Reading Comics 221 "Tampa Comic Con 2018"

This past Saturday I attended my first ever comic con, packed to the gills with geeky goodness.  I picked up a few comics and a bunch of collections (but I haven't gotten around to transposing any of my Goodreads collections reviews here, even though that's been a goal for a few years now).  Here's some thoughts!

The Couch Preview
A typical sketchy-art indy book featuring a twist on superheroes: the lead is actually a psychiatrist whose career is flatlining when he suddenly finds himself with an unexpected new clientele: Wrecking Ball and the Ultra Squad. 

Invincible Iron Man #600 (Marvel)
The last-forever-for-now Brian Michael Bendis Marvel comic!  I've been trying to track down a copy for a little while now, so it was great to find one in one of the vendors' discount bins.  The story wraps up "The Search for Tony Stark," and explains what happened to him, and how he used that to also revive Jim Rhodes.  Marvel also decided to stick with the whole adoption concept another writer introduced a few years back, and Bendis gives us a look at the birth parents.  We see Riri Williams joining a team that also includes Miles Morales, destined to be one of Bendis's lasting contributions to Marvel lore, and his epic Ultimate Spider-Man run.  He skirts the whole idea of Doctor Doom running around as Iron Man recently.  He spends a lot of time with the A.I. Tony ruminating on the nature of his existence, which might as well be considered allegorical for Bendis reflecting on his big transition.  In lieu of one final signature letters/hype column and/or farewell essay, he gives readers some photographs of important behind-the-scene moments from about the last ten years of his Marvel tenure.  It was worth having a look at.

Jupiter's Legacy 2 #4, 5 (Image)
The final issues of the second (technically fourth, if you include the two Jupiter's Circle series with a different artist) volume of Mark Millar and Frank Quitely's bid for a grand superhero generational statement.  It's sometimes hard to separate the hype from the emerging legacy of a Millar comic.  All I know is Quitely feels constrained compared to stuff I've seen him do with Grant Morrison (their Multiversity: Pax Americana is my favorite collaboration between them).  I do like the emphasis on generations, though by "generational," earlier, I was talking about a generation-defining comic like Watchmen. 

Kamandi Challenge #9 (DC)
Tom King's issue in the grand concept of new creators every issue for a year, with each new team finishing whatever cliffhanger the one before it left them.  I'm not sure if King's goal here was to do that or comment on the existential nature of the concept.  Not sure it's one of his better comics, but certainly interesting, as King always is.

Millarworld New Talent Annual 2017 (Image)
Two years running I entered this contest and lost, and it's always interesting to see the script that beat me.  (Two years running I'm not impressed).  The highlights from the results this time are more plentiful than the previous one.  The Empress story (that's the one I entered this time) features great art from Luana Vecchio, with watercolor coloring that helps it additionally stand out.  Simon James' Superior script is pretty great.  Martin Renard's Super Crooks script is pretty clever.  The whole Huck package, writing from Stephanie Cooke and art from Jake Elphick, sells the concept pretty well.  I'm glad I was able to catch a copy of this finally, too.

Nibiru and the Legend of the Anunnaki #1, 2 (Fat Cat)
This is exactly the sort of thing you hope to find at a convention, especially one with name creators (I went to one in Colorado Springs, much smaller, with a bunch of local talent).  Neal Adams was there, and Fabien Nicieza ("creator of Deadpool," his table said, with the only official line of all the creators), and Scott Lobdell!  But the one I stopped at was Pat Broderick's.  The Pat Broderick who spoke to me was actually his wife.  Pat Broderick the classic Marvel/DC artist didn't really do much talking and/or interacting in general, which was fine.  The Pat Broderick who was his wife was very, very eager to talk, constantly hyping Nibiru even after I'd said I would buy it, and even after I bought it!  That's exactly the kind of help you want at something like this!  The comic itself features landscape formatting inside and...fairly atrocious editing.  The art can be a little rough, too.  Still, I appreciated having a look and supporting a guy who's been in the business a long time and sometimes not had the easiest time staying in.  Apparently he's a Tampa local and has had some professional jobs around town, too.  I figured Nibiru was his bid to get back into comics, in the thoroughly modern sense (the project was launched via Kickstarter, naturally).  The storytelling is very much in the Prince Valiant vein. Two issues in and it's basically still setup, though the action picks up with naked men fighting each other in the second issue.  The Pat Broderick who was his wife assured me the third issue was publishing soon, and I've seen art from the next few issues.  These two were published in 2016. 

Scout Comics Presents #1 (Scout Comics)
For a small publisher, there's a lot of excellent art and even decent storytelling on display in the previews included.  The least successful concept is actually Stabbity Rabbit, which had its own table at the con, separate from the one where I picked this up, which is too bad, because something called Stabbity Rabbit sounds like it really ought to be awesome. 

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. 

The Multiversity: Pax Americana (DC)

writer: Grant Morrison
artist: Frank Quitely

via DC Wikia

The Multiversity: Pax Americana is all about the elephant in the room.

The elephant's name is Watchmen, by the way, but like any comic book reference there's a secret identity, too, and that's Alan Moore.  And Grant Morrison spends the entire issue deconstructing the most famous deconstruction of comic book superheroes ever created, one that has been hailed not merely as one of the finest superhero comics ever, but one of the great pieces of 20th century American fiction in general.

Late in the issue, Morrison delivers his most sly commentary on the effort when he quotes President Kennedy from a speech he made in 1963, five months before his assassination, supporting an initiative that led to the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty.

You'll note for the record here that I've previously discussed how Moore's vision was perhaps influenced by his growing up under the spectre of nuclear war, something later generations perhaps may not properly appreciate.

Morrison's reference to the speech is a direct refute of Moore's thesis, and represents the fundamental difference between their approaches to superhero comics.  In Pax Americana, Peacemaker assassinates the president, a direct reference to the Comedian's implied assassination of Kennedy.  Comedian is Peacemaker, and thus in this iteration Peacemaker is Comedian.  Part of what I loved so much about the recent Before Watchmen comics was the chance for creators to more heavily explore the implications of what Moore outlined in his original story, and Brian Azzarello did exactly that within his Comedian, the best of those efforts.  Now we're seeing more of the fruits of comic books directly reflecting Watchmen rather than applying all the wrong lessons, which many of Moore's successors did (I would argue Garth Ennis as being the worst offender, especially in the pages of the vastly overrated The Boys).

Moore was always a cynic in some respects, a Silver Age fan in a post-Silver Age world who clung to his memories and yet was the first to truly obliterate them.  It should be understood that when I say "Silver Age," I refer to the innocent comics that are best reflected in the popular memory by the George Reeves Superman and Adam West Batman on television, which even at that time were beginning to be artifacts of the past, with the dawn of the Marvel Age introducing a layer of new sophistication.

Morrison himself has long attempted to redeem the Silver Age through more conventional means; the "Black Casebook" aspects of his Batman stories were a way of incorporating the more outlandish elements of the Dark Knight's legacy into a more realistic approach, or at least one that better fit in with what comics have since become.  Funny enough, when he did a Bat-Mite story outside of Batman context (Happy!), he was accused of trying to be someone else (Ennis).

Such are critics.

Pax Americana is littered with ideas like this.  It's a terrific accomplishment on any number of levels, the best single issue of the Multiversity saga to date (which is saying something; this was a project that was years in development, and it shows).

There's Morrison's reteaming with Frank Quitely.  The last time they worked this well together, the result was We3, a breakthrough for both of them that still awaits its proper appreciation.  Pax Americana on this score is a perfect example of the benefits of two creators continuing to work together, pushing each other to their very best.  Clearly Quitely is asked to tackle the challenge of Watchmen's famous stylistic legacy, which is half of what everyone gushes about it.  The script itself does so, too.  Not since Grayson: Futures End #1, and this is incredible to have one let alone two comics in a single year to have tackled a story so deliberately, have I read something this sensational.
Morrison's Question reflects Moore's Rorschach, but again and perhaps more tellingly, which came first?  The Question is a character whose legacy has been all but forgotten except through the lens of a pastiche.  The last time he was relevant was in the pages of 52, and in a current iteration has an entire mystical layer that isn't a part of the original legacy at all.  A reinvented persona.  Morrison is a writer who will always be able to understand a character better than whoever else has been handling them previously.  His Question isn't a psychopath exorcising his own demons, but he does take his gimmick seriously.  Maybe the general attitude is the same, but again, Pax Americana is clearly a reflection of Watchmen already.  One that turns the story back around.

Captain Atom/Doctor Manhattan, Blue Beetle/Nite-Owl, Nightshade/Silk Spectre.  There's a lot of analytic potential here.

Bottom line is, this is one master reflecting on another.  I personally think Morrison comes out on top.  He has a better grasp of the subject material and he's more willing to side with the material, oddly, trust that superheroes can make their own defense, that stories can be multifaceted, and that a single issue can do all the necessary work.  Ever since the early days of Batman Incorporated (the first volume), he's made a concerted effort to tell a complete story while suggesting how it fits in the larger context.  That's what he did in Seven Soldiers of Victory, The Return of Bruce Wayne, and now The Multiversity.  This issue is his most subtle and yet most intricate work to date.  It may be the best comic book published in 2014, the most relevant superhero statement of the 21st century to date.

And the project isn't even finished yet.  This is a giant love letter to a medium, to a genre.  That's the difference between Grant Morrison and Alan Moore.  Moore wanted to distinguish an emerging sophisticated approach.  Morrison hopes superheroes can still explain themselves.  It certainly helps to have someone like him around to lend some assistance.