The blurbs of Jonathan Lethem: A long, vague, meandering post about talking about comics

There's been plenty written about Jonathan Lethem's comics writing so far, the first issue of his Omega The Unknown remake/reimagining for Marvel. And there's been much more written about his prose fiction writing over the years. But today, I'd like to focus on another, very specific type of writing that Jonathan Lethem does, one that doesn’t get nearly as much attention—his blurb writing for the backs of other people's comics.

Here’s what Lethem wrote of Adrian Tomine, the Optic Nerve cartoonist currently being written about everywhere for his brilliant graphic novel Shortcomings:



Tomine's genius is to strip his medium of every possible type of grandiosity or indulgence, and the result is that life itself floods in. His mise-en-scene rivals Eric Rohmer's in its gentle precision, and his mastery of narrative time suggests Alice Munro. Shortcomings, as near as he'd get to a grand statement, is as deceptively relaxed and perfect as a comic book gets.

—Jonathan Lethem



I’m not sure I entirely agree with the first two sentences.

What I found most remarkable about Tomine’s Shortcomings work wasn’t how it was filled by real life reacting to a vacuum of filigree, but that it so thoroughly simulated real life in its realism, both in the art and the writing (I’m not quite sure how Tomine could strip the entire medium either; is Lethem saying that comics/comix/sequential art is predisposed towards grandiosity or indulgence?)

And as for the second sentence, well, it’s been a while since I’ve sat down and paid attention to the mise-en-scene of any French New Wave directors, and I freely admit to never having read a single Alice Munro story (That I know of. Do they teach her in school? If so, I might have read her and forgot her name—I was forced to read a lot of things I don’t remember in school).

So I can’t really agree or disagree, but I know when I was reading Shortcomings, I wasn’t thinking, “Day-umn, check out that mis-en-scene!” or “Oh snap! This guy’s mastery of narrative time is the bomb!” And noticeably strong mise-en-scene and mastery of narrative time seems to contradict the statement that Tomine’s comic is stripped down to an indulgence-free negative space which real life may more easily occupy.

But “deceptively relaxed?” Yeah, I’ll second that. And “as…perfect as a comic book gets?” I’d second that too, as long as Lethem means it literally, as in “this is as good as it gets” and not “this is as good a comic book gets.”

But whatever, my intent here isn’t to argue with what Lethem said or the way he said it (Because he’d win easy; I mean, his job is to say things well, and his business is good). Rather, what interested me was this brief piece on The Quill blog, the blog supplement to Canada’s Quill & Quire, which uses Lethem’s blurb as a starting point for what may be a completely imaginary conflict between Tomine and Lethem.

Under the heading “Tomine to Lethem: butt out, smartypants,” the blog entry refers to an interview in The Believer in which the introduction mentions the praise Tomine has gotten from Lethem and Charles McGrath, and runs this quote from Tomine:



I also am trying to think —and I hope other people will start to see it this way —that sometimes a comic can be a great thing because it’s a comic, not because it’s almost as good as a movie, or as good as a prose novel, which I think is the way a lot of people are now trying to process it …. You start to get nervous when the value of a comic book or graphic novel is relative to the achievements of some other medium.



The blog post also says that Tomine “raises doubts that long-form graphic novels are the ne plus ultra*of comics art, and says that comparisons to masterworks in other mediums are implicitly degrading” and that the extended quote from Tomine “could be a veiled reference to the immodest praise of Jonathan Lethem.”

Yeah, it could be, but the post kinda makes it sound like it is doesn’t it? (I first noticed this article after Tom Spurgeon pointed it out on his blog, with the smart-ass link “Maybe He Simply Meant What He Said.” Reading the Believer interview Tomine’s statement isn’t prompted by anything…what the ellipsis in the quote cuts out is the part where he says he wishes people would equate comics to other visual arts as much as movies or prose, because the time it takes to produce a graphic novel is so much longer than it takes to read it. That is, paintings we can go back and look at over and over and see new things in, whereas novels are something we think of as to be plowed through, with each page a part of a whole rather than a work to be regarded on its own (I am, by the way, super-generalizing).

But what Tomine says and what Lethem said, whether the former was responding to the latter or not, is interesting in any case, because I think it speaks to the way people think and talk about comics and, since I spend so much time thinking and talking about comics, well, that sort of thing interests me.

If you boil criticism, comics or otherwise, down to its base essence, it amounts to little more than a series of comparisons—this is good (defined only when compared to bad), this is bad (defined only when compared to good), this is better than that, this is worse than that, here's why.

So comparisons are absolutely necessary in comics criticism. Whether comparisons to other media are necessary depends on large part to who is writing the criticism, and who they are writing it for.

There's definitely a great deal of freedom that comes in knowing your audience as completely as you can. When I review a comic book for Newsarama.com, or here on EDILW, I know this much about just about everyone reading—they also reads comics regularly, and will know the terms and lingo used in discussing comics, as well as just about all of the names or works I could possibly cite when making a comparison.

In that regard, I think a place that hosts writing about comics exclusively, by someone who knows a lot about comics, for an audience of people interested in comics, is probably going to give a review that matters most to someone like Tomine, one that won’t ever need to think too hard about works in other media in order to discuss his comics.

To use an example of someone I read about 400 reviews by today, if Tom Spurgeon were to review Shortcomings at The Comics Reporter, for example, he's free to compare it exclusively to Tomine's past work, cartoonists whose work it resembles and/or other Drawn and Quarterly publications, knowing (or at least feeling fairly certain) that his audience will be familiar with Optic Nerve, Summer Blonde, Los Hernandez Brothers, James Sturm or Rutu Modan and whatever else might come up in the review. Spurgeon can write about Tomine's work without having to compare it to other media because of his depth of experience with the comics medium, and the assurance that most of the people reading his site share a certain degree of interest and experience with the field.

But when you're writing about comics for a more general audience, a phenomenon that’s been ever increasing ever since publishers who aren't exclusively comics publishers have started publishing graphic novels, you can't always assume that the reader knows all the terms. Thankfully we're past a point where we need to explain the word "graphic novel" or "manga" or point out that comics, in fact, aren't just for kids anymore (At least, I like to think we are, and all those local newspapers still writing a "Bam! Pow! Holy Voltron Batman, Manga Is Kinda Popular, Isn't It?" articles are simply way behind the times), but a writer for a venue outside the comics press can’t as easily assume everyone of their readers is an afficianado.

It's in those instances when comparisons to other media are invaluable. When I write comics reviews for Las Vegas Weekly, for example, I write them for a more general audience then I write for here or at Newsarama, and I don’t assume that everyone reading it is exactly like me (as I do when I write about comics here or for Newsarama.com...where, increasingly, I find not everybody is exactly like me...or even all that much like me at all). But the more I think about it, wherever I’m writing about comics, I constantly compare them to works in other media.

Brad Meltzer writes JLoA like it's a novel. DC has a tendency to treat its superhero properties like they were 10 p.m. cop dramas. Marvel's Max line is basically R-rated versions of their formerly PG characters. The characters in Black Metal are designed like those in a Cartoon Network original series. Scott Pilgrim and Sharknife read like video games play. And on and on.

Now, Tomine's certainly right about value judgments—in assessing his work, we're better off comparing it to the comic book canon and what's currently on the shelves now than against works, good or bad, in other media to figure out or communicate how good or bad it is. Because if you start saying things, like "this is so good it's practically a movie," then that's ranking the media, and I would like to think we're well past that point as a society, although comics history itself is littered with stories of that prejudice, of the grand masters of the Golden Age being ashamed of what they were doing, and hoping they could get into something more respectable, like newspaper strips or advertising. Even today, there seem to be a lot of (or, at least, too many, with one being "too many") creators who look at comics as something that movies are adapted from, and I know I've read far too many comics that read like someone's screen play broken up into four or six issues for a miniseries. So perhaps that sentiment is still present in comics to a certain extent, but hopefully confined to a handful of creators, and doesn't exist at all among comics critics.

But there's nothing wrong with comparing a particular comic to a particular work in another media, as long as we're not weighing the media against one another**, and in fact not ever comparing works of one media to works from another would likely make criticism kind of hard to do, not to mention less effective. Consider the influence the works of non-comics media may have on comics writers and artists, for example. I can't imagine talking about Kelley Jones work as a writer/artist without mentioning Hammer films, discussing the art work of Osamu Tezuka without mentioning Disney films (Just to pick two wildly divergent examples, based on my current To Read piles).

While thinking about all that stuff, prompted by the Lethem quote on Tomine and where that lead, I saw this on the back of a copy of James Sturm's America, which I was preparing to review:



Sturm's America is the one glimpsed through the holes in the flag: rooted, grim and enduring. The line of his drawings has a pure grain like that of the voice in William Carlos Williams' epic poem
Paterson, or the singers on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music. Fables like these are an antidote to
cultural amnesia."

—Jonathan Lethem



Oh, Jonathan, what are we going to do with you! So, here's another three-sentence blurb from Lethem on a D+Q book, one that also compares a comic book to two different works of other media. It sounds like a very nice quote, but again, if I stop to think too much about it, it ultimately sounds meaningless to me.

The first sentence, as gripping a visual image as looking through the holes in a flag might be, is really just nonsense—having read the three tales in Sturm's book now, I suppose you could say it presents a country that is rooted, grim and enduring, but what does that have to do with the visual image Lethem starts that statement off with?

Then it just gets crazy, as he extends metaphors to their breaking points. He compares Sturm's line work to the voice in a William Carlos Williams poem and the sound of the voice of singers I've never heard of…? But regardless, what does it even mean? A case could be made for the ways in which linework evokes sound, or the same feelings that the sounds might evoke, but Lethem doesn't really go into it here, so it just seems like namedropping, and it's namedropping to the same effect as his Shortcomings quote…which the Quill & Quire blogger interpreted as something that Tomine didn’t like…which sent me on the weird, rambling tangent that comprises most of this interminably long post.

As for that last sentence in the America blurb, I don't agree with it. If you use a broad definition of fable, broad to the point where it doesn’t strictly mean “fable” but could be applied to other literary terms just as easily, like “a fictional narrative used to enforce a useful truth,” then it could certainly apply to these stories to a certain extent, but Strum doesn't bluntly lay out "useful truths" in the manner of a fable. Maybe Lethem's reading just varied greatly from mine, but it seems to me that Sturm suggests vague truths and leaves it to the reader to contextualize them, rather than making straightforward pronouncements along the lines of "Racism is bad, but inherent to the American spirit," or "Faith is for crazy people" or "killing Chinese people for gold is bad."

Nor do they really do much in the way of addressing cultural amnesia, since they're fictional stories. Based on and inspired by history, yes, but they're not reminding us of things we've forgotten so much as introducing us to stories that haven't yet been added to our cultural memory.

So, Jonathan Lethem—Reportedly a great prose fiction writer, seemingly a pretty good comic book writer, but not so hot at blurb writing.






*Is there a superhero called Ne Plus Ultraman yet? If not, I’m calling it right now.

**And I don't know that anyone actually does that, but apparently Tomine's heard enough of it to make the statement he did to The Believer; given the circles he runs in, he'd be much more likely to hear that sort of thing than I ever would.

Gumby comics: Buy! Buy! Buy!

I don’t want to encourage rampant, ‘90s style market speculation or anything, because we know that inevitably leads to tears (and dozens of copies of X-Force #1 in a short box in the basement that nobody wants), but I think I’ve stumbled upon a pretty hot tip in the old comics collecting game, and I want to share it with you, my dearest and closest readers—Buy Gumby.

Buy multiple copies of Gumby. Put on gloves, handle them with tongs, and put them in bags with boards and store them in a cool, dark, dry place. You’ll be able to able to put your kids through college with ‘em, I guarantee.

Here’s how I know this…

Okay, I slept on Gumby. When the first issue debuted, I was pretty torn about whether to give it a try or not, and did the whole thing where I pick it up in the shop, flip through it, and then just hold it and stare at the cover for a while, while the Angel Caleb on one shoulder and the Devil Caleb on the other present their best arguments as to why I should buy this particular comic book, and why I should not by this particular comic book, respectively.

The original Gumby animation didn’t really do much for me, so really I was just attracted to the book because I really love pliable characters, and the odd-ness of Bob Flaming Carrot Burden on a Gumby comic book seemed like something I had to see for myself.

But then, it did cost $3.95 for a single issue. And that’s pretty much the price point at which I think single issues stop being worthwhile versus trades, so I put it back on the shelf and spent my money instead on a bunch of stupid shit starring the superheroes that serve as my imaginary friends and family.

So the months pass, and two more issues of Gumby come out, and they’re, like, universally praised. The book gets nominated for multiple Eisner awards, and critics and bloggers with reliably good taste are constantly talking it up. I hear that Johnny Cash descends from heaven to guest-star in Gumby #2. Clearly, I chose wrong when I decided not to jump on Gumby #1.

So while visiting my local comic shop on an off day, I saw that there was a new issue of Gumby out and thought now was the time to jump on that particular bandwagon. And I thought the most sensible place to start the three-issue series would be with #2, because that’s the one in which Johnny Cash guest-stars. I found a copy in the back issue bins—for $4.25.

Do you know what that means?

In just ten months, Gumby #2 has appreciated in value thirty cents. That’s over 1/16th its original value. Clearly, this is a comic book investment that is doing what no new comic books do anymore—it’s actually instantly increasing rapidly in value.

That, or they were just charging thirty extra cents for the backing board and plastic bag they put it in.

But is that a risk you’re willing to take?

Someone's been sleeping in Captain Marvel's bed...

The sky turned red, killer sillouhettes ran rampant, and people were being plucked from their home times and dimensions and tossed all over—it was the Crisis, or, as those of us in Earth-Prime knew it, DC's maxiseries Crisis on Infinite Earths. Many big, important, unimagniable things occurred during that event, but perhaps none so unexpected as newlyweds Johnny Quick and Liberty Belle having sex in Billy Batson's bed.

The sordid tale was told in 1985's All-Star Squadron #52, by Roy Thomas, Dann Thomas, Arvell Jones and Alfredo Alcalla.

Green Lantern Alan Scott, Johnny Quick and Liberty Belle from Earth-2 follow their friend Firebrand II into a hole in the sky or something, and end up on Earth-S, where they find Captain Marvel engaged in battle against the shadow things.

After the new heroes help turn the tide, sending the shadow things back to their own maxiseries, they do a little meet and greet, and Alan pulls Cap aside and lets him know exaclty what's up Johhny Quick's ass.


They head for a diner, where the Earth-2 heroes are totally dissed by a young autograph hound. Libby, feeling tired, bored or perhaps just horny, issues a yawn, signaling that this team-up has gone on long enough for her tastes.


Cap takes them to Billy's apartment which is—wow, Billy has a nice pad!


Man, that's much nicer than my apartment. I guess there's some pretty decent money in being a boy broadcaster!

Cap and GL leave the newlyweds to get some sleep, while they head off to do actual superhero stuff. Mainly flying around to see if the green meteor that crashed in Earth-2, and from which Alan's Lantern was formed, also crashed on Earth-S, since he could use a recharge.

But what's this? Libby's not so tired after all!


The next time we see the young couple is this charming scene:


...freaking Billy Batson with his king-sized bed...I'm a thirty-year-old man and I've never had a king-sized bed...

Now, what's weird about this scene is that not only did Libby and Johnny avail themselves of Batson's generosity and then totally consumated their marriage in his bed, but Libby also helped herself to the kid's wardrobe, and slept in one of his trademarked longsleeved shirts. She's wearing it the next morning, which is the internationally recognized signal of I've Just Slept With This Shirt's Owner.

Man, they are some terrible house guests. They sleep in his bed, they do it in his bed, they wear his clothes...could it get any worse?


Oh yeah, Libby could accuse him of being a voyeur trying to sneak a peek at them because he happens to be outside the window of his own apartment.

The nerve of some people.

Man, I sure hope Billy changed those sheets...

October 11th's Meanwhile in Las Vegas...

Man, I can't tell you how many times I've had that exact conversation. This week's Las Vegas Weekly comics column features an actual reveiw of Adrian Tomine's Shortcomings, after last week's gut reaction. Check it out. The column that is, not the book. Well, actually check the book out to, because it's pretty great. So check out the column, then the book. If you haven't already read it. If you have, then just check out the column. Thanks.

Weekly Haul: October 10th

Black Summer #3 (Avatar) Oh man, The Authority are pissed at John Horus and the U.S. military, and are ready to go to war with them both! More hyper-detailed, violent-looking art from Juan Jose Ryp, more Warren Ellis technobabble in the middle of a story that could use less of it, plus more of that Oh my God things are going to get so cool…next issue feeling. The scene with the tank toss was great, but I think Ryp forgot to draw a soldier or someone on that last page, because I can’t figure out who they’re talking too and pointing their super-guns at…unless Dominic can see right through the Fourth Wall and he was threatening me.




Booster Gold #3 (DC Comics) That cover image is so absolutely perfect that it doesn’t even need dialogue and a logo (in the final version, Booster’s saying “I love you, man…” and Hex replies “Shaddup.”) As you can see, this issue involves Booster Gold drinking whiskey with Hex (for two consecutive issues now, Booster has drank with heroes who don’t know who he really is in bars), although the two don’t spend all that much time together. The only change from the last two issues is the mysterious abandonment of the 52 format datelines, and there’s a page repeating a scene from Infinite Crisis that I didn’t quite understand, but other than that, this was another fun romp through DCU history. I’m hard-pressed to pick a favorite bit: Skeets on (er, slightly above) horseback, Anthro getting that jacket he wanted last issue (now for some pants), or Supernova showering his foes with buffalo. Blue Beetle now has some serious competition for its designation as the most fun DC book, and there’s no more appropriate challenger to a Blue Beetle comic than a Booster Gold one.





Captain Carrot and the Final Ark! (DC) I completely missed Captain Carrot and his crew the first time around. I think I read maybe one issue as a wee one and it kind of freaked me out, as I preferred my talking funny animals on the TV screen and my comic books to have superheroes, giant space robots that turn into Earth vehicles and appliances or G.I. Joe guys in them. So I really can’t say how well original artist Scott Shaw (Sorry Shaw, we don’t honor avant-garde punctuation here at EDILW) and new writer Bill Morrison recapture the old Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew spirit. I will say that this book was an awful lot of fun, and probably the densest, most rewarding book of the week in terms of the time spent reading-to-cover price ratio.

Set sometime after that weird-ass Teen Titans two-parter that stopped making any sense at all in the second part (In the first part, Eddie was reading a Captain Carrot comic, in the second part, the CC sequence just randomly appeared in a Titans story), the story opens at the Sandy Eggo Comic-Con, where the Zoo Crew find themselves less-popular than all the fake heroes. When a fire-powered amphibian villain called The Salamandroid, strikes, they swing into action. There’s a lot of set-up given, mostly on the fly and around the edges of the panels, but apparently there’s a war between the animals of the sea and the animals of the land brewing, with some amphibians stoking the flames (This is but one way it echoes recent happenings in the Marvel Universe).

Shaw’s art is downright amazing, and he packs so many visual gags into each panel that many beg returning to and carefully scanning, if only to hunt down more (In this respect, his work is quite reminiscent of Sergio Aragones, who guest-stars…or, at least, Sergio Antelopes does). Morrison is pretty good at the constant animal puns, and while there’s nothing revolutionary about the humor (it’s basically like the Flintstones formula of adding the word “rock” or “stone” to all real world equivalents), I let loose a “heh” on just about every page. My favorites were the title of the Superdog and Bat-Hound team-up title, and Pig-Iron saying “I’m watchin’ Fox News. Er, I mean, the fox on the news.”





Fantastic Four #550 (Marvel Comics) Oh, so there’s where Dwayne McDuffie’s A-game is. I was so sure he was going to bring it to Justice League of America with him, but apparently he left it in Fantastic Four. Well, whatever, I’m just glad we found it. This issue is the surprisingly fleet wrap-up the surprisingly gigantic threat exposed in the previous issue. The Fantastic Six reel in a few uber-powerful guest-stars—Dr. Strange, Uatu the Wathcer, Silver Surfer and Gravity—to help them accomplish the sort of big, crazy task that is Kirby-esque in scope (Or Morrison-esque, which is another reason you’d think McDuffie could have come up with something better than all the villains team up again for his first JLoA arc). Paul Pelletier’s pencil art is slightly stronger every time I see it, and under Rick Magyar’s inks, is even sorta resembling Alan Davis’ in certain panels (That’s a good thing, by the way). The only thing I don’t like about Pelletier’s art is his sense of fashion; check out Storm’s top at the concluding dinner party, or Franklin’s hair. Ew.

Then there’s that Fucking Michael Turner cover. I’d previously said this was one of his better ones, because he got Thing’s face better than before, everyone seems to be standing on solid ground (except the dude flying) and you can’t mess up stretchy guy anatomy, but it still doesn’t reflect the interiors at all, the lack of background and mysterious point of reference for their eyes is still irritating, and I can’t even begin to make sense of Invisible Woman’s ass, or why it’s played up so big on the cover. Still, compare this Thing to his original Thing. Is it amazing that he’s improved so fast in the course of just six months? Or depressing that he apparently did so little work in the beginning figuring out how to draw a forty-plus year old character with such an easily defined look?



Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man #24 (Marvel) Fun fact: This issue costs $3.99, a full dollar more than the cover price of your average 22-page Marvel book. And what do we get for that extra dollar? Three extra story pages, plus Mary Jane’s four-page Official Guide to the Marvel Universe entry, five reprinted pages from Amazing Spider-Man #259 by Tom Defalco and Ron Frenz, and four pages detailing how inks and overdone colors make artist/EIC Joe Quesada’s pencil work look even worse. In other words, readers get absolutely robbed with this issue.

As for the first two-thirds of the book, Spidey hangs out with Dr. Strange, magically seeking an antidote for bullets that sends him all over the Marvel Universe simultaneously (mainly to prevent fans from asking why Spidey didn’t ask Hank Pym or Beast or Dr. Doom for help at conventions) and into the past. The art is less awful than that in the previous chapter “One More Day,” perhaps in large part because there are fewer normal people doing normal things, and the script is also much less awful, but then, writer J. Michael Straczynski probably couldn’t have written worse lines than he opened the last chapter with even if he tried. The last page reveals a surprise guest-star: Dorothy from DC’s Doom Patrol. I think.





Green Lantern #24 (DC) I like how each succeeding chapter of “The Sinestro Corps War” gets a little more exciting, and I find myself shouting back “Oh snap!” “Dayumn!” and “Holy @#$%!” a little more each issue (Well, at least the half of it I’m following; I haven’t been reading GL’s sister book). In this issue, the Sinestro Corps bring the battle ground to Earth, which really ups the stakes (and my interest). For me, the thing about high space opera is that really, no matter how good it is, it’s still just a bunch of silly shit happening somewhere I can’t relate too. But when you start knocking down the statue of liberty and blowing up NYC taxi cabs, then things get real, you know? This chapter is classic, even formulaic Johns, with constantly upping stakes and surprise guest-stars/calvary or threats streaming onto the scene at key points. Someone even gets cut in half, and you may remember just last week someone got torn in half in a Johns-written title. He does change up the big cliff-hanging moment, so here it’s a fist-pumping “happy” big moment instead of an “Oh @#$%, how will they get out of that?” kind of thing.

But, like I said, it’s the little things I like most about this. Like the pained look on Sinestro’s face on page 3, which I like to think is his reaction to having to work alongside Superdouche-Prime, or Sd-P’s announcement of his arrival to the JSA, or the fact that Guy has a Michigan sticker slapped on the side of his Oan power lantern, or John Stewart’s Morgan Freeman paraphrase (the construction’s a tad awkward though; it would have been better if Parallax set him up with a “You have to die.”)

Yeah, it’s big dumb fun, but it’s well done big dumb fun, and that’s the best kind.

One last thing—Am I the only one who thinks lines like, “That means along with my partner, John Stewart, I serve and protect every planet in this designated quadrant” makes Hal and John sound like a couple?

I am?

Okay, just wondering.







New Avengers #35 (Marvel) Yes, that’s Wolverine, being possessed by a Venom-style symbiote—the birth of the most popular character Marvel could possibly produce? Perhaps. Does anything like this happen in the comic itself? God no. The Avengers only appear briefly on a TV screen, and if you look real close, as I am now that I’m writing about it, I see that the New Avengers have all been Venom-ized and are attacking the Republican Avengers. But the other twenty-one and a half pages are all D-List villains being talked at by The Hood, plus a brutal attack on Tigra. (Don’t worry Tigra fans and furry enthustiasts—or is that redundant?—she doesn’t die).

Now, a few years ago I might have complained about Brian Michael Decomprendis giving us twenty-one and a half pages of talking—particularly since the people doing the talking aren’t even the Avengers—but 35 issues in, I’ve learned to accept the curious pacing of the book. And besides, I’ve seen Bendis attempt action-packed issues of New Abengers before, and those tend to be much, much (much!) worse, so all-talk is a-ok with me at this point. Besides, we have Marvel Adventures Avengers and Avengers: The Initiative if we want to see Avengers using super-powers.

Anyway, this issue jumps back in time a bit, and shows us what happened between the events of a few of the past issues, only from the villains’ perspectives. The Hood is attempting to unite all of Marvel’s villains into some kind of union, or secret society or Injustice Gang, if you will. What I found most interesting about this is despite the fact that Bendis is having his characters do the same thing DC villains have been doing for sixty years, and which McDuffie had them doing again just two weeks ago, Bendis at least gives it an interesting angle. We at least get to hear Hood’s sales pitch, and see how he anticipates and smoothes over the normal villain team-up problems, and how he anticipates dealing with the heroes. It takes an idea Brad Meltzer expressed in his first round of Identity Crisis interviews (regarding the only thing you could do to superheroes that’s worse than kill them, which is old hat at this point anyway), but it Marvelizes it. In essence, The Hood plans on controlling people the way real criminals of all stripes control people in the real world—through money and violence.

I could really have used a key in the back instead of a recap page though, because I didn’t recognize most of these guys.




Runaways #28 (Marvel) Well, Joss Whedon has succeeded in doing for this title what he did for Astonishing X-Men—slowing the proceedings down so much with delays that I’ve not only ceased caring but actually forgotten what happened in the previous issue. And here he doesn’t even have John Cassaday’s art to blame! Now, I don’t know that it’s Whedon who’s causing the long-ass delays between issues of Runaways and not pencil artist Michael Ryan, but, if it’s Ryan, then man, what a coincidence that both of Whedon’s ongoing Marvel series have such slow-ass pencilers on them! How delayed is this issue? Well, #26 is dated July, #27 August and this one says December. Everything inside is good enough, but not so good that it’s worth the trouble of plopping down $2.99 to read a chapter whenever it manages to come out instead of just waiting until it’s a trade and reading it then. The brewing war between the various factions of turn of the (last) century wonders is pretty neat, but if the next chapter is as delayed as this one, it’s not like I’ll remember any of this by then anyway.

There's one incredibly weird moment in the story, in which Karolina and Molly meet a girl the latter's age who complains about her "marital duties." To be clear, it's a scene of a girl who, if she were living in the 21st century, would be called a "tween," forced to have sex with an adult man against her will. Okay, so perhaps that happend back then. But does Whedon need to put it in a comic book being published right now? And does he need to use it to construct a silly joke? It's basically used to set Molly up to deliver a punchline.

Oh, and Nightstick and Daystick? Worst. Batman and Robin analogues. Ever.




Suicide Squad #2 (DC) Having missed the vast majority of Jon Ostrander and company’s original Suicide Squad, I find myself at a loss as to what the hell’s going on in a lot of these flashbacks, and even what’s a flashback and what isn’t. I am quite certain that Rick Flag fights a velociraptor and a pterodactyl while trapped in Skartarsis with his mortal enemy with the magical fire scimitar though. So I know this is $2.99 well spent.





Superman #668 (DC) This issue kicks off with a special below the credits note: “Due to unforeseen delays, the finale of Camelot Falls will be seen in Superman Annual #13, later this year. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.” So, if you’re keeping score at home, this is the third DC storyline so woefully behind schedule that the editors decided to steam ahead without finishing it, shunting the conclusion off to be concluded in an annual sometime later (Following in the footsteps of “Who Is Wonder Woman?” and “Last Son of Krypton”) Obviously this isn’t the way to run a comic book company, especially one with a shared universe in which all the stories being told take place (this new story, for example, refers back to those stories that aren’t over yet), but once the mistake of hiring people incapable of a monthly schedule for monthly work has been committed, there’s really nothing to do but apologize, move on and not be so stupid the next time.

This is the first chapter of “The Third Kryptonian,” which will reveal that there’s actually a third Kryptonian on Earth besides Superman and Supergirl. And it’s not Krypto. Or Power Girl. Or Chris. And probably not any of the Phantom Zone criminals, whatever happens to them in the last chapter of that Action Comics story we haven’t been allowed to read yet.

It consists mostly of some evil-looking aliens talking ominously about the number of Kryptonians on Earth, and the World’s Finest team teaming-up to hunt down that third Kryptonian. Oh, and some of Superman being a dad to Chris. I think Chris is a pretty terrible, Cousin Oliver-esque idea personally, but writer Kurt Busiek makes it work as well as it possibly can, and it was actually quite cute to see Robin being all big brother look to the little super-moppet. Just as it was cute to see Superman and Batman in Best Friends mode, working on a little science project involving a red sunlight projector and Pig-Iron kids' watch together.





Wonder Girl #2 (DC) Okay, here’s the thing about this miniseries—it’s not really a story about anything other than its own backstory. Last issue was spent getting us caught up on the events of that stupid Amazons Attack mess and Wonder Girl’s convoluted past. This issue is all about getting us caught up to speed to on that stupid Amazons Attack story, letting us know what’s up with Diana and Donna not being there for Wonder Girl, telling us Hercules’ history right up until last week’s Wonder Woman Annual, and kinda sorta starting to get on with a story of it’s own, when who should appear but the Female fucking Furies, bringing with them more AA and Countdown baggage. It’s terribly frustrating, because J. Torres may have a good story to tell (I did enjoy Hercules’ attempts to convince Wonder Girl that they’re siblings and should help their dad Zeus) and Sandford Greene is a great artist, whose linework and character designs my eyes straight up drink right off the page. But as much as I like the art and Torres occasional light touches (and check it out, Empress and Arrowette meeting Cassie for coffee!), it would be nice if they were serving a story, and not just one more domino that needs to fall to get the DCU from point C to D. Right now, I’m buying this book just for the linework, and while that’s great and all, $18 seems like a lot to pay for some nice linework, doesn’t it?

Attention Columbusites: This movie is relevant to your interests.

Tomorrow night the Wexner Center is screening a documentary entitled Caveman: V. T. Hamlin & Alley Oop, about the famous comic strip caveman and his colorful creator.

In addition to it's comic-centric subject matter, it's written and directed by Max Allan Collins (Road to Perdition, the Dick Tracy strip, Ms Tree, one billion mystery novels), and includes interviews with people you likely know and love, like Will Eisner, Stan Sakai, Sergio Aragones, Frank Stack, Trina Robbins and Mark Schultz.

I have a review of it up at Done Waiting, which you can check out here. It's not that great a piece of filmmaking (plus, I believe the hated font Comic Sans is used liberally throughout), but if you're into comics, it's definitely worth a looksee. Just be prepared to have that fucking song stuck in your head the rest of the night.

For showtime and admission info, click here.

Nothing but links

In lieu of the scans and jokes about Captain Marvel I had planned for today (stupid lady using the library scanner all afternoon when I grumble grumble), please enjoy some links, all numbered for your convenience...


1.) I know how crushed you guys were on Wednesday night when you clicked on over to Every Day Is Like Wednesday for the comics blogsophere’s most hastily written reviews to see what I thought of the new Omega The Unknown series, only to find my Weekly Haul Omega The Unknown-less. Diamond shorted my store, and as of Saturday had yet to get them all of the books they were supposed to have shipped them by Tuesday.

But now your wait is finally over! As I was eventually able to find a copy and review it, and you can click on over to Newsarama.com to read my review of it in today’s Best Shots column.

Just make sure you stop reading before you get to the comments section, because shit gets stupid in there, as it all too often does.

(For the record, Booster Gold is one of my favorite DC super-comics at the moment, and is among one of DC’s better written and drawn books, while my interest in Iron and the Maiden stops at the fairly amusing title, which makes me think of a funny band).

And if you need a refresher course in the original Omega The Unknown series, might I suggest this excellent post from a very handsome comics blogger: Fifteen Random Thoughst about Omega The Unknown Classic.

For more bonus Caleb content, I also reviewed the first issue of DC’s new Simon Dark series by Steve Niles and Scott Hampton.




2.) See that picture above? That is a terrible digital photograph, taken by the tiny little camera embedded in my lap top screen (which flips everything, so you’d follow the panels right to left, not left to right), of the last page of the original Omega The Unknown on the right, and the last page of the new Omega The Unknown on the left.

You can see how similar they are, with the last panel being the exact same.

Well, with one difference.

In the new version, the doctor’s dialogue is “…take the form of the Greek letter Omega?”

In the original, the doctor’s dialogue was “…take the form of the Greek letter Omega!” with the dialogue bubble growing spikey like a scream/shout bubble, rather than a plain old dialogue bubble.

Based on how these two panels alone stack up, one must conclude that the original was more exciting.

Need more evidence? In the lower right hand corner of the last panel of the new version, the word “Continued…” is lettered, and that’s the last word the comic has to offer.

In the original, beneath the last panel ran these words: “Next… Mystery, menace, and madness… James-Michael in Hell’s Kitchen--A super-being on the skids--And the chaos called--The Incredible Hulk!”

Mystery, menace, madness, chaos, and The Hulk, plus some other stuff too? Holy shit, that’s going to be awesome!



3.) Speaking of Newsarama, I’m sure you’ve already heard, but, if not…

I have no idea what it means yet, but I’m hoping it means Lou Dobbs will be joining the Best Shots review team…



4.) Go read Dick Hyacinth’s thoughts on the change. They’re smart.



5.) Tom Spurgeon has a fantastic review of JLoA #13 up. It doesn’t reach quite the heights of brilliant hilarity that his Flash #13 review did (Hey, what’s with Spurgeon and the #13 issues of DC super-comics?), but it’s good stuff. I particularly liked it because his opinion mirrored my own (and that of many others), but he conveyed it with the sort of remove I can never muster, being so close to the characters and their world. Since I tend to think of the DCU as a real place (because I’m mentally ill, I guess), when I see the Injustice League, I immediately start thinking, “Huh, that’s weird these guys just did this last year, and are going to do it again next week at the wedding we already saw…” whereas Spurgeon notices things like the fact that they’re name betrays an inherent ridiculous and the fact that seeing them after a 30 year absence from seeing all of DC’s big villains aligned isn’t the least bit exciting to him.

I wonder why DC sends Spurgeon things like Countdown, Flash #13 and this issue of JLoA. I’m sure there are books at DC that are much, much, much, much (much, much, much) more likely to get a positive review from Spurgeon (the just-concluded Batman arc, All-Star Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder, maybe the Eric Powell issues of Action, et cetera).



6.) I don’t know why I continue to be so fascinated by a comic book I quit reading months ago, but I am. CBR rumormonger Rich Johnston kinda sorta reports on something related to Countdown that is potentially interesting. His column is here, but the here’s the relevant portion:



I understand that there are a number of DC creators who have worked on the "Countdown" series who are expressing deep misgivings about their future workload.

LITG previously reported that Mike Carlin was intending to "heavyweight up" the series, bringing in big name creators in light of sliding sales, and now certain existing talent on the series has found themselves not knowing what their next job will be, if it's there at all.

Except they don't know that that's what's going on.

They do now.



I understand why Johnston constructed that the way he did, to give maximum punch to his big reveal. (I think it’s a big reveal; but the stop light picture next to it is blinking “caution” not “go,” so that means it’s something that’s probably true but not definitely true, right?)

But I really wish he would have constructed it more clearly, because I’m not quite sure what he’s saying. Is it that creators working on Countdown are going to get booted from the title? Or that they won’t be getting any future work?

Because if DC’s going to punish anyone for creating such a shitty comic book, it’s probably going to be the writers. And since Paul Dini’s plotting, he seems to be the one in need of the ass-kicking, but I can’t see why he’d get one, as his name remains big and profitable, no matter how bad Countdown is.

Sean McKeever has two ongoing titles, Birds of Prey and Teen Titans. The former sells poorly enough that I could see it being cancelled at some point (particularly since the title’s become lost without its co-star in it), but Titans? I can’t see DC yanking McKeever off it so soon after putting him on it. It’s not like his first issues were as godawful as Adam Beechen’s.

“Graymiotti” also have an ongoing, Jonah Hex, which constantly hovers around cancellation, plus they should have at least seven more months of work on Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters.

Tony Bedard’s only ongoing is Batman and the Outsiders, but since it’s Batman, that’s gotta be a pretty safe gig, right? I always feel a little bad for Bedard, since he’s the guy DC seems to call to write bridge stories between other people’s stories. I can’t decide if that’s a great compliment to his skills (“Let’s call Bedard! He can do anything! If anyone can straighten out these disparate stories by Judd Winick, Brad Meltzer and Gail Simone it’s him!”) or an insult (“Oh man, we need to kill three months in Supergirl why we get the contracts signed, who do we call?”).

Adam Beechen’s only got a limited going right now, Countdown To Adventures. And he’s also an awful, awful, awful writer (At least from what I’ve read of his—Titans, five issues of Robin, two of his Countdown issues and much of his JLU stuff.)

But then, he’s only one creator, and Johnston’s piece said “a number of DC creators” (yeah, yeah, smart ass, one is “a number”).

Whatever the case, it seems awfully unfair to blame Beechen or any of the others for how bad Countdown is. I’ve seen good stories from all six of the writers who get credit for the series elsewhere, and the biggest problems in Countdown come from the plot points the writers who aren’t Dini have to deal with. I mean, there’s no way you can make a Mary Marvel Gets Black Adam’s Suddenly All Different Superpowers and Becomes a Totally Evil Slut story make sense.

As someone who had his brain assaulted by a half-dozen issues of the series, I sure would like to see someone get punished for how bad it is, but it seems to me that the greatest problems with the series like with editors Mike Marts, Mike Carlin, and whoever it was who sat down with Dini and concocted this dumb-ass plot in the first place.

Of course, Johnston could have been talking about the artists, whom, yeah, are doing a terrible, terrible job. Thing is, they are all pretty great artists, who have done good work elsewhere. Have they been given enough lead time? Have they been given model sheets so they know what the characters look like? Is anyone editing the art? While the art on Countdown has been universally bad—event the covers have been, on the whole, rather terrible—I hope DC doesn't think that's why people don't like Countdown as much as DC wants them to. The very same readers put up with often times subpar art work on 52, but because everything else worked so well, we just forgave it as a symptom of too little lead time (Having revisited some triangle era Superman comics though, I'm less inclined to forgive 52's sub-par art then I was at the time.

You can get the Kuberts (who don't seem to be doing much of anything) or Jim Lee to pencil a few issues, you can get Alex Ross to paint the covers, but that's not going to solve the inherent problems in the series, it's just going to help sales a little. Oh, wait...

Dream Trades: The Complete Hitman

Garth Ennis and John McCrea's two-issue JLA/Hitman miniseries wrapped up last Wednesday, having served as both a welcome visitation to the characters from the old Hitman series, and a sort of belated epilogue to it.

The miniseries was, by just about any standards, a pretty good comic, but I do wonder why exactly DC published it. I mean, publishing pretty good comics doesn't exactly seem like their regular MO these days, does it?

It could be that it was a sort of test balloon for embarking on a trade program of the series, something Comic Book Resources’ rumormonger Rich Johnston has been pushing for.

I don't know how Hitman sold back in the late ‘90s, when it was still being published monthly, but from interviews at the time, I got the impression that it was a borderline title, not selling all that great, yet not selling poorly enough to be canceled. Rather, DC kinda suggested that maybe it could be canceled at some point in the near future, and afforded Ennis and McCrea time to wrap it up to their liking.*

When they did collect it into trade, they stopped at Who Dares Wins, about halfway through the series (the point where Tommy essentially has a mid-series crisis, and things start looking increasingly bad for our heroes). According to dccomics.com, only the last two of the five trades they did are still in print.

Considering that it's the work of Garth Ennis, whose name alone is enough to sell comics these days, I've always found it odd that the series wasn't a bigger hit, and a perennial seller in the backlist—a "from the creator of Preacher" likely should help sell some books, no?

Now that Ennis' name has been built into brand of its own, thanks in part to his adding a long run on the Punisher to his Vertigo credits, perhaps that’s changed.

And if you can get an Ennis fan, any Ennis fan, to crack open just one cover, I would think that a collection of Hitman collections would do quite well in trade, as it has the best of all of the attributes Ennis is known for: Superhero parody, action, crime, western and war movie tributes, homages, parodies and riffs, plus great character work, almost monthly celebrations of male friendships, and lots of guns, cigarettes and beer.

Of course, if DC were to give trade collections of Hitman another try after their first, aborted attempt, I would hope the would do it right this time around.

And to help ensure that they do, this installment of extremely infrequent EDILW feature Dream Trades is dedicated to laying out a blueprint for a practically obsessive-compulsive collection of all Tommy Monaghan stories.

Here's how I think it should go down...




Hitman Vol. 1 The first Hitman trade was a tad inadequate, featuring only the first three-issues of the series, a short Batman Chronicles story, and the Demon "Bloodlines" tie-in annual which introduced Tommy Monaghan.

Well, The Demon Annual #2 is a given, as it’s the first appearance and origin of Tommy Monaghan, a Gotham City hitman who gains superpowers after an attack by the “Bloodlines” aliens (Unimaginatively known in the DCU as “The Parasites”).

Monaghan had two other Demon story arcs, which should definitely be included. “Hell’s Hitman” ran through The Demon #42-#45, and it guest-starred Tommy Monaghan and Bat-villains Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The story revolved around a battle between Etrigan and Asteroth, and climaxed with the raising of the Gothodaemon, Gotham City’s own patron demon. I think this storyline is also the first appearance of GCPD officer Tiegel, who would become Tommy’s love interest in Hitman.

Monaghan also appeared in “Suffer the Children,” which ran from #52-#54, but I’ve never been able to track those singles down.

Both storylines would be good candidates for collection in a new version of Hitman Vol. 1, unless DC is planning on collecting Ennis and McCrea’s Demon run at some point (which they really should—it’s only 19 issues, and features a couple of Hitman stories and a three-part Haunted Tank story, introducing us to a legacy version of the tank’s commander, whom I don’t think anyone, even Ennis, has used since).

Following all the Demon appearances, but just prior to Hitman #1, Monaghan would appear in a short story in the “Contagion” crossover issue of The Batman Chronicles. Thanks to his mind-reading abilities and X-Ray vision, Monaghan’s able to get the jump on Batman, diss his Darth Vader vibe and, with some Bugs Bunny logic, trick the other one-third of their Mexican stand off into training his gun on Batman.

Monaghan escapes, and Batman follows him into the first three issues of Hitman. It’s a pretty good arc, about someone hiring Monaghan to take out the Joker, and Batman doing his level best to save his mortal enemy, an unrepentant mass-murderer. A lot of great moments, and sly observations about the DCU, although I was always a little disappointed that neither the Joker nor Batman ever fulfilled their promises of vengeance on Tommy. But I guess Ennis was just doing what he had to to launch a new DC series—start with a Batman appearance.

This first story amounts to the bait portion of a bait and switch, as the set-up for the series Monagahan gives us—that he’s a super-powered Hitman who only takes cases involving evil metahumans that normal hitmen couldn’t take—recedes to the background almost immediately (The fact that he even has superpowers is often unclear, based on how infrequently he uses them as the series progressing, occasionally vaguely complaining of them causing him headaches).




Hitman Vol. 2: Ten Thousand Bullets The next story arc is the four-part “Ten Thousand Bullets,” which I personally found to be the weakest of the lot, and I actually considered dropping the title with #4. Some big things happen to the supporting cast here, though, setting the tone for the rest of the series—in the world of Hitman, anyone could die at any moment.

It was followed by a one-issue tie-in to 1996’s big DC crossover, Final Night. I actually liked that one quite a bit. The idea was simply that the sun was going out, it was really the end of the world this time, and there wasn’t much chance of anyone saving the day. Obviously someone did, but a lot of the tie-ins just dealt with the heroes spending their last day with loved ones and so forth. In Hitman, Tommy and the boys at Noonan’s sealed themselves in the bar and told one another stories until the super-guys fixed the sun. This was the issue in which his social circle of killers—retiree-turne-barkeep Sean, best friend and unofficial sidekick Nat the Hat, Chow Yun Fat analogue Ringo, and big dumb guy Hacken—really started becoming sharply defined.





Hitman Vol. 3: Local Hero Next up was a four-issue arc called “Local Hero,” in which Tommy was forced to deal with some left-over Bloodlines crap courtesy of some shady CIA types, and has a very memorable team-up with poor Green Lantern Kyle Rayner, who takes a lot of shit from not only Tommy, but also Tiegel. I love that cover of GL reacting to the bill. I could seriously look at that thing all day.

That was followed by perhaps the two greatest issues of the series, “Zombie Night at the Gotham Aquarium.” It’s just what it sounds like. A mad scientist tests his zombie gas out on the fish and animals at the Gotham Aquariaum, and Tommy and the boys must fight their way through zombie seals, penguins, octopuses, dolphins and at least one great white shark.

It’s pretty much the greatest thing ever.






Hitman Vol. 4: The Ace of Killers Next up was a somewhat sprawling six-part story arc entitled “The Ace of Killers,” which brough guest-star Catwoman (rocking the Jim Balent suit) and Jason Blood and Etrigan into the mix, as The Mawzir, a six-armed monster made out of dead Nazis, seeks to procure the titular rifle, the only gun capable of killing demons. Featuring the debut of the Cat-Signal, and local drunk Sixpack’s very own super-team, Section Eight, which included such sensational character finds as The Defenestrator (who carries a window with him to throw people through) and Dogwelder (who, um, welds dogs to people).

“Ace” is followed by two done-in ones, which would round out a trade quite nicely. There’s the “Big Head” issue of Hitman (from a theme month at DC where every cover featured a close-up of the protagonists face, and a good-jumping-on-point story). It was one of the more charming issues, in which Tommy and Tiegel make it official (and Ennis still finds time for a Mexican stand-off gag that ends in wholesale slaughter). Steve Pugh handles the art, giving McCrea one of the few breaks he takes on the series.

Then there’s a one-issue Christmas story in which Tommy and Nat hunt down a radioactive guy in a Santa suit. I actually hate that issue; probably the weakest of the series.





Hitman Vol. 5: Who Dares Wins This five-issue arc sends SAS agents after Tommy and Nat, to wreak British vengeance on them for a friendly fire incident during the gulf war. I think this is the first Ennis story about Britain’s super-soldiers, which he’d follow with plenty more (see all of the WildStorm Kev stories, for example). Given that the first story established anybody can die at any time, this is a pretty dramatic story, in which our badly out-classed heroes flail against a superior force. (There’s also a scene in a restaurant where a morbidly obese man is pushed over and used as a bullet shield). This is where the last round of trades quit.

Hitman #28 is a nice one-issue epilogue to “Who Dares Wins,” in which Monaghan regrets his life of violence, and begins casting about for something good to do. And he finds it in the very next story arc…





Hitman Vol. 6: Tommy’s Heroes This five-issue storyline, interrupted by the #1,000,000 issue, finds Tommy leading Nat, Ringo and Hacken into Africa as mercenaries in a crappy little war there, one which involves evil superheroes. Ennis gets to indulge in his love of war comics and movies without having to leave the comfort of his regular monthly, and McCrea gets to draw our heroes in different outfits, and the color palette changes quite dramatically. One of the few times the boys get out of Gotham City.





Hitman Vol. 7: For Tomorrow From there, things get weird, and it becomes clear Ennis is starting to wrap things up. “Tommy’s Heroes” is followed by one-issue “Of Thee I Sing,” the Eisner-winning Superman issue And the best Superman story I’ve ever read. Believe it!), a dark, dark, dark two-issue story in which Tommy learns of his real father and mother and returns to Ireland to face a past he never knew he had, and another two-issue arc about vampires seeking to invade “No Man’s Land”-Era Gotham, with the Cauldron as their beachhead.

And that brings us to the first Hitman story I cried (Manly, manly tears) during, four-part For Tomorrow, in which the long-foreshadowed conflict between Tommy and Ringo finally arises.





Hitman Vol. 8: The Old Dog A one-issue epilogue is followed by another of my favorites, a three-issue storyline in which Tommy and Nat go back in time, and a pack of Tyrannosaurs led by “Scarback” come to the Cauldron and quickly develop a taste for human flesh. Tackling the dinosaurs, McCrea proves he really can draw anything he’s asked to, and Ennis riffs on the old Judge Dredd strips about the Tyrannosaurus whose name I forget, narrating the stories from the dinosaur’s perspective.

And then Sean gets his spotlight arc, “The Old Dog” and we get flash backs to his youth, allowing Ennis to work a war comic into the middle of this story about two old, retired killers facing each other one last time.





Hitman Vol. 9: Closing Time After the two-issue Sixpack spotlight arc “Super Guy,” we plunge into the eight-issue finale, “Closing Time.” Ennis does an incredible job of bringing things to a close here, dusting off surviving characters from throughout the run, some of which we haven’t seen for years, in a tale that deals with the Bloodline crap that spawned Tommy, and gives him the chance to do that something good, and, if he’s lucky, die in exactly the way he’s always wanted.

I admit it: I bawled.





Hitman Vol. 10: That Stupid Bastard and Other Stories Well, since most of the cast is dead as of the last volume, you would think that would be a good place to stop the trade collections. But it wouldn’t be. After all, JLA/Hitman was really an epilogue for the series—set years after, and flashing back to when Tommy was still alive, before revealing Superman’s personal memorial to and feelings toward the dead Tommy. Surely that needs traded, and it should be somewhere after Closing Time. Hence, a post-Closing Time trade.

To fill out the rest of the trade, DC could stick in the various Hitman crossovers and specials that have nowhere else to go.

For example, this would be where you’d want to put Hitman/Lobo: That Stupid Bastich! #1. This 2000 one-shot was reportedly something Ennis wrote under duress, having no real affection for or interest in the character of Lobo. And oh boy, does it show. Essentially 38 pages of making fun of Lobo, the story has the unstoppable bounty hunter from outer space stopping in Noonan’s to drink a few pitchers of beer after completing a contract on Earth.

“I hated him on sight an’ I wasn’t eve lookin’at him,” Monaghan narrates the first panel. “He dressed like an idiot, talked like a moron, an’ smelled like he wore his bowels outside his body.” Artist Doug Mahnke helpfully draws some cartoon flies orbiting Lobo’s head, just in case it’s not clear that the character stinks.

So Lobo’s spouting catchphrases, all “Main Man” this and “Frag” that, until he notices there’s a cape in the joint:


(I love this panel, and that sentence gets funnier the longer I think about it, with each Leaguer having their own dubious sphere of influence. I can just see Oracle staring at a bank of monitors, and calling things in along the lines Sixpack established: "Batman, we have a rabid raccoon in Chicago that needs your attention! Wonder Woman, there's a bank robbery in process in Chicago—and the culprit's a she! Green Lantern, hostile aliens have just touched down in L.A., and they have green skin, so they’re all yours!")

When he starts picking on ‘Pack, Tommy pours a bottle of cheap whiskey all over himself, shoots out Lobo’s eyes, and takes off running. That’s page 7. The next 31 consist of Lobo, tracking Tommy by scent while waiting for his eyes to grow back, chasing him spouting increasingly ridiculous phrases based around the syllable “frag.” (“Gonna give ya a taste o’ Lobo’s frag a l’orange—served with a side dish o’ frag!” or “Ground control ta Major Frag!”).

Drawing inspiration from Luney Tunes once again, it’s essentially one big, long chase scene, with lots of mafia gangsters getting in the way. Now, given that Lobo is in Superman’s weight class, how does Tommy take the Main Man down? With a little help from Section Eight, a wedding dress, a video camera, and a promise not to tell if he just goes away. Mahnke handles the art, and his experience as a great superhero artist and a great comedy artist made this a perfect project for him. His Lobo is a mountain of a man, towering over everybody and everything, and Mahnke is quite creative as well as detailed in his gore.

This issue is actually a lot like JLA/Hitman in the way it blends the world of Hitman with a DCU regular, and flashes back to do it (The first panel contains an editorial box saying, “Clearly, this story takes place before most of the cast was slaughtered.”)


This hypothetical volume would also be a good place for Hitman Annual #1, which featured Ennis riffing on westerns in a story entitled “A Coffin Full of Dollars.” This was part of DC’s “Pulp Heroes” annual event, which is the best kind of DC annual event—one that’s thematic instead of part of an interlocking crossover.

The idea was basically to put the various DC heroes in genre stories of the sort the old pulps might have featured, although the main distinguishing detail was the cover dress and the fact that each of 1997’s annuals had a painted cover.

Hitman got “Weird Western Tales,” and we got an extra-length story about Tommy heading west to kill some guys for money, as drawn by Steve Pugh and Carlos Ezsquerra.

This might also be a good place to put Hitman #1,000, 000, which featured Tommy traveling to the 853rd century, meeting the heir to the Gunfire legacy, and discovering the ways in which the future is better than the present (mostly pertaining to vomiting).

There’s also supposedly a Sixpack/Superman short story from a Superman special somewhere, but I’ve never been able to find it.

As for non-Ennis Hitman appearances, there’s only one that I think would be worth collecting, and a sort of grab-bag trade like this would be the place to do it, if DC wanted to bother with the non-Ennis stuff.


That would be Resurrection Man #9-#10, by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning and Jackson Guice, which featured DC’s two trenchcoat-wearing, costume-less super-heroes of the time crossing paths. In addition to some great art, Abnett and Lanning write Tommy and Nat just right, and have a great scene in which the pair exploit Mitch “Resurrection Man” Shelley’s peculiar power—every time he dies, he comes back to life with a different super power.

There are a handful of other appearances of Tommy outside his own title, but the Resurrection Man ones are really the best of the lot.

Grant Morrison wrote a fun few panels of Tommy trying out for the Justice League in JLA #5, but Martian Manhunter was unimpressed with his sales pitch (“I kill people for money”) and his smoking. Not bad, but certainly not enough to justify reprinting that whole issue in a trade.



The Denny O’Neil written Azrael #35 features a team-up between the one-time Batman stand-in and Tommy, but it’s pretty inessential, and doesn’t actually read like a Hitman story at all. It could have been anyone in the green trench coat trying to slot the merman gang boss (Although, may I say—Merman gang boss? Not bad, O’Neil).



Finally, there was Sovereign Seven #26, part of the short-lived and now mostly forgotten Chris Claremont DC series of the late ‘90s. I actually just reread it, since I had trouble remembering anything about it, and it’s about as painful to read as any Claremont DC book, particularly the parts where Claremont tries to capture the voice of an Ennis character.

Tommy only has a few pages, as he’s spying on the S7, and when he catches a few of their names, Rampart and Crusier**, he thinks, “Love the names.” Which would be funnier if it weren’t the same guy who came up with the dumb ass names in the first place writing the line.

The only things I liked about the issue were that his coat was mistakenly colored black instead of green (which is obviously a much cooler color), and there’s a pretty cool panel in which Tommy shoots a dude in the back of the head, the bullet exits through the dude’s eye, hits Power Girl in the eye, and bounces off.

And just to be super-anal, Hitman also had a panel or two in Bloodbath #2, a book I rather enjoyed at the time but is completely negligible for it's Hitman content, and one of those Secret Files & Origins specials dedicated to the leftovers of the DCU, cramming all of the less-popular characters (Tommy, J'onn J'onnz, Wild Cat, etc.) all into one story featuring Chase.

But I’d hate to close on that note, so let’s take one last look at That Stupid Bastich!:


Yes, who did weld a dog to Lobo's butt?

Garth Ennis, John McCrea, and a handful of great artists, that's who. Just as they've welded Hitman to our hearts.








*This wrapping-up went a long way toward making Hitman one of the best big-company comics of the decade, as few super-comics get the opportunity to tell a complete story. It's just the nature of the beast, to squeeze every available dollar out of every property. When you think about DC's best ongoings, however, it's likely no coincidence that several of them had proper endings, happy or otherwise (Hitman, Starman, The Sandman).



**Cruiser?! Seriously? Man, if you’re not a giant alien robot that turns into a car, or an out and proud gay superhero with a sense of humor, you really have no business using that name. However, it does kind of fit in with the rest of the team, all of whom sound like X-Men rejects: Indigo, Reflex, Finale and Cascade. Does anyone know if the Sovereign Seven every appeared again after their series ended? This is the only issue I read, and it sucked pretty bad, but it did have Claremont and Ron Lim, plus Power Girl. I always liked the logo, anyway.