As I seem to be dropping a fair amount of Marvel books, and have dropped most of DC’s New 52 titles, I find that in the past few months I’ve gotten into a line of books from Image I wasn’t looking forward to and never thought I’d be enjoying: the relaunch of many of Rob Liefeld’s various Extreme books. Now, I like some better than others, and one not much at all, but for now let’s look at Supreme.

Although Prophet, Bloodstrike, Glory and Youngblood all continued their old ’90s numbering, they’re mostly fresh takes on those characters, or at least new teams picking up the pieces. Supreme is the only title to relaunch with its last writer, Alan Moore, as new writer Erik Larsen thought it would be fair and smart to use Moore’s final, unpublished script to bridge the gap between that run and what Larsen wanted to do on his run. It was a nice idea, as was the decision to publish a variant that matched up with the old logo and cover designs. 

Moore was setting up an assault of The Citadel Supreme in issue #63, where all the various Supremes in the Multiverse hang out, by all the variations of villain Darius Dax. Larsen continues with that idea here, although what seems like a slam-dunk (lots of action and the simple fannish appeal of drawing tons of different takes on the same hero and villain) feels kind of uninspired here, with lots of corny lines and so many characters it’s treated as expected that we know and understand the relationships between Ethan and Diana and Suprema and the like. 

The art, by Larsen and Cory Hamscher, looks a lot like the Larsen art I remember but more rushed, like a 24 hour comic. It lacks the texture and Kirbyesque dynamism I associate with his style, and I’m not sure if it has to do with Hamsher or not. Does Hamscher do the layouts and Larsen finishes? Don’t know, but it’s just an adequate teaming.

In the Afterword, after several paragraphs defending himself for being one of those guys who has to follow another guy’s celebrated run, Larsen explains that his goal here is to marry Moore’s Silver Age homage with the meaner, more violent take on the character as originally conceived by Liefeld. And so, the Mean Supreme is unchained and let loose on the Dax Army (I laughed when one of the Supremes can hardly comprehend that the Daxes would unite against the united Supremes—what else are they going to do?!), with bloody results. It’s okay, and I guess it’s sort of amusing that Larsen draws this Supreme in more of a Jim Lee style, but if, as it seems to be at the end, this Supreme is going to be the new Big Bad that the other Supremes have to stop, well, I honestly think I get enough of that story in Mark Waid’s Irredeemable. I didn’t dislike the issue, but unless Larsen does something really good with this new direction next issue, I’ll be dropping this one.

— Christopher Allen 

Greg Rucka’s gifted comics writing, which brought believability and drama to titles as diverse as Queen and Country and Gotham Central, led me to give his prose writing a try. I think I started with the Queen and Country novels, which were very well written and a nice addition to the mythology created in the comics; but it was with the Atticus Kodiak series of novels that my appreciation for Rucka’s writing found its firmest footing.

Kodiak begins his long character arc in the earliest novels as a the head of a bodyguard agency; over the course of the series his life takes one incredible turn after another, so much so that the only thing tying together his character between the first and the most recent novels is Rucka’s ability to gain and keep the reader’s confidence and investment through passionate but practical writing and what must be mountains of research.

The skill and storytelling style Rucka brought to the Kodiak novels is right upfront in his new novel Alpha, the beginning of what will be at least a trio of novels about Jad Bell, a former soldier who in this first volume finds himself placed at a prominent amusement park ahead of a possible terrorist attack on the park. Thinking about it, the events of September 11, 2001 would have been as effective, if not more so, if one of the targets had been Disney World — the emotional toll (and likely the death toll) would have probably been far higher even than the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It’s a horrific scenario that Rucka dives right into, humanizing it through the point of view of his protagonist Bell, and also Bell’s deafmute daughter and even the sleeper agent tasked with carrying out the attack.

We get right into the heads of these characters, and feel the tension, terror and call to action that arises out of the plot against the park, which may or may not be what it seems to be. Along the way we get a feel for what a soldier like Bell must go through, what motivates him and what he endures to save those he is charged with protecting. Rucka makes what could have been purely political highly personal, so that every setback, and every resulting action, feels logical and sensible, no matter how dangerous or incredible.

I recently mentioned on Twitter that after Donald Westlake’s Parker, Atticus Kodiak was probably my favourite continuing character in prose fiction. I’d say Joe Ledger from Jonathan Maberry’s novels is up there, too. And after devouring Greg Rucka’s Alpha, there’s a good chance Jad Bell will nose his way into that exclusive club pretty soon, too.

— Alan David Doane

Well, at least Darwyn Cooke’s subconscious is functioning. “Ingratitude” is right.

When I was growing up, in the ’70s and ’80s, the superhero comic annual was generally a big, stand-alone story, often by the same creative team as the monthly comic, or maybe the same writer and an even better artist who didn’t draw monthly books much anymore (Michael Golden, Jim Starlin). Guys like John Byrne and Frank Miller did quite a few annuals when they were coming up, and some after they were big names. 

The late ’80s and ’90s brought themed annuals, where a story would wind its way across the annuals of several titles, something like Atlantis Attacks for Marvel, or DC’s Legends of the Dead Earth. You could get some really nice work, or you could get guys who really weren’t good enough for the major leagues and might disappear soon after. As popular characters received spinoff series, and done-in-one stories became one-shots or graphic novels, the annual fell out of fashion. 

For whatever reason, it looks like Marvel and DC are trying some annuals again, though how widespread an effort remains to be seen.

Amazing Spider-Man Annual #39

Writer: Brian Reed

Artist: Lee Garbett

Marvel Comics $4.99 USD

This one falls into the “not the regular team” category. Neither Reed nor Garbett are newcomers, but neither has a regular monthly gig. Reed takes this opportunity to spin off a story from something Dan Slott wrote in the regular book months ago, where Peter Parker’s Horizon Labs coworker creates a time machine that almost leads to the destruction of New York. Here, in one moment of that story, this same invention leads to Peter being removed from time itself. This leads to flashbacks to his childhood and high school days, where he’s still somehow aware of his adult self, even as he goes through the current, altered timeline, seeing how in many ways, things have turned out better without him in the world. Mary Jane is a big star. Norman Osborn, not having Spider-Man to haunt his thoughts, has cured cancer. And Uncle Ben is still alive and living in the same house in Forest Hills, Queens. 

Meanwhile, the Avengers are tracking down the source of these chronal disturbances, mainly just to get some costumed heroes into the book, since Peter never has a reason to become Spider-Man. Garbett delivers pleasant but thoroughly average work, though in his defense, there isn’t anything exciting to draw here. The scenes between adult Peter and a proud Uncle Ben are sweet, and probably worth the price for some, but Reed’s story is sorely lacking in suspense and complications. Without any real effort, Peter just kind of walks through these episodes, which seems to gradually return things back to normal, even though it’s his presence that caused the problem in the first place. 

Batman (vol. 2) Annual #1

Writer: Scott Snyder and James Tynion IV

Art: Jason Fabok

DC Comics $4.99 USD

Scott Snyder, regular Batman scribe, co-writes this one with his former Sarah Lawrence student, James Tynion IV, who will also be co-writing some backups for the regular book. Unfortunately, while that’s a nice human interest story, the actual results in this annual are rather drab and, like most annuals, quite unnecessary. 

Bearing the “Night of the Owls” banner on the top, and yes, a couple owls on the generic cover for dubious reasons, this extra-long tale actually has little to do with the ongoing Owls story. That would be fine, as I’m already getting tired of it, but Snyder and Tynion sure don’t have a double-length story worth telling here. The connection to “Night of the Owls” is that Mr. Freeze created the serum that makes Owl assassins able to be revived after they seem to die. We meet Freeze as he makes his escape from Arkham. Fortunately, despite what one would think are stringent hiring protocols and training on safe patient handling, we get a couple cruel, stupid guards who make this escape easy. Freeze wants to get his beloved, frozen wife Nora back, so that he may yet cure her. 

Jason Fabok, whose work is new to me, does a fine if undistinguished job. As with Garbett’s work above, nothing really stands out in terms of style or storytelling choices. It’s very typical DC fodder.

Nightwing and Robin try to stop Freeze, while we get several page-burning flashbacks to Victor Fries’ childhood and then his time working in a Wayne Industries lab. Snyder/Tynion engineer things so that Bruce Wayne comes off rather heartless in his shutting down Fries’ attempts to cure Nora, therefore justifying Fries’ craving for vengeance. And it should surprise no one who has read two comics written by Snyder that the childhood flashback features a parent saying or doing something that has a monumental impact on the child’s future. Often, it’s just an anecdote, something a father said once that ties perfectly into the events of today, but in this case it’s young Victor, who always loved Winter, seeing his dear mother fall through the ice on the frozen lake. Look, canon may have saddled the writers with the corny coincidence that Mr. Freeze’s real last name is Fries, but that doesn’t mean you have to come up with a pivotal moment that involves ice. 

Like an icicle falling from the rain gutter to the driveway below, Snyder and Tynion demolish the only pathos-evoking element of Mr. Freeze: his deep love for, and relentless efforts to cure, his wife, Nora. Turns out, Nora was just an frozen research project—like a fetal pig in a jar—from the ’40s that Fries wrote his thesis on. He never met her, she’s old enough to be his grandmother, and so his love is false and insane. That’s colder than a gravedigger’s ass, as my father once said, which led to my becoming a sexton. Somehow this results in a story both forgettable and yet risible.

—Christopher Allen

Written by Jack Kirby, Mark Evanier and Steve Sherman

Art by Jack Kirby and Mike Royer

DC Comics $39.99 USD

It’s true; the majority of Jack Kirby’s significant work is now in print, enough to treasure and learn from and make an educated evaluation of a career. But the man was about the most prolific cartoonist in the history of the industry, and there are still some things worth checking out. Just out of the reprint pipeline is Spirit World, a fairly lavish hardcover collecting the sole issue of a halfhearted attempt by DC comics in the early ’70s to explore the magazine market that was beginning to take market share away from them, with college-age consumers moving from comics to things like National Lampoon and Creepy. 

A visionary in more ways than one, if not a particularly good businessman, Kirby saw the future, or a possible future, and got DC to sign off on his idea of a whole new line of magazines targeting this young adult demographic, but DC not only limited the line to a couple magazines, they cut the format from glossy color to black-and-white newsprint, and only ended up printing one issue of Spirit World and In the Days of the Mob before calling it quits. It wouldn’t be fair to say, “cutting their losses”, because they canceled both titles before sales figures were even in, and made little attempt to push the unconventional product through their usual distribution channels.

In the Days of the Mob was Kirby’s return to crime comics, and one would expect that will be collected before long, but Spirit World tells stories of the occult, all introduced by one bearded paranormal researcher Dr. Alden Maas. It’s a framing device not unlike Rod Serling’s Night Gallery or The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, a reassuring presence tying the disparate, done-in-one supernatural stories together. 

The first and only issue looks quite a bit like a Warren publication, with a painted cover (Neal Adams was called in to redo Kirby’s effort, another sign of no confidence in the King) and hysterical Table of Contents. I’m not sure, but I’m guessing the issue wasn’t originally published with indigo ink in place of black the way it is here. It sets it slightly apart from most comics; not a brilliant choice but not a bad one. The first story, “The President Must Die!” involves precognition (oddly and helpfully, the Table of Contents lists the story title on the left and the theme on the right), with an anguished woman making predictions she has trouble getting people to believe. It’s a decent setup, with nice washes on Kirby’s art, but it’s too short and resolves unsatisfactorily, and the brevity seems to prevent Kirby from taking chances on the storytelling, relying on simple grids, although it should be noted the first page of the story is an awkward fumetti starring assistant editor Steve Sherman’s mother as a woman who displays panic in a sedan by cradling her head in her hands.

“House of Horror!” has a much more effective, unsettling collage splash page, and it’s the one story that really gives Dr. Maas an active role, although in the typical, “spend a night in a supposedly haunted house to prove it’s bunk” scenario. Kirby provides some fairly spooky, shadowy figures and unusual textures (a ghost’s encrusted mallet, a seething blob of demonic goo), but even in this more restrained, nothing jumping out of the panel style, Kirby seems by and large to be too much of a dynamic, in-your-face artist to effectively sell supernatural stories. There’s just not enough shadow and suggestion here to create mood or make the reader fill in the blanks from the depths of their subconscious fears, though it’s certainly attractive work.

“Children of the Flaming Wheel” is a silly but charming fumetti with a pretty Native American woman in a vinyl singlet attempting to impart the wisdom of the ancients to a guy with a mustache. It’s probably no worse an attempt by a middle-aged publishing veteran to pander to the hippie market than a lot of what was on the stands at the time.

“The Screaming Woman” is a better effort, though also pandering, a story of reincarnation that finds Kirby in the rare position of accentuating cleavage and side-boob shots of a young woman who is possessed by or the reincarnation of a Spanish peasant who lived hundreds of years before her. It doesn’t feel like Kirby is exactly in his element, but it does represent some of his sexiest depictions of women.

“Spirit of Vengeance” is a text story written by Evanier and Sherman, an okay two page filler that would’t have passed muster for most fiction magazines but did the job for a glorified comic book. Then we have a nice-looking but ineffectual Kirby comics bio of Nostradamus to end his contribution to the issue, followed by a one page Sergio Aragones gag strip ported over from stuff he was doing at the time for DC books like House of Mystery and Plop!

That’s the entirety of Spirit World as published, but the collection then features two pages of explanatory material by Evanier, followed by the remaining four stories prepared for the aborted second issue, which were subsequently published in the DC books, Weird Mystery Tales and Dark Mansion. These are in normal black-and-white.

“Horoscope Phenomenon or Witch Queen of Ancient Sumeria” is rather inert nonsense based on Kirby drawing zodiac-derived characters, but features some of the strongest art in the book, starring a sea witch who’s all swirly metallic surface—think Karnilla the Norse Queen with fins and, for some reason, a telephone she lifts out of the brine. 

Another dull Dr. Maas intro needlessly delays the awesome “Toxl the World Killer”, an emphatic but confused ecology parable that thankfully features plenty of scenes of rough barbarians and their dancing girl entourage beating up on callow, sophisticated polluters and exploiters. Is it irony that the hero ends up destroying everything when he tries to stop the polluters, and his name is Toxl? I doubt Kirby thought about it for long, so why should we?

“The Burners” feels like Kirby read and article, or someone suggested, something about spontaneous combustion, and Kirby did a little research and then knocked out a story about it. If the book was called Gyro World, he could probably have done a similarly attractive, pointless story about a Greek family cooking lamb on a spit, and it would have been about as close to his own personal themes and interests. One could call it professional work based only on the visual presentation; there’s no real story here.

We finish up with “The Psychic Bloodhound”, which is at least a story, and not a bad one, about a psychic frequently called upon by the police. A loose cannon cop calls the psychic in to help find a kidnapper before he kills a girl, and aside from the kidnapper’s Central Casting Brooklyn dialect (“Dis goil will be pushin’ up da daisies!” type stuff), it actually has more suspense to it than most of the other stories.

It’s a Kirby Kuriosity, a long-awaited look at a book fabled for being one of many things DC screwed Kirby over on. To be fair, we will never know what might have resulted had DC been fully supportive of the title in terms of funding Kirby’s production ideas, or letting him have a few issues to settle in to something rather new to a veteran cartoonist who had spent decades producing comics, not magazines. But the truncated results here suggest that, while Kirby could still produce stunning images and an interesting idea or two, whatever the genre, he was not well suited to the project or at least not quite sure what to do right out of the gate.

As for the production, unlike the various Kirby Omnibuses of the past several years, this one is on thicker, nicer paper, not newsprint. There are some odd design choices (hot pink end papers but a rust colored title page don’t really go together, and the use of intentionally grainy b&w extracts from panels cheapens the presentation. It’s still a pretty nice book, but since it only adds up to about three comics, $40 is too much, and in all honesty DC should have lumped this in with In the Days of the Mob and the abortive Soul Love romance comic material, for the same price. Find it on sale or used.

—Christopher Allen

Press release:

The Albany Comic Con will host an auction of original comic book artwork to benefit the local chapter of the Capital District Ronald McDonald House Charities. Local comic book professionals have donated original sketches to the Albany Comic Con which will be auctioned the day of the convention in a silent auction. The auction will run from 10am to 3pm, Sunday, June 10th, 2012. Sketches of famous comic book characters including Batgirl, Supergirl, The Thing (from The Fantastic Four), Black Widow (from The Avengers), and more will be the highlights of the auction.  Sketches have been donated by such notable longtime artists as Joe Staton, Joe Sinnott, Lee Moder, Paul Abrams, Fred Hembeck, and many others. This is the third charity auction that the Albany Comic Con has held, and it is expected to be the largest in terms of the number of pieces of original comic book art available.

The mission of Ronald McDonald House Charities (RMHC) is to create, find and support programs that directly improve the health and well being of children. The charity’s core values include:

* Focusing on the critical needs of children.

* Celebrating the diversity of the programs and staff, volunteers and donors who make them possible.

* Staying true to a heritage of more than 36 years of responsible stewardship.

* Operating with accountability and transparency.

There is no charge to enter the auction and all of the proceeds from the auctioned artwork will be donated directly to the Albany Ronald McDonald House. The Albany Comic Con will be held Sunday, June 10th. Admission to the convention is $5.00. We invite local media to come out for this event, and we thank you for helping spread the word about the charity auction for a very worthwhile organization. 

What: Albany Comic Con  Silent Art Charity Auction

When:  Sunday, June 10th, 2012    Time:  10am to 4pm.

Where:  Albany Comic Con, Holiday Inn, 205 Wolf Rd., Albany, NY 12205

If you’re anywhere near New York’s Hudson Valley, you might want to attend the Woodstock Day School Comic Con, coming up Sunday, May 20th in support of the Woodstock Day School. Two of the best comic shops in the upper Hudson Valley, Comic Depot in Wilton and Excellent Adventures in Ballston Spa, will have tables at the show, and the guest list includes Jim Starlin, Ron Marz, Matthew Dow Smith and others. More details here.

* I think Fatale #5 came out this week, but I’ll probably hold off until the David Mazzucchelli Daredevil: Born Again Artist Edition arrives at the comic shop later this month, before I make the trip to the shop. Over on A Criminal Blog, Bubba runs down the latest news in all things Brubaker and Phillips. 

* I saw The Avengers. I agree with Tony Isabella that it is the best superhero movie yet made, and I agree with any and all calls to donate the price of a ticket to the Hero Initiative as a way to recognize Jack Kirby’s enormous contribution to comics in general and this movie in particular.

* I did pick up the Ellis/Raney Stormwatch hardcover last week (the clerk at the shop asking me if it collects the New 52 Stormwatch — er, no, it collects good Stormwatch comics), but haven’t cracked it open yet. Might be because I am still making my way through the preview copy I received of Jim Kunstler’s forthcoming Too Much Magic, but then again it might be because I have read Ellis and Raney’s Stormwatch probably two dozen times over the years. It’s that good.

* Speaking of Warren Ellis, I saw on Twitter that the next Iron Man movie will be using material from Ellis’s Extremis arc from the Iron Man comic book. Ellis says he understood he was work for hire when he wrote the thing, and is fine with not getting a piece of the pie. I guess I am surprised that a comic that recently wouldn’t have had some sort of royalty clause in the contracts, but then again, it’s comics. Like water finding its level, the comics industry always finds a way to fuck anyone it can.

—Alan David Doane 

I’m not a gamer, but I live with one. I recently received a review copy of Prototype 2 for the XBox 360, and passed it along to my son Aaron for his evaluation. Short version, he loved it. Longer version below. — Alan David Doane

Me personally, I am a huge fan of the prototype series. The second game is a lot like the first but with enhanced graphics and new abilities for you to, as they say, “rip, tear, smash and consume.”

With the “RADNET EDITION” you now have a chance to unlock avatar items such as the Alex Mercer hoodie or Sgt. James Heller’s coat. It has something for everybody, since if you don’t like the missions, you can just do the free roam where you can consume people for disguises, attack military bases, do the side missions of hunting down and consuming your target (usually a scientist doing tests on human targets that you have to stop). The new black hole attack is fantastic. You hit somebody with tendrils and grab items from around him and bring them in to crush him.

— Aaron Doane 

Todd Allen at Publishers Weekly bemoans the loss of what was once a staple of the comics-buying experience: browsing the racks to see what you might be interested in reading. Even in major cities, Allen finds problems with the browsing approach to comics buying — if he doesn’t have a subscription/pull list with a specific store, he often finds he has to hunt for new comics, and sometimes can’t find them at all.

I’d say he’s been extraordinarily lucky so far — I live in a much less cos-

mopolitan part of the world, and have to drive at least an hour to have even a snowball’s chance in hell of finding anything not on Diamond’s top 20 list, if I haven’t preordered it months in advance. I am lucky in that my retailer goes far out of his way to try to find stuff for me if I haven’t preordered it, and that happens often with with types of comics I tend to be attracted to (non-superhero).

I understand retailers don’t want to take the chance of getting stuck with back issues (as we used to call what they think of as “unsellable stock”), but the lack of capital and the lack of foresight are a large part of the ongoing death of the direct market. Is it the retailers’ fault? Not entirely, but if a comic shop doesn’t have most of the week’s releases on the racks for their customers (and potential customers) to browse, they will always, ALWAYS be selling fewer and fewer books to fewer and fewer people instead of growing their business and sustaining the industry. So more stores will close, and even fewer comics will exist. Digital may be a sort of solution to this problem, but for people like myself, and I’d guess Todd Allen, readers who want the physical book to read and feel and smell and put on a shelf for future re-reads — it’s a huge problem in comics now, and I don’t see a solution in sight that will keep the dollars flowing from our wallets to the comic stores’ cash registers.

— Alan David Doane