Ghosts #1 (Vertigo)

(from vertigocomics.com)

writer: various

artist: various

As far as I'm concerned, there are two reasons to read this special, originally released appropriately enough on 10/31/12 (Halloween).  The first is that it features the last original work from the late Joe Kubert.  The second is that is features the first Vertigo work from Geoff Johns.

When I originally sought it out, the second of these selling points was what I thought was my only point of interest.  Johns has now done the majority of his comics work for DC with its superhero comics.  There was also a short piece he did for Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (as well as a number of other comics, including an extended run on Marvel's Avengers a decade ago at this point), and yet he has been so consumed by his various epic visions (on JSA/Justice Society of America, The Flash, and Green Lantern, each of which have lasted for many years) that Johns has very rarely done something other than superheroes.

By now, if you're at all interested in Vertigo you've heard that long-time executive editor Karen Berger recently left the imprint.  Vertigo took shape around the force of the British explosion that hit comics in the 1980s and built itself around Neil Gaiman's Sandman.  It was a featured element of DC's mainstream push in the early 1990s.  Some fans have speculated that Berger's departure signals perhaps the end of the imprint, which has also recently announced the end of the long-running (three hundred issues!) Hellblazer in favor of a DC series for star John Constantine (whom you might know from the Keanu Reeves film Constantine).  I find that to be unlikely.  Vertigo, like everything, is simply in the midst of change.  DC will always find value in a haven for material that plays to a different audience than superhero fans.  Contrary to what Image and other indy publishers may sometimes suggest, the mainstream has room for that stuff.  

I don't always read one-shots, especially anthologies.  It frequently means that they will feature talent a company is trying out, which is fine for that new talent, but it also means that the stories may have little weight to them.  They can certainly be entertaining, but they can also be very throwaway.  Some fans read comics specifically for stories that are anything but.  I happen to be one of those, and increasingly so.  Contrary to that trend, Ghosts features a lot of veterans, not just Kubert and Johns, but also John McCrea, Phil Jimenez, Paul Pope, David Lapham, Gilbert Hernandez, and Jeff Lemire, whose own Vertigo series Sweet Tooth has recently come to an end.  

The first story, "The Night After I Took the Data Entry Job I Was Visited by My Own Ghost" from Al Ewing and Rufus Dayglo, is one of the more memorable and surreal entries, and ironically enough reads very much like an Image series.  As the very long title suggests, it features someone being haunted by their own ghost, who ends up being a lot more popular than them because they're the cool version of the character who's lived the dream (and has no worries).  Gaiman's Dead Boy Detectives, who debuted in Sandman, are the stars of Toby Litt and Mark Buckingham's "Run Ragged," which is apparently the first part of what will be serialized in other Vertigo anthologies.  Cecil Castellucci and Amy Reeder, meanwhile, in "Wallflower" have something that might appeal to romantics.  Neil Kleid and McCrea explore foodies in "A Bowl of Red," while Mary H.K Choi and Jimenez in "Bride" talk about the loss of love.  Pope and Lapham collaborate on "Treasure Lost," features aliens making suspect decisions to preserve themselves, and Hernandez in "The Dark Lady" features a couple of boys you don't realize are dead until the end (so, a little like The Sixth Sense).  

Joe Kubert, who died in August, impressed Berger by sketching "The Boy and the Old Man" within days of her request to participate.  The sketches are what remains of the unfinished work, but a talent like Kubert keeps it worth savoring.  It's eight pages in all.  The old man is dying, but still manages to find the resolve to save the boy from a nightmarish threat.  Very simplistic, very archetypal, and so very much what you'd expect from a master storyteller.  Probably worth the price of admission alone, a testament to Kubert's enduring legacy.

Finally there's Johns and Lemire's "Ghost-for-hire," in which two brothers collaborate on one last prank.  The twist here is that one of the brothers is a ghost, and that they're scamming people with hauntings.  As always, Johns has figured out the elements of an existing story type and used them ingeniously.  It's not just a goof, however.  Johns makes sure to bring the human element to the story, with a twist ending that instead of feeling gimmicky solidifies the value of the whole thing.

Would I say it's worth your while, even if you don't particularly care about Kubert or Johns, that Ghosts truly distinguishes itself from the genre of anthologies?  "Night After I Took..." and "A Bowl of Red" are two other standouts, which makes at least four of nine stories worth reading.  That sound good enough?

Aquaman #s 0 & 13 (DC)

writer: Geoff Johns
artist: Ivan Reis

Geoff Johns has been writing Aquaman from a viewpoint that assumes you know nothing about the character or his world.  For all intents and purposes, this is as it should be.

I don't make that statement to belittle the accomplishments of others, but of all the signature characters of DC Comics, especially members of the core Justice League, Aquaman has had the roughest publication history, with numerous reboots of ongoing series (only Hawkman is truly comparable, but then, Hawkman didn't have this statement said about him in The Big Bang Theory: "I don't want to be Aquaman.  Aquaman sucks."), and at one point was quietly killed off and replaced by a successor who was basically exactly like him (no, seriously! I recommend the stories by Tad Williams if you can find them).

Johns himself brought Aquaman back to the land of the living in Brightest Day, which was a continuity that ultimately mattered only previous to the New 52 relaunch, though it did help inform much of the new landscape.

When Aquaman began last fall, Johns took much the same approach that he'd done with Green Lantern after Rebirth, letting the character establish himself before diving into truly juicy storytelling.  #0 is Aquaman's origin story, which is not so surprising, because Zero Month was all about origin stories, but unlike some others feels completely organic to what Johns has been doing the past few months.  The "Others" arc, concluded in #13, drew the character back to his origins anyway, and leads to the "Throne of Atlantis" crossover event.

The stereotype has always been that Aquaman is just that weirdo who talks to fish and is basically in effective out of the water.  Some of the stories that tried to demonstrate his true potential tied him into Atlantis, or represented him as a fish out of water.  Johns instead focuses on combining these elements.  Like Wonder Woman (with whom he was paired during Flashpoint), he's a son of two worlds but doesn't feel like he belongs in either.  That's what both these issues demonstrate, although they also show his ongoing efforts to find a place in both.  His archenemy Black Manta has ties to both, too, which certainly helps (unless you're Aquaman).

Another clever thing that Johns has been doing is slowly building toward the introduction of Ocean Master, but more on that next issue.

Suffice it to say, but Aquaman has been doing all it can to transform its title character in a compelling read, building up the narrative of his life and fleshing out details both new and that have existed for decades.  This is a milestone of the New 52.  Well, it is written by Geoff Johns.

Action Comics #14 (DC)

writer: Grant Morrison
artist: Rags Morales

Recently I've been filling Comics Reader with a lot of perspective, why you should care about current projects, how they connect to stuff you may be familiar with.  My review of the latest Action Comics will be no different.

Basically Grant Morrison has been telling his Batman epic in miniature.  He's been writing Batman on a regular basis since 2006 and has along the way done a number of really amazing stories, although if you're not careful you could easily become confused by some of them.  Perhaps "Batman R.I.P." best illustrates my point, and is actually most pertinent to his work on Action Comics.

"R.I.P." is all about another of those master criminals thinking that they've created the ultimate web of destruction against Batman (much in the way the cumulative Leviathan arc is working its mojo through Batman Incorporated now).  To that point Morrison had sewn a lot of threads through his stories, until introducing Doctor Hurt and and saying "this is where it all led."  (Although, again, as it turns out it wasn't Hurt but rather Leviathan, but a lot of that is because of Batman's response to his experience with Hurt.)

In Action Comics, much of what Morrison has done so far is to explain how Superman responds to the world, and at the start this was done by way of an updated origin story that made the Man of Steel a little more human than he's sometimes been portrayed, most obviously with the signature t-shirt costume change, although in accord with other appearances he's since taken on a slightly more traditional look.

Yet, as in his Batman stories, Morrison has also been building toward one big threat (call it the Buffy Technique if you must), which I will not spoil for you here but it's been just below the series arc from the very beginning, tied in with Superman's alter ego Clark Kent, and what Morrison has cleverly extrapolated from the best aspect of Sam Raimi's Spider-Man movies, his relationship not with Mary Jane or Harry Osborn but the apartment residents (I'm thinking less of the grumpy super than his cute daughter whom Peter Parker remains obvious to for all three movies) he spends his most human time among.

Action Comics #14 spends most of its time on an problem-of-the-issue event, though, so you don't have to worry too much about the arc that's rapidly drawing to a close (sob!), as well as whole Morrison's tenure.  Although if you want another association, it's very much like an issue of Morrison's All Star Superman, which was widely considered to be brilliant.

There's also the regular backup effort from Sholly Fisch, which remains a highlight of the series.  Here it's actually more important to this specific issue than the lead.  Both stories involve Superman interacting with scientists, but Fisch gets to have him experience an unexpectedly moving reunion with his birth planet, the kind of moment that would probably never occur in anything but a backup feature but is something that probably should have happened a long time ago.  Maybe it did.  But for now I will use it as evidence of Fisch's considerable talents.

Teen Titans #0 (DC)

writer: Scott Lobdell
artist: Brett Booth

For the record, although I seem to be writing quite a bit about Scott Lobdell these days, I didn't buy this issue because of Lobdell, but rather to complete the New 52 Zero Month collection of Robin stories.  (Others included Batman and Robin, featuring Damian; Red Hood and the Outlaws, featuring Jason Todd; and Nightwing, featuring Dick Grayson.)

Teen Titans until recently was the only place where Tim Drake could be found in the relaunched DC landscape.  This had to be considered a little shocking, since Tim was the Robin for two decades, and was the first of them to be featured in his own series, not to mention the only founding member of the Geoff Johns relaunch to retain his own book (unlike Superboy and Impulse/Kid Flash).  Although much of my superhero experience has involved the rich lineage of the Boy Wonder, he's always been who I consider to be "my" Robin.

And yet somehow Tim, who'd become Red Robin (a costume originally designed for Kingdom Come and therefore an identity first held by Dick Grayson, and ironically or not next worn by Jason Todd in Countdown to Final Crisis) in his last phase before the New 52, was dropped unceremoniously into a book that really did not have a link to Batman.  Certainly there is precedent for Robin, but not for Tim Drake, so it was always a little shocking to me that this had happened, and yet as part of the streamlining process it was also a little inevitable that his role should change.

The Teen Titans themselves have tended to fluctuate in terms of importance.  In the Wolfman/Perez '80s they were the lifeblood of the company.  Johns shot them back into significance, but in a lot of ways DC has spent a great deal more energy keeping the Justice League relevant, which is fine, although there will always be comic book fans who believe only by engaging the younger reader base will the industry's future be assured.  This may be one of the reasons why the Titans (sometimes called Young Justice) have a continuing role in the cartoon leg of DC's efforts.

Lobdell, meanwhile, took on the youth wing of the New 52, whether that meant Teen Titans, Superboy, or even Red Hood, which in a lot of ways is another Titans book (and in a previous era this would have been more obvious), based largely on his reputation from Generation X.  Because the Titans have such a turbulent publishing history, I didn't have an interest in checking this new incarnation out.  It seemed if anything something for a new generation, moreso than most of the other new books, even though most of its characters are some of my favorites (the same was true for Superboy, though I had a look at its first issue).

All that being said, I finally read an issue because it finally put the spotlight on Tim Drake.  It's interesting to me, someone taking another shot at Tim's early development.  One of the great benefits of comic books is that they're one of the few creative mediums (music is another) that actively encourages revisiting familiar material.  It's a chance to have a fresh look and discover what makes it special all over again.  A Bob Dylan song sounds different when played by Hendrix or U2, but they're all pretty great (here I'm thinking of "All Along the Watchtower," by the way).

The bulk of my experience with Tim comes after he's already become Robin, so the period in which he figures out (or as depicted in this issue, spends a lot of time trying) Batman's secret identity (originally presented in Batman: A Lonely Place of Dying) is pretty fascinating.  In a Brian Bendis comic this would have been the first twenty issues (which is what he did in the initial Ultimate Spider-Man comics and then again with the introduction of Miles Morales).  Tim is such a unique Robin, too, in that his parents at least at the beginning of his story are both alive.  He's driven by different ambitions than any of the others, including Batman himself, and Lobdell does a great job of explaining that.  (It's also worth noting again that Batman #0 includes brief looks at each of the Robins, and as I said when I commented on the issue, Tim stands out.  Bendis should switch to DC and do that.)

While I'm very happy that this issue happened, I also wonder why.  Shouldn't it have been dedicated to the whole team, if not the new members Lobdell has introduced?  Just wondering.

Superman #13 (DC)

writer: Scott Lobdell
artist: Kenneth Rocafort

I've come to have a great appreciation for the talents of Scott Lobdell.  He's been just beyond the mainstream for years, a name fans are familiar with but not someone who has produced a tangible legacy behind him, though he's certainly done notable things.  When I saw that he was apparently one of DC's major acquisitions to help shape the New 52, I was intrigued.  I'd just become acquainted with his work on Generation X (which was the X-Men title at the time), so I saw it as an opportunity to see how well he held up not just historically but as a working writer.

I was impressed from the start.  I stuck primarily with Red Hood and the Outlaws, which was somehow notorious for sexualizing Starfire (even though only in the cartoon everyone was thinking about had she ever not been sexualized since her debut in the '80s).  It was good stuff, and not just because I'd been wanting a series starring Jason Todd for years.  There was also the stellar art of Kenneth Rocafort.

When I saw that the pair had been elevated to Superman, I wasn't thinking that this particular series was getting its third major creative shakeup of the New 52 relaunch.  I was ecstatic that I wasn't the only one to have noticed not just Lobdell's work but the unique chemistry he has with Rocafort, whose work can be called a post-Michael Turner dynamism, very reminiscent of '90s art but a step beyond it, as if someone were finally noticing that it could be taken to another level.  Like the artists who ushered the Image revolution, Rocafort is not just an artist but a storyteller, one of the boldest of his generation.

All that aside, their work so far in Superman has been everything that I hoped it would be.  There is a tad bit of awkwardness involved in this transition process, however.  Lobdell and Rocafort, either by their own initiative or by editorial mandate (something that admittedly has played a role in the preceding administrations, as it were), are going almost directly into a crossover event (also involving Supergirl and Lobdell's own Superboy) involving the latest incarnation of a threat from Krypton's past coming back to haunt the survivors of the present.

But very few readers of this particular probably cared too much about that.  And actually, Lobdell proves that he hasn't let the continuity of previous creators fall by the wayside, as the personal shakeups that have plagued Clark Kent (our erstwhile Superman, in the off chance you didn't know that), famously including a breakup with Lois Lane (less drastic with new continuity than when Spider-Man did the same a few years back, although of course his ex is Mary Jane Watson, not an intrepid reporter).  

As you may or may not have heard, Clark quits the Daily Planet, and in spectacular fashion, with a grand speech about journalistic ethics and ideals that seem to have been abandoned by today's press (though you may be forgiven to be thinking of TV rather than newspaper as you consider his points, as very few people, ah, think of newspapers these days).

It suggests Superman's famous credo: Truth, Justice, and the American Way.

This is the kind of territory Grant Morrison has been visiting in Action Comics, the other ongoing series to chronicle the adventures of the Man of Steel, in which Superman returns to his roots as a social crusader (though not like Joe Straczynski did in the days leading up to the New 52).

Although as far as the action goes, and again this has a lot to do with Rocafort's considerable talent, this may be the first time Superman looks vital in years.  All of this is to say that if you haven't taken this dude seriously in the recent past, you have one less excuse to use.  Two books, two distinctive approaches, and they're both firing on all cylinders.

Reading Comics #84 "Natural Born Morrison"

Most of the comics Grant Morrison does involve intricate plotting and mythologies that he spends years or at least a good number of issues exploring.  Every now and then he does something on a more intimate scale.  Kill Your Boyfriend is one such example of the latter.

Even after entering the mainstream in 1996 with JLA Morrison has continued to explore his interest in more subversive material.  It might be argued that his unique perspective makes Morrison more capable of finding something of worth in a diverse pool of material.  Boyfriend in many ways is very indicative of '90s pop culture.  In the edition I read he provides an afterword in which he actually laments how his story might be overlooked in the rush by filmmakers to copy material that at the time he wrote it was still fresh, indicating Quentin Tarantino as a predecessor.  Yet some of the movies I can think of that were released by 1995, when Boyfriend was originally published, were actually written by Tarantino, Tony Scott's True Romance and Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers.  Tarantino himself never quite directed a film of the kind of psychopaths depicted in Boyfriend and these films.

Morrison's interest in the story is exploring the increasingly jaded nature of youth culture and the growing surge of violence they were capable of, which he couldn't have known was only getting started.  The Matrix, for instance, which by some accounts Morrison believes was based on his own Invisibles, was cited as an inspiration for the Columbine killers.

The star of Boyfriend is actually the girlfriend, whose parents don't understand her and life exactly the kind of stifling life she believes she's destined for until she stumbles across a rebel who gives her the excuse to experience the alternative, which quickly turns shockingly violent, not the least with the execution of the title character.  By the end of the graphic novel she and her new friend have been cornered, he's shot dead by law enforcement and she realizes that she never actually crossed the line, that she can still pretend innocence.

Her parents debate her innocence early on, convinced that undergarments somehow will somehow prove it one way or another, the way some people claim the way a woman dresses encourages rape.  She offers a running commentary on her own life, as if she's an outsider looking in, and that's the kind of alienation that the story is about.  The girlfriend (never named, by the way, so I'm not just being lazy) dons a wig at one point, and a little red dress, completely altering her appearance.  Identity, then, is something that is only a perception, or so she believes throughout the experience.  She and her friend run across a hippy collective that is also all about appearances, failing to live up to the ideals the new boyfriend lives on a daily basis.

Morrison collaborates with Philip Bond (they work together again in Vimanarama), who gives the story a lightly comic look, as if it's up to the reader whether any of this should be taken seriously.  Sure, there's a lot of sensationalism and not too many answers.  Boyfriend isn't a statement and it isn't a love story, either, the way the Tarantino screenplays unfold.  It's simply a record of the mood Morrison was feeling and was only starting to develop at the time.

It recognizable material but it's also a sharp left turn from the extremes Boyfriend only skirts.  By the end, Morrison's conclusion confronts the reader with everything that they've experienced thus far and forces them to question it all over again.  That's patent cleverness from a master.



Don't forget that I've constructed a whole page dedicated to Grant Morrison's career.  Have a look at it here.

Marvel Now! Point One (Marvel)

writer: various
artist: various

I don't always read Marvel, but when I do I read the best.

Okay, shameless parody of TV commercials aside, I really don't read Marvel on a regular basis.  I have on occasion, but nothing recently, although I always keep myself abreast of the company's stories.  As DC did last fall, Marvel is relaunching its line, although it's been careful to try and make fine distinctions of the differences, the main one being that the creator runs that have come to an end have been distinguished for years, whether you're talking about Brubaker's Captain America or Brian Michael Bendis' Avengers (all dozen iterations) or Jonathan Hickman's Fantastic Four.

Marvel Now! is mostly a chance to begin some new eras (although one can never say if an era on a character or franchise will actually stick).  This one-shot isn't about such eras, but rather some of the smaller properties getting their chance to shine with this initiative.  The framing sequence is written by Nick Spencer, a writer best known for his Image series Morning Glories but had looked to be one of DC's major new writers just before the New 52 began, but instead subsequently surfaced at Marvel.  Spencer gets to handle another Nick, as in Fury, who used to be a white dude in the regular Marvel canon (it's the Ultimates version that was based on and subsequently portrayed by Samuel L. Jackson) as he interrogates a man who claims to be from the future.  I don't know where that's going, but it's probably the least interesting element of the issue.

The most interesting belongs to Jeph Loeb.  Yeah, I'm a fan of Loeb, which these days is sadly not something every comics fan is saying.  He and frequent collaborator Ed McGuinness handle Nova, who is sort of Marvel's Green Lantern, except Marvel has never really defined Nova very distinctively (fans of the cosmic comics may feel free to disagree).  The one depicted here is very similar to Kyle Rayner, the '90s Green Lantern.  As usual, Loeb has a good feel for character, which is why I like him so much.  If anyone can make me care about Nova, it's Jeph Loeb.

Another cosmic franchise featured in the issue is the Guardians of the Galaxy, soon to be featured in a TV series.  It's one of Brian Michael Bendis' latest projects (he'll soon be as ubiquitous with the X-Men as he was with the Avengers), and "decompression" is clearly still in his vocabulary.  Most of the sample of his work here (dealing with the oft-overlooked Star-Lord) is in the artwork, from Steve McNiven (famous from Civil War and Wolverine: Old Man Logan).

Kieron Gillen previews a new Young Avengers book.  I never understood why Marvel took its sweet time developing Young Avengers projects that weren't written by Allan Heinberg.  At one point, this property was one of the hottest things the company had.  Heinberg, better known as a screenwriter, eventually took long breaks from the Young Avengers (far better than the name suggests), and by the time he came back for Avengers: The Children's Crusade, he'd lost the zeitgeist and fans no longer cared.  The few instances where Marvel attempted something with the team by writers other than Heinberg obviously did not receive the necessary creative commitment.  By the preview, Gillen may have figured out how to correct that.  We'll see.

Matt Fraction, who is one of Marvel's Architects (their term for marque creators) and Mike Allred (famed for his creation Madman) preview an Ant-Man project that both looks incredibly promising and also tonally completely wrong.  It's supposed to be Hank Pym (a founding member of the Avengers and soon to be movie star) being angsty.  There's a lot to say about Allred as an artist.  But angsty is not a term typically applied to him.  So that's certainly an interesting choice.  That book will be FF, which is in no way related to Hickman's FF, which was short for Future Foundation, not Fantastic Four, though it was one and the same property.  (Marvel doesn't like to keep things...simple.)

The biggest revelation of the special is Dennis Hopeless's Forge.  Forge is a typically overlooked member of the X-Men who debuted in the '80s, a tech guy who apparently has become something of a mad genius.  He'll apparently be featured in Cable & X-Force (so obviously it features Cable prominently).  If that series is anywhere near as awesome as the preview, it may be a book that I need to check out.

I always enjoy preview books like this.  Well, I have really fond memories of DC preview books like this (such as Brave New World).  I hoped Marvel would have at least something impressive in this one, or a good suggestion at where the Now! thing was headed.  Mostly it's just a massive relaunch with some new books being tossed out.

I'd say, with Loeb's Nova and the potential of Hopeless's X-Force, and even a new shot at ongoing glory for the Young Avengers, that it was worth my time to have a look.