Pandemic Comics #8 “Mark Waid and the Khunds Appear In These, But Not Together”

More comics from the Mile High mystery boxes...

The Justice Society Returns: National Comics #1
Here’s Mark Waid writing the Flash. No, not Wally West, Jay Garrick! But Waid actually gives more focus to the original Mister Terrific, whom he characterizes as...great at everything. I don’t know if it’s only in comics, but it’s really funny how in comics the idea of the renaissance man is such a cartoon, that not only are these people better at one thing than has ever been humanly achieved before, they’re better at a wide range of things. I don’t think comic book writers understand how this works. They really don’t understand how Olympic athletes perform, for instance. They seem to assume that because someone has reached the Olympics they’re absolutely flawless. Anyone who has ever watched the Olympics knows even the winners often show flaws, and a lot of reaching the gold medal is that the vast majority of the field has flubbed horribly. This is not to say that just anyone could beat them. It takes real talent, but real talent does not mean it comes without flaws...Anyway.

The Kingdom: Son of the Bat #1
Here’s Mark Waid again (he’ll come up again!), expanding on the version of this character that isn’t Damian Wayne. In this case, reconciling competing legacies pretty much by default goes in Damian’s favor. This one (will not dignify his terrible name) doesn’t even care to carry on the Batman legacy, and the story is basically about how ineffective he is at outthinking the end of the world. Which is of course something Batman does, uh, every other day (and twice on Sunday).

L.E.G.I.O.N. #32
I think this whole team concept was basically doing a present-day Legion of Super-Heroes. Stupid name all the same. If you’re going to have an acronym in the title, make sure...Okay, just don’t do a series with an acronym in the title. Basically, only S.H.I.E.L.D. gets a free pass with this (and really only because of the TV show, and the movies, has it ever actually gotten one).

L.E.G.I.O.N. #44
Anyway, I’m not spelling out any acronyms again. Ever! Pain in the ass, aside from everything else...Anyway, these issues feature some of the Khunds of which I speak in the title line of this blog entry. The Khunds are kind of like the Klingons at DC, a badass warrior species.

Legion of Super-Heroes #310 
Relationship drama. It’s hard to remember now, but the Legion was about as popular as the X-Men and the Teen Titans in the ‘80s. But they were building less real history, so there’s less to remember. Even “The Great Darkness Saga,” the team’s surprise Darkseid epic, seems to recede easily into the past. Er, future. Also: Khunds.

Lobo: Infanticide #4
Lobo battles his bastard kid! The artwork probably deliberately obscured the gruesome action. More importantly, I’m pretty sure this comic (cover-dated January 1993) is the first time I’ve seen ads heavily promoting the launch of the Vertigo line. I remember a TV spot from the general time period that promoted DC and Vertigo (took me years to have any clue what “Black Orchid” was about, and even now I’m not hugely sure; one of the big early Vertigo comics, but quickly got left behind).

Manhunter #33
This was the Starman of its era, but the acclaim didn’t stretch nearly as far, and it hasn’t received strong collection support. And this issue is perhaps too busy to let any if its material really land. But still impressive work.

Metamorpho #2
Honestly, I assumed some of the stuff I was reading in The Terrifics was created specifically for it, but apparently it’s all right there in these earlier Metamorpho adventures, so that was great to see. Rex Mason would be a much bigger deal, I think, if his superhero design weren’t so...weird. Also: Mark Waid wrote this, too!

The Next #1
At the time, DC seemed to have heavily invested in fantasy writer Tad Williams as a comics creator. Along with this he was also given Aquaman: Sword of Atlantis, and as it happened I read both and thoroughly enjoyed them. But Williams didn’t stick around long (unlike the epic lengths of his fantasy books), and I never did revisit his comics until now. What it read like this time was someone in the vein of Grant Morrison with far more interest in being weird, and no real grounding to support it. Which makes me glad the Tad Williams experiment didn’t pan out. And I only read one of his massive fantasy books, too. He’s someone else’s favorite writer, I guess.

Reading Comics 241 "Batman Annual #4, plus a few more comics"

Batman Annual #4 (DC)

Yeah.  Now I'm sort of glad that this was the last one I read.  I had attempted to order a copy late last year, but got the numbering wrong and ended up with Batman Annual #2, which is itself also a great read, but it left me still needing to read this one.  And now I've read it after the last issue of Tom King's Batman.  And it works extremely well as a coda.

Basically, Alfred's diary, as the cover suggests, details the daily exploits of the Dark Knight.  Big adventures (dragons! and not the first time he's fought them, as Alfred duly notes!), small adventures.  Basically, as if Tom King really needed to prove to anyone he was capable of conceiving a Batman story well beyond the scope of his very long meditation in the main run.  Or if he really needed to prove, yet again, how consistently great he is.

A lot of writers, and I've read a lot of comics, and a lot of comics over the course of years from the same creators, are not this consistent.  They just aren't.  Even those who can hit truly high notes once or twice or even a half dozen times in their careers, they just aren't this consistent.  Sometimes it may simply be a matter of my disagreeing with their personal tastes.  But I've never had a comics writer I've so consistently admired as Tom King, since his breakthrough in the pages of Omega Men.  His co-writing work with Tim Seeley in Grayson, it's something I'll have to revisit in full at some point (though I repeat, I repeat, King's solo work in Grayson: Futures End remains the first time I realized how great he could be), but that's really the only time I haven't been able to say, Wow. 

A lot of fans quibble (and I use the term liberally) over his creative choices, but King, as far as I'm concerned, has achieved his greatness through his consistent use of creative choices, never being satisfying in "just" writing a story, but figuring out the best way to tell it.  That's what truly great writing looks like, that's what I love the most about a story, in any medium, how it's executed. 

And so we get this, which on the surface is pretty simple: a litany of fairly routines situations.  By the end, King isn't even writing anything the reader will see, and his perspective still dominates.  It helps to have Jorge Fornes (and Mike Norton) on art.  Fornes has quickly vaulted to the forefront of deceptively simple stylists, and this might end up serving as one of his calling cards.  Both in story and art, this is the definition of evergreen, something fans will be able to turn to for years.

The Dark Knight Returns: The Golden Child (DC)
In the tradition of the Last Crusade prestige format one-shot spin-offs, Golden Child focuses on Carrie, Lara, and Jonathan (the eponymous offspring for this comic) as they struggle to find their perspectives on the world and how they represent the legacies of their parents.  It's a worthy addition to the saga, and really nice to see Frank Miller get to write solo again.  The artist does a good job of embodying Miller's Dark Knight Returns work, notably with the Joker.

Event Leviathan #6 (DC)
This is something I'm going to want to check out in full, but had to read the final issue sooner rather than later thanks to the big reveal of who the new Leviathan is, one of the old Manhunters (not the robots, the several humans who have operated under the name over the years).  I think Bendis has only further increased the value of his DC tenure with this one.

Legion of Super-Heroes: Millennium #2 (DC)
Even though the Bendis ongoing has since launched, I was pleased to be able to catch the second and final issue of the preview, Rose (and Thorn)'s tour of DC future history leading up to the Legion itself.  Brian Michael Bendis basically achieved the Moira MacTaggert reveal from Hickman's X-Men before Hickman, with the new version of Rose (and Thorn) an immortal who gives an innovative (in superhero comics) approach to the idea, and begging that he revisit her.  But at his best, Bendis does that with every character he touches.  \

The Wildstorm #24 (DC)
Figured I'd check out the finale of the Warren Ellis reboot.  But I'm still not much more interested in the characters, or Ellis, than I generally tend to be. 

Reading Comics 238 "Flashpoint Batman, Far Sector, Second Coming, & more"

I haven't been to an actual comic book store in about half a year, so I decided it was time to visit one, given the opportunity, and found some good stuff:

Batman #84 (DC)
And now there's one issue to go.  Ironically or not, but the longer Tom King's run went, the less fans really cared.  The obvious tipping point was when the wedding didn't actually happen.  Fans felt cheated.  They wanted something truly big to happen, and King seemed to promise exactly that.  Instead the reaction has solidified on...pretty much how all of King's DC material has been received, as so much awkward navel-gazing.  The irony here is that when he did it for Marvel (The Vision), everyone lauded him as a new genius, perhaps because Marvel so seldom publishes reflective material, let alone seems to realize that it has, and that it's worth celebrating. 

I still can't think of any comic book writer I've so consistently admired, who has so often grasped the potential of DC's landscape.  His accomplishments go far beyond anyone else's for the fact of delivering on nearly everything he's done, dating back to Omega Men, when he was entrusted with his first spotlight work.  That goes back to 2015.  Half a decade of excellence, and one long stellar run on a major title.

This particular issue harkens back to his first standout mainstream accomplishment, Grayson: Futures End, where I first came to discover King's remarkable talents.  Grayson was a series he typically wrote in conjunction with Tim Seeley, but for the Futures End one-shot, he wrote solo, and even beyond the clever coding gimmick, it was brilliant character-based storytelling. 

So in the issue, he basically extrapolates the Flashpoint Batman's complete story, which is all the more remarkable because that story was already brilliantly told in Flashpoint itself and the acknowledged best mini-series that spun out of it.  And in doing so, explains his whole purpose for the Batman run he's been doing all along.  This is a master class, not only in itself but in the fruitful extension of someone else's ideas.  When all is said and done, it's something that will need to be included not only in the legacy of Batman, but Flashpoint, and superhero comics in general.

Collapser #5 (DC/Young Animal)
I like to try and discover interesting new material, too, when I visit a comics shop.  Granted, this was far easier when I used to spend far more money on comics (money that I, ah, didn't technically...have?), but now I have to use the old "it looks interesting" approach, or even risk taking recommendations (these don't always pan out, naturally, but then, it's how I discovered Young Avengers).  And Collapser #5 had an interesting cover, and it was a Young Animal comic.  I love the Young Animal imprint, even if fans in general seem strangely apathetic about it.  Such is life.  The results this time were adequate, if not sensational.  I didn't regret buying and/or reading it.  Yay!

Copra #3 (Image)
Ah!  So Copra is being published by Image now!  The last time I can think of that Image picked up a popular self-published comic was Bone.  Probably not the only example, but the only one I really care about.  And Copra is another great acquisition!  It may look crude, compared to the slick packages of virtually every other Image comic (but that goes with the name, right?), but Copra remains a good read.

Doctor Mirage #4 (Valiant)
I've sort of let Valiant's comics slip from my radar in recent years, but I like to keep tabs.  Apparently they finally continued Doctor Mirage's adventures!  Sadly, not under the title The Death-Defying Doctor Mirage, much less written by Jen Van Meter, but it's still nice to see!

Far Sector #1 (DC/Young Animal)
Ah!  It's almost like reading King's Omega Men all over again!  Insofar as it's another Green Lantern tale, without "Green Lantern" in the title, that turns out to be a brilliant new interpretation of what a Green Lantern comic can be!  Far Sector features yet another new human Green Lantern, but N.K. Jemisin doesn't linger (at least in this debut issue) on that aspect so much as the murder mystery she's tossed into, in about as grand a miasma as King's Omega Men featured.  Some readers might complain that Jemisin tries to be too hip, but I think it works, and it makes me want to not only keep tabs on Far Sector, but read some of Jemisin's books.  It doesn't always work, but finding talent outside the usual comic book circles has the potential to find a Jemisin or a Tom King.  And apparently awesome new Green Lantern comics.  Love it!

Flash Forward #1 (DC)
After all the complaints about Heroes in Crisis, I loved when DC announced Flash Forward, a new Wally West tale.  Several issues have been released at this point, but I figured I should see how it began.  And I love it.  Scott Lobdell, who has quietly become one of DC's one reliable character writers, captures a Wally who's even more traumatized than readers by his actions, but thrust all the same into a wild new adventure.  Juxtaposing Wally's arc with another wild ride into the multiverse is itself another interesting choice, but I think Lobdell can avoid duplicating what ultimately happened to Booster Gold when he attempted a career revision in similar fashion (and in the process helped form the foundation of the TV series Legends of Tomorrow, which he inexplicably has never factored into).

Legion of Super-Heroes #1 (DC)
I've never been a devoted Legion fan, but I've read enough Legion comics to have built up an interest, and this is Brian Michael Bendis, still firing on all cylinders in his new DC digs, so of course I dig it.

Second Coming #5 (Ahoy)
Wow.  So I haven't read anything but this issue, but I'm glad this comic exists.  It's exactly what Mark Russell should be writing.  The guy made his name writing stuff like this, so I'm glad he returned to the well.  This particular issue is God and Satan having an awkward attempt at reconciliation, which is itself brilliant, plus the Second Coming Superman analog struggling at another kind of reconciliation, whether or not he'll ever have a child, which '90s Superman (in the comics and Lois & Clark on TV wondered about, too) was also concerned about, although since then we've gotten two versions of Superman's son.  I'm in love with Russell again.  I continue to hope that, even as his profile has risen greatly in recent years, it can go higher still.

X-Men #1 (Marvel)
Jonathan Hickman, riding high from great acclaim for his X-Men universe relaunch, begins to settle in, and I still enjoy the results.

Young Justice #11 (DC/Wonder Comics)
Here's Bendis again, integrating Naomi into the greater landscape.  I love that he's helped Tim Drake finally follow in Dick Grayson (and Jason Todd's! and even Stephanie Brown's!) footsteps and assume an identity that doesn't have "Robin" in it.  I know some fans complain that it's...Drake, which is...already his last name.  But realistically, his secret identity is still firmly intact.  And at the moment, his adventures are so wild, he's far removed from the common element, so it hardly matters.  But I want it to stick.  I want a Drake comic.  (And a comic for everyone in this book!  I wasn't totally committed to the Peter David version of the team.  But I'm glad it's made a comeback.)  And I'm glad Naomi is getting a chance to expand her emerging legacy.  I hope she sticks around for years.

Reading Comics 235 "Second Forbidden Geek Mystery Box"

I got my second Forbidden Geek mystery box, including a Supergirl statue, a copy of Justice League Vol. 2: The Villain's Journey (which was a very pleasant surprise; eventually I'll have the complete Johns collection), and the following comics:

All Star Batman #3 (DC)
Snyder once again in his nutshell, blowing everything up into possibly misguided epic proportions.  This time it's how Batman and Two-Face were actually childhood friends.  But, also features the KGBeast!  Alas, without his '90s Russian accent.

Captain Atom #7 (DC)
This is what I love about Forbidden Geek's mystery boxes, getting stuff I've always wanted to read but for whatever reason haven't gotten around to yet.  Captain Atom was one of those short-lived New 52 titles at launch.  I never had a clue what the series was like.  Now I finally do!  J.T. Krul, one of the dependable writers of that era who kind of disappeared without good reason, depicts his version of the character as Captain Atom has ever since DC gave in and acknowledged that Doctor Manhattan was based on him.  I first became acquainted with the character (whose main claim to fame is being but not really being the secret origin of Monarch in Armageddon 2001) in the pages of Justice League America and Extreme Justice, where he was depicted as more a Superman type, but a more aggressive version (just not to the degree that the original version of Supreme was, before Alan Moore made him a Silver Age Superman pastiche).  The art is from Freddie Williams II, who in recent years has come to be defined by the improbable Batman/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics.  I've got plenty of experience with his work, which I often find too cartoonish but not cartoonish enough to be accepted as such.  Here he's got better line work, though he apparently has no idea what riding a bike looks like (the legs, particularly).  I would absolutely love to read a collected edition of this material.

Constantine #5 (DC)
The New 52 attempt to mainstream John Constantine (a concept begun in Brightest Day) may have been somewhat misguided (at any rate, DC has yet to figure it out) works pretty well in this issue, with John temporarily stealing Shazam's powers (for his own good!), thereby setting a template other tales would do well to follow.  You can't really have the guy (even if he pops up in other books and/or teams) attempting to replicate his Vertigo experiences without recontextualizing him properly.  Ideally, he needs a central story, the way Zatanna is forever associated with her father's career, which increasingly is itself irrelevant but nonetheless provides a springboard to ground her.  The writer, of course, is Ray Fawkes, another great writer in that era who somehow failed to garner due respect.

Deathstroke #20 (DC)
A late New 52 series still running in the early Rebirth era (one of several, including Earth 2: Society and Doctor Fate, given a chance to wind down naturally), Slade (the youthful Slade, sans white hair!) blows up a partnership with Ra's al Ghul to reclaim his children. 

Hinterkind #10 (Vertigo)
A vampire series.  That is all.

Justice League #18 (DC)
A trademark of League comics is the membership drive (something Snyder ignored in pushing a huge lineup with multiple titles right from the start, so that everyone and their mother is instantly included).  That's what happens this issue.  Some new characters (Goldrush is sort of a revision of Bulleteer; sadly neither character has had much of a shelf life to date) and even a tease for the Crime Syndicate saga called Forever Evil makes this a fine character piece in a series with far more character work than you'd think.

Justice League #32 (DC)
Element Woman (a riff on Metamorpho), also featured in the membership drive, and the Doom Patrol(with a vicious Chief whose rival is Lex Luthor), try to tackle Jessica Cruz in the aftermath of her obtaining the power ring of, ah, Power Ring, the Crime Syndicate's Green Lantern.  Cruz later flattened into a character who sort of hid away in her room for...reasons, but it seems Johns originally had a deeper portrait in mind. 

Legion of Super-Heroes #283 (DC)
The token Older Issue in the box, this is an early '80s Legion comic featuring the secret origin of Wildfire.  I actually became more interested in the potential of at least one of the recruits he was testing.  Did anything ever end up happening with Lamprey?   Some quick research says no.  If I ever do get to write comics, I will include her in my Legion!

The New 52: Futures End #39 (DC)
This and Batman Eternal seem destined to show up in mystery selections.  At least I don't seem to get duplicate copies of this one. 

Richard Dragon #12 (DC)
The Chuck Dixon/Scott McDaniel series that reprised their Nightwing act.  Somewhat handily, the final issue.  God, I still want to know why McDaniel ended up blackballed from any significant work following Static Shock.  The dude was a staple at DC for a decade in high profile projects, and then criminally overlooked material like The Great Ten.  He's a treasure.  I doubt he was that awful to handle creatively when given a chance to write as well as draw.  He still shows up randomly here and there.  But, someone, anyone, give him a significant new project.

Superman #5 (DC)
The Tomasi/Gleason Rebirth series (seriously; McDaniel is like Gleason before Gleason was finally recognized), featuring the Eradicator targeting Jon Kent as a human/Kryptonian "abomination."  I don't think Tomasi/Gleason quite nailed Superman the way they did Batman and Robin.  I just saw Gleason popped up in Marvel Comics #1000 (which I'll be reading this week and have thoughts on next weekend).  Give these two a new project together before either considers really jumping ship.

Reading Comics 231 "Midtown Comics"

I had a bad habit of spending money I didn’t have, a decade ago, ordering comics from Midtown.  When I placed my most recent order, it was money I did have, so it was a fine thing to revisit the old habit.  Here’s what I got:

Doomsday Clock #11 (DC)

The penultimate issue, leading to the much-anticipated encounter between Superman and Doctor Manhattan, lays out what exactly Geoff Johns was doing all along, including finally explaining what Saturn Girl has been doing in the Rebirth era (somewhat ironically, for her).  This is probably some of the best stuff Johns has ever written.

The Green Lantern #11 (DC)

Back when I was at my blogging height, I collected a number of blogs I thought would be worth reading on a regular basis, but more often than not I was wrong.  One of them is a comics blog that has continued to review new comics every week, and…I just don’t give a wit about the guy’s opinions.  He seems positively allergic to any real ambition in comics.  So: he doesn’t like Grant Morrison’s Green Lantern.  I think you have to be an idiot not to like a Morrison comic, especially when he’s obviously applying himself and having a great old time.  And he’s clearly doing exactly that in this comic.  And in this issue alone, he does what no one since Geoff Johns has really been able to nail and that’s introduce another forgotten element of Green Lantern lore, and it doesn’t hurt that he deliberately draws on Don Quixote to do it (this has sort of been my Year of Don Quixote).  Anyway, while I don’t love everything Grant Morrison has ever done, this whole run is going to sit very proudly alongside my collection of his works.

Legion of Super-Heroes: Millennium #1 (DC)

Wow.  So, Brian Michael Bendis, folks.  The dude has been a tireless creative dynamo since coming to work for DC, not just with the creator-owned material he either brought with him or began, but the stuff he’s been imagining with familiar characters, and everything fans expected him to do, he just keeps coming up with curveballs.  This comic, for instance, actually centers on Rose & Thorn, a concept I came across in ‘90s Superman comics, but which Bendis makes his own, brilliantly.  Now I want to read a comic based on her, forget about the returning Legion!  But I’ll take the Legion, too, because I’m pretty convinced that if anyone can pull off a relevant new Legion, it’s Bendis.  I’ve never enjoyed him as much as I am now.  I haven’t always been a fan, per say, but I’ve enjoyed him in the past.  But he’s operating on an entirely new level now.  It’s, dare I say, amazing…

Section Zero #6 (Image)

Karl Kesel and Tom Grummett are basically reprising their old Superboy comics, which to my mind is a very good thing, with this one.  I bought the Stuart Immonen variant cover, naturally.

Spawn #300 (Image)

I’m pretty sure the creator-owned landmark Spawn is matching this issue and passing with the next one is Cerebus, which was much-celebrated in times past but much-criticized today.  Now, given that there’re 300 issues of Spawn to be accounted for and maybe the first few years that most fans are actually going to remember, someone had the bright idea to reboot back to the continuity, basically, of those early years for this occasion.  It’s only just occurred to me that Spawn as a concept seems to have copy-and-posted almost directly from Venom, as far as being a symbiotic costume thing.  Todd McFarlane explains how he came up with the character in the ‘70s, obviously before Venom or the black Spider-Man costume ever existed, but I wonder how much of what ended up being Spawn was envisioned back in the day and how much when McFarlane went off to help found Image on the back of all the money he and his fellow pirate artists were making at the time.  In fact, reading (or sort of reading) those Demon Etrigan comics from Forbidden Geek sort of put Spawn further in perspective: He’s sort of exactly Venom, but envisioned by DC. 

Star Trek: Discovery – Aftermath #1 (IDW)

I’m a fan of the series itself, so I didn’t mind revisiting it in comics form, and this comic is a good way to do so, and even harkens back to the best of IDW’s Star Trek comics.

Superman: Up in the Sky #3 (DC)

This is the comic book store reprint series of the Walmart Superman Giant material from Tom King and Andy Kubert, which I thought I’d get at least one issue of, calculating (correctly, as it happily turned out), that this one would feature the “controversial” installment featuring the many deaths of Lois Lane.  And rereading this material was as equally pleasurable as the first time, as I hoped, so that was also good to see.

Quarter Bin 70 "McGraw & Immonen's Legion, Kesel & Grummett's Superboy"

This is a back issues feature.  The comics featured were not actually purchased with quarters.  Although technically, I guess they were, just not with the number of them you were thinking...

Legion of Super-Heroes #53 (DC)
From January 1994.
Tom McGraw doesn't get near enough credit for the exceptional contributions he made to Legion lore.  Between Legion of Super-Heroes and Legionnaires, he wrote or co-write some two hundred issues of the 30th century superteam, and I have yet to read a bad one.  In fact, the more I realize that, the more I wonder why I never became a regular reader.  This is one of those good issues, and I picked it up because I didn't realize Stuart Immonen made his name with the Legion (because I naturally assumed he made it with Superman, where I discovered him), and I wanted to see more of his Legion work, naturally.  Turns out it's typically excellent.  McGraw cleverly provides a subplot featuring a history of the Legion by way of their battles with a particular foe, and it, well, fascinating.  The greater story of the issue somewhat eludes me, dropping in from the middle of nowhere, but it seems pretty grandiose, even by the standards with which my memory judges McGraw's Legion.  So now that I've collected all of Immonen's Superman (except one Secret Files) (which is something I did by ordering the rest from the Internet after some fruitful finds in various comic books stores), I may have to start collecting his Legion.  And possibly McGraw's.  Or, you know, DC could finally acknowledge the work both these guys did, and unveil some collections...

Superboy #79 (DC)
From October 2000.
Sometimes I get the itch to see where the creators I loved from the '90s left the runs I loved reading so much.  Some time ago I read Mark Waid's farewell from The Flash (which was slightly disappointing), and now I've finally read Karl Kesel and Tom Grummett's finale in Superboy.  Kesel and Grummett created this version of Superboy during their overall run in the Superman comics, thanks to the whole "Reign of the Supermen" arc (imagine if that ever made it into the movies...!), and had two separate runs in the ongoing series that followed.  As time went on, Kesel indulged more and more of his Jack Kirby fixation, especially in the second run.  This last issue features a Kirby-esque villain, and a Superboy who has a shield (like Captain America, and the Guardian).  The upsetting part of this is that the letters column clearly promises that after a creative team fill-in next issue, Kesel and Grummett would return.  But they never did.  Eventually, Dan DiDio began his DC tenure co-writing Superboy, but the series lasted only another twenty issues before being consolidated into Geoff Johns' Teen Titans in a new direction (famously suggested by Johns' own letter in the pages of Superboy).  Whether Kesel knew it or not already, he provided a farewell statement in the issue all the same, which was great to see.  I'll always be a fan of the Kesel/Grummett Superboy...