Future State - Top Ten: #3. Superman: Worlds of War/House of El

 

Writer : Phillip Kennedy Johnson

Artists: Mikel Janín, Scott Godlewski

My only previous experience with Johnson was The Last God, which I had only sampled with one issue, which I found impenetrable, so I had no idea what to expect from this.

So you might say this was the biggest surprise (other than my pick for second best of Future State!), because I thought it was brilliant!

Johnson takes a truly mythic approach to Superman, both in the woman who hero worships him at a human level and the task Superman himself has on Warworld.

What made it so amazing for me was that it turned out to be the very unlikely spiritual sequel to Tom King’s Superman: Up in the Sky, the story originally serialized in the pages of the Walmart Superman giants, which immediately became one of my favorite King comics, and Superman comics in general.

Most writers get caught up in Superman going about his everyday heroics, or try to scale him back, and yet Johnson, like King, is somehow capable of doing both.

It doesn’t hurt this comic’s standing, and legacy, to have subsequently enjoyed the early issues of Johnson’s Infinite Frontier Superman ongoing adventures.

Batman: Rebirth #1 (DC)

It's the dawn of the Tom King era in Batman comics.  Although, basically, it's King and artist Mikel Janin reprising their Grayson act.  (It'll be the same for Tomasi and Gleason in Superman, and thank goodness!)  If this is what Rebirth will be like, I can see that DC has indeed learned where its best talent has been. 

Scott Snyder is ostensibly along for the ride.  As with Geoff Johns in Green Lanterns: Rebirth, I think it's a purely ceremonial act, meant to assure wary fans that the old guard was there to make sure the new one knew what came before them.  Because this doesn't read like Snyder.  Snyder was all about diving into what King avoids in this issue, which is the chaos of Gotham around Batman's adventures.  King's Calendar Man, in fact, reads almost exactly like Snyder's Mr. Bloom, unleashing spores that cause chaos.  There's even Duke Thomas (assuming a new, as-yet unnamed heroic persona) along for the ride.

King's an emerging force for psychologically strong superhero storytelling.  His Batman is prone to pushing his limits in the classic sense (one of Snyder's best Batman comics involves a scenario very similar to what is presented in these pages, in Batman: Futures End as he sets about the clone agenda Snyder had previously explored in Detective Comics #27).  Otherwise, King's vision of Batman's strength of character remembers that Bruce Wayne still exists, too, and that his business acumen, and persistence, amount for something, too, the allies he made there, and what they have to say about where all of this came from.

The best lines in the issue come from Lucius Fox, who remembers this about the late Thomas Wayne:

"I once tried to talk your father into coming into the business.  Told him being a doctor drives you crazy.  Whatever you do, people just get sick again.  You make no progress.  He looked at me for a bit, got real quiet, stern almost.  It's a look I've only ever seen once again.  And it was in the face of a masked man [Batman].  Finally, in a dark voice, he said, 'You're right, Lucius, I am crazy.  But the sick need someone crazy enough to believe they can be better.  So what else could I be?'"

Now, recently, in the pages of a Marvel comic, Nick Spencer decided that Steve Rogers needed a neglectful father, that it would somehow help make his origin better.  (This is to say nothing about Hydra.)  That's the difference between Marvel and DC right there.  Steve's dad has been a nonentity all this time.  You can do whatever you want with him.  Thomas Wayne has never had that luxury.  Rarely seen, but every time he's brought it, it counts for something.  Is it a shortcut to make Batman's dad a good guy, too? 

Absolutely not.  Welcome aboard, Tom King.

Superman #52 (DC)

I haven't been following the complete "Final Days of Superman," the Peter J. Tomasi epic that rounds out, as much as any other story, the New 52 era.  The conclusion speaks for itself, however, so I'm not too worried.

In it, Superman is confronted by a doppelganger it takes everything he has to defeat.  Quite literally.  This issue counts as the official second death of Superman.

This is as clear a metaphor of the New 52 era as there could possibly be.  Grant Morrison helped launch it with the second Action Comics #1, presenting a new vision of Superman.  A series of writers within the pages of Superman itself attempted to keep up, and none of them, and indeed including Morrison himself, proved to produce that definitive New 52 Superman in quite the manner fans found with Scott Snyder's Batman. 

So it's only fitting that, out of Convergence emerged a third Superman to contend with in this issue.  Technically, he's been running around the pages of Lois & Clark, but for all intents and purposes (because, I believe, he'll be the star of Tomasi and Patrick Gleason's Rebirth-era Superman), this is his debut, in this epic clash of Supermen.

The solar flare power Geoff Johns introduced, and which has been driving Superman comics ever since, becomes a crucial element in how Tomasi concludes his epic.  The would-be Superman, Denny Swan (a name that combines Denny O'Neil and Curt Swan, two iconic DC creators), has now superseded Ulysses, another would-be Superman Johns introduced and previously featured in "Final Days of Superman," can only be defeated by this new power.  Which, because of circumstances, will prove deadly, should Superman use it again.

Of course he does.  And the Convergence Superman chooses this opportunity to finally reveal himself to the world.  It's kind of perfect.

Helping pull all this off is Mikel Janin, whose work was fascinating within the pages of Grayson, and so it's great to see him given such an opportunity to truly let his work shine.  He absolutely nails it.  This is some of the best Superman art in ages.  He'll next be seen in the pages of Tom King's Batman.  Couldn't be happier for him.

With that, in a way, Tomasi closes the book on the New 52.

Grayson #3 (DC)

writer: Tim Seeley, Tom King
artist: Mikel Janin

via Comic Vine

So this is my first regular issue of the series.  After the intriguing preview in the last issue of Nightwing from Tim Seeley and Tom King and then the brilliant Futures End edition, I decided to give it a shot despite reservations that it might not as an ongoing experience work as well as I might hope.

Now I'm thinking, what was I thinking?

I love spy capers.  Alias remains one of my all-time favorite TV series, and as it turns out, Grayson reads a lot like that (minus Rambaldi), especially in the early days when Sydney Bristow was still trying to figure out loyalties.

And I also realized something about Grayson.  It's actually a lot like one of my favorite storylines from Dick Grayson's past.  It involves another Grayson, Devin K. Grayson, her "Renegade" arc from the Infinite Crisis era (which is more or less the secret origin of what happened to Dick in Forever Evil and this subsequent reboot, which makes it all the more appropriate).  In that arc, Dick went undercover for an extended period of time.  It was gangster stuff, but still the same general idea.

Seeley and King seemed to understand from the start that Dick's sense of identity is fluid, although he himself remains constant under all his guises.  The point is, he's a character who can handle different personas, whether it's Robin, Nightwing, Batman, or an agent of Spyral.  It's the conflict this always brings him, his ongoing identity crisis, that defines Dick best of all.  It's inevitable that at some point he'll stop being a spy, but it's suddenly such a smart move to have finally moved him past his Nightwing days, that it's surprising to realize all those years where I knew subconsciously the character had grown stagnant led to this moment.

Will most issues feature one-off villains like the guy in this one who uses his guns as his eyes?  I guess I'll see (heh).

Nightwing #30 (DC)

writer: Tim Seeley, Tom King
artist: Javier Garron, Jorge Lucas, Mikel Janin

via Bleeding Cool

Among the many fake controversies to be found recently on the Internet was the one surrounding the final issue of Nightwing (this one).  Apparently there's a whole alternate, original version that exists and does the elegiac, retrospective, reverent look that fans might have wanted to see otherwise, and this one has been seen a crude patchwork, poor substitute.

Yeah.

I'll admit, it's not a perfect issue.  But it's a far better one than it could have been.  As you may or may not know, Dick Grayson ended up being a pivotal player during Forever Evil after he was kidnapped by the bad guys and exposed to the world as being the face behind the domino mask of Nightwing.  By the end, he "died."  Not in the typical comic book fashion.  More like a cliffhanger.  In the final issue of the crossover event, he was alive and hardy.

And repositioned.  And so his ongoing series, Nightwing, was cancelled, and was just relaunched as Grayson.

Dick Grayson was originally introduced in 1940's Detective Comics #38.  He is of course the original Robin, Batman's sidekick, the Boy Wonder.  Over the years his role has evolved.  He was the original reader surrogate, the Spider-Man prototype if you will.  Eventually he struck out on his own, starting when he helped form the Teen Titans.  In the '80s he adopted a new superhero identity, Nightwing, and a new costume.  In the '90s he donned the cowl of Batman for the first time.  He was scheduled to die in Infinite Crisis.  Grant Morrison had him reprise his time as Batman.  And now this.

I've long been a fan of the character, thanks to Burt Ward's depiction in the classic '60s TV show.  (Holy glove-fidgeting, Batman!)  I was too young and unfamiliar with the actual comics at the time to know it wasn't Dick who was killed off in "A Death in the Family."  I was devastated when I saw the news in the paper.  I wondered why he wasn't in Tim Burton's Batman.

And, eventually, I thrilled when Chuck Dixon and Scott McDaniel launched the first Nightwing ongoing comic.  I loved that run.  I loved Devin K. Grayson's run.  And I wondered why it was so hard for subsequent creators to sync up with Dick the way Chuck and Devin had.  When the New 52 came around and Kyle Higgins launched the next Nightwing ongoing comic, I thought someone had finally figured it out.  And for a brief moment, he had.

And...so it reached the point where Dickwas once again expendable.  Or, malleable.  A trait that has become perhaps Dick Grayson's defining characteristic.  The ability to be "who you need me to be."

That's from this issue, by the way, those very words, the final ones of this final issue.  It's not a perfect summation.  It's something a character in transition would say in lieu of something more definitive.  But that's what's unique about Dick.  He's an icon who's free to evolve.  Always looking for that chance to define his legacy.  All over again.  Because he's always changing, it's hard to think of him in the same way one does, say, Batman or Spider-Man.

That lost version of Nightwing #30 might have been that statement.  Who knows?  What I love about this version is that it's a final issue that actually speaks to the next issue.  Directly.  You have no idea how rarely that happens.  Is this actually the first time?  Correct me here, folks.

So often, the final issue of a series, or sometimes just a creative run, is self-reflective, self-referential.  Most of the time it's be a different creative team than the one that was last best known, and is incongruous.  Or dismissive.  What have you.

You will note the absence of Kyle Higgins in the credits.  No Chicago (Dick's last context prior to this and/or Forever Evil).  I don't have notable history reading Tim Seeley or Tom King, both of whom write Grayson, along with artist Mikel Janin.  They're all here.  A lot of the issue is representing the new context, Dick as an undercover agent infiltrating a criminal organization known as Spyral.  His new context is being a spy.  Actually, it's not terribly different from Devin K. Grayson's Renegade arc (so there's even precedence!).

There's also Batman beating the stuffing out of Dick.  And Dick fighting back.  We get Dick's version of the mission statement Christopher Nolan had Bruce Wayne's father give him in Batman Begins ("And why do we fall, Bruce?  So we can learn to pick ourselves up."):

"We fall because someone pushes us.  We get up to push back."

I consider this a pretty good time to be a fan of Dick Grayson.  I think the more DC's writers are forced to think about him and work with him, rather than merely write more adventures (which is what it might seem they're doing now), the better he is.  So I'm happy that an issue like this exists.  I'm happy that it tries to reconcile the present with the past.  I'm happy that the ending is the same as the beginning.

But I'm strange like that.