Quarter Bin 78 "Seagle/Sale, Drew Melbourne, Archer & Armstrong, and Bizzare New World"

This is a back issues feature.  However, these particular comics were found in a quarter bin.

The Amazon #3 (Dark Horse)
From May 2009.
And, from 1989, because this was a reprint of a twenty-year-old comic, one of Steven T. Seagle's first projects, and only one project removed from Tim Sale's first collaboration with Jeph Loeb.  I find the latter factoid perhaps more relevant, because it might further explain how their overlooked masterpiece, which I know by its collected title, The Challengers of the Unknown Must Die!, came to be.  A few years back I noticed tonal similarities with Andrew Helfer's Shadow.  As it turns out, Sale and Loeb may have taken inspiration from Sale's own work, too.  Seagle, I think, has remained one of the true comic book mavericks.  A lot of creators try to wear that face, but Seagle lives it.  He's been able to, I think, do it quite successfully.  It also makes him hard to pin down, so every time I spot him, it's a nice little treasure. 

The title of this project refers to the Rain Forest, not the Greek myth that eventually gave birth to Wonder Woman.  It's an '80s environmental message (so of course it resurfaced again).  More significantly, at least creatively, is the unorthodox approach Seagle takes in telling the story.  As far as I could tell, because one out of three issues, even if it's the conclusion of the story, can't quite explain everything, the two sets of captions indicate that the narrator has presented both his initial thoughts and the ones he later publishes for the reader.  Whatever else it is, the story is the guy's reactions, which leaves an impressionist feel to the proceedings.  Those who like straightforward storytelling would probably just throw their hands up in frustration.  I loved it.

But the thing is, that's the kind of storytelling Loeb later adapted for his Challengers comic with Sale.  It's unorthodox, and you can tell how their relationship evolved, to better fulfill superhero expectations, as the years went by.  That first effort, to me, remains the most pure.  So it's nice to see a little more of how it happened.

ArchEnemies #4  (Dark Horse)
From July 2006.
I snatched this up as a reread, because I originally reviewed this mini-series when I first wrote about comics on the Internet (so this would be a ten-year-anniversary kind of deal for me).  The reason I read the comic was because writer Drew Melbourne had won a contest put together by Top Cow back in 2004, when I first pursued the task of breaking into comics.  Drew's winning pitch, Future Heroes, never got made, but I assume the connections he made by winning the contest helped make ArchEnemies happen. 

It's interesting to reread this.  Today, I know that Drew's comics career went no further than this issue, which is kind of sad.  I mean, I really started to root for the guy!  But that's the catch-22 about contests and/or new creators.  Just because you break in, doesn't mean you'll make it.  The guy maintains his fascination with steak (read about it here!), but I guess he fit in that model of trying to look at superheroes differently, that's so attractive to comic book publishers other than DC and Marvel (well, normally; you can never tell with Marvel these days), only too well.  Because that's what ArchEnemies is, a tale of roommates who unbeknownst to each other are actually a superhero and his arch-foe.  It's a great setup.  Drew decided that the villain was, perhaps, a more interesting character to explore.  This final issue makes him pretty human.  (I honestly don't remember the rest of the story at this point.  Part of the comic's marketing campaign was creating a Myspace profile for one of it's characters!) 

The art just makes everything so much harder to follow than it needs to.  Yvel Guichet, directly before this, had been working steadily in mainstream, DC comics.  After this, he didn't.  His last notable work was, once again for DC, Trinity of Sin.  Clearly the guy has mainstream chops, but he seems to have approached this particular project as obtusely as possible.  On the other hand, the covers cleverly acted as the first page of the issue, so that was pretty cool.

In the end, I think the whole idea wrote itself out of relevance.  I think if Drew had been a little more established, this could have been a cool little Image ongoing comic, where the premise itself would have worked.  But instead he convinced himself, or allowed himself to be convinced, that he could try for something deeper, which he just wasn't ready for, and neither was this comic.  But again, Drew still loves steak, so there's that!

Archer & Armstrong #4 (Valiant)
From November 2012.
At the opposite end of that spectrum is Valiant's latest incarnation, which has proven to be a fruitful platform to present the kind of comics readers of Marvel's Ultimates line, and maybe what DC's New 52 era was supposed to be, kind of expected to happen to superhero comics.  The thing that Valiant's done is not overstretch itself.  I can't say whether every project has been a hit, but this is a cohesive, clever universe it has constructed.  The more I read of it, the more, generally, that I love it.

I read the first issue of this particular series digitally a few weeks back, and loved it.  Previously, I had no idea what Archer & Armstrong was supposed to be about.  I thought it might be fairly throwaway buddy nonsense, like Quantum & Woody turned out to be.  But as it turns out, it's actually essential to that core narrative that Valiant has been building.  Concepts like Ivar, the Time Walker (which is another concept that I previously had no idea about) or The Eternal Warrior, or the Geomancer, which was key to the excellent The Valiant mini-series, come from this.  Armstrong is a long-lived guy who's trying to project ancient secrets that bad guys would just love to get their hands on.  Archer is an adept who's been used by the bad guys to get the job done.  Together, they realize they are a great combination, once they sort their differences out, and so goodness ensues.

This is the kind of buddy comic Quantum & Woody only wishes it was.  (Quantum & Woody is a thing because it was the most popular thing from that era of '90s Valiant comics.)  The writer, Fred Van Lente, is a guy I always like to see at top form, because at top form, he's a true pleasure to read.  Valiant tends to collect writers like him (Matt Kindt, Jeff Lemire, Jen Van Meter), who in the best of all possible worlds would be the most sought-after writers in the medium, but for whatever reason don't tend to connect at the Big Two.  So it's Valiant's gain, and Valiant knows exactly what to do with writers like this.  And Valiant, in turn, gets to publish some of today's best superhero comics.

Bizarre New World #1 (Ape)
From 2007.
This is another flashback from a decade ago, Skipper Martin's baby, about an average man who learns he has the ability to fly.  Like Drew Melbourne's take on the traditional superhero archetype, Skipper chose to skew the topic.  In an essay at the back of the issue, he somewhat uncomfortably makes a case that the superhero formula, today, probably looks ridiculous.  This will, of course, be the argument for anyone who no longer subscribes to an opinion they once held, or perhaps never held it.  It's also a textbook case of a fan (he references a closet-full of comics) who perhaps never understood it.

I have no beef with Skipper.  Like Drew, his career went nowhere.  I maintain Facebook contact with him (the sucky thing about social media is that it's a lot of illusion), and so it's especially weird to be talking about the project where I first heard about him, and having to question his thought process.  Then again, it's kind of how the Internet goes.  I don't think he'd be the type to stumble upon this and flip out, but you never know.  (Then again, what did I just do with Drew's comic above?)

The problem with presenting an average's man's experience with learning he has the ability to fly, in the real world, is that it can quickly spiral out of control.  Later comics saw the whole world gain the ability.  This issue sees the lead character grapple with the implications, and then, more directly, how it might affect his relationship with his son.  It ends up being a bonding experience. 

That, I imagine, is what set Skipper's story apart.  Sometimes, writers can't really tell where the heart of their story is.  It happens all the time.  Some of the writers responsible are bad, and that's the reason why, and others just didn't really think about it.  Skipper, in the essay, talks about the six years it took for him to develop the story, and he seems to have focused almost exclusively on how the guy got the powers, if that was even relevant, and none on what the story, ultimately, should be about: an intimate family drama.

Live and learn?  Well, maybe some day, Skipper can learn from it.

Trinity of Sin #1 (DC)

writer: J.M. DeMatteis
artist: Yvel Guichet

via Comic Vine

Combining Trinity of Sin: Phantom Stranger and Trinity of Sin: Pandora and the nonexistent Trinity of Sin: The Question is the new series called Happy Fun Time Trinity of Sin.

I figured I had to at least catch the debut issue, because both parent titles are among series I probably should have been reading all along anyway.  I liked the issue I caught of Phantom Stranger, and Pandora comes with her a whole host of expectations as the most important new character of the New 52, although her actual story debut and subsequent adventures may have undermined her potential.

Originally introduced as the mystery figure who theoretically explained everything about the New 52, Pandora didn't actually enter into regular appearances until a year or so into the DC relaunch, and by that time her own series was almost immediately tied in with a crossover arc.  Fans are increasingly uneasy with series that seem to spend too much of their time interrupted in crossover arcs.  That left Pandora as the latest new character to seemingly become instantly forgotten.

Thankfully she has another shot, this time with a little less pressure.  The first of the three to be featured in the issue, however, is the Question, who has been repositioned to be a mystical figure rather than a vigilante who wears a faceless flesh mask (who, I like to point out, was the inspiration for Watchmen's Rorschach), whose penchant for being defined, well, by questions has been taken to its greatest possible degree.  

Next Phantom Stranger, who used to be known as the guy whose secret origin left him, well, to be a stranger, but has for a while been associated with the death of Jesus, making him the most obvious of the three to be forced to walk the earth (like Cain, as Jules points out in Pulp Fiction, although he might have been referring to Kung Fu and/or Kill Bill).  He's seen palling around with Dr. Thirteen, a semi-obscure mystical detective, who's the most famous of the apparent victims in the issue.

Then comes Pandora.  What defines her?  She's immediately linked with the Greek myth of the box of sin, and as such is the obvious unifying figure for the whole concept for anyone who doesn't know what Phantom Stranger is supposed to be about much less the Question's current role.  It seems Trinity of Sin continues to make her story more about her future than her past, a signal of what's to come.  I guess we'll see about that.  I assume the whole point of the series is to help keep her story going, and I think it's a good idea to keep her contextualized, whether it's in direct associations with better-known figures or the general concept.  It forces everyone to remember what's supposed to make her special.  

When the New 52 launched there were distinct corners of the landscape put into groups.  These guys might otherwise have been placed in the Justice League Dark camp, but they're, well, darker, more haunted figures rather than a bunch of outcasts who tend to have had Vertigo series attached to their recent pasts.  They're the guys who might have been Vertigo figures but never were, a little too superhero but also not superhero enough.  If that makes any sense.  The result, in the current DC landscape, is relatively the same.  If that helps.

I'll be keeping my eye on this one.