Quarter Bin #23 "Icons - This could be your moment"

DC 1ST – SUPERMAN/THE FLASH (DC)
From July 2002:

One of the things DC has periodically done is release a series of one-shots around a common theme (most recently with RETROACTIVE), perhaps most famously during “skip” week in the 1990s, and that’s the kind of thing that was most likely to escape my attention during the first time I retired from actively reading new comics, roughly 1999-2004. Ruffling through the back issues at Escape Velocity in Colorado Springs last year, I had occasion, then, to find a lot of things I had not previously known about, including the DC 1ST initiative from 2002. This particular issue caught my eye since it’s written by Geoff Johns. At the time, I had little experience with Geoff’s early work at DC (even though by that point, he’d been writing there for three years), having only really gotten a chance at the end of “Blitz” from THE FLASH in 2004, well after I’d read a lot about him secondhand. The Flash featured in this comic isn’t Wally West (or Barry Allen) but Jay Garrick, the franchise forerunner from the Golden Age, perhaps the character with the most sustained significance from the Justice Society era, mostly thanks to Mark Waid’s efforts, and as I was just beginning to realize, Geoff Johns as well (when I read the first volume of the Omnibus series that’s collecting all of Geoff’s Flash work, second one coming soon, I got to appreciate his attention to the whole family, not just Wally or Bart, in TEEN TITANS, as it may have seemed from an outsider’s perspective). Geoff’s Jay Garrick is concerned with his advancing age, and the effect on his relationship with wife Joan (something that he echoed in INFINITE CRISIS as he wrote Superman from Earth-2 and his aging Lois Lane), but he remains a vital figure, since he is only just racing Superman for the first time, in the present day. I’m not sure what other creators did in the rest of the one-shots, but it might have been natural to interpret the “first” as an actual first encounter, which would have been seen as Superman and Barry Allen’s Flash, whose races began the tradition, but instead Geoff, who was not quite in the middle of his Wally West tenure, chose to go with Jay, perhaps an indication for any current readers who may believe DC’s creators don’t have an appreciation for the past, thanks to the latest reboot. Geoff has, in fact, often been accused of adhering too closely to Silver Age sensibilities, but it’s rather his ability to blend those of every era, the distant, recent and present times that has allowed him to remain a relevant and vital creator.

JUDGMENT DAY AFTERMATH (Awesome)
From March 1998:

Alan Moore, Alan Moore…I’ll be writing a lot about him in the coming months, so I shouldn’t spend too much time here. What specifically he has to do with this book is that he became a key writer in Rob Liefeld’s Awesome comics line, a version of his Maximum and Extreme Studios, outbranched from Image for a couple of years, before Liefeld had to once again (as he has repeatedly done, more than any other Image founder) appease critics by crawling back to someone else’s house. Moore is best known for his work on SUPREME (and that’ll be a subject for another Quarter Bin), but he also pulled together a rare event book for an indy publisher, JUDGMENT DAY. This aftermath, however, really concerns the relaunch of the entire line, including a new Youngblood (a keystone of Liefeld’s efforts), Glory (basically Wonder Woman), New Men (basically the Challengers of the Unknown crossed with the X-Men), Maximage (basically Dr. Strange), the Allies (Justice League/Avengers), and Spacehunter. The effectiveness of introducing all these concepts is somewhat dubious now, since Moore only concentrated on Supreme, with some additional consideration given to Youngblood and the Allies, and Awesome otherwise pursued other projects (including KABOOM, which I will write about later), and so the thrust of this particular comic really boils down to Moore indulging some of his looser flights of fancy, reaching a somewhat common vein with Grant Morrison as concerns the uniting narrative about the Imagineer linking ancestral creators like Jack Kirby and Gil Kane, who provides the art throughout the special. As with many of Moore’s works, there is a heavy nostalgic feel, a resistance to current trends, though he clearly adopts their sensibilities…

PROMETHEA #27 (ABC)
From November 2003:

Alan Moore, this column, Part 2. The America’s Best Comics line was something he agreed to do for WildStorm, before it became an imprint at DC, and was basically his way of doing perfectly traditional comics outside the DC/Marvel system. Promethea herself was another Wonder Woman substitute, and is famously an early source for J.H. Williams III artwork, perhaps his most famous pre-Batwoman. In this particular issue, Promethea is reaching a climactic event in her career, a prophesied apocalypse, and as such has drawn other elements of the ABC line into her story, including Tom Strong (the Superman substitute). Moore’s writing is strikingly cinematic in this instance, would fit into any modern TV show or movie, yet there’s again the nostalgic bent that he clings to, always trending his themes (and characters) on things he loved as a child (with a few exceptions, like his Swamp Thing work, V FOR VENDETTA, and, one would hope, FROM HELL), updating them from a slightly more mature perspective. This being the only Promethea I’ve read to date, it’s extremely difficult to judge the series as a whole, and I have no idea how many more issues it survived, though I can’t imagine that there were much. The thing that really strikes the outsider perspective is that, contrary to the interior, the cover artwork recalls Superman meeting Spider-Man in the 1970s, both in the poses by our eponymous heroine and the visiting Tom Strong, as well as the modified logos for each character.

THE SPECTRE #21 (DC)
From November 2002:

Astute observers will note the host in this particular series for the Spirit of Vengeance would be Hal Jordan, post-DAY OF JUDGMENT, the lost Geoff Johns event from 1999, whose existing memory now rests in GREEN LANTERN:REBIRTH and GREEN ARROW: QUIVER, and virtually nonexistent otherwise. It’s weird to think now that Hal spent so much time outside of his role as GL, that he went from villainous Parallax (“Emerald Twilight, ZERO HOUR) to penitent villain (masterful FINAL NIGHT) to a soul looking for redemption and finally right back to where he started and for most readers, all it will boil down to at this point is that Parallax was the Fear manifestation planted inside the Central Power Battery by Sinestro, who infected him and ruined his reputation for a while. That DC kept the character in print for the entire time he wasn’t a Green Lantern never seemed to be enough for his fans, even though it was a truly remarkable decision on the company’s part, completely unparalleled in the medium. That he was once the Spectre ought to remain a part of his legacy. Clearly his creators in this series believed they were continuing the narrative of his life: J.M. DeMatteis resurrects Sinestro (so this issue is actually pretty historic) for the first time, a painful process that speaks to the heart of both Sinestro and Hal, their rivalry, something that did not actually remain dormant from the Silver Age to REBIRTH, as it might sometimes seem. If anyone other than Geoff Johns ever wanted to explore that relationship in depth (including the mortal struggle in GREEN LANTERN #50, second series), DeMatteis would get my vote.

THE PRISONER: BOOK A (DC)
From 1988:

Dean Motter is one of those visionary creators who only periodically seems to receive the respect he’s due, sometimes known for MISTER X, for instance, when critics and companies are in the mood. If anyone could have produced a sequel to the classic 1960s surreal, metaphysical, existential TV series THE PRISONER, it’s Motter, and so of course he did that, too, even though it’s been allowed to be forgotten. (Then again, when THE SIMPSONS did a parody of the show, no one seemed to understand that, either.) THE PRISONER was recently brought back to mind by a TV remake and comparisons to LOST, which would make now a perfect time to reprint this sequel. Until such time, however, I will have to content myself with its introduction, and hope I’ll be able to read the rest of it at some undefined point in the future…

ACTION PHILOSOPHERS! #7 (Evil Twin)
From October 2006:

Fred Van Lente is better known for his superhero work, but his fans know him best as the writer for this series, which revisits historic philosophers in clever summaries of relevant thoughts and experiences. This particular issue revisits early Greek thinkers including Aristotle and the Pre-Socratics. Some readers have taken to criticizing the series by saying it trivializes and distorts its subject matter (something Van Lente gets to handle a bit of in this issue’s letters column), but seriously, if you expect any one interpretation of someone else’s thoughts or experiences to be authoritative, then that’s your bigger problem, and so I say, ACTION PHILOSOPHERS is easily one of my favorite comic book discoveries. This wasn’t my first issue (I’d love to read ’em all, since Van Lente presents a lively and concise perspective), and I am more familiar with his COMIC BOOK COMICS (covering comics history) efforts, not to mention dynamite Hercules stories with Greg Pak, but it’s a fine indication that I have more than sufficient material to claim Fred as one of my favorite creators.