Reading Comics 207 "August 2017 LCS Trip"

Here's a brief look at my latest check-in:

Descender #22 (Image)
Remains a favorite, even if I'm not reading it all the time.  The metaphorical knife that was stuck into poor Dr. Quon so brutally early in the series just keeps getting twisted.  In a lot of ways, that makes this his story almost more than Tim's...

New Gods Special (DC)
Shane Davis (Superman: Earth One) turns in a thoroughly competent look at Orion.  He seems to come off best when he's in the spotlight (Orion, I mean).

Nightwing #26 (DC)
Tim Seeley continues extending Grayson's legacy, and Dick Grayson's legacy in general, bringing back Huntress into the fold.  I know fans like to imagine Dick and Barbara Gordon (Batgirl) will one day officially declare a relationship, but between Grayson: Futures End (one of my all-time favorite comics) and the Nightwing/Huntress mini-series from two decades ago...my money's on them.

Revival #43-47 (Image)
Speaking of Seeley, I decided to finally have a look at this, and as it turns out, these are the final issues of the series.  While he's working from a familiar playbook (the most famous recent example being The Walking Dead, which you may have heard of), Seeley injects enough into the intricacies of character dynamics that Revival reads as a distinctive piece.  I'm sure anyone who'd read the preceding 42 issues will take away a lot more, but it was surprisingly easy to get into, with or without the short recaps inside the front covers. 

Green Lantern/New Gods: Godhead #1 (DC)

writer: Van Jensen, Justin Jordan, Robert Venditti, Charles Soule, Cullen Bunn (script: Jensen and Jordan)
artist: Ethan Van Sciver, Martin Coccolo, Goran Sudzuka, Chris Cross, Pete Woods

The biggest thing Geoff Johns did for Green Lantern, other than greatly expand the mythos and it importance to the DC publishing schedule, was establish the event trend, from "Sinestro Corps War" to Blackest Night.  When Robert Venditti replaced him as torchbearer, clearly this trend was retained as the common denominator between them.  

Venditti's latest is also his biggest.  This time the New Gods are involved.  Jack Kirby's iconic if popularly-challenged creations were immediately cast as intrinsic to the New 52 thanks to Johns' own opening arc in Justice League, and they've been working their way back to the forefront thanks to the "Robin Rises" arc in Batman and Robin.  The second and more prominent salvo in this campaign likely to end with next year's Crisis event is Godhead.

It's a great way to go, too.  Venditti and the whole crop of current Green Lantern writers (although the script is from Green Lantern Corps and Green Lantern: New Guardians writers Van Jensen and Justin Jordan specifically) have figured out a way to reimagine one of Johns' major contributions to the mythos: the idea of the White Lantern.  

Now, Johns created a whole spectrum, but for the purposes of Blackest Night and its followup Brightest Day he posited that the combined might of all the rings created the White Lantern (the Green Lantern version of "one ring to rule them all").  The current holder of this title is Kyle Rayner in New Guardians.  I haven't been keeping tabs on any of the series besides Charles Soule's Red Lanterns, so I had no idea that Kyle's been missing from action, as far as everyone else is concerned, for a year (the last writer, Cullen Bunn, is responsible for Sinestro).

But the thing about the White Lantern is that he's in possession of the Life Equation.  For as long as Darkseid's been rampaging through comics, he's obsessed over the Anti-Life Equation.  So it's interesting to see the good gods led by Highfather pursuing its opposite number for a change.  Except this is hardly good news for the Lanterns!  (I also had no idea what was happening with Saint Walker these days.  Apparently he's lost hope, which is a bad thing for a Blue Lantern!  More complications for him, as well as the perennially-hapless Mogo.)

It's good for the New Gods to be approached from a fresh perspective, and Godhead does exactly that.  Highfather has likely never been this vital (except maybe under Kirby himself), and he's surrounded by familiar and new figures who are equally compelling.

The good news is that if you have no real experience with Green Lantern or the New Gods, this issue serves as an excellent primer, too, catching up on concepts and characters with lightning precision.

The art's interesting too.  I love the design concept for the Godhead covers.  The interior here features new Green Lantern work from Rebirth artist Ethan Van Sciver, who shares the workload with a number of others.  There's also some splashes of that indy style that Marvel's been exploiting in series like Hawkeye and Moon Knight.  It's unexpected and effective.

Green Lantern has long been a favorite comics sandbox for me.  I feel guilty for having all but abandoned the sandbox with the departure of Johns.  Fortunately his successors know some fun games to play.

Quarter Bin #29 "The Future is in the Past (sometimes)"

NEW GODS #7 (DC)
From August 1989:
The theme of this edition of Quarter Bin is pretty much spelled out in the subtitle; there's a lot of rich storytelling material waiting to be rediscovered in back issue bins, and as primary case-in-point we begin with Jack Kirby's perennial, in this iteration being co-written by comics historian Mark Evanier (no other name involved has immediate historic appeal). As with just about every other New Gods comic, much of the story in this issue reiterates the New Gods story, pivoting around Orion, spawn of Darkseid, raised by Highfather (the opposite is true of Mister Miracle). I begin to suspect that the problem this franchise constantly runs into is that the material isn’t inviting enough; either you already like it or you don’t, and probably won’t, either. It’s a problem of accessibility. This leads us to…

RETURN OF THE NEW GODS #13 (DC)
From August 1977:
A relaunch literally a few years after Kirby’s original Fourth World tales (spanning NEW GODS, FOREVER PEOPLE, and MISTER MIRACLE), this one features writing from Gerry Conway and an inexplicably redesigned Orion (looking a bit like Geo-Force, actually), and assumed that someone other than Kirby could make the franchise more reader-friendly. That may very well be the case yet, even if readers have since put up nearly-insurmountable barriers. John Byrne, at least in my experience, probably came to closest in a strictly canonical sense with JACK KIRBY’S FOURTH WORLD, while COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS, if read strictly as a Fourth World adventure, would probably do the trick, even if it has the actual FINAL CRISIS to compete with (and hey, it’s Grant Morrison, so a lot of readers assumed the end result was necessarily more significant in any respect than DC’s second weekly series, which I thought was criminally underrated to begin with). What the New Gods need (and what Morrison recognized, if apparently unsatisfactorily) is a strong connection to regular continuity (and again, even Kirby knew that, which was why he liked to sneak in connections to Superman, just not clearly enough; and this brings up another point, in that how awesome would it have been for the King to work on the Man of Steel directly?). Morrison’s answer was to bring Darkseid down to earth, grounding the signature figure of the Fourth World in a human frame. COUNTDOWN, meanwhile, embroiled a number of Earth-based characters in an adventure that ultimately led to the Fourth World, which to my mind is exactly what the franchise needs. If that connection had been more explicit, perhaps readers would have cared a little more. Anyway, RETURN OF THE NEW GODS was not the answer, obviously. There’s a bonus, though! If you possess a working time machine, you can find a handy way to be cast in 1978’s SUPERMAN (you will believe that Gene Hackman can pull off Lex Luthor), thanks to a contest printed in this issue!

ANIMA #0 (DC)
From October 1994:
Another veteran of the 1993 Bloodlines experiment (see also Quarter Bin #s 6 & 8, for Sparx and Argus), Anima was a teen punk enthusiast who became bonded with Animus, her own monster guardian (the 1990s were a great decade to feel nostalgic for the Captain Marvel dynamic of a surrogate character in some sort of partnership with a heroic figure; see also Prime and The Maxx) she could summon in times of need. Anima made a minor sensation and then disappeared completely, like most of the Bloodlines characters, briefly being considered part of DC’s teen line that included Superboy, Robin, Impulse, and Damage. The concept as outlined in this Zero Month issue probably would have fit her nicely in the Vertigo line of the time, except writers (and creators) Elizabeth Hand and Paul Witcover (and this may also help explain her fate, because, really, who?) probably failed to make it clear enough (the series, which had already run about half a dozen issues to this point, lasted about as many more). This is not to say Anima is actually worthless or hopelessly a product of its time. In fact, even considering how Hand and Witcover basically made it a period piece waiting to happen; only a few minor changes would be necessarily to drag it into the OWS era. Besides, comics could always use a few more female lead characters.

NEW TITANS ANNUAL #9 (DC)
From 1993:
The Bloodlines annual that introduced one of the few characters from the experiment to receive their own ongoing series, this was written, naturally, by Hand and Witcover, and follows the same basic outline as every other installment of the event: spinal fluid-sucking aliens unwittingly unlock powers in a random victim, and the resulting character either becomes a hero and helps the main characters or gets in their way. The New Titans were the latter-day New Teen Titans, getting long in the tooth from their Wolfman/Perez heyday but not yet decided on actually (or trying to) move on with their lives. The artwork doesn’t really do the Titans themselves any favors, nor Anima, but it does look good on the aliens, who could perhaps reappear one day, with a slightly more focused story and a more confident lead writer who could flesh them out a little, make them more distinctive…

SOVEREIGN SEVEN PLUS #1 (DC)
From February 1997:
Chris Claremont probably had the most precipitous fall in modern comics history, from writing the most popular comics of the 1980s (and a few years into the next decade) to be an afterthought whose new X-Men comics were completely overlooked a few years ago. That helps explain why everyone found his creator-owned DC work so easy to dismiss, even though I thought SOVEREIGN SEVEN to be some of the best comics I read during that time. The only problem I identify in hindsight is the same problem the New Gods have had for the past four decades, a problem of accessibility. He came up with a great concept, and a distinctive set of characters, but there was no real perspective in how the stories actually handled them. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t. When a large audience is supposed to embrace it, the more deliberate the better (small audiences like insular worlds better), so that everyone has a chance to either latch onto a particular element and try and juggle all of it (again, large audiences are a diverse lot and more often than not are not actually united about the things they like about the one thing they all like). What’s so funny about this one-shot is that Claremont, who clearly would’ve liked to write him some Legion of Super-Heroes, approaches the Legion the way he should have the Sovereigns, with a very selective use from it, concentrating on Saturn Girl while his own team dances around her, with a soft focus on Network (without ever really explaining why readers should care as much about her as he does Saturn Girl). Having read SOVEREIGN SEVEN, I know that Claremont did spend a fair amount of time developing Network and lead character Cascade, and spent time showing how the other characters were unique, but what he failed to do was keep any of them apart long enough for readers to try investing themselves in any of them. That’s what truly makes Alan Moore’s WATCHMEN stand out from other superhero comics, in that he wrote about a team, but that team didn’t really hang out together during the series, and so Moore was able to write about the characters rather than the team, and readers have any number of narratives ready-made for easy consumption (even though the story as a whole assumes you can put all of it together). Then again, WATCHMEN was a twelve-issue maxi-series, and DC probably assumed, the same way that Claremont did, that SOVEREIGN SEVEN, being an ongoing series, wouldn’t have to follow the same rules. Pointedly, the New 52 uniformly puts character first. So, a couple of lessons: respect Claremont, let him write the Legion, and remember that character ought to trump most other elements in a story.

GREEN LANTERN CORPS QUARTERLY #2 (DC)
From September 1992:
Can you believe that there was a time when the Green Lantern franchise didn’t depend on Geoff Johns to carry a full slate of titles? When this issue was published, there was also GREEN LANTERN (the standard flagship) and GREEN LANTERN: MOSAIC, starring John Stewart, with the first Guy Gardner solo book on the horizon. It seems unbelievable now! It certainly was by 1994, when MOSAIC had been forgotten, QUARTERLY cancelled, WARRIOR (what GUY GARDNER transitioned into fairly quickly) barely acknowledging that Guy had once slung a green ring, and Kyle Rayner the last of the Corps (for a while). This one, then, is a great issue to stumble across; a sort of time capsule to what might have been an alternate version of the franchise’s fortunes, if only a few more issues here and there had been sold. The framing narrative is an incredibly unsubtle plug for MOSAIC (I myself have only ever read the first issue, which is something I’ve been trying to correct for the past few years now, but is difficult short of ordering from the Interweb to actually accomplish), a conversation between Hal Jordan and Stewart that catches the reader up on things the latter has been experiencing lately (and can it also be emphasized that Geoff Johns singlehandedly reintroduced Sinestro as an active participant in the Green Lantern saga after many years of near-neglect?) in his own book, leading into short stories involving Alan Scott (who had only recently returned to regular appearances in the pages of a short-lived Justice Society relaunch that as a result only helped remind readers who all those old-timers were who becomes victims of ZERO HOUR), G’Nort, and “The History of Sector 2814,” the plug on the cover that made me buy the issue in the first place. Yes, we get a tale of an 1800s American who becomes drafted into the Corps in the midst of a personal crisis, but I guess what I expected was a somewhat more literal history, detailing predecessors of Hal Jordan and Abin Sur, which leads me to one of my biggest points for this column: Star Wars fans have been accepting generic sci-fi drivel for years from creative minds other than George Lucas, badly filling in elements of the saga that don’t revolve around Anakin Skywalker, yet DC can’t be bothered to do a regular anthology of Green Lantern stories that look at all the interesting things that probably happened prior to the modern era? I mean, sure, we’ve had the sporadic Abin Sur tale, and Johns expanded on the Alan Moore prophecy of the Darkest Night, but there’s so much more that could be done, the first Green Lanterns, even so far back as the Manhunters, or simply fleshing out the rest of Sector 2814 (that’s one of my biggest beefs with the franchise, that sectors and their designations and representatives are mostly a crapshoot any writer can improvise at their will), at the very least. Anyway, Gerard Jones and M.D. Bright (one of my personal defining Green Lantern creative teams) provide the framing narrative, while other featured fellows include Roger Stern, Dusty Abell, Mark Waid (whose story is highly amusing, and together with IMPULSE just screams for Waid to write in this style more frequently), Ty Templeton, Doug Moench, and even Scott Lobdell.

Anyway, that’s it for this column!

Quarter Bin #14 "Genesis"

For some reason or another, I can no longer explain, but back in 1997, I originally only read the first and fourth chapters of the GENESIS crossover event. This was back when DC was doing annual crossover events that typically played out weekly in the main title, and spread into the ongoing series then being published during that month. I don’t think there’s a lot of respect going around for those events these days. Readers are more used to sprawling mini-series that play out over half a year and involve not just crossovers but spinoff mini-series, stuff like that, and there’s been plenty of backlash, because since CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS and SECRET WARS, there seems to have been an event, several events, every single year, and it’s always a struggle to keep up with, whether because of the sheer number of books or the basic cost.

Anyway, I’m not really going to talk about crossover events in general, but GENESIS specifically. Or rather:

GENESIS #s 1-4 (DC)
From October 1997.

These event books were typically assigned to some of the big-time creators, the ones who happened to be hot at that time, such as Dan Jurgens with ZERO HOUR (1994), Mark Waid’s UNDERWORLD UNLEASHED (1995) or Grant Morrison’s DC ONE MILLION (1998). John Byrne, who wrote GENESIS, had been a creative force since the 1980s, with THE MAN OF STEEL chief among his DC credentials. During this particular period, he was involved in WONDER WOMAN and JACK KIRBY’S FOURTH WORLD, both titles being mythology-rich, which was appropriate, given that GENESIS was itself another attempt to bring, well, Jack Kirby’s Fourth World back into relevance.

The whole reason why I’m talking about it today is not that it’s somehow relevant again (even Morrison couldn’t do that with the epic FINAL CRISIS) but because I was always bothered by the fact that I didn’t read the whole thing. Flashforward to a few years ago and a trip to Escape Velocity, then known as Bargain Comics, which at that time had a whole space devoted to displaying bagged collections of original-issue runs for famous story arcs. There it was, the whole set, all four issues, plus the original teaser preview.

Byrne, it should be noted, spares no such thing as subtlety with this one. That’s usually the kind of thing I go for, but big epic tales certainly have their attraction, too, and very few comics properties have that to quite the same degree as Kirby’s Fourth World, the only successful, original mythology to have ever been attempted, and come back to repeatedly, not because the publisher wanted to, but because fans continually demand it. Trouble is, few fans regularly support the Fourth World, which includes Darkseid, Orion, Mister Miracle, and Mother Boxes that “ping.”

You probably have to be familiar with a lot of it to make any sense of GENESIS, and even then the story’s remarkably light, probably one of the thinnest of its kind even from that era (in contrast, Neron juicing old villains with bigger powers really doesn’t seem that cheap an excuse). The short of the short of it is that there’s a “Godwave” that’s supposed to explain superpowers, and its contracting makes said powers all wonky for a little while, and then cause some changes around the DCU (a clever way to doing some spring, or in this case fall, cleaning). It makes sweeping generalizations that really don’t hold to much scrutiny, but then, it’s far more about the Fourth World than about any of the many superheroes it brings together (and even then, the available characters seem to be a thin lot, and they really don’t do all that much except react for four issues).

In that sense, it’s pretty disappointing, but for those who do care about the Fourth World (Highfather dies in the FOURTH WORLD book during the month, an event that is barely mentioned in GENESIS), it remains a pretty entertaining and noteworthy event, one that makes even less sense for modern readers than to those who experienced it upon release, and not just because the New Gods have lain dormant since FINAL CRISIS, but still worth the effort for anyone who might nonetheless be curious, an odd link in a chain that still has great potential.

Given another opportunity (since JACK KIRBY’S FOURTH WORLD really was better than GENESIS might suggest), I’d be more than happy if John Byrne were interesting in another visit.