Quarter Bin 112 "Teen Titans Turning Points"

Tales of the Teen Titans #59, 78 (DC)
The New Titans #71 (DC)
Teen Titans #16 (DC)
from November 1985, June 1987, November 1990, November 2004

Each of these issues kind of encapsulates a turning point for the Teen Titans, so that was pretty neat.  Tales #59 is a reprint of their first adventure under Marv Wolfman and George Perez, the start of a wildly popular run that rivaled the X-Men in the '80s.  Tales #78, meanwhile, features the team apparently splitting up.  New Titans #71, as you can tell from the cover, is an anniversary celebration.  Teen Titans #16 kind of once again reintegrates Superboy into Legion lore (long complicated history, there).

I don't think the Wolfman/Perez run ages particularly well.  I've read "The Judas Contract," and that did age well, but a lot of the soap opera elements that made the run so popular don't work as well today.  Reading Geoff Johns' Teen Titans again is always interesting, because that was one of the runs where he cut his teeth, that and JSA, as DC's resident continuity guy, which is funny because his Titans drastically revamped characters like Superboy [insert classic anecdote about the letter here] and Kid Flash while also giving the team its first successful run in more than a decade.

New Titans #71 also has the distinction of having Tom Grummett art.  Grummett went on to be a Superman artist, and in that way helped introduce the modern Superboy.  By 1990, apparently, his style was already set, so there was no trouble recognizing his work.

It's kind of amazing that Wolfman thought in the '80s that a Titans movie was imminent, which is far more humbling in 2017 than Stan Lee hyping a Spider-Man movie in the '90s.  But that's one of the many reasons to read back issues, to see what people were thinking back in the day...

Convergence: The Adventures of Superman #1 (DC)

writer: Marv Wolfman

artist: Roberto Viacava

Well, this one is one of the best excuses to have done Convergence at all: giving Marv Wolfman an excuse to revisit Crisis On Infinite Earths.  Years later Wolfman also wrote the novelization of his most seminal work, so this continues a welcome tradition.  Here it's an even less likely, ah, convergence.  A different era's Supergirl was one of the famous deaths in Crisis.  Today that Supergirl might as well have not have existed at all except historically, because there have been so many other versions that she has been completely lost in the shuffle.

Wolfman cleverly plays on that, too.  He's got a blank slate to work with, and so not only takes the opportunity to play with her acknowledged fate in Crisis but demonstrating how much fun the character could be.  This is probably the only innocent version of Supergirl available, which is extremely odd to even consider.  Subsequent versions were all dark in one way or another, including the New 52 one, who eventually signed up as a Red Lantern, with all the rage therein implied.  Crisis Supergirl is much more in-line with, say G. Willow Wilson's Ms. Marvel, or even the popular reboot of the New 52 Batgirl.  This is a Supergirl who has a direct relationship with Superman.  Yeah, this hasn't happened since Crisis.  And yeah, that's weird to think about, and even weirder to realize that it took this to realize that.

And even weirder that Lucius Fox, a supporting player I know from other iterations (much like Supergirl herself) comes off in the early pages like Fringe's Walter Bishop.  Which is awesome.  Coming off his most famous version (Batman Begins et al's weapons developer), this is either like finding out what he once was, or could become all over again.  Either way, pretty awesome.

The Crisis era Convergence spin-offs probably have the best chance of helping fans discover, or rediscover, potential like this.  And Wolfman's Adventures of Superman seized this wonderful opportunity.

Quarter Bin #55 "Lex Luthor: The Unauthorized Biography, plus Batman: Year Three, The Mighty Thor, and Young Men"

Comics featured in this column were not necessarily bought in an actual quarter bin.  This is a back issues feature.

Lex Luthor: The Unauthorized Biography (DC)
From 1989

via eBay

One of my many hilarious embarrassing moments concerns my original, failed attempt to buy this prestige format one-shot.  It was just before I began reading comics regularly, and I had entered the shop I would frequent for the rest of the '90s.  They had several rows of boxes lined on the floor.  I totally misinterpreted the deal I was going to get.  I spent a long time going through each box.  I had a huge stack.  I thought I had enough money.  I did not.  To this day, The Unauthorized Biography's distinctive cover is my only memory of the comics I discovered that inglorious day.  I've always wanted to read it as a result.

(Apparently the cover mimics one for an autobiography Donald Trump had released at the time.)

Jump ahead twenty years, and the journey is now complete.  As it turns out, it's pretty good.  The story isn't really a straightforward biography so much as the journey a private investigator takes as he compiles his notes for one.  This was the era of Luthor as a ruthless businessman, and as such all the P.I.'s research turns up how he reached that point, from humble origins involving "obnoxiously mediocre" parents.

via iFanboy

Perhaps the most interesting element is actually Clark Kent's supporting role.  Our erstwhile Superman ends up a Jim Rockford type, accused of the murder because he had no other plausible reason for discovering the body of the murdered P.I. other than professional opportunism, or so the cops figure (if anyone ever made another stab at a Clark Kent-based TV series, his adventures as a reporter, not strictly in a romantic sense, would probably make for interesting material; although even as a comic book, I'm surprised this has never been done).

The writer is James Hudnall, who quickly backed away from mainstream comics and has thusly become fairly obscure, which is a shame if this material is at all indicative of his work.  The artist is Eduardo Barreto, who stuck around much longer.  

Batman #437 (DC)

From 1989

The cover declares, "Batman: Year 3" (Part 2 of 4), although it might more accurately be called "Robin: Year 1."  Everyone knows "Year One," the other notable Frank Miller story featuring Batman.  DC decided to keep the story alive by continuing into "Year 2" (featuring Batman as an established commodity) and "Year 3," which was written by Marv Wolfman, who in the midst of his Titans run certainly had come to know Dick Grayson well enough.  Besides the Robin origin, "Year 3" is also part of the "Death in the Family"/"Lonely Place of Dying" sequence, otherwise known as the death of Jason Todd (the second Robin) and the debut of Tim Drake (the third), so that interspersed with the flashback is a story set in the present at that time.

King-Size Thor #2 (Marvel)

Reprint from 1994, originally published 1966

 I picked this up mostly to have another look at the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby duo.  The featured story involves the (Marvel) Norse version of the games featured in The Iliad, which take a typical-for-that-time twist with bad guys (and Loki).  It's not what I was expecting.  Lee is filled to bursting with his usual hyperbolic dialogue, while Kirby is as Kirby does (it'd be little wonder to discover that he thought up the Inhumans and the New Gods thanks to working on material like this).  There are a couple other stories included.  Not worth mentioning beyond that.

Young Men #25 (Atlas, a.k.a. Marvel)

Reprint from 1994, originally published in 1954

Another vintage experience, featuring the Human Torch (original version), Namor the Submariner, and Captain America (combined, they were known as the Invaders) in separate tales.  It is what it is.  The Submariner tale was the most amusing one.  I have no idea why Marvel is so stingy with Namor comics these days.   

Quarter Bin #39 "Untold Tales of the Past"

HITMAN #8 (DC)

From November 1996:

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

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

From 1986:

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