Quarter Bin #39 "Untold Tales of the Past"

HITMAN #8 (DC)

From November 1996:

I’m got a bad relationship with Garth Ennis.  The last time I read him was in the earliest issues of THE BOYS, which I wrote a reaction about at Paperback Reader, inspiring an angry reaction from fans of artist Darrick Robertson.  Hey, it was the biggest reaction I ever got from writing about comics.  (I suggested that his popular style didn’t allow for a very good depiction of a dog’s face.  His fans didn’t like that.)  Ennis is someone who doesn’t like superheroes, to the extent that he doesn’t understand them, and he has increasingly chosen to represent this in his stories, especially in THE BOYS (this is not an endorsement).  He’s best known for PREACHER, but his work on HITMAN also produced a cult following.  Tommy Monaghan is another product of the 1993 Bloodlines annuals, and is probably the most successful creation to come from it, but because he’s a Garth Ennis character, he’s become nonexistent since Ennis packed his backs and moved on to other projects.  (He gained X-ray vision in the event, but only uses it to ogle women.)  The reason I’m talking about HITMAN now is because I came across a glowing endorsement of the series last week, and so decided to finally take a look, and decided that the FINAL NIGHT tie-in issues that was referenced had to be the safest bet.  I was and remain a huge fan of THE FINAL NIGHT.  In this issue, Ennis seems fairly subdued, possibly because he writes himself out of any superhero connections, and instead focuses on his own characters and their own lives, violent enough for any Vertigo book (not out of place, for instance, in a typical SCALPED scenario).  In fact, I get the impression that HITMAN would have made a very good and very typical Vertigo book today.  Maybe that’s why people are still talking about it.

HISTORY OF THE DC UNIVERSE, BOOK 1 & 2 (DC)

From 1986:

Marv Wolfman and George Perez made their own history with CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, and this was one of the many things that resulted from it.  Wolfman chronicles DC history as it was known at that time, a fictional piece of nonfiction that is still fascinating today, even if some things are changed or no longer relevant.  The tour encompasses some actual world history that is in itself interesting to see contextualized: how long, for instance, it was between the classic Egyptian dynasties and the world of Greek legends.  I learned new things about what the Guardians were up to as well, in the distant past, which is really odd, because for a lot of writers, that has been fertile territory for years, at least in reference, just like the origin of Jack Kirby’s Fourth World, but even that sounds different in this telling.  It was interesting to see Booster Gold referenced, because not only does he sport a cape (which I’d never seen on his costume before), but because this was the very year he debuted.  Yes, now this whole thing is an artifact, to a time when it was relevant, for one thing, and when creators were still working on this particular narrative of DC, which soon enough transitioned into event book and stories as a matter of course, and then things really loosened, and then Geoff Johns wrote a sequel to CRISIS, which created a different kind of narrative momentum, and now we’ve got the New 52 starting things anew.  This is exactly the kind of discovery that makes it worth spending time pouring through back issue bins, which is what I was doing when I stumbled across HISTORY.