Comics: yet another X-Men #1!

Deafened still by the ongoing kettle-drum of DC Comics' "New 52" media phenomenon, I almost missed Marvel Comics' recent re-launch of "Uncanny X-Men" with a new first issue. And I might have given the whole thing a miss in any case, except the artwork is by one of my favorite working comics artists, Carlos Pacheco.

This issue is written by Kieron Gillen and takes off right where a recent mini-series left off: Cyclops and most of the few remaining mutants left on Earth (in the wake of the still-seminal events in "House of M") are gathered together in Utopia, their city/stronghold in the bay off the coast of San Francisco. Cyclops is determined that mutants will no longer be the meek targets of non-mutant aggression, but he's equally sure that the way to turn that aggression around is for his core team (for some mysterious reason perhaps known only to Gillen, he dubs this his "extinction team") to function more as a standard save-the-world superhero team, ala the Fantastic Four or the Avengers. It's an interesting idea - mutants using PR to sway public opinion (to my recollection, it hasn't been used since the launch of the original "X-Factor," many moons ago) - and Gillon bungles it right from the start.

If it's any consolation, he bungles it in the exact same way DC has bungled all but a couple of its own much more headline-grabbing first issues this summer (winter on the calendar, but I'm in shorts with the ceiling fan going in Boston, so as far as I'm concerned, it's summer until it's actually cold): he picks up a game in mid-play, tweaks it here and there in ways that may or may not be good ideas ("extinction team"?), but never pauses for even a moment to give new readers any reason to care about any of it. First issues are - at least theoretically - about providing a 'jumping on' point for those new readers, and yet in the many wide open spaces so helpfully provided by Pacheco's artwork, Gillon never bothers to explain anything, never bothers to catch us up on anything. In short, he makes the same mistake that's been plaguing the various X-books for decades now: he assumes every single reader is chapter-and-verse familiar with every jot and tittle of the X-catechism. The X-Man Colossus is intermittently possessed by the spirit of the old X-Men villain Juggernaut? Prince Namor the Sub-Mariner wears a modified X-Man costume and for some unaccountable reason takes orders from the team leader's girlfriend? Magneto too? It would have taken five minutes to write dialogue and monologue-boxes that grounded new readers on all of this, but Gillon doesn't do that. Instead, he assumes the worst thing you can assume about the opening of any drama: that his audience is already interested.

The result is as insular as most of what's been going on at DC lately, a first issue devoid of drama, meaningful only to the insider crowd, full of 'payoff' moments comprehensible only to a thousand people on the planet. I bought it for Carlos Pacheco's artwork (which didn't disappoint), but if his past is any indicator, he won't be around more than a few issues. Let's hope Kieron bothers to ground his story in that time.

Comics! Legion Secret Origin #1!

I know I mentioned concentrating on Marvel comics for a while in the deeply depressing aftermath of DC's "new 52" offensive (out of which I declare "Batman" and "Aquaman" the winners - which leaves 50 losers), but then last week DC came out with the first issue of a new 6-issue mini-series that either doesn't conform to its new continuity or does without caring - and either way, I'm fine with the results. It's "Legion of Super-Heroes: Secret Origin," and it's written by one of the two greatest living Legion writers, Paul Levitz (hint as to the other one: he's really tall), and drawn by another Legion vet in good standing, Chris Batista, and it offers a long, leisurely look at "the real beginnings" of the Legion.

Naturally, when I read that, I clenched up a little. No comic book franchise in history has been ret-conned and re-imagined more often - and often more disastrously - than my beloved Legion, and to make matters worse, I've been fond of their 'traditional' origin story for a long, long time.

That origin story has been re-worked many times over the decades, but its core narrative always goes something like this: some time in the 30th century, RJ Brande, the galaxy's richest man, is a passenger on a spaceship. One of the other passengers, a teenage girl named Irma Ardeen from Saturn's moon Titan, is a highly proficient telepath, and she suddenly blurts out that two of the other passengers are intending to kill Brande. In immediate response, two other teenagers on the flight spring into action to defend the old man: Rokk Krinn from the planet Braal uses his race's magnetic abilities to seize the would-be assassins' weapons, and Garth Ranzz of the planet Winath uses his electrical powers (acquired in a freak accident) to blast the assassins themselves. Brande is saved, and in that moment he sees something the galaxy needs: a new band of young heroes to inspire people, much like the legendary Justice League did a thousand years before. With his financial backing, the Legion of Super-Heroes is born and quickly begins recruiting super-powered teens from every planet in the United Federation and beyond. It's a goofy origin story, but as origin stories go, it's got a certain charming mixture of fate and serendipity.

The fate part comes from the underlying idea that the world - the galaxy - has waited a long time to get this kind of unselfish heroism back. And the serendipity comes from the fact that all three of those heroic teens were on that spaceship for refreshingly utilitarian reasons: Irma Ardeen - now code-named Saturn Girl - to take up a Police posting, Rokk Krinn - now code-named Cosmic Boy - to escape the planetary depression afflicting his homeworld and find a job, and Garth Ranzz - now codenamed Lightning Lad - to find his long-lost brother. None of them is even dreaming of becoming any kind of superhero.

In this new mini-series, Levitz obviously intends to beef up that origin story and perhaps some of its many unanswered questions, like why the galaxy's richest man wouldn't have bodyguards (or for that matter a spaceship) of his own, or how the new Legion could suddenly acquire the approval of the United Federation to act in a peremptorily law-enforcement role, etc. In the course of just this single issue, we get a great many new and much-needed layers to the old Legion mythos - we meet captains and admirals of the UFP's star-fleets, we need the three members of Earth's shadowy security directorate, and we get glimpses of an RJ Brande who very much has a private agenda of his own. I was entertained and intrigued throughout, except for the very first instant,, since the issue sports the ugliest cover of any mainstream comic in the year 2011: in the background, Phantom Girl is for some reason falling down through a whole in the air, and in the foreground, there's a picture of a pouty Justin Bieber dressed like Cosmic Boy.

But one really, really bad cover can't spoil rich pickings like this - especially when the issue came with the single greatest promotional gimmick of all time: a Legion flight-ring! Now that I finally have one, my only remaining task is to pick a Legion code-name. Some of you may know the, er, code-name I've had for most of my life (it even already ends in 'boy'), but now that I actually have a flight-ring, I'm hoping to upscale to something snazzier. Perhaps Super-Buff Enormous Brain Lad? I'll keep you posted.

Comics! Superboy's Legion!

Given my strong disappointment with most of DC Comics' "New 52" re-launch, I'm mighty happy the company seems intent on continuing their "DC Comics Presents" line of reprints. As I've mentioned before here, these reprints take little issue-runs or noteworthy special issues from DC's recent past and reprints them in square-bound 'mini-graphic novels' for $8 (as opposed to the glossier, thicker actual paperback graphic novels that cost twice or three times as much). It's a nifty and inexpensive way to re-visit some great stuff from the last two decades, and in many cases it's giving a new format - and new exposure - to stuff that very much deserves it. I was worried DC would discontinue these things for the obvious reason: they highlight a continuity the company has very publicly abandoned. There's something vaguely fascistic about the "New 52" (the military-style costume redesigns don't help), and these "DC Comics Presents" reprints certainly don't play ball - but happily, they appear to have been spared the axe. So those of us who don't particularly like 99 % of the new continuity (I'm allowing for the possibility that some of these new titles might grow on me - both the new "Legion of Super-Heroes" and "Legion Lost" aren't actively bad, after all, and although "Justice League" might just be the worst treatment of the team since the Age of Vibe, "Batman" is already phenomenal) might still have these lovingly-chosen reprints to remind us of the enormous heritage DC has abandoned for some quick cash.

A perfect case-in-point would be this week's reprint of the Paul Farmer/Alan Davis "Elseworlds" two-parter from 2001, "Superboy's Legion" - and it's an ironic choice, since "Elseworlds" was an imprint DC designed specifically for 'what if' type re-thinkings of their core characters. If the "new 52" titles were being marketed as "Elseworld" concepts, I'd have no problem with them at all - in "Elseworld" stories, the whole fun of the enterprise comes from the fact that no damage is being done to the standard continuity I've known and loved.

Farmer and Davis are old hands at this sort of 'what if' story, and hoo boy, there's scarcely any Legion detail they don't tinker with in the course of this story (the editors of this edition have done exactly the right thing: they've gone back to those original two issues and seamlessly melded them into one continuous book - this is the enormous, continuous adventure that original two-parter was meant to be)! Here, little baby Kal-El of Krypton gets discovered in his gestation-chamber not in the 20th century but in the 30th - by R. J. Brande, the richest man in the galaxy, who raises the boy as his own son. By the time Superboy reaches his early teens, he's an impetuous, happy-go-lucky kid with the power of a demigod (Farmer unapologetically harks back to pre-Crisis levels of power for the character - one of many retro touches that will tug at the heartstrings of long-time DC fans). His adoptive father doesn't quite know what to do with him, and Earth's Science Police are convinced he's a juvenile super-delinquent.

This Superboy yearns to form a team of teens as special as he is, a team featuring ample nods to the classic Curt Swan era of the Legion but with the numerous tweaks Farmer seems to love (Lightning Lad and Light Lass being effete aristocrats, for instance, or Brainiac 5 being from the 'near-mythical' race of Coluans). Davis' artwork is vivid and kinetic (he's responsible for the second-best Legion cover of all time, after all), and because this whole thing was an "Elseworlds" title, he was able to draw things the DC brass would never allow in normal continuity. One of the many guilty pleasures of "Elseworlds" stories was writers indulging in the freedom to kill, cross-breed, or maim any of the main characters without fear of fan uproar. As a result, when this story features the team's first confrontation with the Fatal Five, Farmer is able to generate not only extra tension but an actual body-count.

The whole story works to give readers an imaginary reworking of one of DC's most obsessively beloved (and oft-reworked) creations - a graphic novel that offers a fun, thought-provoking revamp of a classic, a revamp no more yielding but a dream. No company fortunes are hanging on the proceedings, and we're all better off because of it.

Comics! A Tale of Two Heroes!

This week concludes the initial spread of DC Comics' "New 52" relaunch, and I guess the idea was to finish things off with a bang: the new first issue of "Superman," written and drawn by comics-demigod George Perez. But the issue itself only underscores everything that's wrong with the "New 52" - not only is it a disappointment, it's the single worst  issue of the month. The besetting worry about this whole reboot was fairly straightforward: fans were concerned that the whole thing hadn't really been thought out carefully (this concern wasn't exactly allayed by DC writers telling everybody that the whole reboot came about by chance, while they were at a story conference riffing ideas about a possible love-triangle involving Superman ... "So who should he fall in love with? I don't know (*pauses to chug Red Bull*)... what if we just scrapped everything?"). These are some of the most iconic comics characters in the world, after all - and Superman and Batman are two of the very rare comics characters that have become cultural icons even outside the comics world. Revamping such icons should be the careful work of long preparation, not a quick gimmick done to goose sales for a month. DC editors have been assuring worried fans for months now that they're perfectly aware of the importance of what they're doing, and that they and all the creators involved are completely dedicated to making this relaunch one for the ages. So regarding the first issue of the new "Superman" title, the relaunch of the flagship character not only of the company but of the industry, I have one question:

Why does it stink?

I could handle it being simply different from what I myself would have wanted (in fact, since DC has decided to change Superman's costume, I was resigned to it being different from what I myself would have wanted), but this isn't that. This is a bad comic book, in every detail. Not only are fans handed the mother of all insults the minute they open the thing (George Perez does the scripting and the ... breakdowns? His work is finished and inked by somebody else? So Perez had a more pressing commitment than Superman #1?), but nothing improves from there on out. There's a ridiculous "newsprint is dying" plot, there's an amorphous fireball-villain, there's Justin Bieber (calling himself Jimmy Olsen), and there's the new Superman in his new supervillain costume - he looks exactly like some alternate-universe evil-Superman John Byrne would design in about fifteen minutes after too many jagermeisters. This new Superman spends most of the issue pouting, and when he does try to pull off a fairly simple helicopter rescue, he fails - Superman fails, in the middle of his very first issue.

The whole issue fails. It's cluttered, murky (the whole thing is set at night, for Rao's sake), talky, and completely undramatic. Its Superman is a bragging, ineffectual prick, and it's Clark Kent is even worse - a sanctimonious, unlikeable loser who mopes because he isn't sleeping with Lois Lane (that's another huge twist in continuity - no more married Kents; instead, we're back to the days of Lois saying, "Hey, where was Clark the whole time?" - because those days never got repetitive or, you know, insulting). DC's most conspicuous character is its most conspicuous "new 52" failure - so I have to do without Superman in my diet until this whole idiot mess gets re-revamped a few years down the line.

The failure of "Superman" #1 is only further underscored by the stunning success of "Aquaman" #1, also released this week. The issue is written by fan favorite Geoff Johns and drawn sumptuously by Ivan Reis, and the whole thing is exactly what a relaunch first issue should be (nevermind that it's received way more attention than it deserves - Johns is unhealthily fascinated with this Golden Age gold-and-green version of Aquaman; he masterminded an entire company-wide mini-series solely in order to resurrect the character from the dead and make him iconic again, and now there's this series, the end result of a decade of obsession)(I'm not complaining, mind you - Aquaman's a neat character who's always deserved and almost never received first-class treatment - but I could wish all this energy were being expended on making Wonder Woman the character she should be): it's fast-paced, it introduces us to the main character (something "Superman" #1 is both arrogant enough and stupid enough to think it doesn't need to do), and it sets the first plot in motion. It's all addictively good.

There are changes here too, of course - but they're for the better: this version of Aquaman is physically more powerful than any previous version we've seen, and that's good - and something I've been advocating for years (including many times right here on Stevereads). This Aquaman is super-strong, super-resilient (Reis re-uses a panel sequence from that resurrection mini-series, showing our hero get shot in the head by machine-gun fire and suffer no more than a cut and some irritation), super-fast ... and Johns writes him with a curious mixture of innocence and vulnerability that certainly sets him apart from all the other strutting, posturing "New 52" heroes. This series will be a pleasure to follow, unlike virtually all of the other "New 52" attempts I've seen this month. The two "Legion" titles were merely acceptable; "Justice League" was a pandering mess; "Wonder Woman" suffered yet another complete overhaul; "Superboy" has been ret-conned out of all personality; "Teen Titans" became "X-Men," fully half the first issues felt like completely unsustainable fill-in stuff, and worst of all, my favorite DC character, Superman, has been transformed into a Mattel-costumed Doctor Manhattan rip-off nobody in their right mind would ever cheer as he flew past. Out of the whole misbegotten mess, only a few bright spots: the Batman-family of books fared remarkably well, Green Lantern & co came out without a scratch ... and we have a new Aquaman to follow with interest.

In the meantime, I think I'll post about good ol' Marvel Comics for a while now ...

 

Comics: Star Trek!

Scrappy upstart comics publisher IDW this week began a new "Star Trek" series based on the 2009 Hollywood reboot of the original TV series. It's not the first IDW "Star Trek" title I've read, but it's the first new adventure of any kind I've read that's set in the brand-new continuity created by that long-ago 2009 movie (why on Earth it's taking this long for a single sequel is utterly beyond me - perhaps we could speed things up if all the actors sychronized their rehab stints), so of course I was interested. As I've mentioned here before, Paramount's curious reluctance to 'expand their brand' into the fictional world of this new "Star Trek" continuity is puzzling, especially since nothing that happens in spin-off books or comics can affect the 'canon' of the movies. Perhaps the studio is worried any such adaptation might accidentally stumble upon the plot of the next movie, since the free-range of your average screenwriter's imagination has in recent years become so degraded that Aaron Sorkin's Dada-esque turn in "The Social Network" can be held up as genius. Perhaps that worry is present in the launching of these new comic-book stories set in the reboot Trek-verse.

Except that 'new' is a bit of an exaggeration. True, the issue opens with Scotty down in the engine room tinkering with the machines while the creepy gnome-like creature he brought on board in the movie just sits around and watches (somewhere along the coked-up scripting process of that movie, somebody thought it would be clever if the U.S.S. Enterprise's Chief Engineer came with his own gremlin, and somehow, nobody at any subsequent point noticed what a flamingly dumb idea that is, so now we have a mute and hostile unvetted alien masquerading as a Star Fleet officer engineer, and I guess we're supposed to believe nobody on the command crew has had a minute to notice. Sigh.). But then the action shifts to the young Captain Kirk (the visual template here is obviously pint-sized tobacco addict Chris Pine, from the movie) getting checkmated in three-dimensional chess ... by his best friend Gary Mitchell.

And every long-time "Star Trek" fan in the galaxy suddenly starts paying attention.

Gary Mitchell! The cocksure, swaggering Enterprise helmsman who appeared in the show's first real episode, "Where No Man Has Gone Before," way back in 1966 was characterized - there and here - as Captain Kirk's best friend. In that original TV episode, the Enterprise is on a mission to leave the Milky Way galaxy when a battered space-recorder is located adrift. It belonged to the SS Valiant, which disappeared with all hands some 200 years previous, and when our crew analyzes its data, they learn that at some point that earlier ship's crew grew frantic, and their captain ordered his ship to self-destruct. Shortly after uncovering these unsettling facts, the crew is jolted when the Enterprise encounters a massive 'energy barrier' at the edge of the galaxy. Passing through it causes massive electrical malfunctions throughout the ship - and also causes both Gary Mitchell and psychologist Elizabeth Dehner (one of Gene Roddenberry's classic 'remote' women, described as "a walking freezer unit") to begin developing exraordinary powers of telekinesis and telepathy. They start to lose their humanity as well, and Kirk is eventually forced to kill his old friend rather than loose him on the galaxy. The episode is the first time we see Captain Kirk, the first time we watch him favor passion over logic in a debate with Mr. Spock, the first time we hear the note of personal tragedy that will mark so many of his adventures, and the first time we see him display a willingness to go toe-to-toe with just about any adversary and win (sadly, this last trait would not be passed on to future Enterprise captains).

It's effective stuff, but still: why on Earth would IDW and writer Mike Johnson choose to overlay the events of that episode onto the new "Star Trek" continuity? Wasn't the whole idea of the reboot to free the franchise from the gigantic continuity it had built up over forty years? To create the possibility that Kirk & Co. didn't have those same adventures we all know by heart? In the movie, young James T. Kirk (in "Where No Man Has Gone Before" he infamously has a different middle initial, quickly fixed) doesn't seem to graduate Starfleet Academy with any close friends other than Doctor McCoy - yet here's Gary Mitchell. And although the idea of mapping our new crew and sensibilities onto those old episodes is interesting, why this episode? It's in many ways a clunker - the 'energy barrier' at the edge of the galaxy is never explained (the real explanation would be lack of knowledge on the part of episode writer Samuel Peeples), for instance, nor is the ridiculous idea that the flagship of the Federation would be sent outside the galaxy in the first place. When modern-day viewers watching the episode for the first time learn that exposure to the barrier causes massive extra-sensory powers to develop in those crew members who have high "ESP quotients," they naturally wonder why Mr. Spock isn't affected, given that he's the only actual telepath on board. The answer is simple: when the episode was originally written, Mr. Spock was a work in progress - nobody had thought yet to make him a telepath. Those are the kinds of gaffes that Star Trek fiction (and later episodes) expend lots of work explaining away - why invite them, when you've got a clean slate and all the galaxy to choose from?

Johnson and artist Stephen Molnar do a clean, professional job here - this is an entertaining comic, and it's a series I'll certainly follow to the bitter end. But there are distinctly uneven bits: Molnar, for example, decides to anchor his depictions of the crew on actual photographic likenesses of the supernaturally attractive young cast of the reboot movie, rather than on idealized forms that would be just as recognizable and not have the tendency to look like, well, awkward drawings of real-life people (his Kirk fluctuates in age from roughly 15 to roughly 20). And Johnson's changes to the script of the original episode are sometimes bizarrely counter-productive. For instance, we're told that Elizabeth Dehner won't be joining us this time around ... because she's still upset about a nasty breakup she had with Doctor McCoy! And worse, at the climax of the issue Mr. Spock makes the astonishing admission to Captain Kirk that while the mutating Gary Mitchell was sedated, Spock mind-melded with him and discovered that "no one is there," that whatever's inhabiting Gary Mitchell is completely alien.

First: mind-melding with a sedated sickbay patient, without their permission? So is anybody on the Enterprise safe, then? And second: a good deal of the drama of the original episode derived from the fact that the super-powers he acquired only enhanced Gary Mitchell's megalomania - not that some alien entity replaced his entire personality. Where's the tragedy in that?



Re-doing some of those original-run episodes must have been one of the pitches for this new series, and perhaps the dramatic impairments inherent in that approach can be overcome with some imaginative storytelling. I'd have chosen the first issue of the series to actually show some of that imaginative storytelling (quite a bit of the scripting of this issue consists of virtually line-by-line transfers from the original episode), but that's just me. We'll see what happens in the next issue.



 

Comics! New 52 - Week 3!

This was the first week I actually found myself enjoying "the New 52," DC Comics' month-long barrage of first issues designed to relaunch its entire line of comics and re-invent its 80-year-old continuity for the 21st century. And I can't be precisely sure of the reason why this week sat so much better with me than the previous two did, although I can hazard a few guesses.

Guess number one would be personal investment - as in 'lack of.' Virtually all the titles re-launching this week (with one enormous exception we'll get to shortly) star characters who've never really triggered that much interest for me - standard, sometimes iconic DC characters, yes, but still: nothing I really care about, and so nothing whose desecration would bother me all that much. There have always been such characters for me at DC - one-note superheroes like the Flash, Green Lantern, the Atom, etc - and one of those characters has always been (and this amazes me too) Batman. Don't get me wrong: I love it when the character is done right and hate it when the character is done wrong - but neither the central guy nor any of his multitude of spin-off characters has ever really spoken to me on the particular carrier-hum accessible only to true fans. I realize this puts me in a tiny minority, since the entire breadth of the known universe considers Batman to be the coolest super-hero of them all. But there it is.

This week's re-launches feature a large swath of the Bat-line of comics - there's the first issue of "Batman" itself, the first issue of "Nightwing" (about Dick Grayson, Batman's first Robin, all grown up and fighting crime on his own), and the first issue of "Catwoman" (this week DC launched its three marquee-recognition female characters - Wonder Woman, Supergirl, and Catwoman, and good for them - marquee-recognition female characters are mighty rare in the comics world, and all three of these characters deserve their own titles). This is comforting: DC's out-of-control slapdash creators could do pretty much anything to these characters and I wouldn't have that lump in my throat of caring too much. Which brings me to:

Guess #2 why this week pleased me so much revolves around the aforementioned new continuity - probably one of the reasons I found this week so enjoyable was because it was also recognizable: as far as I can tell, DC has tinkered almost not at all with the general currents of Batman continuity from pre-52. Bruce Wayne is still Batman. Dick Grayson was still his first Robin, Tim Drake his second, and Damian his third and current. Batman still has an quasi-amorous danger-fascination with Catwoman. Dick Grayson still spent a year filling Batman's cape and cowl while Bruce Wayne was otherwise occupied. These three titles (and "Detective" and "Batman and Robin" before them) read like nothing so much as high-octane straight-up continuations of the storylines that were percolating all summer long in the Bat-books. And that 'high-octane' brings me to:

Guess #3: These as fantastic productions. Judd Winick writes "Catwoman" with a novelist's assurance, and Guillem March's artwork is unabashedly sensuous (the, er, climax of this first issue made me hope there was one specific item in Batman's utility belt that I've never before actually hoped was there). Kyle Higgins' main character in "Nightwing" is a perfect combination of boyish and battle-hardened, and Eddy Barrows' artwork (and great cover) is absorbing. And what to say about "Batman"? The superb writing is by Scott Snyder, and the incredible artwork is by Greg Capullo, here excelling even his customary high standards. The Bat-titles have always attracted top-notch talent, but these three issues stand out even by those measurements. I was hugely entertained, even while I was acknowledging that it didn't make a whole lot of difference - these titles, these characters, have just never moved me, no matter how well-done they are. As marvellous as these issues are, the real acid-test is always how you feel about that particular character or title that feels personal to you. Which brings me to:

Guess #4 why this week's "new 52" crop pleased me: this is the week "The Legion of Super-Heroes" debuts at #1, and I read it, and it was sigh-of-relief good. I ordinarily wouldn't have doubted that, since writer Paul Levitz is a Legion legend in his own right and can be counted upon to do everything right (and artist Francis Portela is no slouch himself - this is some fine pencilling on a pretty tough book to draw) - but how was I to know what kinds of pressures had been brought to bear on him by the DC Powers that Be? How was I to know he hadn't been ordered to create another Juvenile Delinquent Legion? (Legion fans will catch the reference to the team's darkest, dumbest hour, now hopefully comprising the only fragment of Legion history we've all agreed to forget)

Fortunately, such is not the case - like the Bat-titles, this issue makes several references to the summer's story-lines and shows a clear line of development from them - the footprint of the "new 52" reboot (hee - pun only belatedly discovered) is soft here, this is more or less the huge, noble, squabbling Legion I know and love, with classic Levitz moments of perfectly in-character barbs and reflections. This week, at least, I can breathe a huge sigh of relief: one of my favorite comics was left virtually unchanged by this company-wide revamp.

The relief can't last, however. "Superman" #1 comes out next week.

Comics! History in the Making!

I wasn't blogging back in the late 1930s when the first "Action Comics #1" made its appearance, so reacting to DC Comics' publication this week of its 'New 52' first issue of what was once its flagship title is all terra incognita to me. That original 1938 issue introduced to an unsuspecting world the character of Superman, a thickset white guy who wore a bright red cape and had superhuman strength and durability. Those original pages, written by Jerry Siegel and drawn by Joe Shuster, contained no real hint of the phenomenon that the character would become - in the beginning, the god of comic books was just a really strong guy with a smart mouth: he fought mobsters, intervened in domestic disputes, dismantled minor mob violence ... exactly the kinds of things later held up as examples of stuff Superman doesn't bother with. As difficult as it might be for later generations of fans to believe, the original Superman was a brusque vigilante who took the law into his own hands and wasn't particularly liked for it by the local police. He was Batman, only bullet-proof.

As some of you have been reading here, DC Comics has decided to re-invent all of their core characters for the 21st century, most certainly including venerable old "Action Comics," which begins this week with, would you look at that, #1. "Action Comics #1."

It's written by fan-favorite Grant Morrison and drawn by fan-favorite Rags Morales, and the first thing long-time Superman fans will notice is the homage these creators pay to that original Seigel/Shuster production. When we meet this new Superman for the first time, he's violently breaking up a meeting of corrupt financiers, and he's being hunted by the Metropolis police (and we're told he threw an abusive husband out a window). And the resemblance to that original 1930s conception don't end there: this Superman doesn't work for the Daily Planet yet, hasn't met Lois Lane yet, and most importantly, doesn't have Superman-style powers yet - he can't fly, he's hurt by artillery fire, and he's only a tiny bit more powerful than a locomotive. We're given to believe he's only been in the public eye for six months (and, tellingly, that he's been getting more and more powerful that whole time), and he's already hated by the Army and a snivelling, conniving Lex Luthor (who's given an anti-alien riff that could become a promising nexus of motivation for the character, if Morrison bothers to do anything with it - of all comic book super-villains, Luthor has always had the worst reasons for actually being a super-villain, so virtually anything would be an improvement).

Despite Morales' always-enjoyable artwork, it's a pretty boring first issue, and it neatly serves to underscore a point fans don't often make these days: that original 1938 first issue of "Action Comics" was also pretty boring. This is re-invention as groundwork: this issue doesn't have the "Five Years Ago" opening tag that last week's "Justice League" did, but it badly needs one. This is obviously Morrison's vision of this new Superman's rough introduction to the world, who knows how many years before he becomes the suited and respected hero already starting to crop up elsewhere in the "new 52" universe.

In fact, that inconsistent sloppiness is my main complaint about all of the "new 52" I've seen so far. DC released a dozen first issues this week (after releasing just one last week), and despite the fact that DC moguls have been assuring fans for months that this whole re-boot was carefully and exhaustively planned, the entire thing feels hastily cobbled together. In four of those dozen issues this week, both Superman and the Justice League are referred to as established, respected things (Batman and Guy Gardner chat like old colleagues, and the Martian Manhunter is described as a Justice League member and describes himself that way), in a separate four, no mention is made of any existing superheroes at all, and in the remainder all our iconic DC heroes are just beginning to appear and learn about each other.



So is "Action Comics" going to spend its first story-arc depicting the years-ago public debut of Superman and then abruptly shift years forward to start giving us 'contemporary' adventures? In four issues when Morrison leaves this title, will subsequent writers be allowed to delve back into this early period for more stories (or even re-do Morrison's incredible dramatic blunder and actually show us something of those initial six months)? No idea.

In this issue, Superman wears boots, jeans, and a home-made red cape - all very obviously ideas that struck Morrison on his way to the bathroom one day and stayed in the final version because there only ever was one version. I myself think a re-launch of the greatest superhero of all time deserves a bit more deliberation than that, but I'm willing to wait a few more issues in the hopes that something worthy of the character starts happening. I'll keep you posted.

Comics! Heaven's Ladder!

Since DC Comics' new iteration of  "DC Comics Presents" is specifically designed to reprint high point stories and artwork from the company's many decades, I'm presuming it'll be cancelled soon so all that glorious past continuity doesn't muddy up the "new 52" onslaught that begins hitting comics shops next week. Can't be regularly reminding your readers of how things used to be if you're trying to sell them a brand new set-up, now can you? Especially the part of that brand new set-up that touches on the Justice League, since the legendary super-group of all DC's iconic characters is undergoing a radical revamping in only a week, from a super-powerful team honored and respected by the world to, it seems, a spatting and hunted group distrusted by the world. I'll be trying that new Justice League (and a dozen other "new 52" titles), and I'll be keeping an open mind to its potential. But nevertheless, I'll always have a special place in my comics-reading heart for the real Justice League, especially for the rare instances when the title is done perfectly.

That's murderously difficult to do, of course. The League has taken on many incarnations over the decades (some interesting, some just plain ridiculous), but it's always at its best when its roster is at its strongest, crammed full of names even the most dilatory comics fans will recognize: Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman (nobody at all recognizes the Martian Manhunter, alas, but he's been with the team from the beginning, so creators always feel obliged to use him, even though the far more natural candidate would be either Supergirl, Plastic Man, or Captain Marvel) ... and with a roster like that, it's well-nigh impossible to come up with challenging things for them to do. DC heroes (at least, until next week) typically don't bicker and squabble among themselves the way Marvel heroes do, so Justice League writers can't get much out of the kind of interpersonal dynamic that would animate a Marvel book like "The Avengers." But actual adversaries capable of giving this 'big seven' roster a serious challenge are almost non-existent.

My own solution to this problem, if I controlled DC Comics, would be fairly simple: "Justice League" would be an annual comic, not a monthly one. Once every year, DC's best writer and artist would give us a staggering, epic adventure of the League, pulling out all the narrative and visual stops, and the rest of the time, we'd just read about the separate characters having their separate adventures.

(Of course, if I controlled DC Comics, none of these characters would be radically re-invented in only a week. And Adam Strange would have his own monthly comic.)



Since there's franchise money to be made, DC will never officially adopt that strategy - but for decades now, they've more or less unofficially adopted it, periodically bringing out special one-shot Justice League issues that stand alone in continuity and offer self-contained and fittingly epic stories. These are almost always far more satisfying than any monthly League title happening at the same time, and virtually every one of them has become a classic of the team's history.

So it's kind of fitting, in a bittersweet way, that one week before the debut of an all-new, all-different Justice League, "DC Comics Presents" would re-issue one of the greatest of those stand-alone Justice League events, "Heaven's Ladder." This book was originally issued back in 2000 in an oversized format designed to better highlight Bryan Hitch's stunningly detailed visuals, and I was very pleased to learn that it would be reprinted in a normal comic-book size and thereby perhaps reach a much wider audience.



The story is epic in its simplicity: the oldest race of beings in the universe is dying, and they abduct a string of planets (including Earth) in order to form a DNA-like helix that will allow them to transcend death into an afterlife of their own creation. The League (here comprised of 'the big seven' plus Steel, Plastic Man, and the Atom) naturally want their planet back, but they quickly become altruistically involved in the quest of their abductors to find peace. And along the way, they share their own beliefs of what the afterlife might be like, from Aquaman's oceanic view:

 In death we become one with the inky depths of the ocean. Below the knowledge of light, we float forever wide and weightless, silent witnesses to the dark above a sea-soaked sandscape older than time. Every creature of the sea, from the mighty whale to the merman to the turtle to the glistening mussels shed of their shells, becomes the very salt that buoys the teeming life beyond them.

To Wonder Woman's more warlike credo:

The ancient Greeks bequeathed us the lesson that death is but a dismal state. All men and women, from the greatest to the most ignoble, are eventually reclaimed by the soil of mother earth. The only way to deny death, then, is to live each day to its absolute fullest - by constantly striving to carve an immortal legend which will serve as your eternal legacy. By making the extraordinary ... look easy.

And naturally, for us Superman fans, this is a fraught topic - after all, our hero died (I still have the armband DC issued to prove it). The Atom remembers this at one point in Heaven's Ladder and asks Superman what Heaven was like, leading to a classic, simple exchange:

"What makes you think I went to Heaven?"

"Because if you didn't, the rest of us have no hope. Seriously, what do you remember? Anything?"

"A sensation that at long last, whatever I had to do next ... it could wait."

Waid's writing is snappy and in-character the whole time (Batman is the typical stumbling block for writers doing this kind of epic thing, since he's a guy with no superpowers who wears a bat suit - Waid handles it perfectly), and Hitch's artwork is magnificent - in my opinion, the best stuff he's ever done. Great chunks of DC continuity are worked into the story, and there are some hum-dinger fight scenes, and the scope of events is so big even this powerhouse version of the League is beaten and tattered and brought right to the edge of what they can do. It's thrilling stuff, and it feels all the more precious being presented to us now, when the foreseeable future might not have stories like this.

So I say "long live the good old days" - not the last time I'll be thinking that about DC comics in 2011 and beyond, I'd guess.



 

Cimmerian 'Stravaganza: The Comics - Part 3!

The great heyday of the Roy Thomas/John Buscema era of Conan comics dwindled, no matter how fervently fans like myself wished that weren't the case. Buscema's pencils eventually degenerated to sleepwalking outlines, and other artists - even the legendary Gil Kane - could step in and shake things up for a bit, but the fire was gone (curiously, Thomas and Buscema's last truly fantastic Conan story wasn't even set in the Hyborian Age - it was an issue of Marvel's alternate-reality "What If?" series in which Conan finds himself transported to present-day Manhattan; he overturns a Volkswagon, thwarts a robbery at the Guggenheim, and beds a comely cab driver before he goes home - in other words, a fairly standard German tourist in the Big Apple). The series - in one form or another - limped on for years and spawned spin-offs ("Kull the Conqueror," "Red Sonja," "King Conan"), and Conan was still a viable property in book-form, as we'll see, but the marriage of the character and the comics medium seemed to have gone stale permanently.

Part of the problem was success. More than one pop culture commentator has mentioned that we shouldn't underestimate the medium-wide effect Thomas' dissemination of Conan had on young creators. Here was a character who possessed only his own raw animal vitality to make his way in the world - no pristine super-powers, no invulnerability or heat vision (or web-spinning and wall-crawling). And making his way in the world was pretty much all he wanted to do: he looked on selfless heroics with a sneer. Thomas (and Buscema's pencils) captured this nature perfectly and then expanded on it, to the point where, as noted, it struck some of us fans that any other comic book adaptation of the character would be akin to blasphemy.

One of the later generation of comics creators who caught the Thomas-Buscema bug was current fan favorite writer Kurt Busiek, and in 2004 he teamed up with artist Cary Nord and delivered the impossible: a comic book re-invention of Conan that both respected the character (and its comics tradition) and revelled in a completely different interpretation.

Busiek's Conan, it should be admitted right away, is by far the truest interpretation of the character that's ever been done outside of Howard. Roy Thomas was a meticulous and adoring Howard fan - but he was first and foremost a superhero writer, and he could never fully shed those habits when he turned to the Hyborian side of his writing duties. Buscema too, for all his frequent grousing about spurning the superhero genre, most often couldn't help himself in his physical design of the character: his Conan, no matter how rough-hewn, wouldn't have looked out of place in spandex.

Cary Nord tore all that down and re-worked it from the basics. In the first few issues of Busiek's re-launch of the character for Dark Horse Comics, Nord's Conan is virtually an anti-superhero. He's a much younger Conan than any we've seen (even Smith's big-haired boy spent half his panel-time looking like Ted Nugent), and he's decidedly non-iconic: a slope-browed, jut-jawed troglodyte. Nord (at Busiek's urging, I'd guess) is utterly unafraid to make his Conan look by turns homicidal and oafish, and that's exactly how Busiek writes him. This is a Conan who gets just as drunk as Buscema's - but looks ridiculous when he does it, not noble. This is a Conan who punches bartenders, women, and children just as readily as Buscema's (or more so) - but in this case they're innocent, and he's just being, well, barbaric. Readers of these fantastic issues teeter between thrilling to the young Cimmerian's exploits and deploring his small-town boorish ways. It's great, great stuff - and great fun.

Busiek is clearly having a ball in these issues. His pace is more leisurely than Thomas could ever get away with, of course - Thomas didn't write in the Age of the Inevitable Trade Paperback, but that age has now engulfed the comics market; creators tailor virtually everything they do with an eye toward the trade paperback collection that will spring up a day or two after their latest story-arc is finished. I doubt I'll ever be a complete fan of this tailoring - I've found it often erodes a writer's willingness (or ability) to engage in long-term storytelling or continuity, tends to lock them into fairly purblind six-issue cycles. But even I have to admit it's served to increase the issue-by-issue quality across the entire superhero comics spectrum; writers who are now thinking about the books their issues will soon comprise tend, I think, to do sharper and bigger work than writers who are just plugging away issue by issue, with no square-bound immortality in sight. There are exceptions of course, and Busiek has written a couple of them - but it hardly matters in this case anyway, since his heart is so clearly in the project on an issue-by-issue basis.

He tackles some of the same epic stories Thomas famously did - "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" is here, as is "The Tower of the Elephant" - but in completely different ways. This Conan's smile is quicker, his temper is shorter, and, thanks to the rather bloodthirsty house standards over at Dark Horse, his sword-work is far more gruesome (Nord excels himself at decapitations). There are still beautiful women, evil sorcerers, and disgusting nightmare-creatures, and the work that's gone into differentiating them from the sprawling comics tradition that came before them is evident on every page. This is a Conan for the 21st century - post-heroic, intensely human but still fundamentally noble.

The Busiek-Nord Dark Horse Conan trade paperbacks are must-haves for any Conan fan, and their run brings us to the end of our look at Conan in the funny books - although surely not the end of the subject! Conan will certainly continue to be interpreted and re-interpreted as long as comics survive in some form or other. But it's nice to close out the subject on such a high note.

Up next: the glut of non-canonical Conan novels as our Cimmerian Stravaganza continues to count down to the new movie!

Cimmerian 'Stravaganza: The Comics - Part 2!

"Conan the Barbarian" (the phrase is synonymous with the character, and yet, in classic "Elementary, my dear Watson," or "Beam me up, Scotty" style, it was never actually used in the original material) became a modest, surprise hit for Marvel Comics shortly after its debut. Fans responded not only to the whole sword-and-sorcery sub-genre but to Roy Thomas' specific vision of the Hyborian Age created by Robert E. Howard for the pulp market decades before. The four-color comic sold well enough, in fact, to sustain a spin-off: "Savage Tales of Conan" was another great Thomas idea, a larger-format black-and-white magazine designed to showcase longer and more visually opulent stories than the regular comic book would usually do. And both "Conan" and "Savage Tales" drew sustained life from the pencilling talents of the same man: Marvel Comics' heavyweight fan favorite, John Buscema.

Buscema was already a legend when he came to the "Conan" titles, but they gave him a range usually unavailable in super-hero comics. In the pre-historic world Thomas was fleshing out from Howard's writings, Buscema was free to let his considerable imagination soar, without needing to conform to the super-strength and eye-beams norms of titles like "The Fantastic Four" or "The Avengers." He was far less meticulous than his predecessor Barry Smith had been, but he also never ran the risk of stylized, static lapses into which Smith's art could sometimes fall. At the height of his powers, Buscema could scarcely draw a cup sitting on a table without viewers worrying it would spill on them - his panels virtually vibrated with movement.

The result was the visual conception of an entire world - and of a character. Gone was the epicene rock star of Smith's run on the title. In his place stood a far more solid adult man, broad in the chest, wide in the waist, less the lithe superhero, more the thickset tavern-brawler. This Conan might still at certain angles have looked young, but he was unquestionably seasoned - he sported a shaggy Prince Valiant haircut, a fur loin-cloth, wide lips, and a broad, oft-smashed nose. He was a stoic, no-nonsense man of violence, and the visuals Buscema came up with issue after issue helped Thomas to refine his idea of the character to an immediate perfection seldom achieved by other writers with other characters (instinct and luck play a certain part too, and timing - think of Claremont and Byrne's Wolverine, or Miller's Daredevil). To most of us reading these issues eagerly every month, this was Conan.

The world Thomas and Buscema helped to create (the working partnership between these two was an amazing fluke on its own - both imperious control-freaks who fundamentally disliked collaboration, and yet here they were working in what seemed to be perfect tandem) was an enormous elaboration on the one Smith had begun to sketch. Monsters roamed everywhere - Buscema's talent for drawing most animals stood him in good stead as Thomas' scripts called for a veritable Noah's Ark of gigantic bears, moths, rats, lions, eels, squids, lions ... as well as the perennially-popular dinosaurs. Conan fights sabre-toothed tigers, pterodactyls, slugs the size of rhinos, and even, in a breathlessly-paced sequence, a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

And through it all, Buscema's Conan is as far away from Smith's virginal quester as possible. This is a man much closer to Howard's original conception (and, with any luck, the version we'll see in only a few days when the new movie adaptation opens in a theater near you): a boisterous creature of huge appetites - some of them frankly sexual. Buscema was able to indulge to the fullest his oft-announced affection for drawing sultry women - including every kind of evil-eyed seductress imaginable (one of them ends up being made of sea weed), a stunningly re-imagined Red Sonja (Buscema replaced the jerkin-and-skirt Windsor had given the character with ... nothing much at all), and, in a long and satisfying story-arc, the corsair-queen Belit, whose death and brief resurrection marked the 100th issue of "Conan the Barbarian."

The run was immensely successful, and it defined the character for an entire generation. Even when the vogue of sword-and-sorcery started dying out, those Marvel issues kept coming: "Conan the Barbarian," "Savage Sword of Conan," "King Conan," and countless stand-alone specials and spin-offs (Thomas and Buscema spent less than a year on an adaptation of one of Howard's other great creations, King Kull, for instance, and it was a joyous event for fans of the character). Conan was drawn in this same period by other great pencillers - Gil Kane, Jim Starlin, Gene Colan, and many others tried their hands at the Cimmerian - but he belonged to Buscema, and of course to Thomas. When their time with the character finally petered to an end, it seemed almost like a Hyborian funeral was in order. Those of us who'd loved the era thought: there might be crappy knock-offs in the future (done more to keep the copyright alive than out of love or craftsmanship), but this kind of genius won't come again.

We were wrong, of course. But we had to wait a while.

Cimmerian 'Stravaganza: The Comics - Part 1!

Our Cimmerian 'Stravaganza of 2011 kicks into high-gear this week in anticipation of the new Lionsgate spectacular premiering on the 19th and starring Iowa's own Jason Momoa in the role that made a certain once and future California governor a star. And the most natural place in the world for our ongoing 'stravaganza to, um, go next is the medium where the character, the world, the very concept of Conan the Barbarian flourished - comic books.

And when we enter that medium, one thing becomes glaringly obvious: with all due respect to creator originality and meaning no disrespect to Robert E. Howard, Conan the Barbarian as he exists in the popular consciousness has a fully equal co-creator, and that co-creator's name is Roy Thomas.

Thomas will be familiar to the more nerdy among you (and to those of you who dote on my frequent comics-postings here at Stevereads)(i.e. the most nerdy among you). He was the organizational and conceptual workaday genius who pretty much inherited the mantle of Marvel Comics from Stan Lee when the company was bought and Lee was promoted to Publisher. Thomas took all the bursting creativity of Lee and his artistic collaborators, added a much more intuitive and comprehensive grasp of inter-title continuity, and almost single-handledly created the next great age of Marvel titles. And in 1970, he managed to convince Glenn Lord, the literary manager of Howard's estate, to allow Marvel to put out a comic titled "Conan the Barbarian."

Despite a significant amount of reader demand, publishing a sword-and-sorcery literary adaptation in 1970 was a bit of a risk for a mainstream company like Marvel, so Thomas originally had a tight budget - too tight, in fact, to allow him to have the company's first choice of artist, the fan favorite (and correspondingly expensive) John Buscema. And in retrospect, this was a blessing: it forced Thomas to 'settle' for a sexy young Brit named Barry Smith, whose pencilling work (especially when he handled his own inking) was only just starting to show signs of the lavish, unique brilliance it would achieve in part because of the leeway Thomas gave the artist on this book. As Thomas remarked at the time when presented with the choice of artists, if he'd gone with Buscema in those early days, he'd have sold more issues and won fewer awards.

Looking at that initial Smith run on the book, it's utterly amazing how fast he throws off the unconvincingly Kirbyesque style he was using in issue #1. In a remarkably short time, Smith starts to show readers the sinuous, glittering detail for which he would later become famous. Most artists mature more slowly, but even by issue #4, the landmark "Tower of the Elephant," there are clear foreshadowings of Smith's more mature look.



Those earliest issues give us a very young Conan - lithe, boyish (indeed, many of Smith's '70s big-hair panels make the character look like the baddest-ass Bee Gee of them all), savage but inexperienced, and as such they make the perfect companion to this new movie, which features a Conan just at the beginning of his incredible career. He's not yet the preposterous monolith we were given in the last movie adaptation, and let's hope he never becomes it: the real Conan was far more than a simple strong-man - he's much more a lion than a bulldozer.

And magnificently sustaining Smith's evolving visuals was the scripting of Roy Thomas, who took a personal love of the character in Robert E. Howard's stories and re-created that character and his entire world for a much, much broader readership than Howard had ever reached. Long before the original movie and long after, mention of Conan was as likely to conjure the world Thomas created as visions of Austrian weightlifters. That world, like Howard's is full of torch-lit taverns and fantastic creatures who've survived from even earlier eras in Earth's troubled history. And more: it was Thomas who perfected the driving tension in the background of Howard's stories - the tension represented by Conan himself, a mortal man without super-powers who encounters all these fantastic creatures, these stubborn hold-overs from earlier times in which even Conan the Barbarian would not have survived ... encounters them, and defeats them. Not for heroism's sake (Thomas' Conan, like Howard's, is usually indifferent to heroism), but because he insists on dominating his own world. As paradoxical as it may seem, this Conan was both a representative of Everyman and an avatar of the 'modern' world.

For all his genius, Smith was never cut out for regular comic book series work, and everybody knew it (it's precisely this quality in his work that makes his frequent forays into the genre so instantly memorable). Luckily, as "Conan the Barbarian" sales blossomed, Thomas was able to acquire an artist who was not only cut out for regular series work but gloried in it, and that artist would go on to create as definitive a visual of Conan as Thomas had created a mental one. That artist of course is the aforementioned John Buscema, and we'll look at his contribution in our next chapter!