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! 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.

Great Moments in Comics: Lois & Clark!

As I've mentioned, these last few weeks of DC Comics have managed to be both sad and anticlimactic. Beginning next week, the company effects a complete overhaul of its flagship titles and all its characters, radically changing the origins, powers, relationships, and back-stories of all its best-known (and lesser-known) heroes. DC is pouring all its energies into this "new 52" revamp, and that's had the predictable effect of throwing all of its ongoing monthly titles into the shade. Readers - even loyal fans - have wondered what the point is of buying their favorite titles when everything about those titles is going to change completely in only a few weeks. And there's been a side-effect as well: all the writers of these various ongoing titles at some point realized that they were every bit as big a part of comics history as the new writers and artists who'll be mucking around with greatness in September: each one of these current creators is shutting down some comics, and many of those comics have been around for most of the last century. In its own sad way, that's some epic stuff - take Paul Cornell, for instance. His name is unknown to me, but this week he's the guy who's writing the last issue of "Action Comics" as we know it. That's a weirdly abrupt kind of responsibility.

He wraps up the ongoing storyline in which Superman and his allies defeat a group of marauding Doomsday clones, and then he gives Superman fans a Great Moment very much like what they've been looking for all these last weeks. Lois and Clark are enjoying a quiet dinner together, and Clark is confessing his worry to her that his friends and allies look up to him for all the wrong reasons, that they're willing to sacrifice themselves for him and maybe shouldn't be. And Lois tells him:

People know the most important thing about your identity ... that, whoever they are, you're like them. A human being. Hitler said he'd made "the superman," Stalin was called "the man of steel" ... but no, one look at you, and no, never, you blow that out of the water ... because people know who the real Superman is. It's this decent guy with the silly smile who's sometimes a little old-fashioned, who lives a whole human life. Who fell in love and got married.

Clark, coming from Krypton didn't make you Superman. Martha and Jonathan did. And thanks to your doubts and your fears and your absolute refusal to be above anyone ... you do them proud every day.

No fanfare, no massive action sequence ... nothing to match the bleak grandeur of "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" - but still: I can't help but feel a little edge in that "people know who the real Superman is."

 

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! Timber Wolf in the Legion!

In yesterday's stack of comics was "Legion of Super-Heroes" #11, written by the legendary Paul Levitz and drawn by someone (something?) called Daniel HDR. It's called "False Start," and it's one of the early chapters in what's promising to be an epic return of the Legion of Super-Villains (only a promise, at this point - DC could always decide to fire Levitz precipitously in mid-story, or else he himself could decide to get himself fired in mid-story), and as you can tell from the cover, the centerpiece of the issue is a fight between the solar-powered Sun Emperor and the super-feral Legionnaire Timber Wolf.

So: the sort of thing that'll be incomprehensible to outsiders and catnip to Legion fans, who've loved Timber Wolf since his original appearance forty years ago (he was doing the whole savage-good-guy-with-claws-who-heals-real-fast a long time before Wolverine showed up over at Marvel). The match is also drastically uneven on its face: Sun Emperor is a 'big' villain, and typically in Legion history 'big' villains are fought by many team mates acting in concert. When that doesn't happen - when a writer intentionally sends out a hero alone against a villain who outclasses him - it tends to bode ill for the hero (one thinks of Chemical King, the original Invisible Kid, the original Karate Kid), so when I saw that wonderful cover, I wondered if Levitz was going to start off this big Legion of Super-Villains story with first blood going to the bad guys.

The mis-match comes from the fact that Timber Wolf isn't a 'big' Legionnaire. He's one of those above-the-middle superheroes without whom no team can function and be interesting (over at Marvel, think of how the Vision held the Avengers together for so many issues), but he's never been a Legion heavy-hitter on the level of Mon-el or Ultra Boy or Element Lad. Timber Wolf his mid-range super strength and agility, and he's got a bad temper. None of that should prevent a villain like Sun Emperor from melting his eyes and ending the fight in about five seconds.

But Levitz is a canny writer (and here he's very ably assisted by the pencils of this mysterious Daniel HDR-bot - this is some very good artwork, and it shows every sign of becoming fan-favorite classic stuff in about five more years of steady pencilling), and Timber Wolf is too popular with Legion fanatics to simply kill - this issue has something else in mind: reclaiming the character a bit. Timber Wolf faces off against Sun Emperor in Japan and simply refuses to let the fact that he's getting char-broiled stop him from beating the stuffing out of his foe (who has, I belatedly realized as I was reading, only normal human strength underneath all those flames). Levitz' scripting always has a curiously enjoyable bare-bones quality about it - in his "Legion," the universe is a tough place where bad things happen, and the good guys are always understaffed and overcommitted - and he enjoys a little poking around inside his readers' preconceptions, as when he has a defiant Timber Wolf object when Sun Emperor calls him an "animal" (always a touchy spot with this particular Legionnaire). "I'm not an animal," he says, "I'm human" - but he says it while he's charging, fangs bared, wild-eyed, whole head on fire, playfully subverting the moment.

This issue isn't meant to be big shakes - we're still in classic Levitz-style 'prelude' issues as his big storyline gears up - but even so it has half a dozen sub-plots percolating along, so there's something for virtually every picky Legion fan, and a real treat at the center for Timber Wolf fans. And the rest of us (what can I say? It's tough to get excited about 'feral' characters when you were one for the first third of your life) can take pleasure in the feel of a big story playing out so confidently - and in the HDR-bot's really good artwork (especially the fun background characters, in time-honored Steve Rude fasion).

Comics! Manflesh, Manhug, Mangog!

A varied and astoundingly good haul of comics this week, from "Book of the Skull," the prologue to Marvel's upcoming "Fear Itself" crossover event (the prologue has some great gritty moments and also boasts the week's best cover) to some fantastic scripting on "Thunderbolts" and "Spider-Man" and especially "Avengers Academy" to the artwork of the always-amazing Alan Davis on "Young Avengers." But even with such an outstanding batch of comics, every reader will have his, er, preoccupations (there's a less kind word that's often used with comics fans, but we need not sling it around here) - certainly I found that to be true.

Naturally, I found myself concentrating on the Legion, for instance. Not the ongoing "Legion of Super-Heroes," but the concurrent ongoing "Adventure Comics," which also features the Legion (those of you who are now rolling your eyes can instead count your blessings - as often as I've written how overjoyed I am that the Legion is appearing in two monthly titles, I've spoken about it far, far more often, to those poor unfortunate souls close enough to hear me - you're getting it easy, here at Stevereads).

This current run in "Adventure Comics" is written by the great Paul Levitz and features the Legion Academy, where brash new potential recruits are taught the basics of being super-heroes in the 31st century. Artist Phil Jimenez gives us some finely-detailed panels of these youngsters in action - getting their overly-ambitious tails kicked in a very satisfactory manner by an amped-up bad guy only Legion fans will remember.

But the part of the issue I found most interesting (Levitz always has many balls in the air, except when he's writing one of his firing-on-all-cylinders mega-epics, which he most definitely has my permission to do sometime soon) was one scene taking place back at the Academy on Montauk Point, where Cosmic Boy and Duplicate Girl are talking with four potential recruits - Lamprey, Nightwind, Crystal Kid, and Power Boy (the latter being both purple and, in classic Jimenez fashion, easy on the eyes; the Legion should always have a purple member on principle, so he gets my vote) - about what happens when the selection process is over. "You've got options," Duplicate Girl tells them. "We've prepared you well, so after the finals, you might get the opportunity to try out for the Legion, or join the Science Police, or even go solo on an outerworld." Cosmic Boy makes it even plainer: "Don't lock in too much on Legion membership. It's not for everyone. The risks are high, the tension incredible, and even if you don't get killed, you have to give up your life to the team." I submit that only a Legion writer as experienced as Levitz (Keith Giffen, say, or the mighty Jim Shooter) could have given one of the team's founding members such a sharp, knowing assessment to make. Although even I'm just a little confused: these kids spend years in Legion Academy for the chance to try out for the team? Isn't that like spending a whole hitch at West Point for the chance to graduate?

Even more iconic goings-on over in "Superman," a title that's been ailing in the excitement department for quite some time now - despite writer J. Michael Straczynski pursuing a potentially great story-line: in the wake of losing an entire planet-full of Kryptonians, Superman, feeling mighty depressed, decides to forego his iconic flying and walk across America. What could have been a really good device for looking inside the character's head turned rather quickly into an entire comic book about the kind of douchey guy who constantly talks on his cellphone while he's walking down the street.

I would have avoided the latest issue of this run, #709, completely, but my attention was drawn by the nifty John Cassaday cover (the genius stroke of having it set against a starry night instead of bright daylight is the thing that does it for me), so I read it. The main plot is just about the dumbest thing I've ever seen this writer come up with - and that's saying something - but the interstitial moments in and around that plot were worth the cover price. At one point, in order to stop a Flash who's running out of control, Superman super-hugs him, which was funny (one can only speculate how much more ... intense ... Jiminez would have made the payoff panel), and at another point Superman tells the Flash a story of his boyhood in Smallville, a story in which a young Clark Kent shares detention with a young Lex Luthor - only Straczynski never has Superman identify Lex to the Flash, making me wonder if in this present state of DC continuity the other heroes don't know that the world's greatest hero and the world's greatest villain went to high school together. I'll have to remember to toodle on over to the relevant Wikipedia pages and see what I can learn about that.

My final, um, preoccupation this time around was the fourth issue of the five-issue "Thunderstrike" mini-series, in which Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz wonderfully revisit their signature joint creation, the Thor-knockoff character Thunderstrike. Only it's not Eric Masterson, who was their original Thunderstrike and died, but rather his teenage son, who's now trying to wield his father's enchanted hammer and perhaps become a superhero in his own right. DeFalco and Frenz have quite pointedly made this series both dramatic and funny - there are quick quips in every issue worthy of Stan Lee himself (in this latest issue, the funniest ones involve some clueless motorists who mistake the series villain for Iron Man, until he starts ranting about killing people, at which point we get: "You know, I don't think that is Iron Man" ... hee). The 'dramatic' part is taken one enchanted hammer too far, however, in this issue, in which the old Thor super-villain Mangog returns, swiftly (and rather unhygienically) deals with the series villain, and then goes on his own rampage into the heart of New York City, looking for Thor.

Thor fans (of which I count myself among the foremost, alas) will recognize Mangog as the H-bomb of Thor villains - not Thor's defining villain (that would be Loki, his evil half-brother), but his ultimate villain, the Galactus to his Fantastic Four, the Morlun to his Spider-Man, the Destiny to his Doctor Strange. Mangog is an artificial creation imbued with - as he himself was originally fond of saying every ten seconds - the strength of a billion billion beings: i.e. physically unstoppable, even physically unchallengeable. When Stan Lee introduced him back in the late '60s, Mangog was meant to represent a foe Thor had no chance whatsoever of defeating.

So hauling him onstage to validate the revamping of a new teen hero is probably a bad idea. DeFalco doesn't usually have bad ideas, so I'm willing to wait and see how the fifth and final issue of the mini-series plays out, but this issue's concluding two-page spread, in which Punkerstrike - or Kid Thor, if you will - shows up with the Avengers and makes some bad-ass comment designed to raise expectations for a massive fight in the next instalment - doesn't exactly make me hopeful. If this is the real Mangog, he once trashed the entire realm of Asgard - including Thor - without breaking a sweat. This current team of Avengers are pretty much pantywaists (I don't even see Iron Man in that two-page spread) and should be smeared like tapioca on Page 1 of the next issue. I'm hoping it ends up not being the real Mangog - or that some Ultimate Nullifier is pulled out of a hat on the last page.

No matter what, I'll be reading! Comics this good will always get me to come back.

Comics! Eye Love the Legion!

[caption id="attachment_2257" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="not the Open Letters Montly logo, but pleasingly close"][/caption]

Sometimes, right there in the middle of a sleet-storm, smack-dab in the center of a pile of the week's comics handed over by one's petulant houseboy, there'll be a shining gem, something so odd and wonderful that it just plain makes your day. The pile of comics I read this week had just such a gem in its innards: Legion of Super-Heroes Annual #1, written by Paul Levitz and drawn by Keith Giffen.

Let's repeat that last part again, shall we? Written by Paul Levitz and drawn by Keith Giffen.

Aaaaaaah. Suddenly, the sloppy day outside feels cold and clear like an overcast afternoon on Prince Edward Island.

Paul Levitz, as some of you may know, is one of the all-time great Legion of Super-Heroes writers. And Keith Giffen, as some of you may know, might very well be the best Legion of Super-Heroes artist (I say "may" only because I retain a soft spot in my heart for Curt Swan - a soft spot I know perfectly well is irrational). These two creators are responsible for some of the best moments, issues, story-arcs, and title-runs in all of Legion history, and they haven't worked together on a Legion issue in about twenty years. Plenty of talented creators have worked on the team in that time (rumor has it, in fact, that one or two of the very best stretches are coming to reprint form sometime soon - expect hosannas here, if that happens), but there's no matching the sheer history involved when giants return to the title. I thought the same thing when Jim Shooter briefly returned to the book he made famous, and hoo-boy, I'm thinking it now, after reading this fantastic issue.

The plot Levitz dreams up is fairly simple: a poor peasant girl on the medieval world of Orando (home to the Legion member Princess Projectra, who's currently using the code-name Sensor Girl) stumbles upon a decaying temple and discovers the fabled eye of Ekron - a mysterious floating eye about the size of a beach ball that bestows immense power upon the woman who bonds with it. Legion fans will know the rest: Sarya of Venegar took possession of the eye (and it of her) and became the Emerald Empress, one of the heavy-hitters of the Fatal Five, a group of villains who've been bent on the Legion's destruction for about fifty years. Some years ago, Sensor Girl pulled a neat trick: she used her perception-altering powers to blind the eye, severing the link between it and Sarya, who by that point had had enough of her connection to the thing and just wanted to die. A lot of shamefully messy continuity has flown under the bridge since that great sequence, and in this issue Levitz takes the perfect approach to it: he simply ignores it. The eye of Ekron is buried in a ruined castle on Orando? Great!

It possesses that poor peasant girl - who's happy to have the power and doesn't notice that it's made her insane - and she promptly snags a passing Legion cruiser out of orbit and slams it into the planet. The cruiser contains Legion friends (with benefits?) Lightning Lass and Shrinking Violet, who were intending to be on vacation and now wake up in the Empress' fetid cells, which can't hold either one of them - Vi because she can shrink to sub-molecular size at will, and Lightning Lass because she possesses lightning-wielding powers that Giffen has always delighted in drawing.

The two quickly run afoul of the new Empress, and as comics-friendly readers will already have noted, Giffen really unleashes his inner Jack Kirby in this issue. It's a delight to watch, and it's a relief from the ongoing Legion monthly title, where these same Legionnaires always look tired, strung out, and fifty. Note to the DC powers that be: in the current continuity, the Legion are no longer teenagers - which means they're adults, the same kind of super-hero adult as, say, Batman or Superman - characters who'll never look older than about their very early 30s. Artists don't need to make each member look like Willie Nelson to underscore their grown-up status; instead, they can look like, well, super-heroes - like they do in this issue.

As I've said before, the key to a good Legion story is to control the roster. If you have twenty Legionnaires show up in response to the appearance of a new Emerald Empress, she gets defeated in about fourteen minutes, and you don't have an issue. This time around, only three team members are able to respond to the plight of Lightning Lass and Shrinking Violet: Sun Boy, Gates the team transporter ... and Sensor Girl, who's fairly urgent to get to her homeworld right away and see what the trouble is. This of course leads to page after page of supreme Keith Giffen fight-scenes (several of which are single-panel splash-pages, which might cause Caleb over at Every Day Is Like Wednesday to grumble about the $5 cost of the thing, but that's only because he's a talented artist himself and so a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to what might be considered lazy storytelling - and he might have a point, but me? I'm no artist, and I just loved the big, self-indulgent feel of it all).

In the end, the new Empress is defeated and Princess Projectra decides to stay on Orando and help repair the damage that deranged peasant girl did. It's a self-contained issue in the best tradition of that dying breed, and the annual's back-up features are light and entertaining (including a hilarious Legion History Board Game that's so quick and informative it  should be a standard feature in every Legion book, with only one small change: surely a Legion board-game must mention Spaceopoly Lad?). There were plenty of other comics in the pile this week, but oh, this one was my own little Miracle Machine!

Comics addendum! The ongoing Legion!

Just a quick note here to sing the praises of the new Legion of Super-Heroes monthly comic written by the great Paul Levitz and drawn by Yildiray Cinar (who is, apparently, one of the High Elves of Eregion - which at least means we'll be seeing his work for a long time!). Issue #9 of the comic features the 'iconic' covers that are running throughout all DC comics this month - a wonderful gimmick that underscores the fact that many of DC's 'intellectual properties' are quite venerable and have been followed by fans through many decades.

No fans more dedicated - nor many titles through more decades - than the Legion! And yet, despite that rich, convoluted history (or maybe the history made it inevitable), the Legion's publication history has been plagued regularly with .... well, crap. Crappy writers. Crappy re-boots. Crappy artists - oh sweet lordie, the crappy artists ....

So it's always a relief when a really good reboot or arc comes along. We got just such a really good spell with industry (and real life) giant Jim Shooter's recent truncated run on the book, and we're getting one again with veteran Legion writer Paul Levitz doing what he does so well: unfolding several plots simultaneously without ever dropping the ball on any one of them. And he's got good artwork serving his words - this High Elf really knows what he's doing, and his inking by Wayne Faucher (presumably human) supplies just the level of control and refinement I suspect he needs.



The combination of that artwork and Levitz at the writing helm is almost reconciling me to the whole idea of following the adventures of an adult Legion. The more I think about the concept, the more I realize that it was the only one that would really work to keep such an old franchise vital, but Legion fans accept change only grudgingly. Levitz's presence certainly helps - and some gigantic, epic story of the type that's always worked so well with the Legion ... well, that would help too, if the powers that be at DC could arrange it.

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.