Gaian environmentalism, including speculation that humanity may be seen as a sort of fever or infection attacking the earth, and various monsters as the world's defense system against them, ideas that have occasionally surfaced in the Godzilla films over the decades. There's also a sub-plot involving an interpersonal conflict regarding the main protagonist and the idea of intergenerational trauma.

Despite these efforts though, MacLean's War For Humanity ultimately boils down to a monster comic about monsters fighting one another and, given the quality of Smith's artwork and his striking style, that's more than enough for a Godzilla miniseries-turned-graphic novel. 

The aforementioned protagonist, Dr. Yuko Honda, had a childhood run-in with Hedorah, and just when it seemed all was lost, Godzilla arrived on the scene to battle the smog monster and save her. That incident would inspire her to devote her life to the field of kaiju studies, travelling the world to give lectures about how Godzilla is humanity's savior, protecting us from other, worse giant monsters.

As for those giant monsters, mankind seems to have made peace with them in the world of this particular story, with governments and militaries closely monitoring them during their regular migrations. 

The arrival of a brand-new giant monster on the scene causes absolute chaos, though. This is Zoospora, a titanic monster that dwarfs all the others, an eye-less green giant with Biollante-like tentacles that seems to be made entirely out of fungus (You can see it towering over the other characters on the cover above).

The newcomer attacks existing kaiju from Toho's stable, pinning them down with its vines and then vomiting some sort of viscous black liquid into their open mouths and then leaving just as suddenly. After the attacks, the monster victims develop the swirly eyes of a hypnotized cartoon character, drool black liquid, and go on violent rampages.

Honda is recruited into an elite team to deal with the new threat, one consisting of a diverse group of Hollywood stereotypes: Annoying (but kinda hot?) billionaire tech bro, tough Michelle Rodriguez-type soldier, nervous genius, etc. Her plan is, of course, to get Godzilla to defend them from Zoospora and his growing gang of converted monsters...but Godzilla seems content to just chill on Monster Island with Minilla. 

Following an unlikely lead, the team consults a bizarre green face growing out of the walls of a cave in Tibet, a creature said to be able to communicate with kaiju. It is this face that tells Honda that Godzilla is not only indifferent to humanity but actually wants Zoospora and the other monsters to wipe them all out, for the good of the earth. 

Plan B? Use a M.O.G.U.E.R.A. to force Godzilla into the fight. By the climax, Godzilla and our heroes piloting the M.O.G.U.E.R.A. battle against Zoospora and possessed monsters Gorosaurus, Anguirus, Manda, Rodan and Mothra (Ebirah also makes a brief, two-page appearance, fighting Godzilla on Monster Island). 

I honestly can't recommend the book highly enough to Godzilla fans...or fans of fantastic comics art in general. In fact, if you're not a Godzilla fan, this comic is strong enough that it just might convert you.

(While we're on the subject of War For Humanity, Tegan O'Neil wrote a rather long but very good review of the series for The Comics Journal, one that puts the Godzilla character in its proper, current pop culture context, including a look at Godzilla's prevalence in American comics at the moment. The piece also features plenty of artwork, if you want to check out Smith's versions of the Shobijin, Mothra, Ebirah and the other monsters. You can read it here.)



Komi Can't Communicate Vol 31 (Viz Media) Manga-ka Tomohito Oda sure respects Tadano and Komi's privacy. In this volume they seem to kiss on purpose for the first time, but it's not presented all that clearly. They are drawn in an extreme longshot standing face-to-face and extremely close together, and, in the following panel, from the neck down. A few panels later, Tadano stutters, "D-Did w-we j-j-just k-k-kiss???" Komi says nothing for a few panels, then tilts her head weirdly, with a narration box telling us "Komi is confused too!!" 

Um, so I think there was a major milestone in the leads' relationship in this volume, but I'm not entirely sure? Nor, apparently, are the characters themselves.

In addition to that climactic possible (probable?) kiss scene in the rain, this volume includes the introduction of new character Kawai's family to Tadano and Komi (both of whom she wants to marry), all the kids enjoying a festival and a social media makeup tutorial by Manbagi. 



Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead (Viz) This latest volume of one of the two manga series I've managed to continue following over the last few years is a bit shorter in new story content, consisting as it does of just a single new three-chapter story arc, "Dolphins of the Dead." It makes up for that, however, with that story being a fairly pivotal one, finally directly addressing a storyline that has been simmering since the first volume of the series. 

And, in terms of page count, it makes up for it with not one, not two, but three short bonus stories starring the characters in new situations.

When Shizuka is looking over the gang's shared bucket list of "100 Things I Want to Do Before Becoming a Zombie" after Akira reports that they have already completed 68 items on the list, she randomly notices that someone has already scratched off #33, "Meet the woman of my dreams."

Akira tries to deflect, but she questions him, bringing flooding back to her memories of him confessing his love to her a few volumes back, when she was bitten by a zombie and about to die from its infection (This was when they met first met Tsurumi, who was able to cure her with a serum hastily made with Izuna's seemingly immune-to-zombies blood.) 

Shizuka had likewise already confessed her feelings...to the readers, if not Akira (She thought she was confessing to him, but the silent figure she mistook for Akira turned out to be a zombie).

As the pair go off alone to try to talk to one another about their feelings (and fail miserably), they are interrupted by a zombie and flee...right into the arms of Sakaki, a handsome young doctor who emits a halo of sparkles to denote just how good-looking he is. Offering Shizuka an alternate path, one where she can realize her long-held dream of becoming a doctor, and in the company of a handsome man who isn't the least afraid to express his feelings, she is suddenly torn.

Luckily for her, and Akira, and the readers—in another manga, Dr. Sakaki could have become an ongoing character and long-running impediment to Akira and Shizuka's inevitable but long-delayed relationship—she's not torn for long. Instead, the young pair of friends finally look each other directly in the eyes, kiss deeply and tell each other that they love one another....just as a zombie horde is closing in, escape is impossible, and it seems they have only seconds left to live. So romantic!

Obviously, they do escape, thanks to a rather unexpected, out-of-left-field intervention, and they will live to star in another volume.

From there we get immediately into the back-up stories.

The first is "Kencho in Borderland," a sort of sequel to the much earlier "Akira in Borderland," during which the star appeared in a short Alice in Borderland crossover, as Zom 100 is written by Alice's manga-ka. Having not read Alice, I'm sure I didn't really get much of "Akira in Borderland," but Zom 100's central conceit carried over: Akira was so elated that he no longer had to go to the miserable job he hated, he was happy to be in almost any other circumstances at all, no matter how dire. Here, Kencho stars in a crossover along with Akira and I, obviously, didn't get any of the references (But Akira is still there, and still happier than he was while working for a living).

After that comes "Making of the Dead (Anime)", in which Akira, Kencho and Shizuka visit a recording studio, where they meet the voice actors playing them in the anime adaptation, and get to record themselves, playing the voices of a couple of zombies (In truth, the Zom 100 characters are here standing in for the creators, writer Haro Aso and artist Kotaro Takata, who actually made the studio visit.) 

This is how I found out that there even was an anime; the opening sequence looks fun (and the use of colorful paint instead of blood and slime is interesting), although I doubt I'll pursue it. There are relatively few properties that I enjoy enough to follow both the manga and the anime, given how similar the latter tend to be to the former, although there are of course exceptions to this rule (Ranma 1/2Dragonball/Dragonball Z, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Full Metal Alchemist).

And then, finally, comes "Making of the Dead (Film)", which repeats the exact same formula, except here they visit a film set, where filmmakers are hard at work on a Zom 100 live-action film for Netflix, and again Akira and Kencho play zombie extras (and again are filling-in for the creators, who had that experience in real life). 

And this is how I found out they made a live-action Zom 100 adaptation. I'd probably be a bit more inclined to check this out over the anime, although from what little bits I see from the trailer, it does seem to track the first few volumes fairly closely; some of the creative choices that need to be made to make a comic into a film tend to be a bit more interesting than those that go into a manga-to-anime adaptation, I think. Here's the trailer on YouTube; they do seem to have captured the zombie apocalypse-as-life-affirming event nature of the series well.

While I was a bit disappointed to get less Zom 100 than usual in this installment, it is nice to see that the creators seem to be having so much success with it, and hopefully the new adaptations will manage to drive eyeballs to the comics. 


Walt Disney's Donald Duck: The 90th Anniversary Collection (Fantagraphics Books) Donald Duck debuted in the 1934 animated short "The Wise Little Hen," which of course makes 2024 the character's 90th anniversary. Fantagraphics, the premiere North American publisher of quality Disney comics, acknowledges the milestone with a massive comics collection, containing 20 or so individual comic stories spanning some 370 pages, including work from all of the best-known Duck artists from all over the world, including Carl Barks, Don Rosa, Romano Scarpa, Daan Jippes and Giorgio Cavazzano.

The contents don't precisely map to the years of Donald's career, with the first comics featured after David Gerstein's welcome introduction being a series of newspaper comic strips by artist Al Taliaferro beginning in 1938. The final entry is a one-page "Donald Duckling" strip from 1998, but it's preceded by what ends up being the most recent story, a Giorgio Salati and Paolo Motturo Duck Avenger story from 2010. So, what's that add up to...just 72 years...? 

Well, that's close enough, I suppose. I certainly don't know enough about the state of worldwide Disney comics to suggest any from the last 14 years or so that should definitely be here, certainly not ones that should bump any of the contents that ended up being included. Even those that I found to be a bit of a drag compared to the more compelling inclusions—like, for example, "Donald Duck, Special Correspondent," a 29-page 1938 adventure made of comic strips reconfigured into an Italian comic book story that sees Donald reunited with "Wise Little Hen" co-star Peter Pig for a story involving two fictional countries at war—have a certain historic value that makes them worthwhile, if not, necessarily, that much fun to read. (What, for example, might Donald Duck's comic book history have been like if Peter Pig had become his sidekick, rather than the extended family of ducks we'd meet in future animated shorts and comics?)

Aside from covering the basic bases by having well-known inclusions from important cartoonists in the character's history that demonstrate what exactly they brought to the proceedings, there are several entries that seem selected specifically because they are past anniversary stories of their own.

So in addition to Carl Barks' 1949 "Lost in the Andes", its 1989 Dona Rosa sequel "Return to Plain Awful" and Roman Scarpa's 1960 "The Legend of Donald Hood," there's also "The Life and Times of Donald Duck", a 1984 story by Marco Rota, in which an apparently completely human reporter from the real world (with five fingers on his hands and everything!) journeys to Duckburg, and ends up interviewing Donald about his life story (a story which has several differences from the canonical life of Donald Duck that we know...or that long-time readers would have seen unfold in the comics) and "Hero 300", a 1991 story by Evert Geradts and Mau Heymans in which Donald uses lightly-edited bound copies of his own Donald Duck comic books to prove he's the city's greatest hero, earning overnight (and fleeting) super-stardom.

There are also Gyro Gearloose-assisted travels through time and to deep space, an abduction by a high-tech, extra-dimensional, underwater civilization, a story where Donald and Scrooge trade lots in life due to the application of Gladstone Gander's luck and another where Donald runs for mayor as a law-and-order candidate (I had to try very hard while reading this one to keep out intrusive thoughts about another candidate for office named Donald who is also fantastically exaggerating the crime problem in order to appear tough on crime).

And there's still more.

It is a lot of Donald Duck, enough Donald Duck, in fact, that at one point I wondered if it was too much Donald Duck, or if such a thing is actually impossible. After sitting with the book for a few days, I think I come down where I would have before I read decades worth of Disney duck comics—there's no such thing as too much when it comes to great comics, regardless of who the star is. 

(As for the fact that I slept fitfully, having feverish dreams of Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge between time spent reading their stories on my laptop or while propped up on couch cushions on my phone—Oh, by the way, like the Titans: Beast World comics mentioned in the previous column, none of the libraries in the Clevnet consortium had a physical copy of this book, so I read it digitally through Hoopla; I hope this isn't a sign of things to come in terms of comics for adults in libraries—I'm going to assume that it had much more to do with the fact that I was reeling from Covid and running a high fever as I read this collection, and not that I had overdosed on Donald Duck.) 


REVIEWED: 

Boy Vs. Shark (Tundra Books) I can't say enough good things about this book, a comics (and comic) memoir by Paul Gilligan about the summer of 1975, when he was a 10-year-old boy who sought to prove his maturity and manhood by going to see Jaws...and only ended up terrifying himself. Afterwards, he was afraid of being attacked by a shark in the pool...and the bathtub...and the garage...and his own bedroom. 

It's about much more than that, though, as the book deals with the pressures on boys to grow up and to demonstrate a rather particular type of masculinity. Big issues and serious topics, yes, but it's also hilarious. 

I reviewed it for Good Comics for Kids, but part of me wishes I would have pursued an interview with Gilligan instead, as I'm awfully curious about just how true a true story it is; some of the characters are just so perfect for the story (particularly the older, juvenile delinquent character, which isn't exactly a flattering portrayal) that I wonder if they were real people or fictionalized composites, and if all of the events in the book really happened in real life just as they do here.

Anyway, it's one of the most fun books I've read in quite a while. Check it out. You can find my full review here



The Grinch Takes a Vacation (RH Graphic) The next installment in RH Graphics' new line of graphic novels starring Dr. Seuss characters features the Grinch and comes courtesy of cartoonist Kaeti Vandorn. 

The character strikes me as a much more challenging one than The Cat in the Hat, who starred in the first one (by Art Baltazar), largely because the Grinch has a character arc so specifically tied to a certain set of experiences. Vandorn's not the first creative to be tasked with exploiting this particular IP though, and I think the strategy she takes—portraying the Grinch as an all-around negative person, despite his conversion experience on that one particular Christmas—is probably the best one available. 

One can an argue that these graphic novel stories featuring Seuss' characters aren't really necessary, and I'm certainly inclined to find those arguments convincing, but I remain pleased that RH Graphic and those involved are seeking out highly skilled individual creators and letting them draw the characters and the comics in their own distinct styles. More here



Monster Locker (First Second) I picked this up mainly because it was a new book geared towards younger readers, and thus seemed to fill the criteria of my "beat" as a contributor to Good Comics for Kids. That, and kids vs. monsters is always a pretty compelling narrative premise to me. 

When I hit page nine and read the line, "And mom is, like, the bravest firefighter in Columbus," my heart skipped a beat. Columbus? Is this set in my former hometown?! I thought, though I cautioned myself; it could be set in Columbus, Georgia, after all. 

But by page 16, it was certain, when protagonist Pablo tells himself that his parents will regret telling him he's too young for a cell phone, after his role-playing game day gets cancelled and he has to walk home from the comics shop: "They'll get me a phone when they hear I had to walk home through the mean streets of Columbus, Ohio."

Aha! Monster Locker is set in Columbus, Ohio! Neat! It turns out that the writer, Jorge Aguirre, is from Columbus, though he now resides in New Jersey. (Aguirre is responsible for the graphic novel Call Me Iggy, as well as the Chronicles of Claudette series, featuring the installments Giants Beware!, Dragons Beware! and Monsters Beware!)

The story, drawn by Texas' Andrés Vera Martínez, is about a very average sixth grader who discovers that his new locker is a portal through which monsters can be summoned. The portal is put into action when the vengeful Aztec Earth goddess Coatlicue and her army of monsters invades the school and ultimately takes over the whole city. 

As for Columbus-specific content, there's not much, and, if I had to guess, I'd guess that Columbus was chosen in part because it's where Aguirre is from, and in part due to its nature as an average modern American city (Eccentric California transplant Takashi Rosenberg does refer to Ohio as a particularly weird place in several spots, though). 

There's a mention of the Scioto River Park, but the few specific locations visually referenced (comic shop Wizard's Way, coffee shop Quazar Coffee) seem created specifically for the comic (I Googled them both, just in case!). 

Still, it's exciting to see Columbus so represented in a comic book, and it's more exciting still that the comic itself is such a good one, a fun, funny adventure that may be targeted at younger readers, but is nevertheless all-ages in the best sense of the term. 

I'd recommend it to any of my readers. And especially to any of them that hail from Columbus, although now that I'm almost 15 years removed from my own time there, I don't know how many of you are actually Columbusites...

Anyway, for an actual review of Aguirre and 
Martínez's Monster Locker, click here. 



The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien (Harry N. Abrams) This is a rather weird book from writer and artist John Hendrix, who has comics, picture books and hybrid prose/comics works on his resume. 

It belongs in the hybrid category, with a joint biography of Lewis and Tolkien and their relationship told in illustrated prose, with only very occasional scenes rendered in the comics form, while another narrative arc runs through the book, this one told entirely in comics and featuring two "host" characters talking about Lewis, Tolkien and the ideas the two thinkers and writers contended with throughout their careers. 

I'd recommend it to fans of either man's work...a group that includes pretty much everyone, I would imagine. More here



Spider-Man: Octo-Girl Vol. 1 (Viz Media) The My Hero Academia: Vigilantes creative team of Hideyuki Furuhashi and Betten Court reunite for a licensed manga that takes its inspiration from The Superior Spider-Man. Doc Ock has once again jumped bodies while on the precipice of death, only this time he accidentally ends up in the body of a Japanese school girl who is in a coma, and the pair are sharing the body. Hijinks ensue, and the long-time Spider-Man villain once again finds himself gradually becoming a hero, this time at the urging of the girl whose body he is inhabiting. More here

Monday, November 04, 2024

I am about to embark on a journey.

Look what arrived in the mail yesterday. Yes, it's my very own copy of the extremely expensive 960-page hardcover omnibus containing almost all of the DC/Marvel crossovers ever published, many of which I have never before read (Of those contained in this volume, I think I've only read the '90s Batman ones and that great Roger Stern-written, Steve Rude-penciled Incredible Hulk/Superman.)

At first, I wasn't sure how I should handle this book, blogging-wise. I could of course simply cover it in my monthly review column, as it is a book I bought this month, but given the current rate at which I consume comics, I assume it's going to take me more than a month to read this thing.

So instead, I think I'll review my way through it, devoting a post to each new chapter/crossover as I read it. In addition to more thoroughly covering the book, that will mean much more frequent posts here on EDILW for a bit. 

I hope to start reading it this week, so look for the first post about it in the near-ish future. In the meanwhile, the next A Month of Wednesdays post goes up, um, Wednesday, so come back for that, and reviews of everything I read in the month of October. 

Sunday, October 06, 2024

A Month of Wednesdays: September 2024

 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.