DC Comics. $39.99 USD

Man, you can really take some folks for granted. 

I’ve been aware of Adam Hughes’ artwork from pretty early on—not his Maze Agency stuff but Justice League and onward. At the time I thought, this guy is a pretty good replacement for Kevin Maguire! Since then, I guess I developed an attitude where guys like Hughes and Brian Bolland—guys who started doing interiors and now only do covers—were somehow not really living up to their potential. It’s like, by not portraying the exploits of our beloved superheroes in sequential form, they weren’t really contributing to their history, weren’t really connected. It’s nonsense, I see that now.

I picked this book up in my local library on a whim. I do get to some comics late in the game but don’t live under a rock, so I’ve known for many years how good Hughes was as a cover artist, even if I was mainly experiencing it in thumbnail-sized solicitation copy or a quick scan at a comic shop shelf of new releases. That he has had a long, venerable run depicting Wonder Woman wasn’t lost on me, but clearly, I didn’t really appreciate how good he is.

This volume is an eye-opener into not just how good Hughes has been and for so long, but how hard he works to keep getting better. With a witty, self-deprecating tone, Hughes walks the reader through cover after cover, including preliminary sketches. We learn where he feels he went wrong, where he picked up a valuable bit of insight into, say, how best to depict the values of metallic clothing, or how Diana’s lasso can be not just an Art Nouveau design element but also one that serves a storytelling function, leading the viewer’s eye along an intended path. With each image, one comes to appreciate the fierce-yet-joyous, vaguely Mediterranean face of Diana, and where Hughes cops to making her too harsh here, too busty there, and boy, those boots are hard to get quite right. It’s amazing; the guy really has a strong opinion about those boots, and he’s sorry but he’s going to keep drawing them that way. Technology like Photoshop has by Hughes’ own admission been a godsend to his work, but the tools and toys are absolutely in service to a real artistic vision, a thoughtful and often humorous journey for beauty. I’ve surprised myself, but I really need to own this book. 

—Christopher Allen

If you watch any reality television like Top Chef or Project Runway, you will notice that there’s always that one guy who expresses a kind of superficial shock and empathy when the person who’s just been cut by the judges comes back into the waiting room. “Really?! You’re kidding me!” A lot of comics readers are like that, or at least a lot of the ones who post in comments threads. I’m not trying to be negative here—it’s a nice gesture that at its best lets the people who were producing the canceled comic know that the few people who were buying their comic liked it and wished them well and an easy transition to other projects.

Still, the cancellation of DC’s First Wave imprint shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone after the first month. The premise of a pulp fiction milieu for Golden Age comics characters like Doc Savage, The Spirit, Crimson Avenger and others to interact in a universe where they were the big heroes and the only superhero was a pulpy, out-of-continuity Batman, was going to be difficult to make a success under the best circumstances. None of these characters have endured in the public consciousness in a way that would bring in many non-comics readers, nor have they been particularly successful comics characters for many years. 

Matters of taste aside, having Brian Azzarello script a lead-in one-shot and miniseries to introduce these characters wasn’t a bad idea. Azzarello has his fans. Using Batman as a way to lead superhero readers over to the line was also a sensible idea. Where DC went wrong has much to do with scheduling and marketing, and those problems are not unique to this line, nor other comics publishers. 

Publishers often have a perverse sort of Darwinism when it comes to publishing new titles, offering three or four in the expectation that that offers better odds for one succeeding than just publishing one and focusing on making that the best it can be. Of course, many times the editors in charge of putting these books together don’t have much choice. Here, DC owns these characters and eventually must publish something featuring them, so there is some logic to doing it all at one time and hoping that generates more buzz than a single title. The problem, then, is that the prospective new customer is led to believe that he or she might need to buy all the titles to understand the line, and so it becomes easier to pass. Instead of a shared universe, it’s a fishbowl with maybe only enough food for one fish. There is no camaraderie here. Do you think Seth MacFarlane was happy about Bob’s Burgers? It’s a competitor for his viewership. First Wave launched with the first issue of the lead-in miniseries, but it wasn’t designed well as a lead-in because they scheduled the release of the Doc Savage and The Spirit books within weeks of its first issue, rather than building off the momentum of a hopefully good conclusion to the miniseries. The fact that those series didn’t feature any of the talent who did the miniseries itself would also dull the excitement, unless readers were as excited by the new creative teams. 

When it comes to the marketing, it seems reasonable to criticize DC for how little they promoted these titles, or indeed most ongoing series once they’ve debuted. I liken DC to a mama pig with a litter of piglets but only two teats, so only the two strongest piglets get fed. And having fed, they’re going to be stronger than the others and thus able to keep getting fed, while those others get weaker and weaker, with many eventually starving to death. I can’t blame DC for putting more time and money into promoting the projects and titles that either have already been selling or show more signs of crossover appeal, as in your Brightest Day and DC Universe Online and Batman and Green Lantern books. That just makes sense. But then again, if you’re not going to do much for other books but one house ad, why bother? What expectation could DC have that this Doc Savage is going to be the one that takes off? I think it’s probably reasonable to assume that most of DC knows that such titles aren’t going to do well, so perhaps they publish them knowing they’ll fail, and the lack of marketing push is just an attempt not to throw good money after bad. 

With the First Wave line, it also occurs to me that those appear to have been approved and developed prior to Diane Nelson taking over. It’s common practice in the motion picture industry, at least, for a new studio head to underpromote movies greenlit by the previous studio head, so that their failure will only reenforce that firing the last guy was the right move. I don’t know how it works with publishing, but it’s just human nature that one will work harder to make something succeed if it started on your watch. Having no attachment to First Wave, once it had performed its first function of trademark renewal and shown the titles were underperforming, it only helps Diane Nelson to show her bosses she’s watching the bottom line and culling the books that are draining profits. 

As far as the execution of the books, it feels wrong to knock them too hard when they’re down and almost out, but Azzarello’s cynicism never seemed a good fit when he wrote Batman stories, so Golden Age pulp heroes seem even more out of his comfort zone (though I could see him as a decent fit on The Shadow with his knack for conspiracy stories). On Doc Savage, well, they took a chance on a novelist with little comics-writing experience and it didn’t work out. It happens, though one would think that there had to be an established comics scribe who had some affection for the Savage novels. Asking a contemporary novelist to take someone else’s character and adapt him to a less familiar medium seems like an added degree of difficulty. Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark notwithstanding, I would prefer someone who’d already written musicals to do the book for a superhero musical than hiring a superhero comics writer for the job. 

As for The Spirit, that was a lovely book, both Mark Schultz and David Hine managing to take a character with a tone and look wedded to the ’40s and adapt him pretty successfully to a grimmer, somewhat contemporary urban setting with his essence intact, aided by the great artwork of Moritat. Those issues are worth tracking down, and one hopes those creators find their next gigs soon and that they’re at least as satisfying and of longer duration. As for DC, it remains to be seen whether they’ll learn anything or continue to dump too many related books on the market at a time and let them cannibalize each other. 

—Christopher Allen

Writers - Joe Gill, Various

Artist - Steve Ditko

Editor - Blake Bell

Publisher - Fantagraphics. $39.99 USD

This second volume of Fantagraphics’ chronological (in terms of creation rather than publication) reprinting of comics by moralizing maestro Steve Ditko finds the young cartoonist rebounding from a battle of several months with tuberculosis in 1956 to emerge into the beginning of a great period of prolificacy. Ditko found work at Timely/Atlas, which would eventually become Marvel Comics, including his first collaboration with Stan Lee, but the majority of the work here was produced for Charlton, which paid less than the industry standard but at least paid on time. 

The other benefits for Ditko were steady work and very little editorial interference, so that he was able to refine his style and storytelling skills quickly. If one story didn’t come out quite the way he wanted, there was always another script ready for him to start drawing. 

Although it’s unclear who wrote these stories, it’s certain that Charlton regular Joe Gill wrote many of them. He was their lead writer, and at a rock bottom rate of $2 a page, Gill had to keep the work coming to make a living. This quantity-over-quality approach results in most of the stories here being, in Gill’s own words, “shitty.” Most of them are science fiction or horror stories with slim premises just deep enough to warrant the four or five pages they’re given. The best ones have a predictable, O. Henryesque twist ending, not unlike the work Stan Lee was writing for Marvel at the time, and the worst ones seem to cut off abruptly or with slapdash, even nonsensical endings. It’s possible Ditko may have written a few, but if so, his Objectivist philosophizing and intense outsider ethos have yet to emerge in his writing. There may be a tale or two here that does find a character who wants to get away to a better world, like the vaguely pedophiliac “The Man Who Stepped out of a Cloud,” but if this isn’t unlike some later Ditko-scripted stories, well, it’s also logical that a script monkey for a third-rate comics publisher like Gill or other Charlton writers might share those fantasies.

The value in this volume is not in the stories themselves, which are not just generally poor but irritating in large doses, but in tracking how Ditko’s art develops. Amid the stock characters of hapless dullards, five o’clock shadow Everymen and saturnine businessmen and the typical rocketships and ray guns of the day, Ditko gains confidence and consistency in his depictions, and an ability to pack more information into fewer images and to guide the reader’s eye across the page for maximum impact. His ability to convey otherworldly horrors flowers as well, especially in a story like “A World of His Own,” which benefits from a terrifically colored sequence where Ditko alternates panels of yellow, gray and orange, the figure within the same color as the background, as if with a filter used in film. It’s not a steady progression but a fascinating one, as taking these stories in order, one sees Ditko constantly experimenting with line weight to mixed results, the amount of effort put into creating texture with ink sometimes diluting the power of the composition. Still, there’s a good deal to enjoy in seeing how Ditko solves problems and attempts to add drama and imagination to the hokey stories.

—Christopher Allen

I’ve been reading books and some old comics, but had a chance this weekend to catch up on a chunk of recent stuff:

Batman and Robin #20 - Peter J. Tomasi and Patrick Gleason step in for a three issue arc in which Tomasi seems determined to misinterpret Damian Wayne as just another disrespectful young delinquent, using contractions, calling Commissioner Gordon “old man,” wisecracking about the dead. That’s just not the character Grant Morrison created. He’s a know-it-all, sure, but a very articulate one who takes his role seriously and knows when to let the grown-ups talk, for the most part. I also thought it was funny that just a month or two after Scott Snyder established that the Dick Grayson Batman wasn’t the type to disappear while Gordon was in the middle of a sentence, Tomasi has him do just that. I blame the editors for this small oversight, but as a creative choice I don’t get why Tomasi isn’t interested in writing Dick as a different kind of Batman, especially when the book opens up with an odd take on Bruce Wayne as the kind of Bat-patriarch who gathers all his boys together for movie night. I only remember the weird characterization; the plot escapes me. Gleason is very average.

Amazing Spider-Man #653, 654, 654.1 - Dan Slott, with some scripting help from Fred Van Lente, wraps up the Spider-Slayer storyline, which makes the younger Smythe into a convincing legacy villain with a new take on the Spider-Slayers: they’re now guys in buggy exosuits that mimic Spider-Man’s danger sense, which makes them hard for even the Avengers to hit. Smythe tries to take down all the Jameson clan for revenge, and succeeds in getting one of them, though I won’t spoil who if you haven’t read it. I will say it makes good dramatic sense and could open up at least one character to a fresh take. I wasn’t a fan of Stefano Caselli’s art, but Humberto Ramos comes back for the .1 issue, which presents legless Flash Thompson as a new, government-controlled Venom, the symbiote approximating his legs and whatever else is needed for missions that don’t take more than 48 hours, so that he can be out before the symbiote takes over his mind. With both stories, Slott proves himself at the very least to have a facile mind when it comes to remixing old intellectual property.

Soldier Zero #5 - Paul Cornell is now off this book, replaced by Abnett/Lanning. They follow through on his ideas well enough, but it’s still a pretty easy book to cut, which is probably what I’ll be doing.

Starborn #3 - Likewise this book. I am not exactly a fan of Khary Randolph’s art style, but I think it’s consistent and accomplished. The story isn’t bad, either, but I’ve seen it all before many times, and aside from the prospect of a race of warrior lion aliens, there isn’t much here that’s novel.

Black Panther: The Man Without Fear #515 - I’ve been liking this. I think David Liss understands that he’s not writing an ongoing Panther series and so he keeps his story tight: T’Challa sets himself up as Hell’s Kitchen’s new protector, and he’s got a new enemy to contend with, a nasty Romanian with family issues and a pretty cool superpower. Panther is going low-tech and solo to prove himself. Good Francavilla artwork that looks organic and sort of in Mazzucchelli territory. I love that Francavilla writes labels by hand, sloppily, rather than having the letterer do it perfectly but incongruously with his art. I’m amused that Luke Cage’s relatively brief time as an Avengers leader has now given him balls big enough to give T’Challa orders, but then this is a guy who went all the way to Latveria to collect a fee from deadbeat Doctor Doom.

New Avengers #9 - Another creative change as Mike Deodato moves from Secret Avengers to this title. Not a whole lot going on yet, and a largish part of the book was given to a flashback with Nick Fury hunting escaped Nazis in Cuba, 1959, drawn by Howard Chaykin. At the end, he’s approached about The Avengers Initiative. Not sure how they’ll make the timeline work. 

T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #4 - Similarly, this team book also gives its opener to veteran George Perez, drawing a kind of recruitment speech/history of T.H.U.N.D.E.R., complete with a busy two-page spread. Perez still looks good, though Scott Koblish’s inks are heavier than I’d like. The rest of the book is mostly talky, leading to a nice surprise at the end. I like what Nick Spencer and Cafu have been doing on this series, which isn’t a book I was expecting to like, but I do wish there was more going on in each issue.

Heroes For Hire #3 - Abnett/Lanning/Brad Walker deliver the okays in this series, as mercenary Paladin delays helping Moon Knight on a mission, as he’s in the middle of surveilling those close to Misty Knight. He thinks she’s in trouble and he’s right. But Iron Fist doesn’t take kindly to being spied on and there’s a fight before known amoral, double-crossing Paladin rather uncharacteristically yells at Iron Fist that his avoiding Misty is a cop-out. When did Paladin get touchy-feely? If you like to see what second-and-thirdl-string Marvel characters do between miniseries and failed solo series, this book isn’t bad.

John Byrne’s Next Men #2, 3 - After a bumpy start, in which it looked like Byrne was working in older pages and taking too much time in set-up, we get two issues with much stronger, more consistent art. One probably has to be a big fan of the old series, though, because the characters are not really themselves yet, all dropped in different eras, or maybe that’s another illusion. It’s entertaining, though I do wish Byrne took his freedom with the series to do more than amp up the sex and torture, but then, that’s the fun in wishing.

—Christopher Allen

Tumor

Writer - Joshua Hale Fialkov

Artist - Noel Tuazon

Publisher - Archaia Studios Press. $14.95 USD

Tumor was a big Kindle hit a couple years ago, its serialized chapters much in demand. I don’t recall reading a whole lot about it through the usual comics news sites, but maybe that’s just me and my irregular attention to such sites. I actually happened on the book in my local library’s New Releases rack and was drawn to its elegant, clever design, with a stark, sepia image of a middle-aged detective holding a handgun on a Chip Kidd-like partial jacket which cuts off the top of the guy’s skull to line up with an embossed image of a brain on the cloth cover. Add to this the unevenly cut pages—a favorite touch that adds welcome texture to the reading experience the way a fine chef may add an item to a dish for a different mouthfell rather than taste—and I was looking forward to the book.

It’s not a bad effort, though I’ll cut to the chase and say my recommendation is a mild one. The hero in question is an aging P.I. who takes on an undesirable case to find the daughter of a local crime boss. She took off with his money, and her boyfriend, and the boss looks to be much more interested in getting the money back than his daughter’s safety. In fact, he’s probably going to punish her severely, maybe terminally. Our man Frank knows this might be his last case because he’s got a brain tumor and not a lot longer to live. It might have been more novel for this last case to be just another paycheck—more hardboiled and unsentimental, I mean—but no, this case is a chance for redemption, as the girl reminds him of his own wife, also the daughter of a crime boss, and her life cut short long ago because of it, with Frank feeling responsible.

There is much made on the cover copy of the most gimmicky element of the book, which is that due to Frank’s tumor, the narrative jumps around in time. Comparisons are made to the film Memento, and I suppose that’s appropriate enough. Both are gritty but standard crime stories enlivened by the device of non-linear storytelling. In the case of Tumor, though, Fialkov doesn’t do much with the device. The jumps in time don’t add a lot of mystery, suspense or pathos to the story; for the most part they either provide abrupt breaks between action with the unseen intervals either promptly explained in dialogue or narration, or easily deduced. And Fialkov also leans way too hard on the easy device of Frank’s tumor causing him to hallucinate that his current female charge is his dead wife, leading to glimpses back to days gone by where the wife is conveniently posed the exact same way, not just in a similar situation. There were some great opportunities with this device for interesting, thorny juxtapositions and contrasts between the past and present, but Fialkov sticks to a pretty basic remit: Frank failed before, and now he has one last chance to redeem himself by being stronger in almost the same situation. It ends up not a bad book but despite the slightly unusual (for comics) nonlinear narrative, an ordinary one, with strong, no-frills art by Tuazon and a script that could have used not frills but more depth and rough edges. On the plus side, I remember the creators, the character’s name and the story a week or so after reading it and returning it to the library, which is something. And I would call Fialkov one to watch, in that he comes up with some decent concepts and different routes of getting them to market. The big superstar talents of 2015, 2020, are probably not going to be the guys who come up the ranks writing a year of Green Arrow. They’ll figure out new ways and how best to utilize the new media.

—Christopher Allen

Shockrockets: We Have Ignition HC

Writer - Kurt Busiek

Artist - Stuart Immonen

Publisher - IDW Publishing. $24.99 USD

Seeing this hardcover makes me feel, well, nostalgic. And it wasn’t so long ago. I started writing about comics about 2000, which is when this first came out. Kurt Busiek was riding high as a comics writer, going from strength to strength, from Marvels to his creator-owned Astro City, and I think this series was preceded by a fine one-shot called Superstar, also drawn by Immonen. This was part of a company called Gorilla, which was Busiek and Mark Waid and some other guys, trying to break away from Marvel and DC and the work-for-hire system and doing their own thing, sort of like the Image boys did, only with guys who could write well instead of draw really awesome tits and asses and thugs and chains and such. I rooted for them, but it ended quickly, as they just didn’t have the dough to make a go of it, popular though they were. 

It’s not that Shockrockets or the other Gorilla work was better or, let’s say, nobler, than superheroes. Look, this is about some futuristic flyboys. It’s genre entertainment like superheroes are. The charm is just that superheroes so overpower the comics landscape that any divergence is novel and worth nurturing. Busiek borrows from Star Wars and other stories to tell of Alejandro Cruz, a blue collar gearhead who wants not only a better life but a heroic, adventurous one, and the fates conspire to give him his chance when one of the Shockrockets, the hotshot elite squad of heroes piloting alien ships, dies. Cruz bonds with the ship, not unlike Abin Sur passing on the power of the Green Lantern to Hal Jordan, and he becomes a new, if insecure and mistrusted, rookie on the team, trying to prove his worth. 

The series is a trial by multiple fires for Cruz, as he not only must overcome emotional barriers in place for his teammates but he has to take on the big baddie, General Korda, a former hero who helped defend Earth from alien invaders but then went on to become a despot with his own country and advanced technology. 

Artist Immonen creates some state-of-the-art work for the time, incorporating manga spaceship design and lots of speedlines, while keeping it relatable to the fairly standard human characters who would not be out of place in any superhero book. It’s a fairly delicate balance and he does it well, although in retrospect the orange/blue color contrast becomes redundant early, and his choice of using black without white or color to depict eyeballs gets a little tiresome as well. He does excel at body language, though, and the facial expressions are rarely overplayed, so he should be commended for these.

Busiek does an able job of carrying off the main story and making Alejandro accessible. There is a sort of hernia in the middle of the book, where he breaks off to focus on another member of the Shockrockets. It’s a kind of bulge of the main story membrane, as if Busiek predicted an ongoing series that could support focuses on all the team, rather than the five issue, discrete miniseries. It’s a fine issue but in comparison to what looks to be all the Shockrockets we’re likely to see, it’s a digression that sort of tilts the book off its rather narrow axis for a time. But good is good, and if given the choice of four tightly plotted issues and four tightly plotted issues and one nice change of pace, I’ll take it. 

IDW’s production is stellar, and the pages look as good as they’ve ever looked. The bonus material isn’t lavish, just some preliminary sketchbook stuff from Immonen, but it’s nice, and makes one wish these two big talents can eventually make room in their schedules to work together again.

—Christopher Allen

Infestation #1 (of 2)

Writers - Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning

Penciler - David Messina

Inker - Gaetano Carlucci

Additional Art - Elena Casagrande, Claudia Balboni

Publisher - IDW Publishing $3.99 USD

Mama mia, that’s a lotta mediocre Italian artists. This is the first issue of IDW’s first big licensed crossover event, with two bookend issues and then two issues each focusing on a zombie & infected robot invasion of various Earths related to the G.I. Joe, Transformers, Star Trek and Ghostbusters franchises. If you’re going to put together a successful story that somehow works for all these varied properties, you can either get some top talent who are just going to let loose and make it over-the-top, goofy, balls-out fun, or you get some mid-level talent who are going to roll up their sleeves and try to actually make something sensible. Abnett and Lanning are Plan B, always competent, able to make something sturdy out of the materials at hand, but they’re never going to surprise you. It’s kind of nice that they found a way to make the IDW property C.V.O. (Covert Vampire Operations) and some of the Zombies vs. Robots characters and ‘bots into the stars here, but they’re mostly shorthand cliches like the hardass soldier dragged from retirement, ready with B-movie lines like “eat ‘em if you got ‘em.” It’s inoffensive, and it seems like one can only read the bookends and the particular franchise issues one’s interested in and get the basic story without needing all of it. Still, based on the issue itself and the two-page previews of the other first issues, having Kirk, or Optimus, or the Baroness taking on zombies and evil robots should have been a real geekgasm, a lot more fun than what’s on display here.

—Christopher Allen

(advance copy provided for review by the publisher)

Putting the dis in distaff, Marvel unloads a misguided monument to mediocrity for that $125 you had no better use for. I see a lot of failed series and by-the-numbers miniseries here, but they seem to miss on some legitimately empowering stories like Kitty Pryde vs. The Brood or ’80s Ka-Zar/Shanna. With an Introduction providing context, even that ’70s story where the female Avengers rebelled against the chauvinistic males would have been fun, and what about Byrne’s solo Sue Storm FF story? There are a few good ones here, but what should have been a carefully spun celebration is more of a sad exposé of decades of disservice to some decent characters and readers of all genders. For the same money, why not buy a set of cheap tires and set them on fire? It’s more entertaining, and the fumes actually cause less brain damage*: 

Collecting TALES TO ASTONISH (1959) #51-58, X-MEN (1963) #57, NIGHT NURSE #1-4, CAT #1-4, MARVEL TEAM-UP (1972) #8, GIANT-SIZE CREATURES #1, MARVEL PREMIERE #42, SHANNA THE SHE-DEVIL (1972) #1-5, KA-ZAR: LORD OF THE HIDDEN JUNGLE #2, DAREDEVIL (1964) #108-112, MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE #3, MARVEL GRAPHIC NOVEL #12, #16 & #18, FIRESTAR #1-4, SENSATIONAL SHE-HULK: CEREMONY #1-2, CAPTAIN MARVEL (1989) #1, CAPTAIN MARVEL (1994) #1, MILLIE THE MODEL #100, PATSY AND HEDY ANNUAL #1, SOLO AVENGERS #9, MARVEL COMICS PRESENTS (1988) #36 and MARVEL FANFARE #59!

* Trouble With Comics is not responsible if you do this, and the tire fire would in all honesty cause more brain damage than reading or even burning this book.

— Christopher Allen