Pandemic Comics #11 “Some of the World’s Finest”

Here’s the last batch of Mile High mystery box comics:

The New Teen Titans #10
I think the ‘80s Titans has some shenanigans occurring with the title of their series, since this isn’t the beginning of the run; I suppose ordinary research would confirm, but the launch title seems to have become Tales of the Teen Titans...Anyway, Wolfman’s writing but the artist is Garcia Lopez (a great favorite among some partisans), rather than Perez (who in 1985 was no doubt deeply immersed in Crisis On Infinite Earths). This issue deals with a number of characters who sort of remained in that era, sort of pivoting around Jericho but not really being about him (Jericho was mute, so it figures, although he was used really well in the second season of Titans).

Titans #15
Not really featuring the team so much as a spotlight for Tempest (the erstwhile Aqualad), detailing his circumstances as they were circa Blackest Night.

Tomorrow Stories #2
An anthology series from Alan Moore’s America’s Best Comics. I get that there are a lot of Alan Moore partisans out there (he’s the guy who legitimized superheroes for the mainstream, after all), but I’m not really one of them, and it’s material like this that showcases what his base-level engagement in the medium is. The last tale features characters huddling in slums, braving the fallout of superhero nostalgia ruining everything. Most of what he says, thinks, and does is a product of Alan Moore’s nostalgia. He seems to honestly think only Alan Moore was capable of saying, thinking, or doing anything relevant, that he existed, in essence, in a post-superhero medium, and that it’s only misguided fans and/or creators who believe otherwise. Doctor Manhattan is the only superpowered hero in Watchmen mostly to represent ambivalence and futility in the modern world. Yay Alan Moore...

The Twilight Experiment #2
From Palmiotti & Gray.

Vigilante #2
This update of the character had a ton of potential, a superhero who talks with a psychiatrist, but Bruce Jones, at least in this issue, spends half the time taking it seriously and half as if he’s doing a parody. I was pretty invested in Jones as a creator. He took over Nightwing “One Year Later,” one of the few stories to feature interactions between Dick Grayson and Jason Todd, and before that he was writing Incredible Hulk in the vein of the TV series, something that caught on years later as Immortal Hulk, freeing the character from what Peter David had done for years, which was basically any and everything, the basic template creators at Image were riffing on in endless facsimiles. Anyway, this Vigilante, for context, is like the Daredevil who goes to confession. I like the idea of superheroes seeking outlets like that, it grounds them in ways that aren’t as forced as...the majority of Marvel’s hamfisted techniques. The psychiatrist is basically being held hostage by Vigilante, too, but you can see the potential in the scenario, how it could have led to a regular partnership. Even Batman never consulted psychiatrists, and he’s got the craziest villains in comics (except maybe Green Goblin).

Vixen: Return of the Lion #1
Seeing someone like G. Willow Wilson transition from something like Air to Ms. Marvel, I always wanted to understand how that was possible. This is another strong indication, as it turns out. Wilson’s Vixen was a member of the Meltzer-era Justice League, and at least as far as this issue is concerned, she treats her more famous teammates much as Kamala Khan does...anyone she meets in her early adventures: by geeking out. Vixen has an ethnic background, which she returns to, an African nation of some generic extraction, where the story quickly falls into the later New 52 trap of immediately introducing a villain who takes the hero by surprise (literally every first issue of a New 52 series ended this way). I really wish comic book writers (and blockbuster filmmakers) weren’t so consistently lazy about this: Hero gets defeated! Hero rallies!

World’s Finest #1-2
I was really hoping these were the only issues of the prestige format series, but of course there turned out to be three. Anyway, “World’s Finest” was the term, and title of the series, when Batman and Superman used to team up (now it’s...Superman/Batman, or the daring alternative...Batman/Superman), and this was a later tribute from comics masters Dave Gibbons and Steve Rude. For large swathes of the first issue, Gibbons allows Rude’s brilliant art do all the storytelling. Only a portion of it retells the origins, though Rude cleverly juxtaposes the bullet of the gun with the rocketing spaceship.

What’s better is that Gibbons seems to be the first and only writer to see how well Bruce Wayne could potentially clean up what ails Metropolis, and Clark Kent could do the same in Gotham. And that’s frankly astonishing, not only that someone figured that out but that no attempt has been made to even create surrogates. There’s no crusading journalist in Gotham (Vicki Vale doesn’t count, and certainly not Knox!). There’s no counterpoint to Lex Luthor. And these things really ought to exist!

This is a story set before they became the World’s Finest, and in these issues go well out of their way to avoid actively collaborating (i.e. fight together), and that’s another great feature. If I were DC this is another easy evergreen candidate. There are surprisingly few of the two together.

Young Justice: Sins of Youth - JLA Jr.
Read this recently from a back issue bargain bin, much as the kind all these mystery box comics likely came from. Thankfully I found a few really great reads in them.

Definitely worth the price of admission. Thanks again, Chuck & Mile High!

Watching the Walmart Giants 8 "February 2020"

Just when I thought I was out...Recently on Facebook there've been announcements about releases and I've been reading and contributing to the comments section.  Seems fans are finally discovering these things exist, and are happy about it.  And the giants keep finding ways to interest me, even though I'm becoming a little jaded (King/Bendis Withdrawal Syndrome).

Ah!  Before I go any further, let me just acknowledge the news that Dan DiDio, erstwhile longtime Publisher at DC, has been fired.  Apparently he was ruffling too many editorial feathers recently.  But speculation is only beginning.  It's suspected that the "G5" initiative, which hasn't even happened yet, might be responsible.  Anyway, sad to see him go. 

From Beyond the Unknown Giant #1

• New story from Dave Wielgosz and Kenneth Rocafort (!!) featuring Green Lantern Hal Jordan being given an object lesson in paying attention to Earth at the expense of his duties to Sector 2814 (to be fair, very little has been done by any writer to expand the idea of the whole sector, which if given an opportunity would probably be one of my priorities).  Love to see Rocafort doing work in these giants, a huge coup (although I'd also love for him to get a big new assignment).
• New story from Tom Sniegoski and Eric Gapstur featuring Kamandi.  Excellent story with a robot butler sort of upstaging Kamandi.  Sniegoski is another welcome presence in these giants, familiar from work relating to Jeff Smith's Bone.
• New story from Dan Jurgens featuring the Legion of Super-Heroes, in a fine spotlight.
• Reprint of DC Comics Presents #3 (from 1974!!) featuring Superman and Adam Strange (cover feature).
• Reprint of The Brave and the Bold #113 (from 1978!!) featuring Batman and the Metal Men.
• Reprint from Green Lantern Annual #3 (written by Alan Moore, from 1987!!). 

These giants are finally pushing well past 2003 (I think the previous earliest reprint point).  The collection ads have also gotten an upgrade.  Tom King is finally being put in the spotlight (the giants were slow to acknowledge even his Batman), with one page featuring Mister Miracle, Heroes in Crisis, Grayson and Omega Men (though a misprint identifies it as Batman Vol. 1: I Am Gotham), plus a Batman/Catwoman page spotlighting an 80th anniversary, plus King's Batman Vol. 6: Bride or Burglar?, Batman Vol. 7: The Wedding, and Batman/Catwoman: The Wedding Album.  There are also ads featuring the work of Jack Kirby and Darwyn Cooke, among others, plus Tomasi/Gleason's Batman & Robin.

Titans Giant #1

• New story from Phil Hester (always great to see new work from him) and Scott Koblish (and Tom Grummett), featuring the adult Titans.
• New story from Marc Guggenheim (big giants favorite at the moment) and Steve Pugh featuring Raven.
• Reprint from Teen Titans #50 (from 1977) featuring the expanded old school Titans.
• Reprint from Starfire #1.
• Reprint of Adventures of the Super Sons #1.

Quarter Bin 108 "Alan Moore's From Hell"

From Hell #7 (Kitchen Sink Press)
from April 1995

I'm not an Alan Moore fan.  I appreciate the guy's legacy, but...I'm not an Alan Moore fan.  So I haven't gone out of my way to read his work.  When I see it in a back issue bin, I'll scoop it up, which is what happened here, but I've yet to find the thing that will change that basic fact.

From Hell was adapted into one of the many movies that disappointed Moore, and that's mostly how I even knew it existed.  It's a Jack the Ripper story, which seems right up Moore's alley, so it's not at all surprising that he wrote it.

The art, if I were to pick this up on the basis of the art alone, I think anyone would agree, not factoring Alan Moore into the equation, does not sell this material. So it's good that this particular issue seems important to the overall work.

In it, Moore has his Ripper perform a gruesome murder and mutilation.  During it, his Ripper loses his grip on reality.  I have to say, it's riveting.  Then Moore explains his creative process at the end of the issue, and that's worth reading, too. 

I didn't end up changing my opinion of Moore, but it was probably the best Moore I've read since Watchmen. 

Reading Comics 203 "Fourth Trip 2017"

Grant Morrison's 18 Days #20 (Graphic India)
I love to keep tabs on it.  Would love to read the whole thing sometime.

Atomic Robo: The Temple of Od #4 (IDW) (2016)
Still an absolute pleasure to read.

Avatarex #3 (Graphic India)
This was the best issue of Grant Morrison's other Graphic India project to date.  Issues seem to be released sporadically.

Batman #20 (DC)
Best issue of Tom King's run so far, ties a lot of stuff together, including some further personal reflections he'd hadn't gotten to yet.

DK III: The Master Race #8 (DC)
Can't help but feel as if Frank Miller envisioned this as a career statement, his current role and how he remains as relevant as Batman.  Also, the Amazons are truly Amazonian basically for the first time ever.  Wonder Woman has really joined the trilogy.

The Fall and Rise of Captain Atom #4 (DC)
To say that Captain Atom has had an interesting publishing history would be an understatement.  Cary Bates returns from the past, too, to co-write a thoroughly considered story.

Green Lanterns #20 (DC)
Checking in.  Still loving it.  Still am hugely pleased that someone is finally getting Green Lantern(s) right again.

Ninjak #25 (Valiant)
Here's a character who always seems so important when I see him in other Valiant titles.  Despite the fact that Matt Kindt has been writing his solo adventures, I hadn't read them until now.  A mistake.

Providence #12 (Avatar)
The conclusion of Alan Moore's latest comics vision, an ode to Lovecraft and those obsessed with him.

WrestleMania 2017 Special (Boom!)
The recent Boom! launch of WWE comics has placed an emphasis on retelling stories originally presented in WWE programming itself.  There's a good bit of that to be found here, and it's done excellently.  Plus the New Day!

Superman #7, 20 (DC)
I had a look at an older issue because I'd heard Tomasi/Gleason were up to their old tricks of telling personal, standalone stories again.  I thought it was drawn by Gleason, too, but it turns out to have been Jorge Jimenez, who is typically excellent.  The latter issue is also the newest one, and once again features guest-stars from Tomasi/Gleason's last project, Batman and Robin.  You guessed it, Batcow and, ah who am I kidding?  Tomasi/Gleason continue to be master storytellers.

Old Man Logan #20 (Marvel)
Jeff Lemire will be taking a trip down memory line in his final issues, and this one's the setup.  A good one.

Quarter Bin 81 "Starlin's Infinity saga, Loeb's Iron Man, Moench's JLA, Hitch's JLA, Waid's Offspring, Moore's LXG"

Although this is a back issues feature that doesn't necessarily always feature comics literally found in a quarter bin, this time you can once again safely assume that.

The Infinity Entity #1 (Marvel)
From May 2016.
I love that my local shop puts damaged new releases in the discount bins.  It makes it incredibly simple to sample stuff I might have otherwise overlooked, such as Jim Starlin once again revisiting his Infinity saga.  Starlin's the guy who has been guiding this stuff from the beginning.  You have him to thank for Thanos, that guy who's kind of the big bad in the Avengers movies, and basically, the Infinity saga is Starlin's ongoing narrative of the further exploits of Thanos, and other interested parties, such as Adam Warlock.  This mini-series actually takes place between two Starlin graphic novels, Thanos: The Infinity Relativity and Thanos: The Infinity Finale, which was released this past April.  Infinity Entity focuses on Adam Warlock as he reintroduces himself following one of those untidy comic book deaths.  It's amusing, seeing him interact with the original Avengers.  These are Marvel comics I eagerly anticipate reading at some later date, the older and newer stuff.  This is, you understand, not something I usually say about Marvel comics...

Iron Man #9 (Marvel)
From July 1997.
I think so much of what Marvel was doing in the '90s came off as desperately trying to look cool (possibly because, oh, the fate of the entire company was in the air thanks to potential bankruptcy) that it ended up alienating older fans and leaving newer fans with the impression that none of this mattered, once the company shifted focus back to more familiar ground.  I rarely read Iron Man comics (I've just never been interested), but I figured I had to read this one, as it was written by Jeph Loeb, during that whole period where he was writing Marvel comics without anyone realizing it was Jeph Loeb, because being Jeph Loeb didn't matter until fans got excited about him thanks to DC work like Batman: The Long Halloween and Superman/Batman (which is ironic, because he never gets the same respect at Marvel, and yet that's where he's been for about a decade now).  This story features an old Tony Stark colleague who was actually partly responsible for the original set of Iron Man armor, and has since kind of gone off the deep end.  Naturally, the guy is totally unknown in today's lore (didn't see him in 2008's Iron Man, right?), and so he's been lost to the same comic book vagaries and/or '90s amnesia that are so easy to rely on with fans.  I didn't find it to be such a bad read.

JLA: Act of God #3 (DC)
From 2001.
Doug Moench was one of the lead Batman writers in the '90s (among other things, helping spearhead "Knightfall" and the vampire saga with Kelley Jones; he also created Bane and Black Mask, as well as Deathlok and Moon Knight over at Marvel, where he did most of his formative work).  One of his last projects with DC was a prestige format JLA mini-series, Act of God, where he imagined what it would look like if all superpowered heroes suddenly lost their superpowers.  By this finale, several of them had banded under the direction of Batman, while Superman and Wonder Woman struggle with finding new meaning in their lives.  It's not terribly hard, in retrospect, to read it as Moench's swan song statement, and so I'm glad to have read it.

Justice League of America #8 (DC)
From May 2016.
Bryan Hitch's Rao saga continues in this issue, and I suspect the next one finally explains why all those dead Superman bodies kept showing up, as depicted in the first issue of the series.  Hitch's art was once known for its hyper realism, but in this series it's been simplified so that it kind of looks like the work of Stuart Immonen.  As a fan of Immonen, I find this acceptable.  Hitch is the writer of the Rebirth Justice League (along with art from Tony Daniel), and I think this was a good choice.

The Kingdom: Offspring (DC)
From February 1999.
The Kingdom was Mark Waid's follow-up to Kingdom Come insofar as it depicted many of the next generation heroes from the original story, and featured the menace of Gog, who was responsible for next generation hero Magog.  The Kingdom was split up between bookend issues where the overall story was told, and several one-shots.  This may be the first time I've read Offspring, which features the son of Plastic Man.  Both of them are struggling with the idea of being taken seriously, and as such Offspring makes for a good standalone story in and of itself.  It doesn't hurt that Frank Quitely provides the art, because Quitely isn't really capable of doing ho-hum work. 

It's interesting, though, The Kingdom, because it's an example of what DC always wanted to do, and eventually did, with Watchmen.  I've talked far too much recently about Alan Moore (elsewhere), but suffice to say I find it disappointing that he left mainstream work the way he did, and wanted no part in revisiting Watchmen.  For a lot of fans, that's become axiomatic, which strikes me as interesting, because this is the comics medium, the place where storytellers are most free to reinterpret, the basic job of storytellers everywhere, ever.  And yet, there's Waid, doing it with Kingdom Come, not very long after.  I mean, it makes sense from a business standpoint.  DC, and its parent company Warners, would understandably be interested in maximizing the profitability of a proven hit.  That's just basic business sense.  I never thought The Kingdom was or was intended to be the same kind of creative statement as its predecessor, but it still provided room for material like Offspring, which represents excellent material in and of itself.  To assume that this is impossible is, to my mind, to completely misunderstand the art of storytelling.

It's interesting, too, just to reconsider Kingdom Come, thanks to something like Offspring.  This was something that was a major deal twenty years ago.  It's not inconceivable to think that fans really did think this was something akin to Watchmen or Dark Knight Returns.  Yet, twenty years on, you really don't find anyone talking about it like that anymore.  I find that odd.  The more I think about it, the more I wonder, have we just lost the ability to conceive new touchstones as actually existing?  Without Kingdom Come, you wouldn't have Civil War.  I mean, Mark Millar's Civil War, when you strip it down to its essentials, is essentially Kingdom Come, done in regular continuity.  Tragedy strikes, and the superhero community is forced to decide what to do next.  Isn't that argument enough that Kingdom Come is still important?  It's just, we stopped trying to see it as important, when it proved about as important as a superhero comic could get.  DC had Identity Crisis, later, and Marvel finally jumped on the bandwagon.  Civil War was clearly a creative watershed for the company.  And you wouldn't have it without Kingdom Come.  I'll leave it at that for now.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen #6 (ABC)
From September 2000.
Alan Moore's last significant creation was LXG, in which he envisioned a unified Victorian literary canon, which infamously was adapted into a 2003 movie that not only proved to be Sean Connery's last, but the straw that broke the camel's back in terms of Moore's ability to interact positively with the mainstream.  (The movie also made it important among fans that movies not treat, to their mind, adapted material with disrespect, which actually had the result of superhero movies after that time being more important in terms of mainstream crossover appeal than appealing directly to fans, which in 2016 seems to have taken on new wrinkles thanks to Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, in which fans have once again sunk their teeth into the debate).  Anyway, reading LXG itself is something of an odd experience.  Creatively it's not much of a statement.  More seems to have been put into the novelty of packaging the comic in vintage ads and, in the letters column, being wonderfully droll than in distinguishing the story experience itself.  At this point Moore had started to retreat into the familiar comforts of home, and yet the comic doesn't read as particularly British (that's why Paul Cornell's Knight & Squire was such a delight to read), and even if that wasn't the intent, just tossing familiar characters together reads like a cheat.  I mean, the old Allan Quatermain makes a fascinating subject, surely, in the same sense that comics with old superheroes (say, The Dark Knight Returns) tend to be, but it's odd to juxtapose him with, say, Moore's somewhat racist impression of Captain Nemo.  Quatermain (best known as the protagonist of King's Solomon's Mines, and as a cultural predecessor of Indiana Jones) and Nemo (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) are surrounded by Mina Murray (Dracula), although for what reason, if not a vampire (as in the movie), I have no idea, at least as depicted in this story (more sense would have been Van Helsing, who was the subject of Van Helsing, which like LXG served as a template for Marvel's Avengers), the Invisible Man, and Jekyll/Hyde, plus Professor Moriarty as the antagonist (by the end, as much of a genius as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan's Khan), a predecessor to James Bond, and some Chinese characters who perhaps deserve about as much speculation as Moore's Nemo...

I feel I have to reiterate that I don't come by my impression of Alan Moore lightly.  I haven't read everything he's done, and wouldn't particularly care to, even if the best of it is better than the worst that I have read.  I'm just irritated, irrationally, by the notion that to some fans Alan Moore is a god, and that his views and his work can't stand criticism, when to my mind not only is it possible, but necessary for any true reader.  I mean, it's not like I'm not used to people picking on the stuff I like.  I know how it goes.  Maybe some of this logic is best left to fanatics.  We all form strong opinions, and to give voice to them, whether in the privacy of friends or in the wide reaches of the Internet, is to invite contrary opinions.  To dismiss the opposite as an idiot is maybe the easiest response.  But just maybe, it ought to have you reconsider why it is you formed those strong opinions in the first place. 

Well, we all reconsider our thoughts, eventually.  Hopefully.  I guess I really shouldn't worry about it. 

Quarter Bin 76 "Automatic Kafka, and other stuff"

A lot of comics bought from an actual quarter bin.  Don't say it never happens...

Automatic Kafka #2 (WildStorm)
From October 2002.
Joe Casey was one of the big names in comic at that time, but then he split off with a couple of his fellow luminaries to form Man of Action, which produced hit concepts like Ben 10 and Big Hero 6.  But before he left, he left a splash, with stuff like Automatic Kafka.  Chances are if he hadn't left, Kafka would have a lasting memory.  Like a lot of Casey and WildStorm's efforts from that time, it was a post-millennial superhero deconstruction project, although today it looks like a precursor to Matt Kindt's MIND MGMT, which to my mind is a very good thing.  So it was certainly a pleasure to read some of it, and I certainly wouldn't mind reading more.  It was certainly the most pleasant discovery of this particular lot, although there was plenty of other good stuff, such as:

Batman: Futures End #1 (DC)
From November 2014.
The Futures End specials were such a rich creative opportunity, and I love checking out what the more adventurous ones attempted.  This one wasn't an attempt, it was Scott Snyder, with Ray Fawkes scripting, revisiting his fascinating vision of the future Batman, so obsessed with his mission that he sets up a series of clones who will continue it indefinitely.  It was easily Snyder's richest Batman concept, and one seen otherwise only sparingly, from a short story in the pages of the anniversary Detective Comics #27.  I didn't read this special when it was originally released, because I didn't imagine that Snyder would revisit the concept, and fan reactions at the time didn't catch on to the significance of the issue, but I eventually read it digitally, and so now I've got a physical copy as well.  This is the origin of the clone initiative, an older Batman who defies the odds and breaks into Lex Luthor's secret lab to get what he needs for it.  I'd love if Snyder eventually returned again to the concept, but a small collection of these two stories wouldn't be out of order, either, so fans know they exist...

Bone Holiday Special (Hero)
From 1993.
This was something of an unbelievable find, a Hero magazine special from the early days of Jeff Smith's Bone.  In it is an exclusive story, plus an interview (Smith comes off as less than impressive, alas), and reprints of early strips predating Bone, back when it was called Thorn.  Bone is an endlessly charming memory, one of my all-time favorite comics, and Smith has proven to be an enduring talent as well, with RASL and Tuki (an ongoing project) also under his belt by this point.

Cerebus #201 (Aardvark-Vanaheim)
From December 1995.
Dave Sim is such a unique character in comics lore.  He was a virtual god of the indy press at his prime, but since Cerebus ended fans have tended to reflect more on his alleged shortcomings than on what he accomplished.  This issue begins the "Guys" arc, and seems to feature parodies of George Harrison and Ringo Starr (and virtually incomprehensible dialogue to match their accents).  I have no idea how representative it is of Cerebus as a whole, but it was certainly unique reading.  Sim includes an origin of Cerebus (and the name of its publisher, Aardvark-Vanaheim) in an essay, so that was pretty lucky for a guy who's not usually lucky enough to find an issue...

Chosen #2 (Dark Horse)
One of Mark Millar's formative projects (he's since retitled it American Jesus, and plans on further volumes) features a boy who may or may not be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ.  It's actually pretty interesting.

Empire #3 (DC)
From November 2003.
Mark Waid was my favorite '90s comic book writer.  Eventually, he started to try and figure out how he was going to follow up all the stuff he'd accomplished in that decade, and everything he's done since has been a continuation of that.  Empire was his first shot at what the kind of superhero storytelling he later developed in his Irredeemable comics.  The concept was, What if the bad guy wins?  This issue features the superhero who the villain only wants the world to think died.  I don't know, maybe my lackluster opinion of Waid in the last few decades colors my impression of Empire, but it's hard to see now why fans were so wild about it.  But they've consistently been wild about a lot of minor work from Waid.  I should know.  I knew his work when it was great...

Green Lantern: Mosaic #6 (DC)
From November 1992.
1992 was from the era I last saw bargain packs all over the place, and how I first discovered Green Lantern: Mosaic.  This was, as I know understand it, the Vertigo version of Green Lantern.  Gerard Jones ruled the whole Green Lantern landscape at that time, and it was surprisingly expansive landscape at that time.  Mosaic was the big gamble.  I guess I couldn't really appreciate how big a gamble it was until I read its letters column.  The first issue of the series was the first issue I read, and for decades remains the only issue.  But I loved that issue.  Eventually, I caught another issue, and then even the arc from Green Lantern where it originated.  Turns out, fans really didn't know what to make of it, and Jones didn't go out of his way to make it any easier.  I mean, this was a Vertigo title.  And it seriously needs to be rediscovered.  It's pretty much the Green Lantern version of Grant Morrison's Animal Man.  And this is how you make John Stewart relevant.

Haven: The Broken City #9 (DC)
From October 2002.
A couple of upstart creators were given a shot at creating something new at DC.  This was a time of pretty wild experimentation at DC, and so it was as good a time to let upstart creators try their thing as any.  The result is better than its complete lack of impact indicates.  I caught the first issue from the same quarter bin a little while back, so it only seemed appropriate that I caught the last issue, too.  Bookending the series were two specials featuring the Justice League.  I don't really know what happened, why the upstarts vanished and the whole thing forgotten.  But it didn't really deserve that fate.

Hawkeye #3 (Marvel)
From December 2012.
But then again, the much better established Matt Fraction couldn't help this series make a bigger impact...

Infinite Vacation #5 (Image)
Back when I thought I was going to continue to be a big fan of Nick Spencer, I caught the first issue of this one, and so reading the last one seemed like it would finally be appropriate.  In hindsight Infinite Vacation may be remembered, if anything, for helping launch Image's continuing obsession with really bold coloring.  This is the era of colorists, folks.

Infinity Man and the Forever People: Futures End #1 (DC)
From November 2014.
This Futures End special is pretty good, too, and is the first time I actually read this New Gods series.  I think its only shortcoming is that it...really doesn't seem all that relevant a New Gods concept.  But it's still a good read!

Justice League Europe #36 (DC)
From March 1992.
Gerard Jones again, this time helping smooth the transition from the Giffen/DeMatteis era to the Jurgens era, as he dismantles the old Bwa-Ha-Ha League (a lot of the members in this issue join Jurgens' Justice League America).

The Mice Templar: Volume IV - Legend #3 (Image)
From June 2013.
I was such a fan of Mice Templar, but I kind of got...tired of it after a while.  The black and white art doesn't help, because it's hard to distinguish characters, especially since they're all rodents.  But it was such an ambitious concept, and eventually ran for, I think, forty-two issues across five mini-series.  This is actually a pretty good issue, and the new essay writer explains the history of anthropomorphic storytelling, which is kind of handy.  So it was a good random issue to help revisit the concept.  Plus, the Salmon of Knowledge! 

Moon Knight #16 (Marvel)
From August 2015.
Predictably, Cullen Bunn features the least imaginative version of Marvel's project to make Moon Knight its second most interesting character (actual storytelling results may vary), after Deadpool.  Although I hear Jeff Lemire is doing some truly killer work with the concept at the moment...

Promethea #22 (ABC)
From November 2002.
Alan Moore is the comics genius (so proclaimed by at least one whole generation of fans) I consider more lackluster than not.  Promethea was his project with future superstar J.H. Williams III, who later collaborated with Neil Gaiman on a new Sandman.  Speaking of which, this issue reads like a lackluster, Alan Moore version of Sandman.  And speaking of which...

Sandman #63 (Vertigo)
I've been trying to catch up with Gaiman's seminal comics saga for a while (as evidenced by my annotations of The Annotated Sandman, a project that will continue at some point).  This issue is from late in the series and, more specifically, "The Kindly Ones."  It is not, however, particularly an issue to hold against counterfeit Alan Moore Sandman.  It's a pretty busy issue, and certainly better than Moore's effort, but not an easy issue to laud among the greater Gaiman material available...

Smax #3 (ABC)
From December 2003.
"ABC," by the way, stands for "America's Best Comics."  Which these really aren't.  They were pretty popular at the time, and Alan Moore's last real stab at popular work (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen came from this era), and the funny thing is, they were all variations on stuff he originally did for Rob Liefeld.  It makes sense somehow.  Anyway, if Moore weren't so completely obsessed with sex, he might do better work.  That's my theory, anyway...

Superman/Wonder Woman Annual #2 (DC)
From February 2016.
This is pretty much how the romance ends.  It's kind of sad.

The New Titans #66 (DC)
From May 1990.
The cover of this later issue from the seminal Wolfman/Perez collaboration features Raven...not making out with Dick Grayson.  It only looks that way.  Raven's meddling in Dick's love life would come a little later in Wolfman's run (a development that's routinely overlooked by fans, by the way).  It's worth noting that George Perez is not on art duties this issue, but rather co-scripting (the beginning, perhaps, of his writing career).  The art, rather, comes from the formative pen of Tom Grummett, whose style is somewhat evident in this early work.  If memory serves me right, he's also drawing when Wolfman has Raven crash Dick's would-be nuptials with Starfire...

The Legend of Will Power #1, 2 (Primal Paper)
From March, August 2011.
A local comics creator produced these comics (it's always worth sampling the native talent, which includes Drew Moss, who was in the store sketching once, and complaining about his publisher complaining about him...).  This isn't Moss, however, but Vince White, and the reason I picked up these issues was because I had the suspicion there might be some Green Lantern in these pages.  But the utter lack of connection between the superhero and his name (which is actually his real name) shows the disconnect between White's ambitions and his actual talent.  He's a better artist.  He needed a co-writer.  Live and learn?

Reading Comics 168 "7/8/15 - One of the Best Weeks of the Year"

Covered this edition: Batman #42, Bloodshot Reborn #4, Civil War #1, Descender #5, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency #2, Earth 2: Society #2, Providence #2, Saga #30, Spider-Verse #3, Star Trek/Green Lantern #1, Star Wars: Lando #1, and Strange Fruit #1.

To say last week was disappointing for a comic book addict like me would be an understatement.  This is not to say that there nothing worth reading, but nothing that interested me, nothing from my pull list and, well, nothing else that I wanted to read.

So this week was an embarrassment of riches.  Very good (or very bad) for a comics addict.  I ended up reading a bunch of stuff I hadn't read previously, or continuing to read stuff that I don't typically read, or enjoyed a bunch of new stuff, and of course a bunch of stuff I've been reading all along.

Kicking off is Batman #42 (DC), the second issue of the Bat Gordon era.  Visually the costume in full armor still looks and will always look ridiculous, and Gordon's military haircut looks ridiculous, but...this is still the best Batman Snyder has ever written.  It's the first time he's allowed himself full control, and it shows.  The fact that astute readers knew Bruce Wayne was never dead, and Snyder has shown every willingness to play along, keeping him in every issue "post-death," including the issue with "his death" after "his death," this is what I've been waiting for.  This is an exercise in patience.  Obviously this is an exception, and if it hadn't been hugely popular from the start, DC would never have stuck around this long.  But thankfully this is an instance where popularity eventually gives way to material justifying the hype.  I don't know how popular this material will be, in the short- or long-term, but I have to imagine, however much longer Snyder sticks around, he will be back to writing Bruce Wayne as Batman, and will be the better for having this experience under his belt.

It's also clear that the villain concept was in part an excuse for Capullo to do a version of Clayface after discovering how well he does it visually in Batman #20 (excellent cover).  I would have maybe capitalized on the horn concept and named the villain Horn (although I guess there are other members of the gang, so there's always a chance, right?).

Bloodshot Reborn #4 (Valiant), meanwhile, is something I picked up because I just read The Valiant, and thought it was pretty brilliant, and because of the timing, which was even better than I thought, I realized this series existed and I should probably start reading it.  It's the first of two Jeff Lemire comics from this week (just as there are two from Charles Soule), and both are winners (just like Soule's).  Bloodshot, as I've explained elsewhere, is a kind of Wolverine, and in this iteration without any of the baggage and written in the full knowledge that it's perhaps is best to just concentrate on what makes him interesting, which is his background and how it continues to impact him.  In The Valiant, Bloodshot lost his powers, and so Reborn is the journey of getting them back.  In this instance, picking up the narrative four issues in (I wanted to try and catch up with whatever was available, but when that meant the latest issue as it was released and only one other plus a few of the preceding series, I opted just for this one) proved no problem at all.  Whatever else has been done in Reborn to date, this issue captures the journey perfectly, exactly as I hoped it'd be from The Valiant.

And even with surprises, such as Bloodsquirt.  Kind of like Bloodshot's Bat-Mite, Bloodsquirt is part of the hallucinations Bloodshot is experiencing as he tries to deal with his situation (the other person he sees is the woman responsible for taking away his powers, but in this scenario, unlike House of M's Scarlet Witch, the late Geomancer was a good guy who was very much Bloodshot's friend, which is why she did what she did, right before she died).  The nanites, meanwhile, that previously gave Bloodshot his powers have been infecting other people, and he's able to absorb them back when he finds these people.  Anyway, the whole thing is pretty fascinating, and executed perfectly.  I'm once again glad that Valiant exists, and that I've found my way in.

 Civil War #1 (Marvel) is one of the many, many Secret Wars spin-offs featuring past notable Marvel stories, whether standalone events or arcs within a given series.  Civil War ought to be polarizing.  Originally, it concluded with Captain America's assassination, but in this version that never happened, and things degenerated to a certain extent as the "Old Man Logan" arc did in Wolverine (which has become another Secret Wars spin-off, not to mention one of the titles announced as becoming an ongoing once Secret Wars ends, and Hugh Jackman's vision for his last performance as Wolverine).

This is written by Charles Soule.  When his exclusive contract with Marvel was originally announced, I conceived of it as a nightmare scenario, not because I had enjoyed his DC work so much, but because I feared Marvel wouldn't know what to do with him.  But as it turns out, that wasn't really the case at all.  If anything, he might be perfectly suited at Marvel, where he can use his best instincts to bring out Marvel's best instincts.  This is in fact a best case scenario.  At DC he was for the most part marginalized.  At Marvel he has the opportunity to become the company's next signature writer, succeeding Brian Michael Bendis and Jonathan Hickman.  I would be very happy to see that happen.

Civil War, then, is a kind of audition.  I mean, arguably all of these Secret Wars spin-offs are auditions, either for talent or for the continuing viability of old concepts.  In that, Marvel again has an edge over DC.  With Convergence, DC was letting fans know once again (and I do mean once again) that it hasn't forgotten its own history, but it was never going to revive anything.  DC is always looking forward, aggressively, often to the detriment of fans who want desperately to cling to the past.  Marvel isn't like that.  It's often just as merciless as DC when it chooses to change things, but it usually goes out of its way to assure fans that things are going to be okay (unless you're a mutant).  Anyway, it's always trying to do things organically, whereas DC is that pesky genetic engineering that everyone has such a passive-aggressive relationship with.

All that's to say, Civil War, and Soule along with it, is once again a fascinating concept.  The problem Marvel has, despite all its virtues (and I'm convinced Marvel fans celebrate the virtues and ignore everything else, on the whole), is that most of the time, once it's come up with an idea it really has no idea what to do with it.  The idea eventually, inevitably, peters out, or mutates so many times that it become irrelevant.

What Soule accomplishes here, as he usually does, is succeed in once again grounding the original idea without losing sight of how to once again progress it.  The original hook of the original Civil War is played out to its logical conclusions, going full American Civil War by creating separate nations: The Iron, which obviously is led by Tony Stark, and The Blue, which is led by Steve Rogers.  Perhaps with the less comic booky version of Captain America's assassination (otherwise, the opposite of what Brubaker chose to do) in the original in mind, Soule has an attempt by Stark and Rogers to negotiate sabotaged by a gunshot.  This Civil War is not dominated by meaningless battles between superheroes, but as a true war of ideology (which is what Kingdom Come was so good at depicting, but more on Mark Waid later).

It's also nice to see Leinil Francis Yu at work again.  He's been a signature Marvel artist for years.  Linking Yu and Soule is hopefully symbolic of past and future.  Although they could certainly continue working together.

Descender #5 (Image) features one of my favorite story tropes, the exposure of a fraud.  Back in the second Harry Potter book/film, The Chamber of Secrets, I was inordinately fascinated by the character of Gilderoy Lockhart in large part because he was exposed as a fraud.  I mention all this because this issue of Descender answers what I was looking for after the previous issue: Why should I care about Dr. Quon, erstwhile creator of adorable boy robot Tim?  Well, as it turns out, because he's a fraud.

And we learn this through the most grisly means possible.  I guess I haven't read enough Lemire to know how typical this is for him, but as far as Dustin Nguyen goes, I wouldn't have expected it, certainly not in his current mode of looking about as innocent as a comic book can, especially with killer robots running amok (although Driller, who is a Killer, can run amok as much as he wants, as far as I am concerned).

Which is to say, Dr. Quon is tortured, in the most direct way possible: a buzz saw is used to amputate his left hand.  Without no warning, mind you!

So Descender continues to surprise, and this is a very good thing, for a series that is proving more and more that what Saga started, other can and might actually do better.  Which is something fans of Saga probably never expected in a million years, let alone less than a handful of them.  (Luckily, ah, Dr. Quon still has a hand to grab things with.  But he won't be clapping again any time soon...)

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency #2 (IDW) continues to be the most improbably comic book ever (probably), and just as interesting a read for it, featuring the obscure Douglas Adams creation featured in two and a half books and nary a holiday to his credit.  Interestingly, the issue doesn't really try to advance the story at all, but merely let the chaos unleashed in the first one continue.  Although we do get introduced to Kate Schechter, from the second and better Dirk Gently book, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, this time with far less Norse mythology surrounding her.

One has the sense that IDW, and Chris Ryall, totally got that Adams was always a guy interested in nutty concepts and great dialogue, because that's what's to be found here, unabashedly.

And for those keeping score, I offered the theory in my review of the previous issue, which had never occurred to me before (because I hadn't given much thought to Adams's past) that Dirk Gently is another Doctor Who figure for his creator.  And the guys behind the comic seem to think so, too, because (and I can't name which one, because I'm not nearly as big a fan of Doctor Who as I am Douglas Adams) at one point Dirk dons a hat and looks the spitting image of one of the regenerations of Doctor Who.

So there's that.

Earth 2: Society #2 (DC) continues this pocket universe's hot streak.  Conceptually, I've loved the concept since it debuted as one of the second-wave titles in the New 52, because creatively it offered so much potential, which a number of writers at this point have capitalized on.  Convergence gave it the best possible spotlight, but the best possible storytelling has apparently saved for Society itself.

Traditionalists, purists, and other such individuals would probably have preferred the Justice Society of America concept to remain exactly as it was originally conceived, which is what the Justice League continues to represent.  And I think Geoff Johns pushed the original vision as far as it could go.  So, much like the Silver Age gave birth to a new Green Lantern and a new Flash, the same has been done for the Justice Society.

Here's where it truly begins to pay off, because now there is a society, and it's as literal as you can possibly get (in a good way), a whole society defined by the superheroes at its heart, survivors of an obliterated Earth.  And now we see what transpires next.  Terry Sloan, the original Mr. Terrific, has been transformed into a leader of questionable ethics manipulating events to his benefit.  I think there was some resistance to this previously, but at any rate I wasn't reading that material, and as presented here it works wonderfully, and he's in a situation that fully exploits his potential.  The same, hopefully, will be true of all the characters, including Dick Grayson as Batman.  This is a series that is going to take its time unfolding the story, and two issues in that's definitely what's been happening.  There are more introductions this issue, oddly enough, which might as well mean anyone who was reluctant to give it a try before has another opportunity to come aboard.

Because this is suddenly some of the best comics around.  Good storytelling, great art (and I liked Jorge Jimenez's work instantly last issue), and builds on a concept that is becoming better and better all the time.

Providence #2 (Avatar) is part of my continuing efforts to get a handle on Alan Moore.  His reputation has Moore out to be the best writer comics have ever seen, but my own views have been more contentious.  The last time I have him a shot was Avatar's own Crossed  +100, a spin-off of the Garth Ennis series, which to my mind embodied all Moore's worst instincts.

This time, however, Moore seems to be interested in what might actually be his true legacy: creating comics that attempt to be as literally the embodiment of the term "graphic novel" as you can get.  While fans might know him for Watchmen or Batman: The Killing Joke, Moore is also known for V for Vendetta and From Hell, both of which are very much relevant to any discussion of Providence.  When he tells a superhero story, Moore is able to disguise or even distort his best instincts.  But elsewhere he can't.  Even the Guy Fawkes mask can't obscure his real interests.  I have this theory that Moore is actually ambivalent about the comic book medium, or at least superheroes, whatever possibilities they might have, because for him they're nothing but memories he formed decades ago.  When he tells a story about superheroes, it is about them, not with them.  Later, with League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, he did tell stories with them, but superheroes of a different kind.  The difference is often hard to reconcile.

Anyway, Moore is interested in telling stories about characters interested in what he is.  Providence is a story of the occult, but in the way Stoker's original Dracula was, as something that's stumbled into like The Blair Witch Project.  This is the second issue, mind you, and I didn't read the first, but I'm not sure how much story I missed because of that.  The Alan Moore that exists today will never again have the impact he did in the '80s.  I don't know how he feels about that, but I think he's becoming comfortable with that.  In the '90s he was still trying to recapture what he'd lost by abandoning DC.  Providence might be the first time he's tried to move past that, return to what he once was, before superheroes dominated his legacy.  So if you're interested in that, you might be interested in Providence.

As for me, I found it interested if sedate.  If there must be irreconcilable differences between fans of Alan Moore and fans of Grant Morrison, this is what you would compare, say, Annihilator against.  And as different as the approaches are, for me there is no comparison.  Give me Morrison and Annihilator any day of the week.  Providence, meanwhile, glimpses for a moment the world Morrison's Nameless exists in.  Considering that I wish Nameless were a little less lunatic, maybe Providence actually represents the bridge that might still exist between them...

Saga #30 (Image) is the issue before a hiatus.  Vaughan and Staples have been taking these throughout Saga's run.  As far as I know, it's the first time a comic book has deliberately done this, and it's probably a smart idea.  I mean, other than tradition, there is no inherent reason why an ongoing series  has to publish continuously month after month for the duration of its existence.

The issue also presents a "season finale," which is something I hope future trades will help distinguish (ideally, I guess I'm arguing, there would be distinct collections for each "season," which is to say the material that exists between hiatuses).  For some time now, the story of Alana and Marko has been defined by their being apart.  They finally stumble back into each other's company.

The other major thing is that our helpful narrator Hazel once again reveals something major about what the future looks like, which in this instance (it hasn't always been as artful) is a very good thing, with excellent timing (which is another reason why I think the "season finale" concept should be better emphasized): she won't be returning to mommy and daddy any time soon.

In a way, Saga is taking on the feel of Lost (which Vaughan worked on), recognizing the inherent drama of reunions between characters who have complicated relationships with each other.  For me, this is another very good thing.  Sometimes I struggle to see what exactly Saga hopes to accomplish.  As of now, this is my conclusion, and I'm happy with that.

Spider-Verse #3 (Marvel) is one of the many, many Secret Wars spin-off releases, which I finally decided to be interested in because it's written by Mike Costa.  I was previously reluctant to embrace Costa's Spider-Man material because I feared he'd ultimately amount to about as much as Wasteland's Antony Johnston when he waded into Daredevil material a few years back.  Sometimes my favorite comic book writers don't write for DC or Marvel, and when they do, the results are less than favorable.  But Costa (responsible for so many excellent Cobra stories for IDW's G.I. Joe comics) has been doing his Spider-Man stories for a few years now, and apparently Spider-Verse is becoming an ongoing (as Web Warriors) in the fall, so I decided to quit fighting it.

I want Costa to do the kind of material I love Costa doing, but that's just not happening with G.I. Joe.  I liked Avengers: Millennium, saw the potential to get close to what I wanted, so I decided to give Spider-Verse a shot.  And it seems to be even closer than Avengers: Millennium.  As you may or may not know, Spider-Verse means the Spider-Man version of DC's multiverse, endless variations of the character.  The most famous one recently isn't of Spider-Man himself, but his dead lover Gwen Stacy, who is officially known as Spider-Gwen, and apparently wildly popular.  She's more or less the lead of this issue, too.  Costa has figured out how to present these characters in a group the way he normally does individually in his Cobra stories, focusing on their varying perspectives.  This I was glad to see.

Star Trek/Green Lantern #1 (IDW) is something that could very easily be a bad gimmick, as comics that mix different properties with different timelines must inevitably be (the Star Trek/X-Men crossover, I still have no idea how anyone could ever take that seriously), but as of this first issue, makes perfect sense.  I have no idea what the second issue will have to say about that, but let's focus on the positive!

What's great is that it also gives me a chance to read a good issue of two properties that aren't currently giving me much in that regard.  (As always, I provide the John Byrne caveat; because my local shop doesn't regularly stock his work, I don't have  a chance to read it regularly, unless I wanted to go the digital route.)  I haven't read IDW's Star Trek work with any regularity in a few years, and more often than not discover that I'm not missing much.  Robert Venditti's Green Lantern, meanwhile, is much the same.

This issue takes place in IDW's favorite Star Trek sandbox at the moment, stories set in the Abrams reboot era.  I think it's a mistake to routinely feature Kirk's Enterprise adventures at a time when new movies are still being produced.  Once in a while is fine.  I think there's much more valuable opportunity looking around the corners, which is what IDW used to do, even in the Abrams era.  Anyway, but that's exactly what this comic is doing, too, except with Green Lantern.

Or more accurately, the corpse of Ganthet.  That's a wonderful image.  With all the times the Guardians have been slaughtered over the years, I never imagined such an image would be so impactful, but there you are.  Until Hal Jordan (presumably) shows up on the final page, there isn't even anything to worry about time-wise.  Ganthet could easily have lived to Kirk's time (the Guardian's are the universe's oldest beings in DC speak).  He brought the last rings across the whole spectrum (red, yellow, blue, violet, orange, and indigo) created or embellished by Geoff Johns, and as Kirk's crew examines the corpse and the rings, the comic has ample opportunity to let the reader enjoy the Abrams era for what it is, a distinct version of familiar Star Trek.

Again, I have no idea what the next issue does to affect the continuing viability of the concept, but so far so good...

Star Wars: Lando #1 (Marvel) is unquestionably the one I've been dying to read since I had first heard about the series.  I've loved Lando since he first sauntered into Star Wars in The Empire Strikes Back, and this comic is written by Charles Soule.

As I've mentioned repeatedly, I had great misgivings when Soule went exclusive to Marvel.  His Red Lanterns was the work that made me a fan of Soule, and I didn't want to see it end.  (Well, DC ended it anyway, in the end.)  When I saw Lando announced, with Soule as writer, I saw it as the best chance to see Soule in the mode I knew best from him.

Turns out it's better than that.  Never mind what I already said about Soule above, this one's better than I could have imagined.  It not only features Lando, which is obvious, but takes him in new and unexpected directions.  Now, I'm about to reference Lost again.  Unlike a lot of fans, my affection for it not only didn't go away after the way it ended, but was actually amplified by it.  I loved the whole final season, in fact.  This is relevant, because in Soule's mind, Lando is something of a Sawyer, a con man who given the chance could absolutely go straight.  When we meet Lando in Empire Strikes Back, that's exactly what happened to him, but the Lando we meet is difficult to imagine as anything else.  I read and enjoyed the L. Neil Smith books, too, but they were part of the whole thing that suggested if Lando had ever been any different, he was basically Han Solo.

Which is not very imaginative.  Given a chance, Han would never have become an administrator.  But Lando loves a good con, because a con is basically an opportunity, and that's what con men love.  As a con man, Lando suddenly makes perfect sense.  And his Cloud City buddy Lobot becomes fully alive in the comic, too, plus a number of nefarious associates that make it seem just as if Star Wars: Lando is the first time anyone really tried to do additional Star Wars material.  Because this is exactly what Star Wars was always meant to be.

And so why care about Lando at all?  I liked him because he really wasn't involved in Luke's adventures.  Other than snatching Luke from that weathervane, if you think about it Lando really has nothing to do with him in his two movie appearances.  But this doesn't stop him from being, arguably the most confident man in the room, even when he quickly realizes he's got to switch allegiances.  That deal he strikes with Vader turned out to be a bad idea.  So he flips.  He's the only character to do that, too.  Han, if you'll remember, spends most of his time actively trying to avoid entanglements.  That's what he had in common with the old Lando.  He didn't see the opportunity Luke represented even though it was staring him in the face.  He came back because he grew to care about the boy.  Not Lando.

All of which is to say there was always unexplored potential in Lando.  As of now, there's less.  Or, more.

Strange Fruit #1 (Boom!) is the first installment in the Mark Waid story fans have been waiting for since Kingdom Come.

Whereas Alex Ross has been trying to recapture his Kingdom Come glory ever since (just as the project itself was originally embraced as "the next Alex Ross project" after Marvels, which Kurt Busiek followed up with the similar Astro City), Waid seems to have been incredibly reluctant, which is probably because initially he didn't understand what he'd accomplished.  Before Kingdom Come, Waid was a fan who became an editor who got to write The Flash and then anything else he wanted.  But along the way, he had the opportunity to do something big, Kingdom Come.  Even though fans (like me) claim the best of his Flash was incredibly hard to surpass, that's exactly what he did.  He set the bar higher than anyone could have imagined, and I think like Waid himself, everyone has been struggling to catch up with it.

This was transcendent material, for Waid, for superheroes, and in some ways, comic books in general.  Snooty fans won't even take superhero writers seriously, will try and create mainstream credentials by being anything but.  What Waid realized was that this wasn't by any means necessary.  But having someone like Alex Ross around to make it visually distinctive would probably help.

Here he was J.G. Jones, whose most visually distinctive work previously was on the landmark covers of the weekly series 52, which are among the rare covers to get their own collection.  Jones has gone to some trouble to evoke Alex Ross, but where Ross tends to be minimalist, Jones sketches in the rest.

Otherwise the rest is entirely Waid.  The only other times he's invoked Kingdom Come was to try and recapture the scope of superhero storytelling, which resulted in lesser works like The Kingdom and the Irredeemable/Incorruptible universe.  Strange Fruit is nothing like that.  And considering the charged nature of race relations, and even the status of the Confederate flag (interested observers can make much of the issue's final image on that score), it's beyond timely.  It's timeless in the best Kingdom Come manner.  It's Waid coming home to Boom!, yes, but it's also Waid coming to terms with a part of his legacy he has finally come to embrace, a challenge he set aside and has returned to at last.

At its heart, Strange Fruit is a variation on Superman.  It even evokes Django Unchained.  But it is distinctly its own, too.  It looks at politics, too, by the way, but at its heart is a social landscape at turmoil with itself, trying to come up with easy answers and finding that to be a difficult task.  And suddenly, there's this black man standing there, tearing the whole scene asunder, come to Earth like Superman, in a rocket that crashes in a field, but this is a full-grown man.

Who and what he is are matters for the three remaining issues.  I highly recommend you investigate the results for yourself.  And welcome back, Mark Waid.  It's been a long time.

Crossed Plus One Hundred #1 (Avatar)

via Previews World

writer: Alan Moore

artist: Gabriel Andrade

If I hadn't known about this beforehand, I probably would've ignored it just like everyone else seems to have...

Crossed is a Garth Ennis project.  Depending on how much you know about Garth Ennis, once you read any Crossed at all, you have a pretty good sense what Garth Ennis is all about.  And actually, there's supplemental material in this issue that explains everything you need to know about it, should you be so interested.  And it explains everything you need to know about Garth Ennis, too.

More pointedly, this unusual project for Alan Moore, working in someone else's playground (y'know, besides a bunch of long-dead writers who fall outside the moral outrage attached to everything everyone has tried to do with his material over the years) for a change, might be one of those things that explains everything you need to know about him, too.

Crossed is a post-apocalyptic thing about a virus that unleashes mankind's most basic instincts, which Ennis interpreted as the most depraved possible.  Crossed Plus One Hundred, as you may or may not be able to guess, is Crossed a hundred years in its future.  Mankind survives, but the victims of the virus are, well, hardly model citizens.  To call them zombies, as in The Walking Dead, or even cavemen, as in Tuki, would be a serious upgrade.  They're basically stereotypical rednecks, if they were also zombie cavemen.  Redneck zombie cavemen!  What a concept!

Anyway, I don't think this is at all a project that would convince anyone who doesn't see Moore as a hallowed treasure of literature in anywhere near that kind of light.  It's interesting.  And it's also language that Moore sees as degenerating worst, which makes the whole thing read like someone who definitely doesn't have Moore's fabled credentials.  Basically as if written by redneck zombie cavemen.

As far as objectivity goes, the redneck zombie cavemen give themselves the worst dialogue, though.  Just so you know.

Quarter Bin #63 "Binge-worthy VIII: Superstars"

Superstar: As Seen On TV (Image)
From 2001.

via eBay

This is now the best thing I've read from Kurt Busiek.  Busiek made his name on Marvels, the project also known for launching Alex Ross's career, and later as the creator of the sprawling Astro City, relaunched last year by DC.  I've often found that Busiek is best read as a nostalgia writer, though, hesitant to do anything that would break away from his image.  Superstar is a departure.  It was an early millennium attempt from comic book creators in general to do something new.  The lead character is a superhero whose worst enemy is also technically his biggest supporter: his own father.  That's a dynamic that is itself a fresh concept, but the greater concept around that one is one that was actually years ahead of its time: Superstar was made for our social media age, as his power levels are literally fueled by public support.  It's shocking that this was a one-shot deal, and that apparently no one has thought to revisit it (aside from an expanded IDW re-release three years ago).  The main draw for me, though, was artist Stuart Immonen, who at the time was transitioning away from his then-career defining monthly commitment to Superman and embarking on the course that has led to the altered style he's employed at Marvel for years now.  This is pure Immonen goodness, what might be considered now a what-if scenario if he and Busiek had expanded on the concept.  That would've been nice...

Tales of the Unexpected #8 (DC)

From 2007.

via DCU Reviews

The lead in this mini-series was the Crispus Allen version of the Spectre, but I picked up this issue because of the back-up featuring Dr. 13, an obscure occult detective recently somewhat featured in Trinity of Sin, and the reason I was interested was because the creative team for the story was Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang, who recently concluded a three-year arc on the New 52 Wonder Woman.  It's interesting to see how Chiang's art evolved from then to now (positively, which is something I'm still struggling to say about Immonen), from a more cartoony look to...at least a more streamlined version of that look.  The story itself is pretty good, too.  Grant Morrison fans will probably love how it ends.  Maybe it's because I was not necessarily aware of Dr. 13 until recently, but I was surprised to learn that the character of Traci 13, whom I first noticed in the pages of the original Jaime Reyes Blue Beetle series, is in fact Dr. 13's daughter.  Yeah, it seems kind of obvious now...

The New Teen Titans #12 (DC)

From 1981.

via comiXology

New Teen Titans was one of the hottest comics of the '80s, and its legacy still looms large.  My first exposure was a random back issue I found in an antique store, New Teen Titans #39, in which Dick Grayson officially quits his Robin persona; the debuts of Cyborg, Starfire, and the whole "Judas Contract" saga are elements that will always keep the Wolfman/Perez era relevant for fans.  Last year I read a volume collecting the first handful of issues.  This latest random selection was not nearly as lucky as the previous one, however.  I know there are plenty of good Donna Troy stories, but this isn't one of them.

Tom Strong #36 (ABC)

From 2006.

via iTunes

Turns out this is the final Tim Strong story from Alan Moore.  Tom was a kind of pulp hero that was also Moore's quasi-extension of his Supreme work, which was a quasi-extension of the Silver Age Superman (woo!); the headlining act of the America's Best Comics imprint that Moore walked away from once WildStorm was acquired by DC, a company Moore no longer had any interest in working for (despite having made virtually his whole reputation there, with Saga of Swamp Thing, Batman: the Killing Joke, Watchmen, and other projects).  Tom remains in print, however, thanks to original artist Chris Sprouse.  Moore's finale is strong even for those like me who have read very little Tom Strong.  It wraps up his story, explaining certain elements of the mythology, and is arguably a much stronger read than "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow."  If you're curious about the character, you could do worse than to start with Tom "At the End of the World."

Wanted #4 (Top Cow)

From 2004.

via comiXology

Wanted is the project that helped Mark Millar launch his MillarWorld, a unique distinction he's given his work since after having become Hollywood's third favorite comic book writer after Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman.  Wanted was very loosely adapted into a major motion picture, and of course there have been two Kick-Ass movies, and now Kingsmen: The Secret Service.  The movie version of Wanted had James McAvoy run around Angelina Jolie as assassins.  The original comic involves a whole world of supervillains.  I'm convinced Millar originally conceived of this as a DC project, and after DC opted for Brad Meltzer's Identity Crisis Millar revised his idea as a standalone concept.  Who knows?  He'd already helped make history with The Ultimates, and would do so again with Civil War, but my favorite Millar mainstream effort remains "Old Man Logan."  The Wanted artist is J.G. Jones, who would later illustrate boldly the covers of 52, plus the interiors for the majority of Final Crisis.

Quarter Bin #56 "Binge-worthy I: Alan Moore"

These comics were sixty cents each.  The title of this column is inaccurate.

Recently the good folks at Zimmie's in Lewiston, ME (my history with this shop stretches back to 1992) indulged one of my worst habits: scouring bargain bins.  One week they had a whole table of long boxes filled with cheap comics.  I've made multiple surveys of their contents and come up with some fun reading.  This is the first in a series that explores what I found.

1963: Mystery Incorporated (Image)
From April 1993.

via Wow Cool

Alan Moore has become known for two kinds of comics: mature works that helped redefine the potential of the form, and nostalgic projects that looked backward at its most stereotypical instincts.  1963 comes from the latter instinct.  After Moore left DC and mainstream superheroes behind, he began a journey toward finding a new platform, which would eventually lead to Tom Strong and then League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the ongoing project that has become his most notable recent output.  1963 is probably his thickest nostalgia act, something he pulled out for the budding Image line that was probably among its first material not to heavily rely on the reputation of its artist.  It's also the closest he's ever come to doing Marvel material.  For whatever reason, although he famously holds a grudge against DC, for which he created Watchmen, Moore has never even worked for Marvel.  Clearly, though, he was once a reader.  Mystery Incorporated is a pastiche of Fantastic Four, with four characters who have equally fantastic powers and little interest but quipping their way through the given crisis.  That's about all there is to find here.  That may be why only die hard Alan Moore fans even know about this particular effort.

Alan Moore's Awesome Universe Handbook (Awesome)
From April 1999.

via Comic Book Realm

The bridge between 1963 and Tom Strong (as well as the rest of America's Best Comics) was laid down by, of all people, Rob Liefeld, whose Image offshoot imprint had a number of different titles but should best be remembered (and it should be remembered) as Awesome Entertainment.  Moore had previously helped relaunch Liefeld's Supreme as one of his nostalgia acts, a version of the Silver Age Superman (as last seen in the famous "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?"), which led to his involvement with a rejuvenation of the whole Liefeld landscape.  This release detailed his plans for the whole thing, a rare public look at project proposals that only the name Alan Moore could possibly have justified.  There's Supreme, of course, plus Suprema (patterned after Supergirl), Glory (revamped as his version of Wonder Woman), and Youngblood (once and always the Avengers).  Alex Ross, still riding high at the time thanks to his Marvels breakthrough (with Kingdom Come yet to, well, come) provides the preview images of Supreme and family (including a Krypto equivalent).  The Moore version of Supreme remained relevant for years (in fact, Tom Strong and the whole ABC line was based off this work) and recently Warren Ellis has started building on this legacy within the pages of Supreme: Blue Rose (I've yet to read an issue, but am very eager to correct that).  This is really the only time I've been a first-hand fan of Moore.  The whole thing fell apart rather quickly when Awesome itself disappeared, and that was disappointing.

Albion #1 (WildStorm)
From August 2005.

via Comic Book Realm

This one was plotted by Moore but scripted by the team of Leah Moore (daughter of Alan Moore) and John Reppion (husband of Leah Moore), whom I've previously experienced in the excellent Complete Dracula adaptation.  It's sort of the British LXG mixed with Watchmen.  The title refers to an ancient designation of England itself, a sort of mythic version of the country.  This is the part where I admit I probably should reread this issue because it's pretty interesting, and this was my first exposure to the project.  Truth is, I tend to talk a lot of smack about Moore (Alan Moore, you understand), and this is in large part due to the fact that Moore himself has made it difficult to like him.  He's got a huge chip on his shoulder, a sense of entitlement he actually technically deserves as the most respected comic book writer of the past quarter century, which is also to say the most respected writer in comic book history itself.  But I also think he cashed in his chips far too early, burned bridges (on his end) at a point when he was really only beginning to explore his potential.  If you think his work as it is is impressive, it's my contention that his legacy could have been better if he'd simply gotten out of his own way.  An Alan Moore who continued to evolve, who looked forward (even if he mixed in looking backward, too) would deserve the contempt he holds over everyone else in the industry, whose viewpoint on superheroes doesn't look like it was frozen in the Silver Age and only looks otherwise at his say-so.  In short, someone who respects his contemporaries, and possibly even his own readers.

American Flagg! #40 (First)
From May 1987.

via Cover Browser

Although the series was created by Howard Chaykin, there's an Alan Moore connection, since he wrote material for a few issues.  Those were the days when Moore still played well with others, which curiously, as you've already seen me indicate, ended with Rob Liefeld (which would seem, by reputation, to be self-explanatory).  Chaykin, ironically, is the creator you get when you do everything right and you become a legend, but no one really seems to notice.  That's American Flagg! in a nutshell, too, one of those '80s projects that fell outside of the Big Two, that didn't involve superheroes, and wasn't written by Alan Moore (for the most part).  (Dean Motter's seminal Mister X is another example, although Dark Horse has been doing a commendable job at trying to correct this.)  The title of the series refers to Reuben Flagg (no relation to Stephen King's Randall Flagg!), who probably has more significance in a post-Girl with the Dragon Tattoo world, a man who tries to fight back against a corrupt system.  (Like Moore's fascination with Nixon, who's still president in Watchmen, this is a concept that probably made a lot of sense back then, and actually means more now than it has in a while.)  Chaykin still pops up regularly with new projects, but his profile is so far diminished that only the comic book industry itself still thinks he's important.  He's been forgotten by fans.  This issue wasn't written by Chaykin, however, but by the team of J.M. DeMatteis (who remains relevant as he works on various superhero projects at the Big Two) and Mark Badger, making it a creator-owned title that could also thrive in the hands of others (which is always rare).  If I'd had options, I'd have wanted one written and drawn in the inimitable style of Chaykin himself, though.

Reading Comics #120 "Alan Moore is really...Norman Mailer?"

So I've been writing about Alan Moore recently.  Well, not so much about him directly, except in the instance of a review for Miracleman, but in relation to other comic book creators.  Moore's legacy understandably looms large in the medium.  He's considered the titan of all writers, and those who cherish him, which is to say a large portion of the comic book audience and literary critics in general (Time listed Watchmen as one of the 100 best novels of the 20th century), hang on to his every opinion.  His opinion tends to belittle everyone else around him, by the way.  This isolating effect preserves Moore in a vacuum, and as such this is how he would like to be considered.  But maybe that's not the only way to view him.

Watchmen in particular seems the best way to approach him.  It's the story of a superhero landscape converging on a decisive moment concerning the balance of good and evil.  The character of Ozymandias has determined the only way to break the cycle of victory and defeat is to unite everyone around an imagined enemy.  (Never mind that fifteen years later the whole world did in fact unite in such a way, and then very quickly disintegrated in spectacular and alarming fashion, after 9/11.)  Very pointedly, and also quite ironically for the continuing impact of the story, the Cold War looms heavily in Watchmen even though it is only a few years from being concluded.  (It was originally published in single-issue form from 1986 to 1987.)  It's not even specifically the struggle between two superpowers that fascinates Moore but the existence of the doomsday clock, one of the famous symbols of the story, counting down the world's chances of nuclear annihilation.

I came to Watchmen years later.  The disasters I was most familiar with growing up were Challenger, Chernobyl, Exxon-Valdez, that sort of thing.  I was nine years old when the Berlin Wall came down, twenty years removed from the chance to be alive when it was constructed.  I grew up in a different kind of world.  Moore's President of the United States isn't Ronald Reagan but Richard Nixon, who at the rate he would have been going eclipsed the record FDR actually set five decades earlier.  No one ever really questions the logic of any of these decisions in Watchmen.  I think it's because the target audience was far more aware of the world Moore grew up in than I could ever have been when I knew the story only as one of the most famous and critically praised comic books ever created.

As such, for me Watchmen itself exists in a vacuum.  Except it doesn't.

I've just stumbled upon this 1970s talk show clip:

In it, literary giants Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer engage in something you would probably never even imagine as a possibility in today's world, two writers engaging in a verbal war of words.  The last time a writer was on a talk show, Oprah was castigating James Frey.  We couldn't have a Truman Capote today.  Maybe the sight of Vidal and Mailer measuring the size of each other's...finger bowls (host Dick Cavett certainly has some fun with Mailer's comments) was enough to convince everyday Americans that writers were maybe just a little too full of themselves.

The clip was enough to get me to wonder a little about Mailer, who died in 2007.  His was a name I knew, vaguely, but had never read, and I think there's a good reason for that.  Probably in the 1970s everyone in college would have read him, but he never came up in the early 2000s.  His moment had passed.  So what was his moment, exactly?  He was one of the people who tried to figure out what the 1950s were all about.  Yes, that's how far back he goes.  He was a writer who tried to make sense of the culture shift occurring during the start of the Cold War.  At the start of the doomsday clock, if you will.

This had the effect of opening the last sixty years of American history wider than anything else I've experienced in half that time.  Mailer argued that the constant threat of nuclear annihilation should have produced a definitive break in human psychology.  And it did.  Except that instead of everyone fearing that the world was going to end at any moment, the younger generations started living simply for the moment.  I guess, initiating a full decade before the Summer of Love the concept of a counterculture.  (Marlon Brando in The Wild One and, more famously, James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause thank you for acknowledging this.)  If there's no guarantee of tomorrow, why live by the old rules at all?

And you know what, that's something I completely understand.  I've been observing for years how the culture around me seems to have been directly influenced by the 1960s, socially and politically.  It never even occurred to me that it wasn't that decade at all, but a decade earlier that had produced this radical shift.  And so, maybe someone like Alan Moore makes more sense than he might otherwise seem, to someone who didn't experience any of the immediate effects of the Cold War, who only read about it in history books, watched it end on TV.

His Watchmen becomes the final statement of the doomsday clock.  His attempt to put the whole thing behind him, everyone, whoever cares.  This apathy for superheroes that infuses Moore's work is another symptom of his conclusions.  Superheroes were originally relevant in WWII.  This was a time when people needed superheroes.  They almost went away completely in the 1950s.  I guess it only figures.  When they staged their comeback in the 1960s, they were permanently warped, or so it seemed.  They became much more ironic.  (Which explains all the movies that have been made recently from Marvel characters.)  Moore's apathy, his latent cynicism, is a direct response to this trend that had been developing for decades.  Do superheroes stay or do they go?  Do they even still have a point, when the real world has no one capable of magically eliminating the greatest threat mankind has ever faced?

It's not Moore but Mailer who first addressed this.  Mailer didn't do it with superheroes.  But Moore's concluding thoughts from that era, they become so much easier to understand.  Today they're on the verge of losing all sense.  Watchmen will be remembered as a statement on superheroes.  But its deeper connection, its historical resonance, may be lost, if fans continue to listen to Moore himself, who long ago began a different kind of battle, one that, well, looks a lot like Mailer matching wits with Gore Vidal.

So maybe there's more to Watchmen than I once believed.  Not the clever symmetry in the art.  Not the dawn of the age of the adult reader.  There's a point to the fear Ozymandias represents, the fear of something so great it must be combated with something even more grotesque.  This is a story of morality, not superheroes.  And has everything to do with nuclear annihilation, but not a doomsday clock.  It's a war of cultures.

So maybe I need to read Norman Mailer.  Maybe Alan Moore doesn't really matter without the context of Mailer.  Then, and perhaps only then, will I truly be able to reconcile the monstrous ego of Moore, to find out what he's really trying to protect.  The kind of innocence his Rorschach dedicated a savage career to avenging, perhaps.

And perhaps, just perhaps, I'm struggling with these thoughts now because of another game of brinkmanship, once again taking place between America and Russia.  But we've learned from the past.  Right?