Quarter Bin #31 "Catching up with Waid, Fialkov, Robinson, & Morrison"

THE FLASH #150 (DC)
From July 1999:
This is the conclusion of the six-part “Chain Lightning,” one of Mark Waid’s final Wally West epics (before the “Dark Flash Saga,” which I’d never heard about beware doing a little research, and the poorly-received latter-day reprise of “The Wild Wests”). I tracked this one down because “Chain Lightning” was a story I was abruptly forced to quit when I weaned myself off comics in 1999, and I was always curious about how it ended. With art from Paul Pelletier, as it turns out. Pelletier was a favorite of mine, thanks in no small part to his work in SUPERBOY AND THE RAVERS, so it was nice to discover that he was another of the fine artists who worked with Waid on THE FLASH (there’s a laundry list). Anyway, also with a nod to CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, long before Geoff Johns wrote a sequel, during a time when fans might’ve believed that they had already heard all there was to know about that event. Wally’s predecessor and mentor, Barry Allen (and this was long before anyone suspected Barry himself would make a comeback) famously met his end in that story, and so “Chain Lightning,” which had already introduced Barry’s apparent evil twin, the original Thawne, built toward Wally finally facing that moment, with complicated results, and once again affirming that his legacy wasn’t to carry on Barry’s but to build his own. It’s certainly an interesting issue to read for any of the reasons you can gleam from these thoughts.

ELK’S RUN #1 (Hoarse & Buggy)
From 2005:
I first came upon the name Joshua Hale Fialkov when I was a part of the Digital Webbing community, and his name was already kind of legendary thanks to his work on this mini-series (I don’t know what happened to the publishing company Hoarse & Buggy, but ELK’S RUN could easily be published by Image or Vertigo today), which was his first published comics work. Today he writes I, VAMPIRE for the New 52. ELK’S RUN is something I’ve meant to read since I first heard about it, and so I’m finally making good on that personal commitment, and this issue is a fine reason to believe the rest of it is equally excellent. Fialkov remains someone I believe will make a huge impact on the comics landscape, and I’m happy to have been there at the beginning. Well, close enough.

JSA #1 (DC)
From August 1999:
James Robinson, still flush from his STARMAN success, helped launch the new adventures of the Justice Society along with David S. Goyer (and an opening push from Grant Morrison), lending Jack Knight and his gift for getting at the heart of the connectedness at the heart of a shared superhero community. The series continued, with another relaunch added in the mix, until the New 52, where it’ll soon be reborn, again under the auspices of Robinson, as EARTH 2. I thought, thanks to my recent experience reading STARMAN, that I should read at least the start of his JSA.

JLA #31 (DC)
From July 1999:
I’ve been playing catch-up with Grant Morrison’s JLA for the last several years now, finally reading the complete ONE MILLION and “World War Three,” and now the conclusion to “Crisis Times Five” (which curiously ran for four issues). As I indicated above, this is the story Morrison did to help launch the new Justice Society, which in Morrison’s hands is predictably more grandiose than written by anyone else. Mixing the imps of the 5th Dimension with Thunderbolt formally in the possession of Johnny Thunder, the League joins forces with the new Hourman as they confront Triumph, the DC equivalent of Marvel’s Sentry.

JLA CLASSIFIED #s 1-3 (DC)
From January-March 2005:
As I’ve said before, I was inexplicably avoiding Morrison during my transition back into reading comics around this time (it was SEVEN SOLDIERS OF VICTORY that convinced me back aboard), so I should have been enjoying these issues as they were released. Instead it took a few more years. One of my main hooks was experiencing Knight and Squire in some of their original modern tales, after Morrison bringing them back along with the rest of the Club of Heroes, and eventually the excellent Paul Cornell mini-series, and truth be told, although billed as an Ultramarines tale (they were a team Morrison introduced in his JLA run), the British Batman & Robin are more or less the stars of the story anyway, so that was pretty awesome to learn. There’s also clear foreshadowing for SEVEN SOLDIERS, plus the joy of reading Morrison writing the League again, which was assumed to be the hook in the first place, as well as art from Ed McGuinness. As it turns out, I was an idiot to avoid this the first time around, but the truth is, I probably appreciate it more now. By the way, nobody writes Gorilla Grodd like Grant Morrison.