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! Avengers Assemble, volume 1!

Our book today is the great graphic novel collection Avengers Assemble,Volume 1, originally published in an oversized hardcover a decade ago and now at last re-issued in paperback. I owned and often re-read the hardcover (an indulgence I seldom make for graphic novels, but this one was well worth it), but alas, it failed to survive the ravages of my Summer of Homelessness, and since in the meantime the thing had never appeared in paperback, I assumed the worst and figured it never would.

But we live in the great age of comic book reprint collections, and so here it is - a burstingly colorful volume featuring the first nine issues of the title's late-'90s relaunch, written by Kurt Busiek and drawn with mind-boggling mastery by George Perez.

This relaunch happens in the wake of Marvel's disastrously poorly-conceived attempt to 'coolify' some of their most venerable titles by giving them entirely into the hands of a few fan-favorite artists and having a kind of company sack-race to see who could dump the most crap on the market in the shortest amount of time.

The Avengers and lots of other Marvel heroes (but not the X-Men) had voluntarily sacrificed themselves, you see, by leaping into some kinda void in order to defeat a boringly all-powerful bad guy named Onslaught. This gave Marvel a chance to do two things at the same time: 1) finally have a continuity that was mutants, mutants, and more mutants, and 2) launch a series of books set in a new continuity, where the origins of titles like the Avengers or Captain America could be entirely re-thought. It seemed like win-win. But even a win-win scenario will quickly head south if it involves boneheaded and blasphemously untalented fan favorite artist Rob Liefeld, and this one did. Liefeld is the most notoriously inept artist to get regular work since Herb Trimpe, and he's not only inept but droolingly adolescent, so obsessed with his ability to draw huge boobs that he infamously even gave a pair to Captain America.

So this relaunch continuity quickly descended from crappy-but-bearable to unbearably crappy to so-crappy-we-want-our-old-crap-back, and Marvel learned once again that it had some fans of things other than its best-selling books (sadly, the company apparently needs to re-learn this lesson every decade or so - witness the lineup of the current Avengers, featuring Spider-Man, the Thing, four clones of Wolverine, President Obama, and some free tacos). An event was concocted - Heroes Return - and the divergent reality was scrapped in favor of re-starting a handful of flagship Marvel titles starring old favorite characters as fans remembered them, not as a comics convention full of overgrown drunken frat boys felt like making them.

Hence, this Avengers #1, written by Kurt Busiek, drawn by George Perez, and opening in a rare moment of complete peace and quiet for Marvel's most powerful super-team. They're back from their alternate-dimension adventures, yes, but they haven't fully adjusted and aren't even officially a team again - just a small group of friends sitting around talking in stately Avengers Mansion, wondering about the meaning behind the day's outbreak of attacks on many Avengers past and present by various beings that seemed plucked from Norse mythology. Norse mythology, you say? Why, that sounds right up Thor's ally - except Thor disappeared in the super-confusing lead-up to the switcheroo, and his own title didn't get a relaunch with the others.

But he soon appears, looking ragged and telling a tale of having found himself alone in the ruins of Asgard. It turns out several of the city's most powerful magical do-hickeys - including the Twilight Sword and the Norn Stones - had gone missing ... only we learn they're now in the hands of Morgan le Fay, the centuries-old sorceress and dedicated Avengers-hater. She uses those talismans - and the reality-altering powers of the Scarlet Witch - to create yet another new reality: this one a warped variation on the medieval times Morgan loves so much, in which a huge team of temporarily re-imagined Avengers serve as her brainwashed personal bodyguard. Seems like the perfect plan - since this IS reality now, there's no chance of anybody opposing her.

It's a daring move on Busiek's part, re-launching the book with just the kind of alternate-reality storyline that raised fan ire and caused all the mess in the first place. But it's an entirely justified gamble, since a) Busiek is a very strong comics-writer who generally doesn't set challenges for himself that he can't meet, and b) he's joined here by the aforementioned legendary George Perez, whose artwork on this Avengers run (this first volume of "Avengers Assemble" and the two that will - hopefully quickly - follow it in paperback) is the best of his entire career. The result is a triumph of good old-fashioned superhero comic entertainment.

Morgan is eventually defeated (she's fighting about forty Avengers, so she didn't have that much of a chance), and the team eventually settles in back at Avengers Mansion to do that most quintessential of all Avengers activities: picking a new line-up. Busiek is a lover of comics essentials - a firm believer in the 'if it ain't broke' school of writing that's all but vanished from comics these days - so his new team has no Gilgamesh, no Doctor Druid, no Rom the Space Knight ... instead, we get Avengers staples: Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, the Scarlet Witch, Hawkeye, and the Vision, plus a wild card, Warbird, and two requisite new additions - Justice (who spends the entire run pumping his fists in excitement and generally tripping over himself) and his girlfriend Firestar (who spends the whole run, girlfriend-style, moping and criticizing him).

There follow some really fun issues full of Perez's amazing artwork (with one fill-in annual by Carlos Pacheco) and Busiek's spot-on characterizations - the highlight of which is certainly "The Court-Martial of Carol Danvers," in which the Avengers are forced to deal with the fact that Warbird likes to drink while super-heroing.

My only quibble? Well, apart from the fact that a super-team that faces such world-class dangers as Kang or Ultron would never voluntarily saddle itself with a pair of dim bulb third-stringers like Justice and Firestar, I in fact do have a very small quibble with this first volume - really, with just a touch of Busiek's dialogue. At one point when the extended team has gathered to discuss the threat of all those Asgardian attacks, somebody asks the Black Widow her opinion - and Busiek has her say "I'm not sure my record entitles me to speculate" - surely a reference to the string of issues where she lead the team back in the 1990s. Those issues were written by Bob Harras and drawn by Steve Epting, and in my opinion they remain the least-appreciated great arc in Avengers history - well deserving of a couple of nice graphic novels just like this one.

But those are pretty minor quibbles - the Black Widow is just one panel, after all, and the Avengers have always had dippy third-string members mixing with their A-listers. On the whole, this big volume does nothing but delight. Avengers fans should snap it up right away and then wait impatiently right along with me for the subsequent volumes.

Comics! Crisis Revisited!

This certainly isn't the comics entry I thought I'd make this week. In the saturation-bombing leading up to the release of its next mega-movie, Marvel Comics has been dusting off and rolling out every old Thor-related project they've been sitting on, and they've been commissioning every new Thor-related thing they can. The Thor movie – directed by Kenneth Branagh and starring Anthony Hopkins as Odin – will doubtless be a wowsy experience (I'm hoping against hope that it isn't done in 3-D; I don't know how many times I'm going to have to survive that intensely idiotic fad before it's gone for good), and since Thor is my favorite Marvel character, I'll not only be seeing it in the theater but I'm as happy as anybody for the glut of Thor-titles on the comic shop shelves these days. I love what's out, and I'm hoping for more (starting with bringing the black-and-white 'Essential' reprints of the character down to the great Walter Simonson era) – so you'd naturally expect that any week featuring not one, not two, but three new Thor titles would generate a Thor-entry here at Stevereads, where we've had Thor entries before.

But no! The single most remarkable thing on the comics shelves this week (purchased in this case not from my beloved Comicopia but from the unreconstructed nerds at JP Comics & Games, who've managed to assemble a first-rate little shop of comics and games at a time when brick-and-mortar stores are disappearing about as fast as vegans in Iowa; if you're in scenic Jamaica Plain, by all means stop in and give those virgins your business!) isn't Thor-related at all: it's the fifth issue of DC Comics' “Legacies” mini-series.

This series ought to be attracting a lot more attention than it is. DC decided to draw on some of the top creative talents in the superhero comics industry and re-tell the history of its imaginative universe, from its beginnings with the cloaked and cowled mystery men of the 30s, to the Nazi-smashing heyday of the Second World War, and then on through the seminal events of the DC continuity. Each chapter so far has been superb – I'm enjoying the series immensely and will certainly spring for the collected edition when all the chapter are done – but nothing prepared me for the artistic or emotional wallop of this fifth issue.

In terms of 'seminal events,' few things in DC's history compare with 1985's “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” a twelve-issue mini-series in which the company sought to streamline its problematically profuse continuity by means of a storyline in which an unstoppable wall of anti-energy sweeps through the multi-verse of alternate dimensions (see? Confusing, and that's just the summary), eliminating and consolidating all the hundreds of various alternate-Earths and variation-superheroes into one smooth backstory. Of course, comics beings comics, the plot was more complicated than that, involving one of the lamest super-villains in DC's history – which is saying a lot, considering that this is the company that thought a guy with eyeballs on the ends of his fingers would make a terror-inducing enemy for Batman (instead, he ended up with twelve black eyes). But the main import of the story was its epic scope – all the heroes of all the various worlds of the DC universe, desperately fighting to stave off what looks like completely annihilation.

And aside from the epic scale, there was one other stand-out thing in “Crisis”: the amazing artwork of George Perez. He'd been pleasing fans long before this mini-series came along, but it was only in these pages that he first demonstrated just how sprawling and mind-bogglingly detailed his pencils could get. His work on “Crisis” raised the 'epic mini-series' art-bar so high that for years, he himself was the only one who could reach it.

So it made perfect sense for DC to want Perez to be the artist for the issue of “Legacies” that recaps “Crisis” for a new audience. But that's easier said than done these days: Perez does no regular series work anymore and has 'retired' from comics about as often as Stephen King has retired from writing bad novels. Booking Perez was by no means a given – but here he is, in this issue, drawing 18 utterly glorious pages of re-tread DC history. It's a visual feast, made all the more memorable by the fact that it was Perez himself who provided the original milestone artwork for most of the events retold in this issue: not only “Crisis” itself but the mega-successful re-launch of the Teen Titans in their own book.

So the issue was like a homecoming (must have seemed like one for writer Len Wein as well), and maybe any other artist would have used such an occasion to coast on nostalgia. Instead, Perez page after page of his top-form pencils, including both the epic and the particular.

On the epic side, there are the issue's two show-stoppers, which are really just the same enormous scene drawn from two different angles. The first is the cover itself, showing the assembled heroes of the DC universe scrambling to save as many civilians as possible from the wave of brilliant anti-energy that's consuming a city street. The shot is from 'superhero level' (we're dead even with Superman himself), and its level of detail is really amazing. Perez makes the wise decision here to give us symbolic rather than literal action – obviously, if you need 30 superheroes to evacuate one city street, you'd be talking about some pretty shoddy superheroes; Superman and the various Flash's could evacuate an entire city in mere minutes, after all, as could any of the various Green Lanterns. Instead, what we get is a great illustration of heroes helping people in the face of disaster.



Then 18 pages in, we get the same scene (with one or two minor details mysteriously changed) from the ground-level viewpoint of the ordinary cop who narrates the series. The elements are all in their same places, but the composition has an entirely different impact, here stressing the desperation and confusion somebody without super-powers might feel in such a desperate situation. The two scenes side-by-side are a masterful performance.



No less masterful are the little pauses Perez takes, the priceless visual flourishes he puts in that most comic book artists either leave out or botch. He's always done this: “Crisis on Infinite Earths” is loaded with such little moments, including my favorite (I actually wrote about it when “Crisis” first came out, under a pseudonym, for a dear publication that's long gone, so it's oddly gratifying to be able to mention it again in the alleged permanence of the Internet), when Wonder Girl fails to see the wall falling toward her and is only saved at the last minute by a super-speeding Superman – a neat little reminder that even to other super-heroes, the Man of Steel is a life-saver:



In this issue of “Legacies,” there's a wonderful sequence where our ordinary heroes – two cops who've responded to the blazing red skies that presage the catastrophe – suddenly realize they're not the only heroes to respond to the emergency:









Of course, savoring stuff like this makes me wish DC had somehow convinced Perez to draw the whole mini-series. It would have made sense; Perez drew the two-issue “History of the DC Universe” that was the obvious progenitor of this series. But that's just more nostalgia talking: I'm enjoying the rotating roster of artists for this project. It's just tough not to think the remaining issues won't look slightly anti-climactic, after this unexpected little feast.

Essential Avengers Volume 7!

Our book today is Essential Avengers No. 7, which carries Marvel’s ‘essential’ black-and-white omnibus collections of the Avengers forward into the 1970s and features some fascinating themes and moments in the series’ run. This volume makes for great reading, mainly because the writers of these issues – Steve Englehart, Gerry Conway, and Jim Shooter – were all comics fans themselves and were resolutely writing for adults who could be presumed to have better things to do than read comic books all day.

The anthology starts off with a bang – or is that a Kang? (sorry- couldn’t resist) As with any super-team book, certain bad guy story arcs get recycled, and this book opens with two of those familiar arcs in full bloom: the Avengers squaring off against the Squadron Supreme (think: a watered down ripoff of the Justice League, and you’ll have it pretty close) (hence the joke made by the Avengers’ resident bow-and-arrow man Hawkeye in the recent crossover mini-series in which the Avengers meet the actual Justice League; he assures everybody they’re just dealing with some watered down ripoff of the Squadron Supreme!), and the Avengers dealing with the recurring villainy of the time-travelling villain Kang the Conqueror.

The Squadron Supreme story is writer Steve Englehart at his most socially sardonic, mixing some lively superhero action sequences with cultural and political commentary, some of which appears to be delivered by none other than Nelson Rockefeller (it’s a long story):

They [the Avengers]’re not the real problem anyway – I am, I and all the other corporate and conglomerate executives who have taken control of this country! We run your lives and you don’t know it – since so few of us ever stop out from behind the scenes. Even then, all you see is an image – a carefully-crafted image, like any other products! We talk a lot about honesty, and pride, and team spirit – but what we really want is power! The talk’s just to get you to give it to us. And you do! We commit the most outrageous acts – turn completely around on anything we’ve ever claimed to stand for –and you go right along, pretending not to notice…

And as for the Kang story, well, there Englehart abandons all subtlety: the Avengers’ biggest gun, Thor the Norse god of thunder, is in these opening issues just coming off several frustrating encounters with Kang, and the highlight of this segment comes when Thor has finally had enough – he knocks Kang outside of his citadel and decides to finish things once and for all, in a classic sequence that features brute force over political commentary.



Another long-time Avengers story-theme that’s done very well in this anthology is the team’s changing roster. The Avengers was the first super-team book to make such a big fuss over this question of who was in and who was out – previously, various members would wander into and out of team-pages largely based on what use the writers had for them (anybody they couldn’t use that month was said to be ‘on a mission’ or some such). Here, it’s a media event, with reporters doing television specials on the speculation leading up to the announcement of a new team-roster. And there’s an illicit thrill for Avengers readers, too, in this theme – there’s always something fun about seeing a new lineup in place for the first time, wondering how its dynamics will play out (I wonder if this tradition will be maintained when Marvel re-launches the Avengers in the wake of the Siege mini-series … it would be a shame if the opportunity were wasted), speculating on the character interactions.

The roster in this entire ‘essential’ volume is remarkably stable: there’s the Beast (a former X-Man whose slow integration to the team is the thematic spine of this volume), Captain America (here written a bit less woodenly than previously or afterwards), Iron Man, the Vision, the Scarlet Witch, Hank Pym (here going under his Yellowjacket persona), and the Wasp … and for most of the volume, that core is joined by the disastrously boring revived character of Wonder Man (the Sentry of his day, as it were).

That team fights the Squadron Supreme, Doctor Doom, a lameass bad guy named Graviton, lots and lots of each other (Vision squares off against Wonder Man, the old World War II speedster the Whizzer takes on Cap, Iron Man, and the Beast, and – in one of the first panel-sequences that really started to show the burgeoning strengths of artist George Perez – Ant-Man comes believably close to taking on the whole team), and, of course, Ultron: the anthology’s epic confrontation with Ultron, the near-indestructible killer robot first created by Hank Pym, is not only the brooding high point of Jim Shooter’s writing career with Marvel Comics but also some of George Perez’s most visually detailed and arresting work to that point (Perez, as many of you know, continues still to improve as an artist – as seen most recently in Legion of 3 Worlds but also in yet another Avengers/Ultron showdown, from about ten years ago).



There are fill-in issues (including one with atrocious Herb Trimpe artwork and one with atrocious George Tuska artwork), naturally, and there are sub-plots that go nowhere or get metamorphosed along the way (Englehart , for instance, was notorious for that), but page-for-page, this is yet another fantastic volume in Marvel’s ‘essential’ line. Bring on volumes 8 and 9, I say; let’s hurry up and get to the Steve Epting 90s!



(a perhaps unnecessary end-note: of course Marvel's 'essential' volumes are in black-and-white, so the glorious colors you're seeing in these examples won't appear in the book you'll be buying - but that book is a whole lot less expensive than buying all those issues would be, so resign yourself to using your imagination a little, for pete's sake ...)

Comics! Long Live the Legion!

Well, the celebrated and much-anticipated "Legion of Three Worlds" storyline is now concluded, and if DC's own gossip is to be believed, the Legion timeline is now fixed and canonical again. "No more Legion reboots" was the editorial refrain - star writer Geoff Johns was entrusted with creating the 'real,' final version of the venerable Legion of Super-Heroes and nailing that version to the mast once and for all.

A brief big picture recap:

In the 31st century, three alien teenagers - who'll later be known throughout the galaxy as Saturn Girl, Lightning Lad, and Cosmic Boy - use their combined superpowers to save the life of mega-zillionaire R. J. Brande, who in gratitude (and perhaps out of nostalgia) finances the creation of a super-team just like the legendary ones from the 20th century (The Justice League, the Teen Titans, etc). This team - the Legion of Super-Heroes - soon boasts teenage members from many planets throughout the United Federation of Planets, plus one spectacular guest-star: using time-travel technology, the Legion recruits Superboy, Clark Kent before he grew up to be Superman. For thirty blissful years, DC Comics published the adventures of Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes, and the team developed a rather intensely devoted fan base. The team's enormous roster changed from time to time (members died, members were added, etc), but the basic concept of the team itself - future teenage superheroes living, loving, and fighting evil in the far future - stayed the same. And I loved it, as I loved no other comic book in the world (not even Superman).



Then DC Comics ran the Crisis on Infinite Earths mini-series that changed the very nature of all its continuity. In the new clean-slate comics world that resulted, Clark Kent had only adopted a superhero identity as an adult - he'd never been Superboy, so he obviously couldn't have shared adventures with the Legion. Which threw the Legion into creative limbo. First one set of writers and editors rescued it from that limbo, re-creating the Legion from the ground up, then later a different set of writers and editors used a reality-altering plot gimmick to re-create the Legion again, differently ... and so on. By the time all these successive reboots were done, nobody - and I mean nobody - could tell what the 'real' Legion was, what had and hadn't 'happened' in its past.


In the decades since Crisis on Infinite Earths, DC writers have been slowly, systematically dismantling the changes it implemented, and one of the last to go was that no-Superboy change (the reason it was so slow to change was entirely corporate: the whole while, Paramount was making money off its successful TV series "Smallville," which featured a young Clark Kent who most certainly never puts on a costume and calls himself Superboy). And as that no-Superboy stance started to crumble, writers and editors naturally started thinking of ways to re-integrate some kind of Superboy into the Legion again. A couple of recent storylines came right out and said Superman did indeed have a career as Superboy (the exact parameters of it are still very vague), during which he shared many adventures with the Legion of Super-Heroes.

A brief small picture recap:

In this current plot, the Legion who shared those adventures with young Superboy has grown up, just as Superman has. They're seedy, unkempt adults now, with lots of burned-out cynicism where their hope and optimism used to be, and the United Federation of Planets has grown distinctly disenchanted with them. Into this charged relationship comes an insane, alternate-reality Superboy who's dumb as a post and homicidally inclined. He assembles pretty much every 31st century super-villain the Legion has ever faced and attacks the team with the rather uncomplicated goal of killing them all. Superman comes to help from the 20th century, and the Legion also manages to summon two of those other-incarnation versions of the Legion to help out in the epic battle that follows.

While that epic battle is raging, Superman, Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl, and Cosmic Boy are off in another dimension, fighting the long-time Legion adversary the Time Trapper, who has opened up portals to a gazillion other dimensions and times - thus creating the narrative potential for Johns to use "Legion of 3 Worlds" to reboot Legion history one last time. I could almost picture it happening - big climactic fight, gigantic time-space explosion, Time Trapper defeated and destroyed, and from the wreckage, a new Legion, teenagers full of hope and happiness, who thank Superman for all his help and send him off to the 20th century so they can go back to having adventures with his teenage self from a bit earlier in the 20th century.



Well, the battle does rage, although it shouldn't at all. The single biggest flaw of this imperfect mini-series is the way Superboy-Prime (the crazy alternate Superboy) is presented as virtually unstoppable. He manages to kill several Legionaires without really trying all that hard, and they don't manage to do more than slow him down, which is absurd. For the course of three entire issues, Superboy Prime is engaged in one long fist-fight with, by my count, seven individuals who are as strong or stronger than he is - such fist-fights, when conducted by nutso teenagers with no combat experience, end in said nutso teenagers getting pounded into tapioca in about ten minutes. In addition, this Superboy Prime is fighting several opponents who can a) blind him, b) freeze him, c) render him completely immobile, d) turn his blood into daffodils, or lead, or kryptonite, and e) make him think he's won and so convince him to just stand there while he gets his lights put out. None of that happens. One of his opponents is an adult Daxamite (i.e. already more than his physical match) wearing ten Green Lantern rings. That's as close to God as you get in a secular world, and yet Superboy Prime is still going strong at the climax of this issue.

But it doesn't matter. The important thing is, there is a climax, and the bad guy is defeated (in fact, he becomes what I can safely refer to as the most reviled figure of evil in the world of comics, in a turn of events that's actually flat-out hilarious - no matter what I was expecting to feel about the long-delayed ending of this series, I certainly wasn't expecting to laugh out loud), and for about half a page, I eagerly wondered if any of my expectations would come true - I wondered exactly what kind of new Legion Johns would create.


Needless to tell any of you who've already gobbled up this issue, I was disappointed - and not in the way I was worried about. Johns didn't create a new, definitive Legion I didn't like - he spent the issue's last ten pages telling readers we already have a definitive Legion: the skeevy, downtrodden adult version, low on manpower, embittered by losses, and at odds with the United Federation of Planets. The other two alternate versions of the Legion (either of which I prefer) are sent packing back to alternate dimensions, and the remaining incarnation - the disgruntled adults - settles down to what I presume will be a series of stories starting in the upcoming revival of Adventure Comics.

One of the issue's epilogues tells us that years ago, Clark Kent as Superboy went to Smallville High School and joined a team of super-heroes - and we're shown a skinny Superboy flying through the sky with members of that original, youthful Legion of Super-Heroes. And when I saw that panel, my first reaction, thinking about this upcoming Adventure Comics, was "Yes! Show us those adventures!"

Then I realized we've already had those adventures, for all those years and all those wonderful issues in the old Adventure Comics, and in Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes, and in The Legion of Super-Heroes. What DC has managed to do, at last, is bring its continuity back around to a point where at least we can say those adventures 'really' happened. Hundreds of Legion back-issues are now DC continuity again, instead of being the weirdly dislocated oddities they've been since Crisis on Infinite Earths. I should call that a win and count my blessings.

But it wouldn't be Stevereads if I did that, now would it?

Because dammit, I wanted more. I wanted more of those adventures. I wanted the Legion to stay uncontaminated by the gritty realism that infuses the rest of superhero comics. I wanted them to stay heroes, appreciated by the people they protect and serve. I wanted Superboy on the team, somehow.

Whatever I get in the upcoming run of Adventure Comics, it's unlikely to be that. Apparently, the "no more Legion reboots" roulette wheel has stopped on an adult Legion of grizzled souls in a world that hates and fears them. The definitive Legion is here, and probably most fans are happy about that. And hell, if that happiness translates to keeping the Legion in some kind of regular publication, then to that limited extent I'm happy about it too.

But I've got my fingers crossed for a reboot ....

Comics! Legion of Three Worlds!

Even before the first issue of Legion of Three Worlds came out, five years ago, I knew it was essentially unbloggable for a non-fan audience. It's a six-part mini-series written by fanboy favorite Geoff Johns and drawn by living legend George Perez, and it brings together many different incarnations of extremely long-time fan favorite superteam, the Legion of Super-Heroes; it travels across space and time, it's got a demented villain (an alternate version of Superboy, here as elsewhere portrayed as having about ten times the power such an alternate version would have, with no explanation given), it's got tons and tons of inside details decipherable only to those few basement-dwelling virginal nerdwoks who've been slavishly following every detail of Legion lore for the last twenty years, and it's all building toward some kind of mystic-cosmic-speed forcic mega-climax of a type DC Comics really should avoid for the next couple of decades.

In other words, despite Johns' admittedly considerable talents as a comics writer, and despite boasting some of Perez's most energetic artwork in weeks, Legion of Three Worlds is comprehensible to about three people on Earth - and Johns and Perez aren't two of them. I don't know who those three people are, but I'm in no hurry to meet them.

This demented Superboy - called Superboy Prime - is an all-purpose psycho who runs rampant in the 31st century, the time period of the Legion of Super-Heroes. He assembles almost all of the Legion's worst super-foes, and they proceed to wreak general havoc. Superman travels from the 21st century to help, and he brings along two entire Legions from two separate alternate realities. There follows an awful lot of hyper-detailed fight panels like this one:


A visual delight to fans, yes, but not much of it makes any sense. And there's a good reason for that: DC Comics has allowed the continuity of the Legion to degenerate into a state nothing short of madness. In other titles, a total ground-up overhaul is a momentous occasion, something writers and editors ponder long and hard, something that's executed with at least some degree of foresight and dedication, something that takes root and developes to at least some of its potential.

Not so the Legion. Since writer/artist Keith Giffen rebooted the title thirty years ago - in an inspired 30-issue run that ranks as one of the greatest in the Legion's long history (and which is still, to DC's shame, uncollected into any format) - the Legion has been unmade and remade half a dozen times, and each time virtually all of its forty-odd characters underwent major changes in costume, powers, origin, etc. There was a clone Legion; there was an adult Legion; there was a dystopian Legion; there was a youth-movement Legion ... and none of these versions was allowed either to live to its full potential or to be quietly swept under the rug. Instead, each of them was violently and dramatically un-created in some ever-vaguer cosmic calamity. Zero Hour. Four different Crises. Various Invasions. I think Legion even got retooled during the last Mutant Massacre.


To say the least, this isn't how a company should treat one of its oldest, best intellectual properties, much less one with the, er, devoted fan-following of the Legion. This back-to-the-drawing-board crap should have been halted a long time ago, and DC - preferrably after listening to lots and lots of the aforementioned fans - should have picked one version of the Legion and stuck with it. They should still do that.


And according to my young friend Elmo, they might yet. Apparently, Johns has condescended to give the Legion yet another revamp - and given his popularity with fans, it's bound to be hyped all over the comics world. Which means it might have a chance of actually sticking around for a year or two. In which case, I have my own humble suggestion as to what that revamp should be. See how this concept grabs you:

It's Earth of the 31st century. Mankind has tamed fantastic technology and spread to worlds throughout the galaxy, but there is still evil everywhere, and it's been a thousand years since the last Age of Heroes (the time of the legendary Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, etc.). On a routine business trip, billionaire industrialist (and history buff) R. J. Brande is the victim of an attempted kidnapping. He's saved by three teenagers - Garth Ranzz of Winath (who possesses the ability to throw around electrical discharges), Rokk Krinn of Braal (who possesses the magnetic ability to control metal), and Irma Ardeen of Titan (who's a powerful telepath) - who just happen to be in the vicinity. Their actions give him a great idea: why not band them together as the nucleus of a super-team, to jump-start a whole new Age of Heroes? And so the Legion of Super-Heroes is born, quickly expanding as more and more super-powered young people flock to its banner. Cut to their various adventures in the 31st century. Perhaps mix in a time-travelling Superman or Superboy. Perhaps kill off a member every four or five years, in some big storyline. Turn no member into a giant friggin snake. Let the whole thing run for ... oh, let's say forty years.



I'd buy it. Hell, I already have, for about forty years.

I'm hoping I'll get the chance again, and it's really quite annoying that whether or not I have the opportunity will entirely rely on one overworked (and undercommitted) hot-ticket writer and what he decides to do or not do. It should rely on DC Comics knowing enough not to fix something that isn't broken.


And in the meantime, there's the world-class confusion-bomb that is the finale of Legion of Three Worlds to look forward to/dread. I'll keep you posted when it comes out, in about two years.

JLA/Avengers!

Our book today is JLA/Avengers, the graphic novel collection of the epic four-issue collaboration between comic book giants Marvel and DC in 2003 and 2004, now finally out in a trade paperback in a bookstore near you.

For many comics fans (myself certainly included), this story line is a kind of dream come true: an elaborate and highly detailed team-up/fight between the greatest super-hero team of the Marvel universe, the Avengers, and the most iconic super-hero team of the DC universe, the Justice League - here written by a comics fan who manages to 'get' just about every one of the many characters he's writing, and drawn by a comics legend and fan favorite. The comic-reading public had been promised some variation of this collaboration at every fan convention and trade show for the last thirty years (artist George Perez slips in funny visual references to all of them in the course of this story), and here popular writer Kurt Busiek is finally given permission not only to have the core members of both teams meet, but to have them fight - with a couple of actual winners and losers (non-comic fans have to realize how very, very rare that is in the comics world).

Now that all four issues have been collected, first in a deluxe slipcased hardcover and now in a handy trade paperback, it's easier to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the story - it has plenty of both. In any mega-thingamabob like this, the organizing plot device will be a Maguffin of massive proportions, and in that JLA/Avengers doesn't disappoint: a cosmic super-baddie from the DC universe, Krona, wants to know what came before the Big Bang. He wanders through one alternate universe after another (destroying most of them in the process, as cosmic super-baddies tend to do) in search of the answer, until he gets to the Marvel universe, where the cosmic chess-player The Grandmaster tells him he knows of a being who pre-dates the Big Bang - he offers to make introductions, IF Krona can best him in a game of cosmic chess, using the super-heroes from two alternate universes as living chess pieces. Instead of immediately eviscerating The Grandmaster, Krona agrees - and so the Justice League and the Avengers are pitted against each other!


This presents Busiek with his first major problem, because he's enough of a comics aficionado to want to use only the quintessential members of both teams as his key players. For the Justice League this is comparatively easy: it's the roster even most non-comics fans will know by name - Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Green Lantern, the Flash, Aquaman (to which add that perennial unknown, the Martian Manhunter, and Busiek's quite appropriate addition of Plastic Man). For the Avengers it's much trickier - you want a roster that has a good deal of physical power but that also represents the team at its best. Busiek picks a great central core: Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Hank Pym, the Wasp, the Vision, the Scarlet Witch, Hawkeye, and Quicksilver.

Comics fans can spot the problem right away, at least in terms of having the two teams of chess-pieces initially square off against each other: the Justice League would mop the floor with the Avengers. The Justice League roster includes three characters with world-class super-strength, four characters who can move at super-speed, four characters who can emit energy-beams of some kind or other, five characters who possess (or can summon) some form of invulnerability ... etc. By contrast, the Avengers contingent has two characters who are entirely dependent on technology (and one who is a piece of technology), two characters with no super-powers at all, only two characters with any degree of invulnerability, and only three characters with any degree of super-strength (and only one of those, Thor, has it in comparable degree to that possessed by half the Justice League team) ... etc.

If this thing were being handicapped by Las Vegas bookies instead of written and drawn by comics fans for comics fans, the resulting fight between these two teams would take about five minutes. After those five minutes, Thor would be the only Marvel character still standing - and he'd be facing Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, and the Martian Manhunter, so he wouldn't be standing for long.

But that's never how things happen in the world of comics, and Busiek knows it (you can tell he knows it by the two absolutely priceless scenes in JLA/Avengers where he bucks against it - once by having Batman 'spend fifteen minutes beating up some loon in kevlar' offstage - i.e. the allegedly badass Punisher, and once by having Captain America handily demolish the allegedly badass Prometheus ... while uttering my single favorite line from the book, "Try fighting the Wehrmacht, mister - it teaches you FOCUS!" Hee). So the battles between the two teams in his book are more prolonged and even-sided affairs.


Of course long-time comics fans will have dreamt of some of those battles, and they'll disagree with some of Busiek's outcomes. Some of the fights he orchestrates are iconic in their own right: Batman and Captain America, for instance, are each respective company's most popular and well-known non-superpowered character, one a grim nighttime avenger of wrong, and the other a flag-wearing champion of right. How on Earth can you call a winner in such a fight? On his side, Captain America has not only the super-soldier formula coursing through his body (and making him, at least according to The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, virtually incapable of getting tired) but has years of experience fighting all kinds of opponents. And on the other hand, you have ... Batman, the least beatable of all super-heroes, powered or otherwise.

Busiek solves this particular problem cannily (he makes them so experienced they don't need to fight - they become the ones who realize both teams are being used as pawns in a bigger game), but that still leaves him with lots of others. DC's Flash is just plain and simple faster than Marvel's Quicksilver. DC's Green Lantern has access to technology (his ring) that just plain and simple outclasses the technology of Iron Man's armor. DC's dark-eyed emotionally-controlled team 'outsider' Martian Manhunter has all the powers of his Marvel equivalent, the Vision, and lots more besides. And who on the Avengers even approaches the balance for a character like Wonder Woman - as powerful as Superman and with five hundred times his fighting experience?

It's to Busiek's credit that in addition to side-stepping some of these problems by getting the two teams co-operating on the double, he also shifts his focus onto the differences in the two teams - and by extension the two universes and the two companies. At one point Aquaman comments to Superman that the heroes of the Marvel universe seem generally less powerful than those of the DC universe ("and," Aquaman points out, "their world is stacked against them"), and although this doesn't cut any mustard with Superman (he's portrayed throughout as interestingly disdainful of the Marvel heroes' inability to inspire the populace), it's a great motif running throughout the book. We're told that the Marvel Earth is smaller than the DC version, and louder, and less healthy (Superman's senses note harsher sunlight and higher blood pressure) - and this perfectly reflects the more hardscrabble, more human kind of superhero that Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko wanted to create forty years ago, specifically as a comment on DC's larger-than-life icons.

At one point when the Avengers' expert marksman Hawkeye rejoins his comrades, the Wasp warmly welcomes him with a friendly peck on the cheek, and it's a winning, natural moment - and unthinkable in DC's more Olympian cast. Busiek puts little moments like that everywhere in his sprawling cosmic epic, and they all work.


The whole book largely works, and by far the most moving moment comes when our combined heroes are faced with a choice: go on living in the fantasy-world caused by the forcible combining of their two worlds, or fight to separate those worlds and restore both their realities. In order for them to make an informed decision, The Grandmaster shows them a kaleidoscope of key moments from their respective realities - a guided tour of the very worst things that comics readers have seen happen to these characters over the last twenty years. It's a surreal moment, as long-time readers realize all they've been through with these characters ... and when it's over, our heroes do just what heroes always do: they choose to suffer for the greater good.

Again, JLA/Avengers mostly works, and reading it again after a lapse of years allowed me to pick out not only more of the delectable little character moments Busiek includes but also more of the fantastic, fanatical, insanely detailed penciling work of George Perez, who manages, in the course of four issues (and all at once on the cover of the fourth), to draw just about every major and minor character in the entire history of both Marvel and DC. Virtuosity like that becomes almost scary, but in a good way.

And at the end, of course, the door is left open for other such epic adventures! To which I have an obvious suggestion but one nevertheless I'd love to see: the full cast of Golden Age characters from each company, fighting and then teaming up against Hitler, the Red Skull, Per Degaton, and whatever other baddies come to mind. JSA/Invaders! Who's with me?