Reading Comics #112 "Free Comic Book Day, Part 1"

My experience of Free Comic Book Day technically takes three faces.  The first was Free Comic Book Day itself, which is the subject of this post.  Then there was yesterday's hangover, and also downloads from comiXology.  Now, I haven't read the downloads yet, and I'm not sure when that'll happen.  Hopefully soonish.  That leaves the two batches of physical comics I have read, and they were fruitful indeed, which is half the reason why I'm separating the two days in two posts.

The first day was a little delayed.  I worked a morning to early evening shift.  Usually I love to be one of the customers lining up before the store opens on FCBD.  That just wasn't going to happen.  So I hustled to Muse Comics in Colorado Springs after I got off and looked around excitedly  for the freebies.  Muse had two tables set up (usually where their gaming tables are set up, because even twenty years later it's still sound business for a comic book shop to double as a gaming emporium), one for kids and one for adults.

Now, I've already said that this was significantly late in the day.  Obviously I can't say how many of the actual titles Muse originally had, but by the point they had something like two left.  One was on the kids table, the other on the adults, and it was Image's Walking Dead contribution (more on that in Part 2).  But the thing that Muse did that was really cool was to compensate the stragglers like me by placing some older back issues for free consumption.  Most of them were exactly what you'd expect from typical back issue bargain fodder, but the dedicated (and knowledgeable) sifters were in for some even bigger surprise treats.  Maybe this is how it was for earlier patrons (and maybe why they ran out of the intended comics so quickly; in my experience at Escape Velocity it was always three), but we could choose up to five, and I ended up having to make some surprisingly painful choices.  I gave up a vintage Ambush Bug, folks.  Ambush Bug!  Yet I think I made some good choices.  Without further adieu, here's my haul from this unexpected version of FCBD:

1602 #8 (Marvel)
from June 2004:

(And yes, the format of this post will look very familiar to those readers who have read the Quarter Bin columns here at Comics Reader.)  Simply put, I was amazed that this was among the offerings.  It was the chief reason why I thought there must be some mistake, that they couldn't just be giving those comics away.  This, along with Eternals (based on a Jack Kirby concept very similar to his New Gods over at DC), is one of Neil Gaiman's very few stories for Marvel.  It's all the familiar characters set in colonial times, and it's the end of the mini-series.  I've never read the complete let alone any of 1602, but I've long been aware of it.  The interesting thing to my mind is that Steve Rogers (a.k.a. Captain America) is the lone character to be represented by his actual self, having traveled through time and become basically an adopted Native American, very similarly to what Grant Morrison later did in The Return of Bruce Wayne.  Rogers is already famous for two different eras, which is one of the things the recent Avengers movies has depicted very well.  The rest of the characters are all clever extrapolations of their familiar selves, though Matthew Murdock (a.k.a. Daredevil) perhaps has one of the more interesting variations (a lot more assertive, certainly).  Nick Fury is a central character in this issue.  Peter Parker (I'm using all their familiar names but they have contemporary versions in the story; this one is also known as Spider-Man, obviously) is a boy.  The X-Men are still in factional disputes.  The science geeks still speak in general science geeks terms as if they're exactly the same level of advanced awareness then as they are now.  It's interesting that in both instances with his Marvel material, Gaiman works far more diligently with established lore than he does at DC (see: Sandman, a master class of iconoclast literature).

All Star Superman #12 (DC)
from October 2008:

In the collection I no longer have, I had the complete All Star Superman.  This is the final issue of the maxi-series.  In it Lex Luthor has availed himself of the same temporary duplication of Superman's powers that Lois Lane enjoyed earlier (a somewhat different experience than she had in Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman).  He thinks he's finally gotten everything he wanted.  He thinks he's finally triumphed over Superman.  Now, the whole point of the story Grant Morrison tells in this series was to see what Superman would do if he thought he was about to die.  He essentially becomes an even more mythical version of himself.  There are clear echoes in the later Action Comics stories, though in those Morrison tries his hardest to remained subdued (doesn't really work too well, admittedly).  Here he makes the point that Luthor again fails to achieve his stated goal of being mankind real savior "if given the chance," again proving what really sets these adversaries apart.  At the end of the issue Superman should theoretically be dead, because that was the whole point of the story, but as with "Doomsday" and "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" (the Alan Moore story that closed out the era before the John Byrne reboot in Man of Steel) DC again proves incredibly reluctant to kill off Superman.  It's just something writers can't find themselves willing to do.  The interesting thing is that Morrison fans link this whole story with his earlier DC One Million, which features a Superman who stayed inside the sun for millennia.

Hourman #17 (DC)
from August 2000:

This is a comic that technically comes from DC One Million, actually, as well as 1999's revival of the Justice Society of America, a team that had been dormant for years.  Morrison's JLA was the hottest thing going for a number of years, and the Society came back in JSA, clearly evoking as closely as possible a book that was all about the team's successors.  This version of the Society was heavily focused on legacy, and the Hourman of this series is a version from the future Morrison envisioned from the year DC's comics would hit their millionth issues (so that's the origin of the title).  The original Hourman famously gained his powers (for one hour at a time, hence his name) from a wonder drug (some slightly more recent comics have explored the ironies of this in the steroids era, which Marvel hasn't addressed with, ahem, Captain America).  This Hourman is a machine.  Like an even more obscure series from more or less the same time, Chronos, Hourman was a good series to more directly explore the concept of legacy than even James Robinson's Starman.  I thought it was a heck of an idea, not even just because it was derived from Morrison.  When I look for back issues, I usually tend toward ones like this, from series that most people won't really be thinking about but I'm more than eager to see how it developed after I lost track of it (remember or not, I wasn't a reader from roughly 1999 to 2004 for any kind of regular basis).  I was not disappointed with this return visit.

Relative Heroes #5 (DC)
from July 2000:

I was and am and will remain a big fan of Devin K. Grayson.  Grayson was the most appropriately named writer of Nightwing ever.  It's an assumed name, but as she once described it Devin wasn't purposely going for that kind of synergy.  She first rose to prominence in a mini-series with Nightwing (Dick Grayson) and Huntress, and then had the opportunity for an extended run on Nightwing itself.  I never did find out why she eventually went on a kind of exile, but still suspect that the ridiculous controversies that crept up in the middle of that run (and perhaps how it ended thanks in part to the developments of Infinite Crisis) were largely responsible.  She's a writer who knows how to handle high concept while remaining incredibly intimate.  That trait is on display in Relative Heroes, about a pair of shape-shifting alien siblings who end up in one of the many teenage teams that tend to crop up in comics.  (Two that are among my favorites but are in fact obscure were featured in Superboy and the Ravers and The Next.)  Reading this issue (the last before the conclusion of the mini-series) is almost like reading Young Avengers five years earlier (but without successor angst).  It makes me wish all the more than Grayson would come back to comics in some kind of regular basis.

Stronghold #1 (DDP)
from August 2005:

Grayson and Phil Hester both had a number of selections I had to choose from, which was a really good and yet really frightening prospect.  To my mind, they're both members of a club that should be among the all-stars of the comics creative community today.  For whatever reason, neither are.  Hester is better known as an artist, but he's also an extremely capable writer, and this is just another example (others that I'm personally familiar with are Golly! and The Anchor).  Stronghold might be considered a kind of cross between Hancock, Superman, and Unbreakable.  It's the story of a cult that exists to protect humanity from a god-like being who if ever exposed for what he is would provoke the apocalypse, because his archenemy is basically the Devil.  So the cult actively engages in keeping this being completely ignorant of what he truly is.  So also a little like The Truman Show.  It manipulates every aspect of his life.  We follow both this guy and the young woman who has basically just undergone the cult's own Rumspringa, the Amish rite of passage where young adults can choose to experience the outside world and decide for themselves if they will return to their previous life.  It's all pretty fascinating.  I mention Superman because if anyone, much less Hester, ever approached him like that, regardless of whether they wanted to commitment as fully to the idea as Stronghold, it could totally revolutionize the Man of Steel.  It's basically how Lex Luthor views him anyway.  So I am very happy to have discovered and read this one, too.