Quarter Bin #38 "Band of Heroes"

SANDMAN MYSTERY THEATRE #4 (Vertigo)

From July 1993:

Matt Wagner is one of those great comic book writers who’s managed to float through the medium for years without having been locked down by DC or Marvel.  He’s perhaps best known for GRENDEL, which he’s done for Dark Horse, and MAGE, which he’s done for Image.  He actually has written for DC on a semi-regular basis, but as I said…he’s a floater.  SANDMAN MYSTERY THEATRE is one of those books Vertigo was publishing when I first started reading comics but wasn’t old or experienced enough to be interested in reading at the time.  I always thought it had to have some connection to Neil Gaiman’s SANDMAN, but then, at the time I didn’t have any experience with that one, either.  But no, MYSTERY THEATRE starred the Golden Age Sandman, Wesley Dodds, whose last major appearance was KINGDOM COME.  This is the first issue I’ve actually read of the series (late to the game, I know), and now I can appreciate it as a kind of monthly crime thriller that TV features in infinite combinations these days, sometimes in franchise variety, a period comic book that was another of the Vertigo books at that time that featured experienced DC properties in new and interesting ways.  I wonder why it’s been forgotten since then, left out of print, and not even a legacy character who’s trusted to be anything but a bit player in team books.  I think given influence I’d probably change that.  This being an early issue, I get to read letters reacting to the very start of the series, too, which is always fun.

STARMAN: THE MIST (DC)

From June 1998:

Part of the “Girlfrenzy” skip week event, this was a one-shot spinning out of James Robinson’s STARMAN.  Fans reading it today may find the references to Hal Jordan villains a little quaint, especially since BLACKEST NIGHT star Black Hand is featured as an obscure curiosity.  It should be no wonder that I purchased this issue around the same time I was reading the omnibus last year, in an effort to steal some extra STARMAN goodness without spoiling some of the rest of the story I’ll be reading once those collections are printed in paperback later this year.  It’s funny, because THE SHADE is helping to keep one of Jack Knight’s foes in the headlines, while the one featured here has kind of gone into the very obscurity that Robinson was playing with here.

BRIGHTEST DAY #24 (DC)

From June 2011:

The conclusion of Geoff Johns and Peter Tomasi’s follow-up to BLACKEST NIGHT was something I missed last year when it was first published, thanks to my semi-retirement from reading new comics, which at that time was more semi-permanent than it is today, since I only really started to try and be semi-active once FLASHPOINT began.  To me, BRIGHTEST DAY was on par with 52, certainly leagues better than the meandering TRINITY, and better focused than COUNTDOWN (though I am probably COUNTDOWN’s biggest fan, just as I remain one of 52’s biggest supporters).  With a tightly focused core of characters and a smaller slate, BRIGHTEST DAY was like the catch-all version of Johns getting to do all the characters he’d really love to work with, and will probably go down as the best Deadman story to date (which made it all the bigger a shame that Boston Brand only received the first story of an anthology title in the New 52, rather than his own series).  The biggest shame of BRIGHTEST DAY was that Johns and DC so quickly went about rebooting everything, so that there was no real momentum from what occurred in this story.  As a big-concept culmination of the previous incarnation of the DCU, however, it’ll be worth relishing for years, or simply as an excellent sequel to BLACKEST NIGHT, to which BRIGHTEST DAY is probably superior.

BABYLON 5: IN VALEN’S NAME #3 (DC)

From May 1998:

J. Michael Straczynski and the fans of BABYLON 5 are guilty of worshipping a TV series that did not actually live up to its reputation.  Like a long series of B-movies, it was a show with a grand vision that could not in execution match its ambitions.  Still, there are legions of fans out there.  Perhaps one day it can be redone as an epic trilogy of movies, and Straczynski can be present to help guide it once more.  For now, its legacy is what it is, and that can be seen in spin-offs like this comic book, too.  Valen, if you didn’t know, is the Minbari name Jeffrey Sinclair assumed after he traveled back in time to help end the war he couldn’t prevent from happening in order for the resulting Shadows conflict from ending in disaster.  Sinclair was the first lead character in the series, and was quickly replaced in the second season.  This is the story of how his reputation meant everything (except anything practical to the weekly episodes).  Straczynski has become known as someone who believes in total creative control, and BABYLON 5 was the project that helped him get that reputation, yet the irony is that a critical analysis suggests that he flew by the seat of his pants, making it up as he went along (even if he didn’t, that’s exactly what it looks like now, regardless of how well-documented the transition between the fourth and seasons is), rather than deliberately shaping the series from a pre-plotted roadmap.  It’s funny, too.  Every time a BABYLON 5 or STARGATE or BATTLESTAR GALACTICA appears and starts usurping the Star Trek audience and makes them believing they’re actually the hot new thing that’ll endure forever, they can never really launch an enduring franchise.  Maybe they all try too quickly, I don’t know, but it’s always funny to see them collapse (even X-FILES did it).  Just thought I’d mention that.  It amuses me.

SUPERMAN: METROPOLIS #11 (DC)

From February 2004:

This was a twelve-issue series that Chuck Austen did in the year before I started getting back into comics, and something I’d never heard of before stumbling across it at Heroes & Dragons.  Starring the intrepid Jimmy Olsen and featuring a strong technological theme, I kind of wonder why it’s been so thoroughly forgotten, given the extreme nature of smart phone obsession we now endure.  You’d think if DC sanctioned a twelve-issue mini-series, the company believed it enough to keep it in print.  Jimmy is a character who’s been famous for so long that he can be easy to take for granted.  Me, I’d keep him active in the paperback collections, and I’d have plenty of suggestions on how to fill them (not the least being his “I found out Superman’s secret identity!” debacle from the late 1990s), and I’d definitely have him starring in his own book.  Of all the Superman characters, he’s the most relevant to the average reader.  If DC wanted to start somewhere in picking up that slack, they can reprint this story.

SUPERMAN: THE MAN OF TOMORROW #2 (DC)

From fall 1995:

In the ’90s, it was impossible to escape Superman and Batman on the stands every week, and eventually even the skip weeks were covering in BATMAN CHRONICLES and this title, published quarterly for a handful of years.  At the time of this one’s release, Lex Luthor was just coming back from an extended period of being his own son, via a surrogate clone sporting a full head of red hair, thanks to UNDERWORLD UNLEASHED (which had not yet begun), and years away from being elected President of the United States (yes, it happened), and he was matched by the mysterious Contessa, a character I’d keep around as a permanent addition to the Superman mythos.  I’d also retain Alpha Centurion, who was still working his way into the Superman comics of the time after a false introduction during Zero Hour.  The Centurion was so rich in potential, and was years ahead of the Hollywood curve that with GLADIATOR brought back the appeal of the historical epic, yet he disappeared soon after his arrival, never to be heard from again.  He’s another character I would unquestionably revive, with probably a few modifications.  I thought I’d read most of his appearances, but I guess I wasn’t quite as religious with Superman at the time as I thought I was, since I skipped the second issue of MAN OF TOMORROW, with the Contessa and Centurion clearly on the cover.  It was another happy discovery.

JSA CLASSIFIED #30 (DC)

From November 2007:

Mr. Terrific’s early loss in the New 52 of his first ongoing series was a mercy killing.  The book was terrible, baffling in its lack of understanding of just how awesome Michael Holt really is, and how relevant he is in the modern world.  Arvid Nelson, one of my favorite writers, wrote this spotlight that has the rest of the Justice Society backing him in one of his periodic wars with Nazis (a crossover with Atomic Robo is inevitable!).  It’s still weird to think that the JSA has had so many books in recent years, but was ignored in the first wave of the New 52, and still won’t have a book with its name in the title in the second.  But then, Robin doesn’t have his own book, either, so there’s at least some consistency.  I hope DC hasn’t given up on Mr. Terrific as a character who can command his own stories.  We’ll see.