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.



 

Comics! A Clash of Titans!

There's something primordially satisfying about superheroes fighting other superheroes - it's always far more compelling than superheroes fighting anybody else. I don't know why that is, but I've been enjoying it for eons just the same. And some superhero fights are just undeniably more enjoyable than others - and that part I do indeed understand: it's all about iconic value. If you take two superheroes with no iconic value and have them fight, absolutely nobody is going to care who wins (well, fanboys will care, but since nobody cares about them, we're in the clear). Daredevil verus Power Man? A mere statistical blip. Captain America versus Wolverine? A classic waiting to happen (and I do mean waiting! despite the fact that these two should make a riveting rumble-epic - two perfect fighting machines, neither of whom gets tired, one armed with an unbreakable defensive weapon and one armed with unbreakable offensive weapons - they've never had a satisfying fight, despite having had a very satisfying Mike Zeck fight cover. Go figure).

And the greater the iconic value, the greater the power of the imagery involved, the better the fight - or so it used to be. In terms of power-specifics, no fight in the DC universe should be more enjoyable than Superman versus Wonder Woman, but although just such a fight was done very well a few years ago, DC can actually field an even more iconic confrontation: Superman versus Batman. Despite the fact that Batman has no super-powers and should therefore lose in about a tenth of a second, the staggering iconic weight of comics' two most recognizable figures carries the day - as was perfectly illustrated (literally, in this case) at the climax of Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns, when a grizzled old Batman fights a stronger-than-ever Superman - and comics readers everywhere held their breath (it's my hope that we'll someday see a live-action special effects extravaganza version of that very scene - with Bruce Willis playing Batman, of course).

It's trickier over at Marvel, since their most iconic character, Spider-Man, is also something so rare he has almost no parallel in comics: a totally non-aggressive hero. It just doesn't feel right to have him showing up in the books of other characters, throwing punches at them - he's a sweet-faced good-natured young guy who'd rather talk and joke than establish a alpha-male dominance. It's true that Wolverine has quite a bit of iconic value nowadays too, and there were satisfying moments to that storyline a few years ago where he felt compelled to take on the entire Marvel lineup of heroes one by one.

But for me, the real Marvel kicker has always been Thor versus the Hulk. Not just because of the power involved, although it was always neat wondering what would happen if Marvel's two most powerful characters duked it out (that's the one thing that stopped fights between the Hulk and the Thing from being equally compelling - no matter how well-done the confrontation was, the reader always knew the Thing was going to lose), but also because the nature of the iconic value here was completely polarized: Thor was an intelligent, refined, quasi-Shakespeare-spouting god from a shining city, and the Hulk was a near-bestial pea-eyed creature of incoherent rage. That always added a zest to their rare confrontations.

Or at least, as mentioned, it used to. Nowadays, their confrontations aren't rare anymore, and writers who were children in the 1970s are now comic creator's united in one solid belief: that Thor is some ponce who's totally dependent on his magic hammer to last even five seconds against the super-cool Hulk. Sigh.

A perfect case in point came out to comic stores this week: the third issue of "Earth's Mightiest Heroes: The Avengers," the comics-companion to the new cartoon series on Disney. Don't get me wrong: the issue is really well done, written with deceptive wit by Chris Yost and drawn with nifty vigor by Scott Wegener. In it, two celestial bad guys - the Stranger and the Collector - place a wager on who would win in a fight, Thor or the Hulk (most Marvel super-villains are in fact just this kind of barely-disguised fanboy). They brainwash Thor into attacking the Hulk, and the show is on.

Wegener does something that's by now very familiar in such fights: he gives Thor a great opening out of the gate specifically because he knows Thor's going to get his Asgardian ass handed to him in short order - and that's just what happens here. Thor gets in precisely one good shot and then spends the rest of the abortive fight getting punched around by the Hulk. The Stranger and the Collector (I forget who bet on whom, but it doesn't matter - they're both windbags) keep commenting on how Thor, despite his power, is probably going to lose because, as the decades-old Marvel tagline goes, "the madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets." And if you fight an opponent who keeps getting stronger the more angry he gets, and you aren't similarly blessed, you're certainly going to lose eventually.



So Thor blasts the Hulk with a lightning-bolt smack from his mystic hammer (no explanation as to why it doesn't seem to hurt the Hulk - writers hardly ever bother to explain that, although I'd really like to know), and then the Hulk starts knocking him around until the fight is interrupted by Thor coming to his senses. Inconclusive, you might say, and hardly unprecedented for being so. A few years ago, in issue #5 of Mark Millar's epic first run on "Ultimates," we get the same thing. In that story line, Thor is a seedy hippie with an enormous glowing hammer and the Hulk is a snarling gray-skinned cannibal with an attitude problem. Millar's approach to this retooled Avengers fiddles with virtually every established tenet of that super-group - but he leaves the familiar Thor-Hulk rope-a-dope untouched: his Thor is given an impressive initial success against the Hulk specifically because it's going to count for nothing - the Hulk's going to shrug it off and knock Thor into the middle of next Tuesday. Millar's Thor arrives on the scene in an impressive burst of lightning and smugly enumerates to the fallen Hulk specifically what damage has been done to his body ("you've got three broken ribs, a punctured lung, a shattered spine, an enlarged gall bladder," etc.) - then the Hulk swats him across midtown Manhattan like last year's graffiti. Sigh.

It all prompts me to recall the good old days, when 'equal' meant 'equal' and when, at Marvel anyway, house policy forbade iconic fights from having clear-cut winners. I specifically recall, of course, the halcyon summer of 1973 when Marvel ran its very first cross-title storyline, a six-issue event dreamed up by Roy Thomas and written by Steve Englehart, in which the company's two most powerful super-teams at the time, the Avengers and the Defenders, were tricked into fighting each other. The plot involved Loki and Dormammu and a quest to assemble some sort of mystic do-hickey and enslave all of reality, but like most fans at the time, I didn't care about the plot - I just loved the prospect of seeing so many superheroes square off against each other.

And square off they did! Some of the match-ups were interesting, and quite a few were absurd (and at least one turned out to be awkward, in light of Marvel's later continuity: Captain America fought the Sub-Mariner, and neither acted like they knew each other or had been comrades during WWII - mainly because it would be a couple more years before Roy Thomas himself thought up the Invaders, the super-team to which Cap and the Sub-Mariner belonged, so in 1973 it didn't exist yet) - the Silver Surfer fought the Vision, the sad-sack Swordsman fought the Valkyrie, Iron Man fought Hawkeye, Doctor Strange fought Mantis and the Black Panther (he just puts them to sleep, rather than turn them both into caterpillars), but all of that was mere prelude to the climax of the whole event: Defenders #10 - Thor versus the Hulk.

Oh, I can't tell you how I lived for that issue! How my beagles and I trooped dutifully to the corner variety store to see if that longed-for delivery had come (this was in the days before the Internet, when corner stores allowed dogs inside and nobody had posted shipping schedules for comics). These two characters had only fought once before, in a maddeningly off-scene two-panel encounter years ago in the Avengers, nine long years before, but this issue promised a full-length showdown.

I wasn't disappointed: with Englehart writing and the underappreciated Sal Buscema drawing, Thor and the Hulk square off in L.A. and duke it out for seven glorious pages ... it had everything any fan could ever hope for - except a winner. Instead, after he's had them trade blows for a while, Englehart has his two characters lock up in a straining match, each trying to move the other without success, until finally their two teams show up and convince them to stand down.

Defenders #10 was blissful for me, but looking back on my callow younger days, I realize that instead of being pleased I should have fired off an angry letter to Roy Thomas, taking him to task for placating mindless Hulk-fans with what amounted to a stalemate. Of course, back in 1973, I didn't have access to the Good Book that now rules my life, the Holy Text that I now consult for guidance on every one of life's most important questions.

I refer, of course, to the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, expanded edition.

In that mighty tome, the facts are clearly laid out. Thor has 'class 100' strength, meaning he can lift (press) over 100 tons. The Hulk, the Handbook notes, also has 'class 100' strength - but only when he's enraged. In his 'normal' state, he can only lift (press) about 70 tons. In other words, he needs to get mad and stay mad to approach Thor's level of strength. And even when he's there, he's only there - where Thor is too. The Handbook is silent on how much more than 100 tons Thor can lift - it's possible that the Hulk would be significantly weaker than Thor even after he himself reached the 100-ton range. If I were to write that irate letter to Roy Thomas today (much as it grieves me to say so, I don't believe he's a reader of Stevereads), the point I'd make would be very simple: if, when the fight starts, the Hulk is only two-thirds as strong as Thor, the fight would never last long enough for the Hulk to win. Added to which Thor's vast centuries of combat experience fighting monsters just like the Hulk - there's just no way things would result in a stalemate, let alone a loss for Thor.

And yet lose he does, time and again. Even if we don't talk about the recent animated movie that features a Hulk-beating-Thor sequence so long and detailed it practically qualifies as S&M porn, there are still plenty of comic book fights between the two in which the Hulk wasn't even inconvenienced - just take the nancy-boy's croquet mallet away from him and slap him around like a Girl Scout until you get bored.

The moral of the story? Everything was better in 1973.

Comics! Captain America Reborn!

In Marvel Comics, the resurrection of Captain America proceeds apace. The second Ed Brubaker/Bryan Hitch issue of the mini-series that will bring back the Star-Spangled Avenger is out, and it's got enough thought-provoking oddities to warrant a quick second comics-entry so soon after our last one. Because, as you all know, I thought the death of Captain America was a stupid plot-afterthought to the overall poorly-conceived 'Civil War' storyline, I'm naturally interested in seeing it fixed. Cap is Marvel's third-oldest continuing character (70 years still seems impossible to believe), and he's also their third most-recognizable character (after Spider-Man and Wolverine) - his absence from the Marvel Universe is the black hole at the center of so many of the problems confronting Marvel's continuity right now, that a well-done resurrection tale could undo a lot of bad karma.

And I do so love a well-done resurrection tale! Comic books are rife with them, of course, and some are done much better than others. The dumbest, sloppiest, most protracted and lackluster of such resurrections was sure Marvel's revival of Captain America's WWII sidekick Bucky (who was good and properly dead for so long that the fact had become axiomatic in the comics world - "nobody dies, but Bucky"), who's returned as some sort of half-cyborg cold warrior named, appropriately enough, Winter Soldier. After the death of Captain America, Winter Soldier donned his uniform and his famous shield - to give solace to a grieving country, and all that. Naturally, he features prominently in the story Brubaker and company have to tell here.

That story is almost as old as the character of Cap itself. A key thing to remember about the Marvel Universe is that everybody in it has already had to deal with the death of Captain America once before: at the end of WWII, Cap and Bucky were lost and presumed killed in an explosion - the world didn't know that the super-soldier serum flowing through Cap's body preserved his life and put him in suspended animation, from which the Sub-Mariner and the Avengers accidentally revived him decades after the world thought him lost. So a second return from the dead isn't really pushing things for the character, provided it's handled well (note to the Marvel bullpen: kindly don't kill this character off again).

This particular resurrection story is, so far, being handled well. Brubaker is capable of some taut plotting, and he's settled on a classic mechanism of rebirth for his character: that old standby, the time-travel story. The two issues of "Captain America Reborn" that have appeared so far (the first one with a nifty cover, the second with a crap-assy cover)(which makes the third anybody's guess) have two parallel plots: the efforts of the new Bucky/Captain America and his allies to infiltrate the lair of the government bad guys they suspect had a hand in killing the 'real' Cap, and the 'real' Cap narrating long vignettes from his life - which he's mysteriously re-living from beyond the grave. In this issue, he wonders what's going on - he's inside his own memories, unable to alter them but not simply re-experiencing them; he's thinking for himself, about himself, as the reels of his life unspool.

But is it his life? This second issue opens with a scene from 1944, where Cap and a bunch of grunts are storming a fortress somewhere in Europe. The grunts are under heavy fire, and Cap is there to save the day - and also to fight the Nazi super-villain Master Man, which he does in one beautifully drawn and choreographed fight-sequence of some six or seven panels. If some of you are thinking that's a bit quick, you're not alone - I thought the same thing. Master Man, after all, is an invulnerable super-villain strong enough to take on the whole of Captain America's WWII super-team the Invaders, including the Human Torch and the aforementioned Sub-Mariner. In the current Marvel continuity, Captain America could no more take on Master Man alone - and beat him - than he could beat the Hulk without help. So let's go to the tape, shall we?


Cap launches himself up at the descending Master Man, slams him against the fortress wall, plants his boots against his enemy, spring-boards backwards, and lets the two of them plummet to the ground, with Master Man absorbing the impact and Cap pile-driving down right on top of him, leaving Master Man unconscious. Boom. Fight over. But in current Marvel continuity, Cap couldn't make such a catapulting leap, and Master Man could easily shrug off such an impact. So what's going on?

The narrative shifts to Bucky/Captain America getting his ass kicked by the bad guys, and when it shifts back to the 'real' Cap, we're seeing a scene very familiar to comics fans: skinny little Steve Rogers volunteering to be experimented upon by kindly, brilliant Professor Erskine, in an attempt to create the world's greatest super-soldier. Steve drinks the super-soldier serum, undergoes the radiation-bath, and quintuples in body-mass, suddenly bristling with muscles. And as all fans know, that's when tragedy strikes: a Nazi saboteur lurking in the watching crowd shoots and kills Erskine, thereby insuring that Steve Rogers will be the only person to receive that precise super-soldier treatment. And in the instant of Erskine's death, an enraged Steve Rogers smashes through the plate glass and hurls the Nazi to his death against the energy-combines in Erskine's lab.


Except in this version, this 'memory' our narrating Cap is re-living, he doesn't just kill the Nazi saboteur - he leaps up forty feet to do it. Even spurred by grief and rage, the Captain America of the current Marvel continuity could no more do that than he could flap his wings and fly to the moon.



But there is a Captain America who can do these kinds of things. He's the Captain America from the 'Ultimate' universe Marvel created some years ago in order to tell more updated, bad-ass versions of the origins of some of their oldest characters. As I've mentioned here before, the Captain America who debuted in Ultimates was in many ways a preferable version of the character: more of a soldier, and much, much more than a superb athlete dressed in a flag - that Cap was a genuine super-being, indefinably tougher, stronger, and faster than even a perfectly-conditioned normal man. The Ultimates Captain America very probably could defeat Master Man in six panels (if memory serves, he defeated the Hulk in about the same amount of space, albeit temporarily), and he could certainly clear forty feet in a rage-fueled leap.

So I'm starting to wonder.

I'm starting to wonder if Marvel hasn't given Brubaker and company permission to tweak their Star-Spangled property just a bit. I'm wondering if one of the most successful and well-conceived creations of the 'Ultimates' universe is simply being moved over to normal Marvel continuity.

In short, I think the Cap I've been reading for lo, these many decades really is dead and gone. So ... long live Captain America?