BOUGHT:
This volume represents the tail end of Wolfman's run on Batman. In fact, the last story arc collected is a bridge of sorts between Wolfman's run and Grant's taking of the reigns. That would be the Peter Milligan-written "Dark Knight, Dark City." (As for the remaining story, that's the 1990 annual, a Two-Face focused story written by Andrew Helfer and drawn by Chris Sprouse.) I assume that means this will be the end of the Caped Crusader collections, as the next batch of issues of Batman are Grant/Breyfogle ones, which have been collected elsewhere already.
Reading (and/or re-reading) these comics in their proper sequence and context like this, one of the things that became apparent was how much tighter continuity was back then. Though the collection is dominated by some of Batman's biggest rogues—The Joker, The Penguin, Two-Face and The Riddler—their appearances seemed like big deals, and there characters all had something of an arc.
The Penguin, for example, is afforded a three-issue, multi-book crossover in which he brings Gotham City to a standstill and almost kills Batman repeatedly, thanks to mute, hunchback "Einstein's brain in Quasimodo's body" Harold's invention that allows him to control birds.
The Joker is still recovering physically and mentally from being shot in the chest just before his helicopter crashed at the climax of "A Death In The Family" the year before, and he has essentially lost his mojo; he references his thing with Two-Face in "A Lonely Place of Dying", but there's a rather unusual (by today's standards) timeline of what Joker was doing when and where (that story, by the way, involves a Joker impostor* drawing The Joker out, and ultimately getting thrown back in Arkham where he becomes "himself" again. The events of "Death In The Family" and 1988's The Killing Joke are all pretty fresh in the minds of Batman and Commissioner Gordon, too).
The Riddler story "Dark Knight, Dark City" is his return to villainy, after he was all but retired in the pages of 1989's Secret Origins Special (in a excellent short story by perhaps the single most unlikely Batman creative team of all time, Neil Gaiman, B.E.M., Matt Wagner and Joe Matt), thinking there's really no place for a Riddler in a world where The Joker is killing people. That too was a three-issue arc.
I think the sense of event and of a continuing story during this time period of Batman comics comes from several factors. Certainly creators have a lot more leeway today than they did back then; if more than one writer wants to use a villain in the same year or month these days, it's not like DC ever seems to say no, which is why we might get, like, eight different Ra's al Ghul stories across six titles in a single calendar year, for example.
But there's also the fact that there's just so many more Batman comics every month; in 1990, there were just two—Batman and Detective. This December, DC has solicited around ten, depending on what you want to consider a Batman book. They are Batman, Detective Comics, Batman Universe, The Batman's Grave, Batman/Superman, Batman and The Outsiders, Batgirl, Nightwing, Catwoman and Red Hood. And that's not counting non-canonical stuff ,like Batman Beyond, Batman: Curse of the White Knight, Dark Knight Returns: The Golden Child, Batman Tales: Once Upon A Time, Shadow of The Batgirl, Joker: Killer Smile and Joker/Harley: Killer Smile. And then there are all the comics from the Harley Quinn spin-off franchise. And the books in which Batman and members of his cast appear prominently, like Justice League, Teen Titans, Young Justice and so on.
That's a lot of pages to fill, which means pretty much every month almost every A-list (and B-list, C-list and probably even D-list) Batman villain is going to appear...repeatedly. And because so many of those appearances are in their own, distinct, out-of-continuity stories, it seems as if creators all have an implied permission to do whatever they like to reinvent the characters with each usage. Sure, in theory, that's a good thing, to let comics creators create without having to worry about their editors stomping on their ideas...but only in theory. After all, it's not like every Killer Croc story a person who works for DC comes up with is both a) a great story and b) needs to be told, you know...?
The other thing that seems sort of strange about these comics when read today is how much Batman gets the shit kicked out of him during the course of his adventures. The character has become so synonymous with being prepared for every eventuality that it now seems kind of rare for almost anyone save the greatest villains to ever get the jump on him, but, well, in "The Penguin Affair" he is repeatedly almost killed by flocks of mind-controlled birds. I mean, a fucking goose knocks him on his back, making him think, "Can't take many more knocks like that--!"
This more mortal, vulnerable Batman also just seems to wear plain old gray and black (but colored blue) spandex, which tears away easily to show human flesh, and he's occasionally bloodied. Perhaps it's the influence of the movies, but today's Batman costume is more akin to a suit of armor.
The two non-Wolfman stories that finish up the book were the most striking to me this time around. I've read both before, one of them repeatedly, but this time I couldn't help but notice how both seem like more-or-less throwaway stories—"Dark Knight, Dark City", for example, appear to be a fill-in arc—but both had apparently out-sized pop culture influence.
The Helfer/Sprouse/Steve Mitchell Two-Face annual is basically the character's origin story...re-told here as an extension of Miller and Mazzucchelli's then just three-year-old "Year One" arc. This is essentially the story that Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale would expand upon in their Long Halloween, fiddling with it quite a bit (and adding a dozen villains or so), but, as in Loeb's version, Helfer's has Dent turning to murder as a means of achieving justice long before the first drop of acid touched his face.
The story even more strongly pre-figures the Batman: The Animated Series 1992 two-episode Two-Face origin (simply titled "Two-Face), so much show that the character design of the cartoon's Harvey Dent seems to be a direct adaptation of Sprouse's version of the character.
And then there's this hospital room sequence.
As for "Dark Knight, Dark City," it includes scenes set in the 18th century township of Gotham, wherein a small group of occultists perform The Ceremony of The Bat in an attempt to raise "the Daemon calling itself BARBATHOS."
It's a scene that Grant Morrison re-visited during the course of his multi-title Batman run, specifically in the miniseries Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne, and Barbathos became Barbatos, the cosmic devil being that played such an important role in the Scott Snyder-written Dark Nights: Metal series and its many attendant spin-offs.
There are three 9-page "serious" stories, followed by a three-page gag comic built around a single joke rather well-told. Each features a credits-page that also gives readers a little paragraph explaining who the character is, exactly, which one imagines might be necessary for some of these guys.
Writer Jed Mackay and artist Chris Mooneyham present a Ulysses Bloodstone story set in the ancient, almost prehistoric past, when the famed monster-hunter (now most famous for being Elsa Bloodstone's dad, I guess) was more-or-less a Conan-like barbarian character (albeit one with a glowing red gem in his chest). The story bears a passing resemblance to Robert E. Howard's oft-adapted "Tower of The Elephant" story, but here the super-powered alien being worshiped as a magical being is one that will be quite familiar to Marvel comics readers: A skrull.
There's not much too it, really, but I really like Mooneyham's line work. He draws wind and weather you can feel, and when Bloodstone swings his sword, you can almost feel the breeze of it passing in front of your face.
Writer Sebastian Girner and artist Francesco Manna have an interesting Shang Chi, Master of Kung Fu story that has the hero meeting a white eyebrow master type in a Chinese "ghost city" for one of what we find are occasional battles. The creators get a lot done, in terms of revealing aspects of Shang Chi's character, demonstrating how good he is at kung fu, and the one thing that prevents him from being as great a master of it as the old guy he's fighting. Although maybe that depends on one's perspective, as that weakness is the same one that makes Shang Chi a hero.
The creators attempt to fast-forward through the battle, and give a sense of how big, intense and wide-ranging it is in a two-page spread with a handful of in-set panels and illustrations and a dotted line showing their path through the city but...while the information is conveyed, what they're trying to say is clear without having much impact. It's not hard to see how the strategy might have worked better if it had a more insane amount of content on it. Like, it's not hard to imagine what, say, Tom Scioli might have done with that space and concept, with ten or twenty times as many in-set panels in the same space, you know...?
Cloonan both draws and co-writes her Dracula story, with co-writer Michael Conrad. It's a pretty great story, again covering a great deal of ground in terms of characterization, demonstrating Dracula's immortality, his romantic side, his monstrous aspect and his occasional dandy-like manner. It's not a terribly Marvel story, other than the fact that this Dracula has a mustache, but then, Dracula did have a Bizarre Adventures cover of his own before, unlike these other guys.
Set in the present and in the late 1930s, it features Dracula using a pseudonym no more difficult to see through than, say, Dr. Acula would be, and visiting a club, where he sets his sights on a beautiful young woman. She, in a neat reveal, turns out to be the descendant of someone he crossed paths with in the 19th century and, in another elegant reveal, the ancestor of another person he crosses paths with.
Cloonan's Dracula is, visually, a perfect mix of creepy, elegant, bad-ass and sexy...he's Bela Lugosi's Dracula, if he were given the power and agility of a cartoony drawing. I can't imagine Marvel ever commissioning such a project, particularly as they've been using the character more and more as a super-villain involved in the lives of the X-Men and, most recently, The Avengers, but damn, I sure would love to read a Conrad and Cloonan ongoing series featuring their Dracula, maybe with more limited interaction with Marvel characters (like, maybe just Blade, or some Golden Age heroes, or a cowboy character or three, etc).
The final story is a Black Goliath one by writer Jon Adams and artist Aaron Conley. While some panel-time is spent on William Foster in Black Goliath mode, bragging about his super-powers and wearing his original, extremely-dated get-up, the focus is on a peculiarity of his power. That is, when he grows to his enormous size, he borrows mass from "an extradimensional source." Here, we see that borrowing of mass from within the extradimensional source. Which is, unfortunately for the inhabitants, inhabited.
It's a simple gag, but quite effectively told. I wonder if a more straight or serious artist, echoing the styles that the character would have originally been drawn in might have been slightly more effective, but Conley's art is really appealing, and he's great with funny-looking expressions.
In 1941, Flash Barry Allen and Green Lantern John Stewart get to know the long-absent Justice Society of America, who we haven't seen in-continuity for eight years now...and who, as far as as anyone in the DCU knows, never even existed after the machinations of Pandora or Doctor Manhattan or Dan DiDio or whoever around the Flashpoint/The New 52-boot. They go through the expected introductions, including confusion that results from The Flash and Green Lantern introducing themselves to The Flash and Green Lantern, and Barry and John puzzling over the how many duplicates there are of heroes in their own time, and the Flash's weird feeling of deja vu (alluded to in an earlier chapter, when he started to almost remember his own death in the pages of Crisis On Infinite Earths).
The best part? When Barry looks at the diminutive Golden Age Atom and says, "We have an Atom and a Starman, too, but yours seem to have different powers... Can your Atom shrink anymore than that?" At which point The Atom bristles and threatens to punch him. I am a big fan of Al Pratt's super-power basically being weaponized short man's disease.
Also of note, at least to me, is the fact that Jimenez seems to draw Wildcat's costume as...fuzzy. I've never thought of him in a fuzzy cat-suit before, although I suppose it could have always been fuzzy, and different artists just didn't draw it in such a way that its texture was apparent. I'm not sure how I feel about a fuzzy Wildcat. I've always loved the idea of a big tough guy coming at criminals dressed like a giant house cat, as that's a hell of a lot scarier than a dude, say, dressed as a bat, but if the suit's fuzzy? Well, that's kind of approaching furry territory, isn't it...? (Also, I prefer Golden Age Wildcat's costume to be depicted with the enormous cat eyes, just as I prefer Hawkman's helmet having big, weird staring bird eyes; both are drawn here to have white, pupil-less eyes in their masks).
Anyway, the two Leaguers eventually figure out that the maguffin they are there to retrieve is Golden Age Starman's cosmic rod, the original of which is kept at "a military base in the pacific." The reveal of which military base, and the exact date that the Leaguers have arrived on, is a really well-handled reveal that I've probably spoiled just by hinting around, but then, this issue came out so many weeks ago that hopefully you've already read it if you were going to.
Meanwhile, in the future, The Trinity hang out with Kamandi, fight Brainiac robots and realize how Braniac seized control of Kamandi's time period: He's apparently been bottling possible futures throughout hyper-time like he's traditionally done with cities.
Then we get about three pages of pretty striking moments. The Trinity and Kamandi are confronted by Justice Legion A, the 853rd century's answer to the JLA that Grant Morrison, Val Semeiks and company created for their (excellent) DC One Million; there's an awesome/stupid sequence in which Sinestro, Cheetah and Gorilla Grodd are piloting Japanese zeroes and leading the bombing of Pearl Harbor; and Aquaman makes his entirely predictable return after being presumed dead way back in "Drowned Earth".
Things are definitely happening now, and, the best part is, that in addition to being fun and exciting things on their own terms, they seem to be leading back toward a pre-Flashpoint version of the DCU, when their were generations of heroes stretching back to the Golden Age and a loose but linear history to the shared universe, rather than just a confused blob of NOW! plus whichever stories the writers most fondly remember and/or want to use to buttress their own fan-fic retreads.
Hooray!
This issue features some Star Wars-esque space battling in the present, climaxing with The Anti-Monitor picking a side in the war; The Trinity vs. Justice Legion-A (the Legion should really wipe the floor with the three Leaguers in seconds flat, but they're being controlled by Brainiac, which maybe handicaps them...?) and their teaming-up-to-fight-a-greater-menace being the somewhat unimaginative Brainiac One Million (Brainiac's DC One Million analogue was, remember, Heartiac); and Barry Allen, John Stewart and the JSA battling the Legion of Doom in the middle of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, climaxing with the arrival of Aquaman, which is a pretty cool scene, even if the drama of it was lost by his role in the story already being revealed last issue.
Snyder and Tynion give The Flashes and Green Lanterns some bonding time, as they share dialogue on a few pages, but nothing particularly revelatory comes out of their talks...certainly nothing that can compete with the simple power of Porter drawing the two Lanterns streaking through the sky together, or the two Flashes running over water side by side. The JSA has been MIA so long, that just seeing them teaming up with the Justice League in a comic book again is genuinely exciting.
There's a ten-page framing sequence by Bunn and artist Scott Hepburn, in which Kid Kaiju and one of his monsters investigate a spooky mad science castle on an island in the Baltic Sea, and there they find a book entitled Anatomy of The Monstrous, at which point the comic gives way to the supposed contents of the book. These are somewhat confused, as they pair a pin-up style image of a classic Marvel monster by a guest comics artist, none of which really look like they could/would be found within the pages of Anatomy of The Monstrous, with a "monster cross-section" credited to a "Superlog," all of which do seem to be what one might find in such a book (All created by the same person, they all look like they belong together, for example, and they are all concerned somewhat with the anatomy of the monsters).
So the meat of the comic is 20 pages of Marvel monster illustrations by Superlog and a who's who of artists-you-really-want-to-see-drawing-monsters, including Nick Bradshaw, Jacen Burrows, Becky Cloonan, Juan Jose Ryp and others. The particular monsters are Fin Fang Foom, Gigantus, Goliath,The Hypno Creature, Man-Thing, Mangog, Manphibian, Monsteroso, Monstro, The Space Beast and Zzutak. Bradshaw's cover, therefore, is only 25% accurate.
Superlog's variant cover has fewer monsters, and a full 50% of those appear within.
After the reader gets done staring at Superlog and company's images—Stokoe's Fin Fang Foom, Clayton Crain's Space Beast and Ryp's Monsteroso best-reward long, lingering scrutiny—Bunn and Hepburn's narrative resumes, and what "story" there is reaches its conflict and resolution.
The castle and the book, which Kid Kaiju refers to as "a how-to guide for making monsters," belong to a little kid who introduces himself as Maximlian Frankenstein. He has apparently used it to make a bunch of hybrid versions of the monsters we just learned about, in weird forms and boasting the powers of all of them in weird arrangements. There's a giant cephalopod like Monstro, for example, but it has a Fin Fang Foom-head at the tip of his tentacles, or a giant-size Man-Thing with the hands of Mangog and the headdress of Zzutak.
Kid Kaiju summons his monsters and, a too-brief battle later, the hybrids are defeated and Max Frankenstein jet-packs away, while the final panel includes a close-up of the spine of Anatomy of The Monstrous, allowing the reader to see that it's marked "Volume 1 of 10."
I know I don't speak for the broader Marvel comics-reading audience—the most excited I got during any part of Iron Fist season 1 that didn't have Jessica Stroup on-screen was when we saw Danny's stickers of the old Marvel Monsters under a desk in Rand headquarters—but I would be happy to look at drawings and cross-sections of another 90 Marvel monsters.
They could skip the framing sequence and go right to a Superlog and friends art collection as far as I'm concerned, though.
While the organizing principle of these reprints seems to be the first appearance of various Hulks, I suspect this one is included not just because of the Devil Hulk, which gets referenced quite a bit in Al Ewing and Joe Bennett's ongoing The Immortal Hulk, but also because this idea of a head-space full of Hulks that Banner can rummage through seems to play a part in the series as well (The last trade I read, for example, featured Bruce Banner summoning Fixit's mind into his own puny body in order to survive a close-quarters encounter with a cyborg super-assassin).
Jenkins' doesn't seem to do anything too noteworthy with the concept here, at least in this 22-ish page chunk of his run, but I did enjoy seeing Garney's work from this period, earlier than any other Ron Garney pencil art I've seen, and seeing what Garney and Buscema look like when they work together. The answer? Pretty good. Their art looks pretty damn good together.
The already in-progress story is that Doctor Strange's foe Nightmare has been able to manipulate The Hulk, and is in the process of sending him to smash Strange, a task that requires occasional prodding, as Hulk's so easily side-tracked. The issue follows him from the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel to 177A Bleeker Street, as he fights his way through a huge SHIELD operation meant to stop him (lead by Gabriel Jones, and including Bruce Banner's then-girlfriend Kate Waynesboro, the latter of whom I had never heard of).
Strange is ultimately able to half-cure The Hulk, stopping him from smashing his sanctum sanctorum with some kinda force field and using his magic to set The Hulk loose on Nightmare in his dark dimension, but leaving The Hulk "a mindless monster in truth now," a monster strong enough to jump away to cause trouble in the next issue...which is collected in Incredible Hulk: Regression, according to the tag added at the end of the last page.
There's some really quite fine art in here, and Buscema's Hulk has a more ape-like appearance here than he often seems to have elsewhere, a similarity urged along not just by the facial features, but also the more prominent ears and long arms. Buscmea also does a particularly fine job on the character's rage-twisted face, including an image of The Hulk practically foaming at the mouth (This was, remember, 1984, a few years before having mouths full of spit was considered "cool" in superhero comics).
Mantlo's narration is very much of the era, and thus has a certain dramatic charm that can hover between poetic and purple, buzzing back and forth between the two depending on the line. The story benefits from its simple structure, of The Hulk basically just raging from Point A to Point B. Given the character's simple nature, it works in the context of a Hulk comic where it might not have been so effective in another title.
David's script for the issue makes for a good stand-alone read, and it is carefully-enough constructed that there's a degree of mystery and suspense over who this Joe Fixit person really is, as the Hulk isn't fully revealed until page 17 (The cover of the issue rather spoils that surprise, but then, I suppose anyone reading a comic book entitled The Incredible Hulk would have assumed the Hulk was going to show up at some point during the proceedings).
The real protagonist seems to be Las Vegas casino owner and cartoon gangster Michael Berengetti, who we follow through the course of an evening of work. When an out-of-towner expresses his desire to move in on Vegas, Berengetti rebuffs him and then Mr. Fixit must be called in to protect his boss Mr. B from a small army of gun-wielding toughs.
When Fixit first appears, he looks a bit like the Kingpin in a topcoat and hat, but eventually his true identity is revealed when bullets start bouncing off of him. There's a kind of neat reversal of the traditional Hulk story in here, in which Fixit fears losing control and having his other form come out (that form being Bruce Banner, of course), and there's a scene of Fixit essentially having a little anxiety attack about the prospect of transforming, and then struggling to hold the transformation back (I'm not sure if David was the first to flip the Hulk premise like that or not, of course).
Purves' art is adequate and communicates the story well enough, but it doesn't have a particularly strong identity or style, and didn't do much more than translate a prose script into comics form, although there is something appealing to the misshapen, almost Frankenstein-like look of this version of the Hulk (which had appeared previously, if not quite as fancily dressed).
The one part that didn't sit quite right with me was the repeated intimations that this is a Hulk that fucks:
(When Marlo arrives in Fixit's room, however, it seems pretty clear to both of them that she's there to have sex with him). The above panel indicates that she enjoyed their date, and while this isn't the first time I've seen a joke about The Hulk's big penis, um, it's not really an aspect of the character that is particularly interesting to me. Maybe I'm a bit old-fashioned, but I prefer a Hulk who keeps his ripped purple shorts on, I guess.
It was weird reading this recent issue among all of these other, far older Hulk reprints, because it really drove home just how much less comic you get these days. I spent a fraction of the time reading this that I did on all the others. There are just 67 panels in the whole 21-page story, no page of which has more than five panels on it. There are two single-page splashes and two two-page splashes. Written in the artist-friendly, bombastic splash page-and-cameo style of Loeb's Superman/Batman run, several arcs of which were drawn by McGuinness, there's not much to it other than a couple of weird mysteries a Marvel fan would probably want to know the answer to, and, in that regard, at least, this seems to be a good "ad" for Hulk By Jeph Loeb: The Complete Collection, which the last page says this is continued in. (On the other hand, the particulars of the status quo of the Marvel universe might be a little baffling to readers walking into this issue cold, though).
The body of The Abomination has been found in Russia, and the villain was seemingly badly beaten before being shot repeatedly. Doc Samson, She-Hulk, Iron Man, Maria Hill and General Ross are trying to figure out who killed him, but the clues don't quite match up. It seems like The Hulk did it, but the Hulk is supposed to be dead at that point...additionally, the Hulk doesn't use a gun, doesn't emit radiation constantly and isn't red, a color that a child who witnessed the event keeps repeating over and over.
The Winter Guard show up, and there's a fight.
And then there's a surprise cliffhanger.
While I didn't like some aspects of the mystery at the core of this storyline, and the book would very quickly get really weird, I still think the idea of a red Hulk was a good one, and Loeb certainly deserves props for coming up with an extremely marketable variation on a decades-old theme.
And McGuinness, of course, was born to draw superheroes posing and fighting.
As you hopefully already know from reading it—or, if not, because you have a very good memory and remember reading my review of the earlier True Believers reprint of the story—the so-called "Living Hulk" is the the giant, mouth-less, orange, furry Muppet-armed Xemnu, who arrived on Earth in a crashed spaceship and was revived by Joe Harper, a small-town electrician.
A small-town electrician who, I suspect, also has super-strength, or else how could he have loaded this giant creature onto his truck...?
And this is his undoing, as Joe Harper is able to save the day. Man, what a strange place the Marvel universe was in 1960! There weren't any Avengers or mutants, no Spider-People or Fantastic Fours. Captain America was frozen in ice, and Namor was wandering around, an amnesiac, bearded hobo. But the world didn't need superheroes to save it back then. A plucky small town electrician was more than equal to the task of repelling alien monsters.
The 13-page Xemnu story is followed by the five-page "I Made The Hulk Live" from 1960's Strange Tales #75 (although Taboo, "The Thing From The Murky Swamp!" was that month's cover monster), drawn by Dawn Heck, and maybe scripted by Lee or Lieber (there isn't even a signature attached to this story). This is basically the sort of mid-century sci-fi story with a "twist" that we tend to associate with The Twilight Zone now. After a gorgeous splash page of a giant metal robot, referred to in the narration box as "The Mighty HULK!" (they still haven't landed on "incredible" yet, I guess), menacing a gas station. From there, we meet a short guy who is pretty angry about his height, so much so that, in the second panel he appears in, he's thought-ballooning his vengeance: "I'll show them! One day I'll have my revenge on them all!"
He channels his short man's rage into becoming a scientific genius and then working in a remote laboratory in the woods, attempting to invent a growth serum. When that fails, he builds himself a giant robot to pilot, the hulk of the title. He outfits it like a bunker, apparently planning to live in it forever, but, well, there's that twist, you see.
Sometimes we don't need superheroes or small town electricians to save the world; sometimes the villains accidentally save us from themselves through their own tragic character flaws.
This was a dollar well-spent, even though I've read one of these two stories repeatedly. I think I've said it before, but I'll say it again: I'd like nothing more than an ongoing series from Marvel reprinting stories like these for a $1 a pop.
BORROWED:
It may have something to do with this "Hunted" storyline being somewhat bigger than the past story arcs, given that it played out not just in eight issues of ASM, but it also spilled over into four special, "extra" issues of ASM that were labeled Amazing Spider-Man #16.HU and so on, but, if that is the reason, it's not a great one. This certainly reads complete unto itself—or, at least, as complete unto itself as most any Amazing Spider-Man comic can so many decades after the book's launch—but it is the climax of several sub-plots that have been running throughout the book ever since Spencer relaunched it, and continues to move another sub-plot forward.
I'd say that Marvel's unfortunate labeling makes this more challenging to read in trade than serially, but then, there are those weird ".HU" issues, each of which turns out to be a sort of solo side-story featuring a character in "Hunted" that may or may not actually be all that important to the proceedings (Black Cat, The Gibbon, The Lizard and The Vulture). Having now read them, I can deem which were really worthwhile to the overall story and which weren't, but were one deciding what to buy off the rack, there was really no way to tell whether they were going to be important or not.
Spencer writes all four of them, so that would have been an argument in favor of reading 'em all; Greg Land was responsible for all of the covers of the ".HU" issues though, so that would have been a reason to avoid 'em all. I guess buying the trade means one need not make those decisions on one's own (The Gibbon issue, for example, is extremely unimportant to the proceedings, but Spencer and artist Ken Lashley provide an elegiac, genuinely affecting life story of The Gibbon, who seems like the only one of the many animal-themed villains that is definitely killed in the hunt).
The plot is the very one that Spencer has been teasing for a while now, and seemed to be crystal clear by the end of volume 3, although there are layers and twists to it. Kraven The Hunter has hired Arcade, Taskmaster and Black Ant to create an impenetrable force field and stock it with most of the Marvel Universe's villains who bear the names of animals (Spider-Man's rogues gallery contributing many of them, given how full of animal guys it is). He isn't hunting them, but rather a bunch of rich "big game" hunter assholes, the sort he had been hunting in Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, are invited to hunt them, seemingly safely by piloting super-robots in the shape of Kraven created by Arcade. I say "seemingly" because, as you might assume, it's all a trap to essentially wipe-out the hunters and the hunted, but Kraven has plans bigger, weirder and more dramatic than even that.
Trapped inside the park is Spider-Man, who was knocked out and dressed by Kraven in his black costume, and Kraven also has The Black Cat and The Lizard's son held captive. So while Spidey's trying to break out while trying to save a bunch of bad guys who are simultaneously trying to kill him (and growing increasingly desperate to do so, as he begins having visions of MJ in peril), The Lizard is trying to break in to save his son. And there are, obviously, several wild card characters. And Kraven's son and chosen heir is there, although Kraven keeps him completely in the dark about the real reason he's there.
So it's really the best kind of big superhero epic, one with a simple but compelling elevator pitch premise, but it also features some rather byzantine planning by the boss-level supervillain, through which the writer synthesizes decades of character continuity and different writers' takes on the characters to do something new, but that feels natural.
I should probably stipulate that I have never actually read "Kraven's Last Hunt," so the references to the events of that story, and what seem like they are meant to be allusions to it didn't impact me the way they were likely intended to impact longtime readers, and I am ill-equipped to determine whether the choices Spencer made with the character make sense with that story or not. I mean, I'm mostly familiar with Kraven from Squirrel Girl, and Spencer seemed to do a fine job of honoring Ryan North, Erica Henderson, Derek Charm's Kraven while also rationalizing how that guy could also be an evil supervillain both before and after hanging out with Doreen and the gang.
The artwork is, as is to be expected in such a big story told in such a short time, fairly all over the place. Regular Amazing Spider-Man artists Humberto Ramos, Ryan Ottley, and Chris Bachalo all show up, with Ramos doing the most pencil work (about a third of the collection, all told), while Gerardo Sandoval, Iban Coello, Cory Smith and a half-dozen or so inkers join the aforementioned Lashley in drawing this thing. For the most part, the style is pretty consistent; Ramos, Ottley and Bachalo's work is hardly identical, but it's all in the same aesthetic ballpark. The only real visual clashes come in the form of character designs. Bachalo's fantastic Lizard design which, again, looks like a real lizard, only bipedal and giant, is the odd one out among the more dinosaurian takes.
Anyway, I rather enjoyed this, and it seemed like another great offering from Spencer and company, but, as a casual Spider-Man reader, I am curious about how any more ardent Spider-Man fans felt about it.
Because of that, the pacing is unusual; what might normally have taken part of a single issue or story arc instead takes 140 pages, spread over the course of four months (Batman publishes twice-monthly, but this arc was interrupted for two issues to make room for a Batman/Flash crossover tying into the events of King's own Heroes In Crisis miniseries). It read just fine in collected format, of course, and it's actually great fun to see the sudden and dramatic shifts between artists in each issue, as the book basically becomes an artist-focused Batman anthology for a half-dozen issues, but I imagine it would have been frustrating to hell to read serially, with a month between chapters of Batman trying to fight his way out of his nightmares, with the reader knowing that it is a fight that lasts (at least) seven rounds.
When we last left the Dark Knight in Batman Vol. 9, the Flashpoint Batman appeared in the Batcave behind him. This volume opens with Batman appearing to attempt to solve the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne for young Bruce Wayne, but it turns out we are inside the fantasies of "Master Bruce" the weird, kinda lame villain that has been one of King's few, minor additions to Batman's rogues gallery during his time at the helm of the book. That issue's drawn by Travis Moore.
When we first get inside Batman's head, he is in the process of awaking to find himself the captive of Grant Morrison and Andy Kubert's Professor Pyg a relatively new Batman villain who really seems to have caught on (he was first introduced in 2007). Held in what appears to be a meat locker of some sort, it's basically an issue-long fight scene drawn by Mitch Gerards. Throughout, the only words come in the form of Batman's thoughts in narration boxes, as he tries to puzzle out how he got there and why things don't seem to make sense, particularly why he can't hear Pyg's voice even though he knows he's talking. It's in the last panel that he realizes this is a dream. Though labeled "Knightmares, Part 2," this seems to be the actual first issue of the arc (Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say, it seems like it should be the first issue to me).
Let's tick through the rest quickly. The next issue is drawn by Kings on-again, off-again Batman co-creator Mikel Janin, and finds the ending of Batman #50 going somewhat differently, with Catwoman showing up on the rooftop at the last minute just in time to marry Batman after all; John Constanine keeps appearing and disappearing throughout what follows, though he's just a mental creation of Batman's own subconscious, there to remind him that this is just another dream, even if it seems more pleasant than the previous ones.
Next, the great Jorge Fornes shows up to draw an issue in which The Question (Vic Sage model) interrogates a cigarette-smoking Selina Kyle, who tells him a story about how they first met and one of their early team-ups (which Fornes' David Mazzuchelli-esque art is perfect for) and The Question calls bullshit on Catwoman's bullshit rationale for leaving Bruce Wayne at the altar/rooftop (It's nice to see that King himself seems to realize that it is bullshit, but it might have been nice if he left some clue that he meant for her rationale to be transparently idiotic at the time, rather than waiting like 12 issues). Although Catwoman, Batman and The Question get the most panel-time, Two-Face briefly appears here (as he did in the previous, Janin-drawn issue), and there's a two-page sequence that gives Fornes the opportunity to draw a large swathe of rogue's gallery: The Penguin, The Riddler, Mister Freeze and The Joker.
Next, Lee Weeks and Fornes draw a mostly silent issue that is just one long chase between Batman and The Joker, the focus of which appears to be as a showcase for the artists. They don't disappoint, but, again, this sort of indulgent issue would have driven me nuts if I paid four bucks for it it and waited 14 days for it. The only words are copious sound effects, the stuttering of the bartender at "Porky's" (introduced in King and Weeks' weird-ass Batman/Elmer Fudd crossover) and then Batman's narration on the last page.
Next, Amanda Conner, Dan Panosian, John Timms and Janin all join King for the story of Lois Lane throwing a bachelorette party for Catwoman in Superman's Fortress of Solitude, while Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne hang out in Wayne Manor, trying to relate to one another as Clark and Bruce, rather than Batman and Superman. This is obviously a funny issue, and much of it is quite effectively, although I think all of the best bits are those between Clark and Bruce (The best bit? A background gag that plays out in the fourth, fifth and sixth panels of the fourth page, involving Alfred's souffles. How does this qualify as a nightmare? It's...complicated, but a large part of it just seems to be a nightmare in contrast to reality, as Batman sees what his life could have been like if things happened differently. It is on the last page of this issue that we finally see Batman hooked up to some kind of machine, in "real life."
Finally, the story resumes with the final issue of the trade, drawn by Yanick Paquette. Broken into two distinct sequences, Batman and Catwoman dance, as Batman explains to Catwoman how he realized what is going on and how he's going to break free and, in the process, they once again discuss why she left him: Here she offers a better, realer rationale, one that actually makes sense for both of their characters, rather than what Catwoman wrote him in her letter which, I guess, retroactively or not, was her attempting to let Batman down easy (Whether what he articulates is actually his greatest fear or not, I'm not entirely convinced, as Batman is clearly capable of loving others, even if one can argue quite convincingly that he's incapable of loving another person romantically in the way that husbands and wives love one another). Interspersed between the scenes of their dance and Batman their conversation are scenes, as their costumes and the settings change to reflect their history together, are scenes supposedly set in the real world, in which Flashpoint Batman Thomas Wayne and a nude Bane spar with one another, and seem to come near to killing one another. (I don't know, I don't like Bane's chances against Batman; if he can't defeat a 60-70-year-old Batman, how's he going to take the mid-thirties-ish Batman?)
In some ways, I think this may be the best volume of the book to date, or at least the strongest collection. But then, that owes a lot to the fact that it's a series of only loosely connected stories, in which King is free to make observations about Batman and his version of Catwoman and some other supporting characters, without having to do much in the way of a story.
The more pages of King's Batman I read, the more convinced I am that King is a great comic book writer, but a relatively poor storyteller.
By the second volume, the series really seems to have found its sense of humor, and settled on a direction, treating Goblin Slayer's chosen vocation of goblin-slaying as a source of humor as well as a defining characteristic. At the opening of volume two, an unusual party of silver-ranked adventurers arrives at the guild: A high elf archer girl who looks straight out of an RPG, a dwarven magic user whose fashion choices suggest a Eastern origin more than a Western one, and a big, towering humanoid dragon-like guy referred to as a "Lizardman." The first two fall pretty squarely into type, particularly in their constantly teasing enmity for one another, but the latter is a rather unusual character. Although he looks like a dinosaur man, he's dressed in vaguely Native American style, including face-paint, fringe-heavy pants and jacket that suggest buckskin, and even a full feathery headdress.
The party comes to the guild seeking a person they call by various names: Orcbolg, Beard-Cutter and, of course, Goblin Slayer. That last name summons him immediately, for as soon as they get the word "Goblin--" out, he appears and starts asking about goblins. Joining with the title character and the priestess, they set out to clear a particularly large goblin nest that has been established in a sort of inverted underground tower, close enough to elven lands to draw the attention of multiple races, and for various leaders to put together such a rag-tag group, human-free campaign party.
Far lighter than the first volume, the second volume gradually introduces the new characters and their quirks, plays up Goblin Slayers' difficulties in relating with others for humor, and a good 50 pages pass before they see their first goblin. There's a surprise waiting for them at the bottom of the nest, though, as the relatively easily dispatched—if devious—goblins are apparently serving under a non-goblin master: An ogre.
This ogre seems to be more of an Eastern one than a Western one, as not only is he physically formidable, towering twice the size of the Lizardman and wielding a metal club far longer than any of the characters, but he's also has magically abilities, and is well on his way to slaughtering the whole party...at least until Goblin Slayer is forced to use a secret weapon that is teased in the earliest pages of this volume. He if, of course, unhappy to have wasted it on killing a single non-goblin foe rather than wiping out a nest of goblins with it, but the whole quest sets up a sharp contrast between him and the other characters, and their different views of what they do. While he finishes off the ogre while dissing him, forgetting his name and then dismissing him as less powerful than goblins anyway, the elf thinks about how much she dislikes Orcbolg, and how adventures are "supposed to be fun...The joy and accomplishment of finding and learning new things... That's an 'adventure' to me. He doesn't understand those feelings at all. He just keeps hunting goblins."
Her narration falls over contrasting images, of herself happily emerging from a passage underground into the light, and Goblin Slayer in the middle-distance in an almost all-black panel, his back to the reader, plunging his sword into prone goblins to make sure they are dead.
The elf doesn't really have a name...in fact, none of the characters do. It's not so noticeable in the manga itself—the dwarf, who directly addresses her most often, calls her "long-ears"—but the short prose stories at the end of each volume drives that point home. There she is referred to as "High Elf Archer", and the rest of the party is called "Dwarf Shaman," "Lizard Priest"** and, of course, "Priestess" and "Goblin Slayer." That aspect of the story works far better in comics than prose, where dialogue is attributed via the lines drawn around it, rather than by having to name characters whenever they talk. Of course, prose is apparently Goblin Slayer's home medium, so perhaps that's a truer Goblin Slayer, even if it doesn't appeal to me (There are also a series of "light novels;" I've been ordering these from other libraries, and about half of the time I get a light novel sent instead of a manga collection, as they appear indistinguishable from the covers and in the library catalogs).
Volume 3 begins with a three-page sequence in which a little gray-haired boy, whose face is never seen, is talking to his older sister, and then we see Goblin Slayer awaking from sleep and, presumably, that dream, to find that that boy was Goblin Slayer. Although Kurose frames the sequence—and, indeed, all future sequences featuring Goblin Slayer sans helmet—so that the reader never actually sees his face, it turns out that the character is apparently completely human, male and not horribly disfigured. In fact, he's apparently quite handsome, which might help further explain why the girl at the farm and the lady that works the desk at the adventurers' guild are so keen on him.
This volume is fairly self-contained, in terms of the plot. Goblin Slayer finds clues that goblins have been scouting out the farm he lives at, and, when the girl and her uncle that own the farm refuse to leave, Goblin Slayer goes to the guild and urgently requests all the help he can get in defending the farm from what he suspects is an entire horde of goblins, numbering 100 or more, and lead by a "Goblin Lord," which is the goblin equivalent of one of the guild's higher-ranked adventurers.
His friends all come to his aide, and rally the rest of the guild, leading to a pretty huge battle sequence involving pretty much every character in the series so far, plus many minor heroes given short scenes appearing here for the first time. It's the most Lord of The Rings-y sequence in the comic so far, both in scale and in some of the specifics, like the goblins riding upon wolves to attack (another tactic, "meat shields", is something Tolkein never would have dreamed up, and Peter Jackson wouldn't have put to film). Goblin Slayer himself tackles the Goblin Lord, with an invaluable assist from the priestess. Oddly, the Goblin Lord is given a fairly extensive origin sequence, in which we see how he rose from a regular, lowly goblin to his current station; a sequence that seems to involve him fighting and killing a manga Conan at one point. Pressed to repay his debt to the adventurers' who helped out, Goblin Slayer takes off his helmet when asked, to the shock of all at the after party.
In Volume 4, Goblin Slayer must repay his debt to the elf archer, and so he joins their party again for what is meant to be a "fun" quest exploring ruins, but they manage to find some goblins there after all. Eventually, their party journeys to a big city, where they are given a particularly involved mission from Sword Maiden, a high-level heroine that seems to be something between a superhero and a pope in her faith, the same faith that the priestess shares. Apparently goblins have been appearing within the big city in which Sword Maiden's temple is based, and so Team Goblin Slayer explores the massive sewer system beneath the city, finding unusual and unexpected threats, like goblins sailing in boats and a huge albino alligator. The book ends with a rather dire cliffhanger, as our heroes are trapped in a room that goblins are piping poison gas into and, when they finally burst in, our heroes see this horde is also being lead by a goblin champion, a huge specimen who seems to be more than a match for any of them.
Volume 5 has the team as close to death as they have ever been as the champion and his horde overwhelm them in the dead end they're forced to fight in. Goblin Slayer is badly hurt, and unable to help as the champion grabs the priestess and proceeds to take several gory bites out of her, starting to eat her alive. The elf is held down and stripped nude, about to be gang-raped by the goblins. The dwarf and Lizardman will simply be killed when they fall, rather than raped or eaten...the benefit of being male in this milieu, I guess...? Goblin Slayer manages to rally, of course, and rather brutally and gorily defeats the champion, sending him in full retreat.
This being a setting of magic inspired by games, neither the priestess nor Goblin Slayer actually die, despite suffering mortal wounds. Instead, they are magically healed. (In the case of Goblin Slayer, the "miracle" that saves him isn't the sort of minor spell that the priestess generally casts—like "minor heal" or "protection"—but a "resurrection miracle" performed by Sword Maiden and the priestess, something that is accomplished by "sleeping with a virgin." Indeed, Goblin Slayer awakes in bed next to the naked, sleeping priestess...so apparently they've had sex, although it seems to have been purely a matter of life and death, as their relationship isn't drastically changed at all by the off-panel event.
Once everyone's been magically healed, they head back underground for a less horrifying adventure, finding a magical mirror that seems to serve as a goblin portal, guarded by Goblin Slayer's answer to a Beholder in D&D. Our hero decides to refer to it as "Giant Eyeball," and this particular conflict that involves more problem-solving and creativity than the desperate fighting of the previous one.
In the sixth and final volume (that's been released so far, anyway), the team finishes off the goblins dwelling under the city and their rematch with the goblin champion that almost killed Goblin Slayer and the priestess earlier, and they do so in a very thorough, very unexpected and unusual way that involves the entire team and the magical gateway mirror. The remainder of the volume is a relatively low-key, climaxing with the girl at the guild desk asking Goblin Slayer on a date...and Goblin Slayer accepting. I guess we have to wait until volume seven to see how that goes, though...
As for why was a bit reluctant, it wasn't just that some of these events turn out to be real clunkers, even when the concept is simple and solid, or if the creators are great at what they do and have a pretty good track record, as writer Jason Aaron and artist Russel Dauterman do (although that is always a concern). See, in this particular case, Aaron has been building to this event series for...well, for years now. A glance at Wikipedia confirms that he's been writing the Thor characters regularly since 2012, and I've read...lets see...eight issues of it, circa 2014 and 2015. I've picked up on some details via osmosis, but I still don't know what Nick Fury Sr. said to Thor to make him suddenly unworthy. I don't know how Jane Foster got the hammer, or how she lost it. I don't know where Thor's new arm came from. And so on. If this event was gong to be the climax of some seven years of storytelling, well, I was afraid I might need to have done all the homework first.
Thankfully, I did not. Aaron has obviously been building up to this forever, as some of the villains introduced at the outset were ones I had first met/been reintroduced to during those eight issues five years ago, and I certainly didn't know what lead to what, but the book was thankfully, surprisingly easy to follow. I suppose much of that comes from the relative simplicity of the plot, which is this.
Malekith, the dark elf, has declared war on the
Malekith sends weird-looking elven assassins to take out various still-standing Asgardian characters here and there, and then launches a full-scale invasion of New York City, pitting armies of ice giants, elves, trolls and other monsters against all the superheroes for an everybody-fights-everybody sequence that is the starting point for the story.
From there, it's a fairly straight-forward story. The heroes retreat to Avengers Mountain after a pretty decisive defeat, one that kills off all of Asgard's valkyries, and then the involved heroes split into various teams to do various tasks. One team must go to Asgard to secure and hold the bifrost bridge, so they can move between realms. One team must go to the realm of the dark elves to take over their "black bifrost," limiting their ability to move between realms. One team must travel to the land of the frost giants to rescue a stranded Thor. And another team, apparently dubbed the "War Avengers", travel around the world fighting various armies, as the bad guys start staking out continents to call their own.
Meanwhile, Thor himself goes through a dramatic rite of passage that echoes that of his father, ultimately facing off against Malekith in a neat climax in which he games a "rule" set forth that says only Thor can enter the arena Malekith made for him.
As is typical of Aaron's Marvel writing, there are a lot of very big, very cool moments, chief among them being blind superhero Daredevil stepping in to fill the boots of blind Asgardian Heimdall to master the bifrost, being promoted to "The God Without Fear"; Punisher Frank Castle battling dark elves with bullets and conversing with light elves, about as far removed from his regular milieu as imaginable; Odin donning an Iron Man-esque suit built by Tony Stark, Shuri and the dwarf Screwbeard to become "The Iron All-Father"; and a rather novel application of Venom's symbiote.
In addition to the cast of the Thor books—Thor, Loki, Odin, Freya, Jane Foster—and Aaron's Avengers team, Wolverine, Spider-Man and the aforementioned Daredevil and Punisher play the biggest roles, although Dauterman gets to draw a pretty sizable chunk of the publisher's currently active heroes (and, obviously, a ton of Marvel heroes who don't even manage a cameo in this series will appear in the hundreds of pages of tie-in material).
As surprising as how easy-to-follow the story was for a casual-ish Marvel reader who has been all but ignoring the Thor books is the fact that Dauterman is the only artist on the series, apparently requiring no fill-in artists, inkers or assists. This is all just Aaron, Dauterman and colorist Matthew Wilson. And Dauterman is a really good artist, making this the best-looking Marvel event series in...well, that I can remember, anyway. Generally, the art fluctuates rather widely as different artists with different styles are involved and, often, the involved artists tend to be ones whose style isn't to my taste, but not here. This is a pretty damn gorgeous book.
REVIEWED:
Other than that tiny nitpick, this original graphic novel about Superman's time in Smallville was a great deal of fun, and in the same vein as most of the pair's previous DC Comics work. Cues seem to have been taken from the Smallville TV show, as Superman's classmates include Lex, Lana and Pete Ross, the last of whom looks like the actor who portrayed him on Smallville, even though Lana is a fair-skinned ginger, as per the comics, and, when a second Kryptonian arrives in town, it's referred to simply as "The Blur."
*I'm genuinely surprised that we haven't seen more of this character since, given the perennial popularity of The Joker.
**The deities of his people are, amusingly, dinosaurs. When he casts his first spell, tossing a handful of bone shards and run stones before him to raise a "Dragontooth Warrior," which appears to be an obedient lizardman skeleton that performs tasks for him, like running a wounded elf captive out of the goblin dungeon or, later in the second volume, fighting the ogre alongside the other warriors, he prays, "O horns and claws of our father, Iguanadon."
***Well, the "job" after my day job, anyway
The setup of hulk turning back to puny banner if he gets too stressed -- either kirby or ditko did that for a while. The early hulk issues show kirby ditko and lee not quite sure how to make the character stick so they keep switching up the premise: now hulk is smart! Now he's only hulk at night! Now he's hulk body with banner head! (That was a weird one)
ReplyDeleteA fourth Batman: The Caped Crusader volume does appear to be in the works, collecting Batman #455-465 and the Annual #15.
ReplyDeleteYou interpreted the first chapter of Knightmares as being inside Master Bruce's head; I actually thought we were inside Master Bruce's head inside Batman's head. That was among the things I found narratively curious/interesting about the whole book, that we see Batman dreaming of other people -- he's dreaming of Master Bruce just as he is, for instance, of Selina and Lois in the Fortress. Batman is the omniscient reader here, in a sense.
You really need to read David's run on the Hulk, because it's terrific. And yes, Marlo became a very important character, to the point where she married Rick Jones.
ReplyDelete