Trouble with Comics

The Discipline is the controversial new comic from Peter Milligan, Leandro Fernandez, and Cris Peter. Explicitly dealing with (inhuman) sex, art, and class, on the surface, The Discipline has nothing in common with Another Castle, the debut comic from Comics Alliance editor Andrew Wheeler and up-and-coming artist Paulina Ganucheau. Another Castle is all-ages and deconstructs the trope of the princess in need of rescuing. At their heart though, both comics examine female protagonists trapped by societal convention. Only one of them offers the possibility of a happy ending.

Amusingly, The Discipline opens with that happy ending, as 23 year old Melissa engages in a bout of vigorous lizard-person form sex with Orlando, a mysterious being sent to recruit her into the titular organization. The rest of the comic is a flashback, revealing how Melissa is married to the filthy-rich Andrew, but comes from a lower-class background herself. Now she lives an idle life, not even using her English degree in a job at publishing house any more. She exercises, goes to the museum to look at (apparently fictional) Goya paintings, and gossips with her friends about how her husband is absent from her life. She tries to give some of Andrew’s money to her family, but they rebuff her. Milligan and Fernandez’s last comic, The Names, was ostensibly a critique of the One Percent. It did not quite work, but the pair accomplishes everything it seemed to try to do there in a few pages of The Discipline. Everything about the absent Andrew seems utterly contemptible, and while Melissa complaining about her lifestyle should not endear reader sympathy, there’s no denying the emptiness of that lifestyle at its core. In this scenario, it’s easy to root for Orlando (likely an allusion to the Virginia Woolf novel, which was used by Alan Moore in later League of Extraordinary Gentlemen books)in to seduce Melissa, particularly when he actually rebuffs her first attempt to get him into bed. The first issue does not reveal anything about the Discipline itself, but it at least implies to the reader that it’s about more than the mind-blowing, body-altering sex on the opening pages; there’s a spiritual component, and that’s as intriguing as the titillating imagery.

If only things looked so promising for Princess Misty, the protagonist of Another Castle. The only daughter of the king of Beldora, she’s promised to wed the foppish Pete and by her own admission, has no friends only “hair and make-up.” She wants to take a more active role in the kingdom, but that’s prohibited by “Don Diego’s Code of Conduct” (not that she’s read it). The villain of the book, Lord Badlug the Terrible, captures her on page seven, after Misty carelessly heads off when she (and she alone) spots one of his spies, then goes off into the forest to try and find out more. The very nature of this trap depends on Badlug knowing how Misty chafes in her role and wants something more out of life than marriage to Pete and babies. Rather than playing off the knowledge her and trying to seduce her, he imprisons her, intent on holding a forced wedding (Badlug is cursed and cannot leave his own kingdom. Marrying Misty would expand his kingdom, once her father died).  Wheeler and Ganucheau, to their credit, do not portray Misty as being passive in the situation; she actually escapes, but returns to captivity when confronted with the depths of Badlug’s depravity and anger. She vows to do everything in her power to fight him from there, so as to avoid what happened the last time he kidnapped a princess. Unfortunately, from what we see in this first issue, defeating Badlug is the only sort of a happy ending Misty can look forward; the society around her, despite its bright trappings, is too restrained by tradition to allow her to be herself. The book would be far more interesting if Badlug was portrayed as responding to that aspect of Misty, so that she would be torn between her desire for self-actualization and desire to protect her kingdom. Instead, there’s no real conflict here and apparently no way for the heroine to get an ending worth rooting for, either.

by Joe Gualtieri

It Takes A Villain is TWC’s bi-weekly column about comics in which super-villains take the starring role; brought to by your favorite black ops bad-ass, Mick Martin.

What exactly is the point of a work-release team of super-villains?

I’m saying you’ve got the Justice League – often multiple squads of the Justice League- and you’ve got the Teen Titans and the Outsiders and the Birds of Prey and the Justice Society and the Green Lantern Corps; along with gobs of solo heroes jumping rooftops and streaking across the sky. It’s a wonder anyone in either the Marvel or DC universes can do so much as jay-walk without some traumatized jerk in a mask ready to dropkick them for it. So, in a world with this kind of super-hero surplus, why does the United States government then say, “well, we need one more team comprised of super powered murderers, thieves, and rapists; and if they actually survive their missions, we let them out of jail for good?” Or, you know, if not for good then at least until Booster Gold or someone else kicks their ass.

The only obvious answer is that while, sure, the world already has a ton of super teams, the government doesn’t have much control over what they do. The government can’t stop the Justice League from doing something it doesn’t want them to do. And it certainly can’t deploy the Justice League on specific missions. It can ask for help and in times of crisis (actual crisis, not DC crisis), it will almost always get it. If the government needs help fighting off invading aliens or stopping an incoming asteroid or some other Michael Bay horseshit, sure, the Justice League will be there.

But sneaking into Soviet Russia, liberating a political prisoner, and getting her to the States all for the sake of global PR? Yeah, Superman and Batman probably aren’t going to make time for that.

I wasn’t going to review Suicide Squad, Vol. 1: Trial by Fire quite so soon. I ordered it around the same time I started It Takes A Villain, but since I knew my first review would be about the New 52 volume of Suicide Squad, I figured I’d want more of a break between reviewing different volumes of the same title. I thought it might even make more sense to review it sometime late September or early August; close to the release date of David Ayer’s film adaptation.

But once I broke down and read Trial by Fire, I knew I didn’t want to wait to review it.

Suicide Squad is violent. Considering the name of the comic and the premise, that shouldn’t be surprising, but the way the violence is handled is different. That, I guess, shouldn’t be surprising either. The restraints DC Comics had to deal with in 1987 helped make the violence more artful and more interesting. One of the sequences I find the most memorable is in the beginning of the sixth chapter when Deadshot kills a Soviet soldier. Deadshot raises a rifle and says, “No sweat.” We see a panel showing the faces of three Soviet soldiers searching for something, with a BLAM! above them. In the next panel we see roughly the same shot with the flanking soldiers’ heads reacting to the gunshot and a simple red explosion erupting between the eyes of the center soldier and covering most of the top half of his face. The way it’s presented, the explosion could be blood, or it could just be a mark of impact. The page’s final panel has the soldier knocked backward and his comrades reacting to his killing. Most of the panel is colored the same as the previous panels, with the exception of the killed soldier’s head which is completely lost in shadow, with telltale inky spurts exploding from his forehead. 

While I’m sure it’s the gorier, more explosive, and direct style of today that sells, this is so much more elegant and ingeniously subtle. It reveals everything while showing almost nothing. I’d take this over Harley Quinn and King Shark ripping their way through a stadium of cyborg zombies any day.

Compared to more recent shots at the franchise, Ostrander and McDonnell’s Suicide Squad was politically charged and controversial. The team’s first mission in this volume is to take down a Middle Eastern mercenary super-villain group called Jihad. The aforementioned “Mission to Moscow” storyline is the longest in the book – spanning three issues – and follows the team’s incursion into Soviet Russia to attempt to save a dissident Russian writer who, it turns out, doesn’t really want to be saved.

The story so bold I’m surprised to have not heard of it before reading this volume is from Suicide Squad #4. A crossbow-wielding vigilante calling himself William Hell is fighting crime in Central City, but the only criminals he hands over to the cops are the ones who aren’t white. White criminals he recruits into his Aryan Empire. The Squad is sent to infiltrate Hell’s organization and expose him for the racist he is.

More than anything, what impresses me about this volume of Suicide Squad and makes me desperately hope DC keeps reprinting the original series, is that Waller’s Task Force X doesn’t handle things the way they do now.

More recent incarnations of Suicide Squad aren’t much different from straight super-hero teams. Yes, they’re more violent, but super-heroes in general are more violent than they used to be so that doesn’t really mean a whole lot. Books like today’s New Suicide Squad are really just super-hero titles with a little gimmick twist.

Not so with the original Suicide Squad. They were different. They were exactly what they were supposed to be: a super-villain answer to The Dirty Dozen. The Suicide Squad is an elite secret task force that does not accomplish all or most of its missions with big, loud, stupid super-fights. Sure, they have their fisticuffs, but most of the time they’re doing everything they can to operate under the radar. When the team exposes William Hell in Suicide Squad #4, no one has any idea they’re involved. Captain Boomerang is the only team member Hell ever sees in costume. Deadshot, Nightshade, Rick Flag, and Bronze Tiger are all disguised. Chronos – the squad member arguably most instrumental in Hell’s downfall – is never actually physically near the action. And Hell’s defeat has nothing to do with a fight with the Squad. They just trick the stupid, racist sonofabitch. Certain members like Nightshade and Black Orchid operate almost completely from the shadows, never or rarely taking part in any violence. In the “Mission to Moscow” story, squad members like Penguin and Deadshot don’t appear in costume for so much as a single panel in a three-issue long storyline. Because why would they appear in costume? They’re trying to get in and out of the Soviet Union in secret. They don’t want to spread bloody carnage all over the place just for the fun of evil wicked evilness. They want to finish their mission and go home. Compare that to New Suicide Squad which opened in Russia with a huge, explosive, city-rocking battle between the Suicide Squad and Russia’s Rocket Reds.

Ironically, it seems like over the years super-hero titles got more like Suicide Squad while Suicide Squad got more like everybody else. Books like Ultimates and Secret Avengers worked hard to get that military black ops feels that Suicide Squad had. Super hero team books overall have a stronger military feel these days, using military lingo and tactics. In the opening salvos of Avengers Vs. X-Men, the assembled team of Avengers about to invade the beaches of Utopia listened to the military strategy/pep-talk of Red Hulk, even though the lousy derivative bastard had tried to bring down the US government a few months before.

It seems unlikely that Suicide Squad will ever get back to its less fight-y, black ops feel; at least judging by the look of the film and the fact that Harley Quinn has become as much a fixture on the team as Deadshot and Captain Boomerang. I like Harley Quinn. I adore her solo comic. But she wouldn’t have lasted five minutes on the old team. How do you get through a secret mission in Soviet Russia with someone like Harley Quinn? How do you incorporate the Joker face and giant cartoon mallet with a stolen Soviet soldier uniform?

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed the New 52 Suicide Squad. I’m a bit more on the fence with New Suicide Squad. I’ll certainly be checking out the post-Rebirth series and I’m precipitously guessing the film may be the best super-hero flick of the year (or at least close to it). But this original volume is something a bit more different. Something tougher to find in other books, and it’s regrettable that aspect of the franchise is gone. I’m just happy that for now DC looks set to reprint the rest of the original series, and if it’s new to me, it’s new to me.

Suicide Squad, Vol. 1:Trial by Fire is good. Read it.

This week’s question: Last month, Image publisher and creator Eric Stephenson delivered a speech at Comicspro looking at the history of the comics industry that concludes by blasting variant covers as being bad for the industry. Do you are agree?

Logan Polk: As a reader, I don’t care about variant covers in the slightest. As a collector (and Deadpool fan) I enjoy some of them immensely. The problem is that I can’t afford to enjoy them in my collection. Occasionally I’ll spring for one that I really dig, but it’s not often. The bigger problem? Thanks to Marvel’s (I’m singling them out since that’s the only one of the Big Two I ever give my money to) policy of tiered variants not only are most of them out of my price range, but my local comics shop can scarcely afford to get them either.

They’ve effectively created a system that falsely inflates sales, props up their incessant attempts to reinvent their properties and leaves their sole source of distribution floundering. It’s absolute insanity. So, if the choice were for me to occasionally be able to snag a cheeky Deadpool variant, or even a cute Skottie Young piece, or for my friend and only local comics distributor to be able to get the items his customers want without having to worry about ordering enough issues to hit some arbitrary number, I’ll take the latter. If comics are going to survive as a physical medium, the people that produce them have got to stop abusing the people that sell them.

Joe Gualtieri: Variants covers suck.

In theory, having multiple covers to pick from on a comic is egalitarian, and leads Skottie Young fans to try everything Marvel publishes. In practice, it’s awful. For those not in the know, variants basically come in three flavors:
-free order variants where retailers can order all they want (I’ve been out of Diamond long to forget the official term for these).
-“order all” variants tied to your orders for something else (this is mostly a Marvel special)
-Ratio variants.
Generally, people talk about the last of these when they talk about variants, but all three are worth discussing. “Free order” variants aren’t so bad, really. There’s no artificial scarcity, in theory readers could buy the cover of their choice. The downsides are the title taking up extra rack space and your poor retailer trying to figure out if he or she needs more of one cover than another. If these were the only variants, I don’t think anyone wuld much care.

The “order all” variants are a pain in the butt for your retailer. The way this works is, if your order of Deadpool #12 exceeds your order of another comic by a certain percentage, you can order all you want of the Skottie Young Deadpool Baby Variant for #12. Where it gets tricky is the book that Skottie Young incentive cover is tied to probably isn’t Deadpool #11, it could be Uncanny X-Men #1. Then next month, there’s a Skottie Young variant for Squirrel Girl #1 where it’s tied to your orders for Deadpool #12… and so and so forth, every month linking back to a different comic where Marvel was trying to jack up sales, in theory inflating the sales of something every month to keep those Skottie Young variants rolling in (I don’t mean to pick on Young, and many of those covers are cute, it’s just a series that’s been running for close to five years now). It can also be a pain for your poor retailer to have to do the math here, although I understand Diamond has recently started out rate stating what targets are for individual retailers.

Last but not least are the ratio variants, where a retailer orders so many copies of the main cover to get one ratio variant. Companies will also stack these up, so when you order 5000 copies of Dark Knight III #1, in addition to the 1:5000 Jim Lee sketch variant, you can get 50 copies of the 1:100 and so on down the line. Publisher justify these ratio variants by saying they help titles find their levels, but any cursory examination of sales charts reveals that’s a lie. Retailers order extra copies of titles to get variants, which are sold at premium and in short order the extra copies of the regular cover wind up in a dollar bin. Heck, it might even take that long; one retailer near me had Dark Knight III #1 for half price day of release. In way, this is good for people who just want to read comics and have the patience to wait for books to hit bargain bins, but it actually devalues the work the creators put into the comic itself and emphasizes a collector mentality where only the outside of the comic matters.

No comic better encapsulates this problem than Supergirl and the Legion of Super Heroes #23 by Mark Waid and Barry Kitson. I read that title when it was coming out, and when I saw the 1:10 Adam Hughes variant, I wanted one, and unusually for me, was willing to pay a small premium (it was, after all, only 1:10). Well, I never found a copy and moved on. The cover got reproduced in the trade. Flash forward to now, and there are people claiming this one of the most important comics of the last decade and copies easily fetch hundreds of dollars. I completely understand the comic is scarce, but so what? Original art is scarcer, and it’s possible build a nice collection of pages and sketches that cost less than high-end variant covers. That Dark Knight III Jim Lee sketch cover becomes particularly egregious. Those covers, with mediocre, boring Batman head sketches are commanding about $3000. Meanwhile, a much nicer vintage sketch of Psylocke by Lee sold for less than half of that. A quick search of reputable dealers turned up actual X-Men pages by Lee for less than $2000. That’s an extreme example, but it’s still generally true. And that “scarce” variant cover? The image is readily available online and trades usually reprint the associated variant covers, so really what are you paying for?

Mike Sterling: For the new Dark Knight III series, there were an avalanche of 
variant covers. The usual 1 in 10/1 in 25/1 in 50 etc. variants, the variant covers commissioned for specific retailers, the blank variant so you can take it to a convention and pay a comic artist to draw on it, and then, of course, there was the Original Sketch by Jim Lee variant. For retailers who ordered 5,000 copies of the regular cover of Dark Knight III #1, at a wholesale cost of well over $10,000, you would be able to order one copy of this variant upon which the co-publisher of DC Comics gifted his personal illustration.
A glance at completed eBay auctions for this very item, as of this writing, shows that it seems to sell in the high $3000s, occasionally cracking four grand. So, let’s assume the wholesale cost on those 5,000 comics was $10,000, for simplicity’s sake, even if that’s on the low side. You sell your sketch cover for $4,000, and so, just to break even, you have to sell another 1,000 copies of the regular Dark Knight III #1. And then if you sell those 1,000 copies, you have another 4,000 to try to unload. Now, I admit, for larger stores in big cities with extensive mail order clientele, they could possibly move this excess product. They can also make some bank on the 100 copies of the 1/50 variants they received, and so on. If that one eBay seller I saw can be believed, there are supposedly only 43 copies of the 1/5000 sketch variant in circulation. That means 215,000 copies of the regular cover for #1 were ordered to get that specific variant, and that doesn't include all the copies ordered by other shops that didn’t splurge for the 1/5000 variant. And it doesn’t include the dozens of store-specific variants that also required minimum purchases, and…well, you get the idea. (Ultimately, over 440,000 copies of #1 were produced.)

My prediction at the time was that there would be a flood of regular DKIII #1s on eBay, selling for pennies on the dollar. A look just now (and it was difficult just finding the regular #1 amongst all the variants) shows I was a little off… there are copies selling for as much as one or two dollars.

This is all just secondary market stuff. For the average reader, who just wants to read DKIII (and there are a lot… there are plenty of people coming to my shop just for this series, and I can’t be the only retailer experiencing this), they don’t care about all that. For folks who are into the variants…well, some of them just like the alternate artwork, some want to invest or immediately flip the book online, or whatever. And whatever you want to do, however you want to interact with the hobby, hey, go for it.

But it’s a little troubling, this much excess. That’s a lot of dough tied up in one product, despite the fact that the comic is selling, a large amount of that product almost certainly is going to waste. Blown out on eBay, stashed away in boxes in the backroom, maybe even just straight-up recycled. (I’ll give you collectors a moment to recover from that onset of the vapors after reading that last one.) The regular covers served their purpose, the chaff you have to cast off in order to sell the variant cover wheat, which is a terrible metaphor but I hope you forgive me. And that’s money that goes into short term profits, which I absolutely will not blame anyone for pursuing in the current marketplace, but I wonder how much money went to DKIII that didn’t go for other items shops could have carried, that could have attracted readers that weren’t necessarily looking for Bat-comics. Now, if you’re a large shop going all-in on that sketch variant, you probably didn’t impact your other stock that much. But for small stores, that have to watch their budgets, bumping up your orders to that next plateau in order to get that next variant might mean having to order a copy or three less of something else.

And that’s great for Marvel and DC. They naturally want stores to spend less money on other products and more on theirs. That's just business.

The main purpose of variant covers is get retailers to order more copies of the book. Dark Knight III is the most extreme example of that in recent memory. Usually, however, it’s more a case of maybe a retailer deciding to order nine copies of something, seeing there’s a 1 in 10 variant cover, and bumping it up an extra copy to order the variant. Behold… two more copies sold!

Or there’s the “match or exceed previous orders” variants… “equal or beat 
your orders on Variant Cover Man #1 with orders for Variant Cover Man #2, and you can order as many copies of Variant Cover Man: Variant Cover as you want.” Generally this means having to at the very least maintain or slowly increase your numbers over time in order to continue receiving the latest variants. (I cover that particular strategy on my own site in much greater detail.)

And then there’s the form of variant cover particularly favored by DC, in which retailers can freely order both the regular and the “themed” variant cover… that theme being a topic that all these freely-orderable variants feature during that specific month, such as “Batman's Anniversary” or “Harley Quinn” or “Lego” or so on. And there’s the problem with that… these variant covers can actively mislead the customer, as the themed illustrations have nothing to do with the contents. It was the Lego covers that drove this home, as disappointed customers in droves returned Lego-covered comics to the shelves after discovering the comics inside did not feature the expected Lego-ized heroes.

It’s not necessarily all negative. Different cover images may appeal to different customers’ tastes, and if one cover for a certain comic doesn’t catch a person’s eye, maybe that comic’s other cover(s) will. Plus, ordering a few extra copies of a title to get the incentive 1-in-whatever-number variant could mean having more copies around on the shelves rather than selling out right away, allowing for more potential sales. And, if that variant sells at a premium price, it helps subsidize the cost of the extras.

In the long run, though, it’s a sales crutch to entice retailers to bump up numbers, as well as being a wee bit rough to to deal with at ordering time. It’s hard enough, even with months and months and years of sales reports to go by, to try to order the right number of comics that you’re at least partially guesstimating will sell two or three months down the road to regular readers. Adding “huh, I wonder if anyone two months from now will want any of these variants” to the equation just pads the chore. I mean, as a retailer, variants can be a good sales tool, and they do attract attention, but I can’t help but wonder if the energy expended on producing, retailing, and buying variant covers couldn’t be put to better use in this industry. It’s a short term patch to the ongoing problem of cash flow in the comics business, but it’s not the solution.

This week’s question: What’s your favorite anniversary issue?

Tim Durkee:  I’m glad that this question was given an extra week. I knew I could catch up with my reading and two anniversary issues would be a part of that. First off, I’m very far behind, so please don’t chuckle too loud when tell you I just finished Amazing Spider-Man # 690-700 including every point one and gimmick book in between. For all purposes issue 692 is the 50th anniversary issue, but that was overshadowed by the hype surrounding 700. The cat has been out of the bag for several years now, the question would have it been worth the cover price when first released?

I hate when a character dies in a book, not because my favorite hero or villain has perished, but because they never last. Give it a few months, maybe a year and they are back so I was I was in hurry as I knew what to expect. Did ASM 700 deliver to a reader who is very skeptical of deaths, anniversaries, and gimmicks? It sure did!

For a moment I actually thought this was it, the last story. No more Parker. The way the letter columns were filled it was more like a eulogy page rather that a celebration of one of the greatest super-heroes created. And I am reading this, believing this, knowing what happened. That’s what we call darn good writing, true believers! Now I’m on to Superior Spider-Man, which I stayed away from initially. I’ve never been known to have a favorite anniversary issue, until today.

Mike Sterling: Very early on in my comic collecting endeavors, I always went out of my way to pick up “special” issues. Extra-sized anniversary editions or annuals or the large treasury editions, even if they were from series or featuring characters I didn’t normally follow. There was just something especially enticing about these, even if the higher pricetags bit into my funnybook-buying budget. And, in the late ‘70s/early '80s, there was no shortage of fine books to choose from: Flash #300, detailing the origins of all the Rogues, Detective Comics #500, a monster of a comic featuring stories starring not just Batman, but several other characters featuring throughout the series’ long run.

And then there was Justice League of America #200 from 1982.

A great premise: the founding members of the League have gone out of 
control, and it’s up to their latter-day teammates to bring them down.
A great story structure: each confrontation is divided into its own short chapter, including one splash page punctuating the conflict between the characters.
A great collection of artists: each chapter is illustrated either by the artist most strongly associated with the characters involved (such as the Flash versus the Elongated Man by Carmine Infantino, or the Atom versus Green Lantern by Gil Kane), or by an artist that is most perfectly suited to said characters (such as Green Arrow and Black Canary versus Batman as drawn by Brian Bolland). The artwork for the framing and connective sequences is by George Pérez, who was then nearing the end of his run as the regular Justice League artist.
The story, by Gerry Conway, very nicely showcases each major character from the title’s history, as well as tying the plot into the team's origins. It is, in effect, a sequel to Justice League of America #9 (1962), where the League’s origin was initially told. Conway also contributes an extensive text history of the series on the inside front and back covers.

This is 72 adless pages of superhero perfection, presenting the almost Platonic ideal of how each character should be treated. Sure, maybe Pérez isn’t quite as polished here as he would become in short order, but there’s no denying his work’s power and enthusiasm. He certainly holds his own with the other featured artists. In addition to Bolland, Kane and Infantino, there’s Jim Aparo, and Dick Giordano, and Joe Kubert, and Brett Breeding, and more. If anyone’s taking suggestions for one of those giant tomes that features high-quality scans of original art, I nominate this book for the treatment.

Justice League of America #200 is the comic I think of when I think of superhero comics. It’s the one that reminds me of why I became interested in superhero comics in the first place. Not that it was my first superhero comic, by any means, but it still remains, at least to the part of me that still remembers that youthful thrill of seeing the week’s new arrivals on the newsstand racks, the best.

Scott Cederlund: My Legion of Super-Heroes fandom started out sporadically.  I probably read more reprints of older Legion stories in Adventure Comics or even the old Treasury Editions.  There’s one Treasury Edition that reprinted a Mordru story that’s still one of my favorite comic stories.  Those old Silver-Age stories were hokey but all of those super-powered kids running in those old fashioned costumes held a wonderful charm over me.  That’s probably why I had a problem with some of the more modern (at least modern circa 1983) Legion stories.  The characters kind of seemed familiar but with all of their updated, Bronze Age costumes, my mind couldn’t connect those old Legion stories to the current Legion stories.

Legion of Super-Heroes #300 is a suspect anniversary issue because the series continued the numbering of the original Superboy series after it became Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes with issue #197.  So maybe the 300th issue of Legion of Super-Heroes is a bit of a stretch but it provided the link for me between the Legion I knew from those old reprints and the modern day Legion as it contained a number of imaginary stories about possible timelines for the Legion, all written by Paul Levitz and drawn by a number of different artists.  

Levitz’s story touched on all of the eras of the Legion, all the way back to it’s earliest and corniest days in the late 1950s and 1960s, through the Bronze Age cynicism of the 1970s and all the way through the Keith Giffen technological utopia of the 1980s. These stories were “what ifs,” looking at the decisions that the Legion had made through those years and how they could have been different. And Levitz even framed it through the perspective of the brother of the late Ferro Lad.  All of these maybes and could-have-been were told from the point of view of one of the Legion’s first and greatest tragedies.

There’s only a handful of comics from 1983 (or even before that) that I can actually remember buying and reading for the first time. I got the issue from a shop called All American Comics in Evergreen Park, Il, on a summer night. And I read the comic in the lobby of the Christ Medical Center on 95th Street. My father had taken me to the comic shop as a mild bribe before going to visit my grandmother in the hospital. I can remember the lighting still being dim in the waiting area while my father went up to my grandma’s room. I probably went up to her room for a little bit but I was probably quickly allowed to go down to the lobby to read my comics while my dad spent time with his mother.  

The comic means as much to me about the contents of it as it does about the summer of 1983 when my grandmother died of cancer. When the question was posed about anniversary issues for this column, I immediately thought of this issue but it took a while to sink in about what the comic means to me and why I still have it in my collection.  The comic is full of possibilities and things that never happened in the Legion continuity, but they all could have happened if the writer and artists had made different choices along the ways. For this anniversary issue, Paul Levitz tapped into some of that potential that exists in all comics within the boundaries of continuity.

Joe Gualtieri: This week’s question is borderline impossible. It would have been tough enough if we could pick five, but one anniversary issue? Especially as someone who was a young teen during the prime years of anniversary mania (Marvel made a way bigger deal about the thirtieth anniversaries of their various superheroes than they did the fiftieth), this felt like a nigh-impossible task. Outside of material reprinted in The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told (“To Kill a Legend” from Detective Comics #500 is a contender here), my first anniversary issue was likely Detectve #627, celebrating Batman’s 600th appearance in the title (yes, it’s actually his 601st, an error pointed by many letter writers in subsequent issues). It reprinted the very first Batman story, “The Case of the Criminal Syndicate” by Bill Finger and Bob Kane, and a retelling of the story, “The Cry of the Night is- ‘Kill’”, from #387 by Mike Friederich, Bob Brown, and Joe Giella. It also contained two new reinterpretations of that first story by essentially the then-contemporary teams on both Detective and Batman: Marv Wolfman, Jim Aparo, Mike DeCarlo, and Adrienne Roy, and Alan Grant, Norm Breyfogle, Steve Mitchell, and Roy. The Grant/Breyfogle tale was a little gruesome for my tastes at the time, but getting four variations, retold over time, has always left an impression on me as a great way to do an anniversary issue.

My favorite though? In the end, it comes down to two issues, both from the same storyline, Spectacular Spider-Man #189 (the first of four issues celebrating Spider-Man’s thirtieth anniversary in 1992, each with a hologram on the cover, because 1992) and #200. My first Spider-Man comics were Amazing #347 (Venom!) and Spectacular #175 (Doc Ock!), both purchased from Robinson’s Convenience Store on the same day because they had villains I liked from Marvel trading cards. Funnily enough, I came in as a classic creator left, as Spectacular #175 wrapped up Gerry Conway’s final Spider-Man story-arc (though it was written by David Michelinie). The next two issues were fill-ins by some guy named Kurt Busiek, and then in #178, J.M. DeMatteis’s run started with a sequel to his already legendary Kraven’s Last Hunt, with Sal Buscema on art. Despite not having read that story, his run worked really for me, in part because the story was something of a thematic sequel, focusing on Harry Osborn and his struggles with his father’s legacy as the Green Goblin. By the end of that initial arc, Harry had fallen to his worse impulses, becoming a villain again.

After a detour involving the Vulture, DeMatteis brought Harry back in #189 for “The Osborn Legacy.” Deranged after using his father’s super-strength formula, Harry kidnaps his own family and starts psychologically torturing Spider-Man. At the end of the issue, Spidey actually turns Harry over to the authorities, despite the threat of Harry revealing his secret identity as Peter Parker. Over the next year, Harry would occasionally show that he could still reach out from prison, but he was released in #199. The next issue, “Best of Enemies!” sees Harry up his war against Spider-Man, his family struggling to deal with his instability and Harry fighting himself, caught between wanting to do what his evil father would want and his long friendship with Parker. The issue is tense, and features one of probably only two scenes returning to the scene of Gwen Stacy’s death that is actually any good, as Harry takes Mary Jane Parker there to assure her he will not hurt her. In the end, Peter and Harry come to blows, Harry poisons Peter and leaves him to die in a death trap before Mary Jane talks him into going back. Then the super strength formula he used a year earlier turns to poison and kills him (a simple metaphor, but beautifully done, and perfect for the genre). Harry Osborn’s death is absolutely stunning, a scene so well done by Buscema that DeMatteis deviated from his original plans and left the final pages silent.

Spectacular Spider-Man #200 is everything an anniversary issue should be: it wraps up the current creative team’s story-lines, but beyond that it truly builds on the history of the characters involved. “Best of Enemies” gets its impact not just from the artistry of DeMatteis and Buscema, but from everyone who came before on the Spider-Man comics. It’s a story that demands a mature Spider-Man, and is inconceivable without him being married to Mary Jane. Marvel has, inexplicably, just reprinted parts of it, and the only way that makes sense to me as vindictiveness over how it shows how wrong nearly everything the company has tried to with the character since has been, as Marvel’s flailed about, trying to de-age him, believing kids couldn’t relate to an older, married Spider-Man. *Ahem* Anyway, it also has a foil cover, and being 11 in 1992, I confess to having a weakness for those when they’re well done.

This week’s question: What’s your favorite romance in comics?

Logan Polk: Thanos is one of my favorite characters. I think he’s endlessly compelling when handled right, and a big part of that is his love life. So, my favorite romance in all of comics has to be Thanos and Death. Okay, it’s more of an obsessive and unrequited love than an actual romance, but it’s a story that I’ve followed for most of my comics reading life, and one I still find completely fascinating. To want the approval and affection of someone so much that you would seek godhood and attempt to wipe entire portions of the galaxy out of existence? That’s an epic love story. What can I say, I’ve always been a fan of the bad guys just as much (or more) than the good guys.

Tim Durkee: Even though it is not as popular as his first fling with the human Lois Lane, I enjoy the chemistry between Superman and Wonder Woman. I was first introduced to their relationship with the Kingdom Come miniseries, an Elseworlds tale. That is a story that does not take place in the current time frame of stories in the DC Universe. I’m not sure if he was seeing the Amazon on the side and decided to go full-time after Lois Lane’s death, sorry for the spoiler. They both are also an item in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight universe. More spoilers: Superman and WW have a child together and another on the way. The impression is that there was still a relationship between Clark and Lois before Lois’s death. I can understand Lois being all gaga over the Man of Steel, I just can’t see him seeing any interest in her, so having him with the most powerful woman in the DCU makes more sense to me. Now, the new 52 universe has them together, so I’m told. I have read some reviews about them together. Some love hate, more hate it. I am curious what direction the DCU films will take with the introduction of Wonder Woman.

Mike Sterling: I never really paid much attention to romance in comics when I was younger. Generally, that was for good reason; in most of the superhero comics, it wasn’t so much “romance” as “plot point” or “character description.” You know, “Lois is Superman’s girlfriend” or “Iris is Flash’s wife” or whatever. Love interests existed to be threatened by villains, or to be nosy about secret identities, or to be pined over, or whathaveyou. It was a technical point, not an emotional connection.

So, as will come as no surprise to most of you who are familiar with my online shenanigans, it was the romance that popped up in, of all places, Swamp Thing that caught me off guard.

Yes, Swamp Thing, the comic about a monster who fights other monsters while hangin’ out with pals who are related to monsters or are monsters themselves. That’s where a comic book romance finally hit home with me, and yeah yeah make your jokes, but it was one of the most totally out-of-nowhere-but-yeah-of-COURSE moments I’d ever read in a comic at that point. I’m talking about Saga of Swamp Thing #34 (March 1985) by Alan Moore, Steve Bissette and John Totleben, where Abby tells Swamp Thing of her feelings for him, exclaiming “how could you love me?” Swampy’s response: “Deeply…silently…and…for too many…years.”

That pair of awkward admissions between a couple of characters I’ve been reading about for so long…that was the sort of honest emotion that’s not present in the eternal running-in-place of Superman and Lois, or most other superhero books. Particularly for someone like me, who’d been invested in these characters and was suddenly blindsided by this step forward, a change in the status quo in a storytelling industry that doesn’t like changes in the status quo.

Naturally, the relationship was fuel for melodrama, as this is comics, after all. Abby getting up to some plant-lovin’ becoming fodder for tabloid journalists, losing her job as a result, etc. etc. – all part and parcel of the soap opera style of funnybook storytelling, but through everything, Swamp Thing and Abby felt like an actual, and oddly normal (or as normal as they could manage) couple.
It didn’t last, sadly. Now, a couple of Swamp Thing series and a line-wide reboot of the shared DC universe later, Swamp Thing and Abby's life together is no longer at the center of Swampy’s adventures. It's nice, though, to recall a time when I could be genuinely surprised at a turn of events in a comic book. And not the usual "THIS ISSUE - SOMEBODY DIES!“ type of nonsense that’s no longer really working anyway - but just a couple of characters that you’ve read about for several years, quietly and shyly admitting their feelings to each other.

Joe Gualtieri: Growing up, I was the weirdo in your group of comic-loving friends, the one with really weird taste. You see, I vastly preferred Cyclops (Scott Summers) to Wolverine.

As the kid in your class who literally would remind the teacher to give the class homework, I suspect this is part of why Scott Summers appealed to me, along with the hyper-competence. I suspect it’s also worth noting that my first X-title was X-Factor #65, and I started regularly reading with X-Men #1, so more than five years after the ugliness with Madelyne Pryor occurred, and a couple years after Pryor was firmly established as a clone of Jean Grey created by Sinister, so that controversy was essentially a settled matter when I began reading. So I was Cyclops fan, and I was really into his relationship with Jean Grey. When John Byrne and Fabian Nicieza teased an affair with Psylocke, I didn’t take it seriously as storyline (nor, rereading those issues, should I have. There’s nothing there, really). Years later though, when Stephen T. Seagle hinted at real cracks in their relationship, I was apoplectic, and wanted him off the comic, which happened not long after, and after a few terrible issue by Alan Davis, I dropped the X-Men comics for the first time in about eight years. I soon started buying them again, as Davis finally did “The Twelve”, a story the X-books had teased since the late 80s. That arc ended with Cyclops apparently dying after being possessed by the soul of Apocalypse (this is all actually relevant). That was basically it for Davis, as Chris Claremont returned to the X-title for a disastrous run both creatively and n terms of sales. Marvel’s Editor in Chief Bob Harras was basically fired over it, he was replaced by Joe Quesada, who brought in Grant Morrison to revitalize the X-franchise. Oh, and Scott Summers returned from the dead prior to Morrison’s run starting in New X-Men #114.

Morrison’s run infamously begins with the line, “Wolverine. You can probably stop doing that now” foreshadowing how the series would focus on the idea of change and nowhere would Morrison affect more change than in the character of Cyclops. Following his resurrection, Summers’s marriage to Jean Grey is in tatters, the two not having touched each other for five months. Cue Emma Frost joining the team. She almost immediately hits on  Summers, and Morrison leaves the result of her come-on ambiguous at first. Gradually, it’s revealed that the pair involved, but only psychically, as a sort of sexual therapy for Cyclops. Jean Grey-Summers learns about it at the end of “Riot at Xaviers”, and the fallout carries into the first part of “Murder at the Mansion”. To Jean, the affair is just as real even if it’s happening on the psychic plane, and it soon turns out that despite her detached demeanor, Frost has real feelings for Summers. The reveal comes on one of my all-time favorite pages (drawn by Phil Jimenez) as she break down in Wolverine’s arms, the panel layout narrows until she has to ask, “Why did I have to fall in love with Scott Bloody Summers?”

The relationship hits the back-burner for the series from there until the final arc, “Here Comes Tomorrow” (the title an allusion to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake), a new take on “Days of Future Past” where the key moment is Summers walking away from Frost at Grey’s grave (she died at the end of the previous arc). Jean Grey, in a superhero afterlife, heals reality, urging “Live. Scott.” Which prompts him to embrace Frost, after answering her question, “Don’t you want to inherit the Earth” with “I… yes.” The “yes” and scenario reads as a gender-flipped allusion to Molly Blooms long soliloquy that closes Joyce’s Ulysses:

[…]how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.

As the Blooms do not have a perfect relationship, but love each other, the allusion suggests that rather than the story-book, “perfect” romance of Scott Summers and Jean Grey, Summers and Emma Frost will have a more realistic and messier relationship. Subsequent comics certainly bore this out and while the relationship seems to have run its course (plus Cyclops is dead again), the beginnings of their relationship make it my favorite in comics.

It Takes A Villain is TWC’s bi-weekly column about comics in which super-villains take the starring role; brought to you by the lusty temptress of sinful delight, Mick Martin.

It’s likely I never would’ve heard of Breathtaker if I hadn’t started writing It Takes A Villain. When I first conceived the column, I wanted to make sure I knew about as many villain-led titles as possible. I compiled a list by going through an online comic shop and scanning every single title. Breathtaker’s title probably wouldn’t have grabbed my attention if it wasn’t a DC comic. Since it was DC, right away, I knew it had to be either a villain comic or a Vertigo title. Once I read the description of the series – a woman who kills men with sex is pursued by a super-hero named The Man – I felt lucky to have stumbled upon such an intriguing sounding villain-led title, though I was also a little hesitant. The description said the comic was released in 1990. If the story was really as interesting as it sounded and it came out that long ago, why the hell hadn’t I heard of it? Still, precisely because I knew nothing about the series beside its title put it high on the list of comics I was excited to read for It Takes A Villain. A quick search on Amazon revealed that DC was planning to release a trade collection of the comic in late 2015. Unfortunately, those plans were scrapped. But I was curious enough to do something I hadn’t done in a very long time: I doled out the money for the single back-issues, and I don’t regret a penny lost.

I still can’t answer the question of why I had never heard of it. Maybe because the protagonist was female, maybe because without the Vertigo imprint comics like this fell through the cracks. I don’t know. Regardless, Breathtaker is wonderful and deserves to be talked about and written about more. After reading it, though, I actually questioned whether or not it really belonged in It Takes A Villain. This is a column that’s not just about comics in which villains are the protagonists, but super-villains from the super-hero genre. That’s why you won’t be seeing any reviews of Lucifer or Darth Vader here. But for some very specific reasons, Breathtaker not only fits, but shines a light on something I’m seeing more and more in super-villain comics.

Not to mention, I paid for the damn comics and they’re good, so whatever. I’m writing about them.

Written by Mark Wheatley and beautifully rendered by Marc Hempel and Kathryn Mayer, Breathtaker tells us the story of Chase Darrow: a woman whose love is fatal. The deaths aren’t intentional. Chase doesn’t want to hurt anyone, but her victims’ love is just as much a drug to her as her magnetism is irresistible to them. Her love doesn’t kill instantly, but in increments, and the story opens on the final moments of Chase’s relationship with the rich Paul. Though only in his mid-fifties, Paul looks as wrinkled and spent as a man in his nineties, and all it takes is one kiss from Chase to kill him. Moments after his death, Paul’s grown son Charlie finds Chase. She tells him what happened, and because he is just as spellbound by Chase as everyone else, his only concern is the trauma she’s been through.

Chase goes on the run and soon the violent super-hero The Man is after her. Under fire for thoughtlessly killing innocent civilians while chasing criminals, government agent The Man is desperate for some good PR. Chase’s growing trail of bodies is music to The Man’s ears. He eventually captures Chase, but falls victim to the same yearning as all of Chase’s men. Eventually a group of men related to Chase’s former lovers – men who now all want to be her lovers – find Paul’s son Charlie and hunt for Chase to save her from the authorities.

Everywhere Chase goes, she tries to avoid being the flame that draws in doomed moths, but she can’t help it. Even animals are drawn to her. When Chase helps an elk in the woods whose antlers are caught in a tree’s branches, the elk wants to be with Chase as much as any human man. Chase cannot stop men from wanting her or stop herself from needing them.

When I first read the series description, I was expecting Chase to  be much more deliberate. I kept thinking of the earthbound goddess in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods who literally devours men with her vagina during sex. But while men can’t resist Chase, she’s no temptress. She doesn’t kill men for money, for power, or for kicks. She needs sex to survive. Without it, she quickly ages and, presumably, dies. But she tries to control it. In fact, she doesn’t kill all of her victims. If she only has sex with a man once or a couple of times, they survive, but younger men suddenly find themselves with heads of white hair or even bald. Yet most of those who survive wouldn’t call themselves victims.

This is why I considered not reviewing Breathtaker for this column. Could I really call Chase a super-villain? Sure, she has powers. Sure, she’s got a bonafide super-hero on her tail, but a super-villain? Chase is as much a victim of her situation as any of her men. She’s riddled with guilt and at one point tries to commit suicide because of it. You could even argue Chase is more of a victim than the men. At least she tries to fight her urges and avoid hurting anyone, while the men throw themselves at her without giving a single damn about the consequences. The trucker Lou that Chase meets at the end of the first issue gladly hands over the keys to his truck when he learns the law is after her. Even though he’s got two kids to look after, moments after Chase drives away Lou whips out a revolver and is ready to fire on a pursuing police car; holstering only when sees it’s actually an ambulance.

But I include Breathtaker because, among other reasons, it brings to a head something that seems to be a recurring theme in these super-villain comics I’m reading: addiction.

Chase is addicted to contact with men just as the men become addicted to contact with her. They know she’s killing them and don’t care, just as an addict will knowingly race towards the edge of the cliff. In the very beginning of Breathtaker, Chase sounds like an addict fooling herself about who’s in control. “I can control my need,” she says. “I can pace my need.” And then two pages later her lover is dead.

There is a recurring theme of devouring and overeating in Breathtaker. The Man berates his handler for interrupting him during breakfast. The dedicated but sympathetic Detective Cob who pursues Chase is constantly eating though he’s as thin as a board. At a crime scene, Cob is devouring a burger and asking for seconds. When he meets with the mob of wanna-be-Chase-lovers he inhales a pizza. When Chase stops at the diner where she meets Lou the trucker, there’s a veritable kitchen worth of spent plates, bowls, saucers, and glasses at Chase’s table.

Sounds kind of familiar? Maybe like a guy floating through space and devouring entire planets because, you know, he just has to? To survive?

When I wrote about Superior Spider-Man, I mentioned addiction, and the more I read these villain-led comics and think about the implications of who these characters are and what they do, the more the word “addiction” springs up. It could be projection, I’ll admit that. I have my own addictions. I wrote about that a bit in my Superior Spider-Man column. Addiction is on my mind a lot so it could very well be that I’m just looking at these comics through that lens and naturally see exactly what I want or need or just plain expect to see.

But I don’t think it’s that. Or, if I am projecting, then at most I’m turning up the volume on something that really is there, but maybe doesn’t deserve as much attention as I give it (but it does).

I can’t say I’ve become some kind of expert on super-villain comics. There’s still so much to read and I’m having a ball reading it and writing about it. But if there is any general comment I can make at this point about super-villain comics, it’s that it seems like the central struggle of the super-villain-led comic is the struggle of men and women doing shit that just doesn’t make any goddamn sense.

I’m not saying it’s not believable, mind you. I’m not saying it’s bad writing, no. I’m saying these characters, super-villains, are mostly smart people who make stupid choices, who act against common sense and their own self-interest. You can call it addiction or you can call it obsession. You could just call it insanity. Regardless, it all boils down to men and women who go to unbelievable lengths for stupid and mostly unattainable goals, and for the most part both the efforts toward those goals and even the unlikely realization of those goals will only make their lives suck more.

Just looking at some the titles I’ve written about so far, there’s the Suicide Squad who risk their lives for a woman known for manipulation and lies – who they know from experience will likely never give them the clemency she promises – instead of using their super powers and amazing talents to break the hell out of prison (which every other super-villain seems to be able to do pretty frequently). There’s Astro City’s Steeljack who keeps being drawn back to his criminal roots through plain old habit. There’s the Doctor Octopus of Superior Spider-Man who has finally defeated Spider-Man in every conceivable manner, but actually imprisons himself in Parker’s body and life, and can never be happy with his victory. There’s the Maestro of Future Imperfect who risks all and loses it in attempt to unseat a god. There’s the Penguin protected by wealth and power, almost in the arms of a good woman who impossibly loves him, who throws it all away just to get back at the memory of children who bullied a lonely, ugly child.

No, there’s nothing unbelievable about these people beyond their silly titles and their outfits and their powers. That they rush towards defeat and ruin with eyes wide open is not difficult to believe. We have no Penguins and no Doctor Dooms but we eat ourselves to death, drink ourselves to death, drug ourselves to death, and fuck ourselves to death. We are crushed in stampedes for Black Friday deals. We fly through windshields so we can check Facebook on the highway.

This is why these super-villain comics are so important to me. I love super-heroes, but they don’t happen. They make more sense, but they don’t happen. But what super-villains experience is what we experience in our culture. Futile struggles for worthless treasures. I can’t relate to some caped asshole who spends all his day thinking about what’s the more righter thing to do golly gosh darn it. Sure, I’ve had my moral conflicts, we all have, but if I’m honest then I know that more often than I ask myself whether or not what I’m doing is right, I’m asking myself whether or not what I’m doing makes any damn sense. And the answer usually, of course, is “No, Mick. No it does not.” When my apartment is filthy and my clothes are all dirty and my cats’ litter box looks like a rock garden and my phone’s voice mail seems to only exist for the sake of bill collectors; and because of all this I plan a productive evening tackling my issues; and I stop at a grocery store on the way home from work and buy a bowling ball-sized bag of peanut butter M and Ms and spend the entire night prone on my couch, shoving sugar in my face and binge-watching Parks & Recreation; I’m not worried about whether or not I did the morally right thing. I’m worried about the fact that I know I have a respectable IQ yet everything I do is so goddamn stupid that I should be checking my knuckles for drag marks.

The men of Breathtaker throw themselves at Chase even though for most of them it will only mean their deaths. They fall in love with her in seconds. Detective Cob stands uselessly in the way of The Man to protect Chase, one of his many snacks still clutched in his hands. The Man is shot and almost killed pursuing Chase, but he keeps going, even when one of his legs looks like nothing but chewed up bone.  

I’m going to keep reading these super-villain comics because they have something to teach me. About why you and me act against our own good. About why I have to go to meetings full of strangers to stop myself from doing things that hurt me. About why I do things that make no goddamn sense.

I’m writing this at 2:30 in the morning. For free.  

Captain Marvel #1 by Michele Fazekas, Tara Butters, Kris Anka, and Matthew Wilson

A solid first issue that does a good job of establishing Carol Danvers’s new status quo as head of the new version of Alpha Flight, which is apparently the new version of SWORD. The art by Anka and Wilson is crisp and clean; this is a nice looking book, which I could not say about the title when it launched in 2012 with Dexter Soy as the artist. If there’s a flaw here, it’s a tendency by Fazekas and Butters to not introduce the supporting players. Aurora and Sasquatch are called out in identifier captions, but there’s nothing else about them. Abigail Brand and Puck receive more prominent roles, but it feels like key information is missing for new readers, particularly that Puck’s small stature is the result of a mystical curse, when he complains how much pain he’s in due to his size. Still, those concerns aside this is a solid and fun book.

Clean Room #2-4 by Gail Simone, Jon Davis-Hunter, and Quinton Winter

I enjoyed the first issue of Clean Room, but it felt like it didn’t go much beyond the idea of a comic examining the cultural footprint of Scientology. The second issue is a superb horror comic and the fourth in particular feels like it expands the title beyond the Scientology box. This is very close to becoming DC’s best comic.

Citizen Jack #1 by Sam Humphries, Tommy Patterson, and Jon Alderink

We all have our pet peeves and one of mine is when the first issue of a comic is basically just a dramatized version of the solicitation copy. I mean, okay, the solicitation probably didn’t mention Cricket, the dolphin political pundit, but if you’re selling your comic with the premise that it’s about a politician selling his soul to the devil to get elected president, don’t end your first issue with him selling his soul. Let me put it another way, if this comic was published by Valiant, this wouldn’t be #1, it would be #0. Maybe I’ll give this another try when the trade hits, but as it is I feel like I gave it a shot and the creative team gave me nothing I couldn’t get from a blurb in Previews.

New Romancer #1 by Peter Milligan and Brett Parson

Well, it’s better than Greek Street. Oddly, despite the bloody last two pages, this does not feel at all like a Vertigo book, it seems like it’s aimed mainly at female teenagers, largely due to Parson’s utterly gorgeous art, which if it has any antecedent in Vertigo history, it’s probably Phillip Bond. The book’s lead, Alexia Ryan, is a programmer for an online dating site. A Weird Science-like accident (the film, not the EC Comic) leads to her algorithm coming to life as Lord Byron. Some hijinks ensue, and the last page implies things won’t be all fun and games. Overall, this is a solid start, but as always, there is the distinct possibility of things turning with Milligan, who is probably the least consistent great writer in comics history.

The Shield #1 by Adam Cristopher, Chuck Wendig, Drew Johnson, and Kelly Fitzpatrick

Nice looking, but boring. Cristopher and Wendig’s reinvention of the Shield as a perpetually reincarnated spirit of America hits notes genre fans have seen time and time again. And at least give her a shield, considering it’s the book’s title and the most famous aspect of the character (at least the Impact version was wearing shield-like armor).

– Joe Gualtieri

This week’s question: what’s your favorite use of sports in comics?

Mike Sterling: I’ve never been one for sports, really. I mean, as a young'un I did play baseball and football with the neighborhood kids, but I never had much skill for it or interest in it. Any sports interest I did have probably peaked in high school nearly 30 years ago, as our volleyball team made state champion, and that was essentially that.

As such, I didn’t really seek out or pay much attention to sports in comics. It was always there, of course…Ronald Raymond was a high school basketball player in Firestorm The Nuclear Man, there were the weird mystery tales of DC’s Strange Sports Stories, and of course the famous DC heroes versus villains baseball story, but I think my favorite sports mention in comics actually involves a fictional sport.

Befitting a young nerd like myself, I perused the science fiction section in the local library, slowly working my way through the shelves. I particularly enjoyed the anthologies, the annual collections like Orbit and Nebula and such, and it was in one of these hardcover collections that I first encountered “Rules of Moopsball” by Gary Cohn. (You can read it yourself right here, presented online with permission by the author.) It wasn’t so much a story as…well, as the title says, rules for a bizarre, fantasy-tinged team sport. I think my particular interest in it came from an odd obsession I had (and still have, in fact) about reading game rules and examinations thereof. Not playing the games, necessarily, but enjoying how the various parts of the rules were detailed and worked together. (A favorite book of mine from that library was a history of the Monopoly game, for example.). As such, “Rules of Moopsball” was an unexpected diversion from the more traditional prose stories in the countless number of anthologies I would consume.That was the late ‘70s/early '80s when I read that story (and would occasional reread on later checkings-out of the same book). Not too long after that, I discovered the Legion of Super-Heroes comics and started following that series…in which, eventually, I would come across the occasional reference to the 30th century sport Moopsball.

Well, that surprised me a bit. There were two options I considered at the time: either the folks responsible for the Legion comics made up a name that coincidentally was the same as the sport from the story I’d read, or it was a specific, in-jokey reference to that very story. This wasn’t some huge mystery that occupied my time for years on end or anything…it was just something I noted, and as I became more immersed in comics, and eventually realized that the Gary Cohn who wrote “Rules of Moopsball” was in fact the same Gary Cohn who was also writing comics I was reading at the time, I eventually realized that, yes, it was bit of an in-joke.

As I recall, I don’t believe we ever saw the actual game of Moopsball in action in the Legion of Super-Heroes comics themselves, which was probably fine (particularly if they attempted to duplicate the game as described in the original story, which might have been a little too weird for a mainstream superhero comic). Despite that, I did appreciate this odd collusion among three different oddball interests of mine, reminding me that just maybe, I wasn’t alone in enjoying all these things.

Logan Polk: I know it’s hardly original, but I have to say I always loved it when we got to see the X-Men playing softball (or any sport really) in their downtime. I couldn’t tell you the first time I came across it, or in what comic. I do know that it wasn’t one of Claremont’s issues, as I didn’t come to the X-books until after he’d already left. But, since then I’ve probably read a dozen or so of those tales, including many of his. I’ve always been a sucker for sports films, so I’d venture to say that melding even a bit of that with the superhero genre just hits me in exactly the right spot. Considering the excessive crossovers of the last several years, it’s rare that the books slow down long enough to show the characters having anything close to fun. And under Brian Bendis’ pen the slow moments are usually time for him to “showcase” his dialoguing skills. I do remember a fairly recent issue of Avengers Academy (in the last few years at least) that pitted them against the new generation of X-Men in a football game; it was a fun throwback to much better days in both of those franchises.

Joe Gualtieri: Generally speaking, there are no best answers to the questions asked in this column. This is not a week where this is a case. Sure, like a lot of people who read X-Men comics in the 80s and 90s, I’ve got fond memories of softball games (which the Avengers tried to appropriate) or of John Byrne and Jim Lee’s attempt to switch the tradition to basketball in X-Men #4. I’m also just the right age to ironically love NFL Superpro (I want the trainwreck of this coming back so badly!) and Godzilla playing a game of hoops. Still, none of those are “Foul Play.”

Originally printed in Haunt of Fear #19 and illustrated by Jack Davis, “Foul Play” is one of the more infamous EC Comics horror stories. It’s not actually one of EC’s best. Oh, it’s ably drawn by Davis in wonderful, gory detail. Unfortunately, the characters and motivation are minimal, even by EC standards. The star pitcher on a team leading in the ninth inning of the last game of the minor league baseball season puts poison on his spikes and kills the best hitter on the opposing team. The team doctor figures out how the hitter died and rather than contacting the police, the players decide to handle the matter themselves. So they trick him into appearing at the ballpark the night before the next Major League Baseball season begins (as the pitcher was promoted) then dismember him and play a baseball game using the pitcher’s body parts as the equipment. The last page, with the hitter’s intestines used as baselines, his chest as the catcher’s well, chest protector, a leg as a bat, and his head as the ball make for some of the most indelible and grand guignol images in comics history. It’s little surprise that “Foul Play” was specifically excerpted in Frederic Wertham’s infamous Seduction of the Innocent. So while the story is thin, both for it’s unforgettable imagery and place in comics history, it’s my favorite use of sports in comics.

We Can Never Go Home by Matthew Rosenberg, Patrick Kindlon, Josh Hood, Brian Level, Amanda Scurti, and Tyler Boss is undoubtedly one of the biggest indie comics success stories of 2015. Buoyed in part by coverage of a controversial costume-change sequence in #3, the book burned up the back issue market. The trade paperback debuted just before Christmas and lives up to the hype. The book focuses on two teens, Madison and Duncan. The most popular girl in school, Madison hides her superpowers from the world until her boyfriend hits her during a confrontation with Duncan. In turn, Duncan tells Madison that he can kill people with his mind. The two have brief courtship that’s cut short following a violent incident that causes them to go on the run together.

From there, We Can Never Go Home is, at turns, exciting, funny, and compelling. There’s just one problem. I feel like I’ve already read this comic before. Twice, in fact. It’s called Harbinger. Originally published by Valiant in 1992, Harbinger was created by Jim Shooter and David Lapham. Joshua Dysart revived the series in 2012. I don’t mean to suggest a one-to-one correspondence here, but tonally, We Can Never Go Home clearly owes a huge debt to the two versions of the book. Shooter’s big idea for the title was a grittier version of the X-Men, where the characters were on the run, not living in a luxurious Westchester mansion. Dysart’s version is slower-paced than Shooter’s original and really foregrounds the troubling and dysfunctional relationship between the telepathic Peter Stanchek and normal human Kris Hathaway. Rosenberg and Kindlon switch the genders of which member of the couple possess powers, but they keep the manipulation. Like both versions of Harbinger, it’s about protagonists on the run, living on the margins, and does not center the story on a big city like New  York. The last comparison is the Closed Casket organization Madison and Duncan briefly become involved with, which seems like a very low rent (and probably more realistic) version of Toyo Harada’s Harbinger Foundation.

Despite the familiarity of the story, Rosenberg and Kindlon, who are relative newcomers, do manage to make Madison and Duncan compelling. The real star is Josh Hood. Hood’s been in comics for nearly 20 years and worked on Superman, Spider-Man, and Aquaman, but only sporadically. The turning point for his career seems to have been a stint at Zenescope starting in 2012. We Can Never Go Home is, whatever its other flaws, an amazing showcase for someone who has apparently been overlooked all this time. His figures are clean and gorgeous like those of an but the world around them feels gritty, run down, but not Noir-ish. Really, the only comparison that makes sense to me is Dave Gibbons. Hood’s work isn’t as formally restrained though, and his action sequences are more fluid.

In summation, We Can Never Go Home manages the neat trick of both living up to its hype and disappointing. The story isn’t quite there, but it’s visually spectacular and likely marks the arrival of a major talent.

– Joe Gualtieri

It Takes A Villain is TWC’s bi-weekly column about comics in which super-villains take the starring role, brought to you by the alternate future reality more bad-ass version of Mick Martin.

The army of mini-series rolled out with Marvel’s Secret Wars event had its share of villain titles. The chronicles of Battleworld included M.O.D.O.K. Assassin, Squadron Sinister, and Red Skull. But while It Takes A Villain continues to feed my interest in super-villain comics, my first comic book allegiance was to a certain green-sometimes-gray (never red, not in this house) goliath. Because of that, because of the fact that I write about super-villain comics, and in spite of what was initially a lukewarm interest in the new Secret Wars event, the announcement of Peter David and Greg Land’s Future Imperfect mini-series confirmed that I would be reading at the least one of these alternate-reality-crazy, nostalgia-fueled Secret Wars things.

Now, I have to warn you that this column is filled with spoilers. That’s something I like to avoid normally, but this isn’t an ordinary review. What intrigues me about this new version of Future Imperfect has less to do with how good the series is and more to do with the intentions of the writer. And it’s impossible for me to discuss that without revealing exactly how this series ends. You’ve been warned.

Incredible Hulk: Future Imperfect was released in 1992 as a two-issue prestige format mini-series. During a period in which Banner’s mind occupies the Hulk’s body, the hero goes into the future at the request of a squad of desperate rebels. Shortly after he arrives in Dystopia – presumably the only city left standing in the post-nuclear Earth – the Hulk learns that the super-powered despot he’s been recruited to take down is, in fact, himself.  The radiation that killed so many only served to make the Hulk of the future more powerful, as well as helping to nudge him toward insanity. The Robert Bruce Banner of the future calls himself The Maestro. He sports long white hair and a beard, and a skin of darker green with sick-looking welts rising off its surface.

Incredible Hulk writer Peter David had already won over scores of fans to his redefining of Bruce Banner’s relationship with his alter ego, and his original Future Imperfect series is widely considered one of the best stories in a run that is still a fan standard against which every other Hulk writer is judged. Veteran artist George Perez created visuals in the comic that remain fan favorites; the most memorable being a double-page splash of a trophy room featuring relics from just about every Marvel character you could think of.

Of the many Secret Wars series based on old series and crossovers, Future Imperfect is possibly the only one written by the same guy who wrote the source material. Because of this, there’s something of a metafictional edge to Future Imperfect, particularly to the Hulk fan who remembers David’s groundbreaking run and how it ended.

Like most of the Secret Wars series, Future Imperfect’s opening setting is just another one of God Doom’s kingdoms. This one is Dystopia, of which The Maestro is the Baron. The series opens in the wasteland outside Dystopia, where the mutant Ruby Summers (presumably the daughter of Cyclops and Emma Frost, though I don’t remember if this is ever confirmed) stumbles upon an old, weak man who claims to be a de-powered Odin. Ruby is a member of the anti-Maestro resistance and brings the old man to the rebel hideout. Once there, a psychic scan reveals the truth: the old man is The Maestro, but in Banner’s human form. It’s a brilliant move by David for a couple of reasons. First, when Maestro was introduced, the Hulk did not transform back and forth between his body and Banner’s, so it was always kind of assumed the Maestro was the future version of that specific incarnation of the Hulk. I don’t believe a single appearance of the Maestro exists before this one in which he transforms to human. Second, having Maestro enter the story as a false god is a nice bit of foreshadowing.

Once the cat’s out of the bag, Maestro gets his Hulk on and the rebel leader soon appears: The Thing, but not Ben Grimm. In this Dystopia’s history, it was good ol’ Thunderbolt Ross who got belted by cosmic rays and transformed into the Thing. It’s a huge, bloody battle, and in the end the Maestro is the victor. Maestro takes Ross prisoner, but he has more in mind than torture and death.

Okay, the biggest spoilers are inbound. Again, I consider you warned.

The Maestro, predictably, doesn’t like taking orders from God Doom. He’s found a book claiming that a suit of armor exists called The Destroyer that gives its bearer the power to kill Doom. With the possible outcomes that the Maestro will either succeed and leave Dystopia or fail and be murdered by Doom, Thunderbolt Thing and his rebels agree to join Maestro on his quest to find the armor. They travel to the very Asgard-y Battleworld domain Nornheim. After a tussle in a tavern and fight with Ulik and some of Ulik’s troll buddies, Maestro and his reluctant comrades learn that the aged, wheelchair-bound Rick Jones is the guardian of the Destroyer armor.

Jones happily allows the Maestro to use the armor. Soon after, Doom appears and attacks his subversive Baron. The Destroyer armor is as good as the stolen book promised and the Maestro easily kills Doom and takes over Battleworld.

But, not really.

One moment we see a triumphant Maestro standing amid a crowd of kneeling super-heroes, promising to be a just and beneficent god. The next, we see Ross and his rebels watching Maestro, confused. They see the Maestro standing before the armor, yelling at no one in particular. Rather than giving him the power to kill Doom, the armor simply fed the Maestro the dream he wanted to see and apparently will always see until he dies.

Future Imperfect ends with the deluded Maestro – a false god now as he was in the desert in the beginning of the series – paraphrasing lines from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias: “I am the Maestro! King of kings! Look on my works, ye mighty…and despair!”

This is not the first time David has quoted Ozymandias.  He referenced it heavily in Incredible Hulk #467; the powerful issue that ended his 12-year run on the series. The title of the story, “The Lone and Level Sands,” was taken directly from the sonnet.

Reading this new Future Imperfect series with that in mind puts an interesting spin on it.

There are loud echoes not only from the original Future Imperfect, but also David’s original Hulk run and even his one shot Incredible Hulk: The End, in this newer mini.

Some of the references are specific. During his final, delusional battle with Doom, the Maestro taunts Doom by implying the villain’s deadly blasts are serving simply to scratch his back.

Any fan of the fantastic Peter David/Dale Keown era of Incredible Hulk should immediately recognize this gag as a repeat from the Hulk’s battle with the U-Foes in Incredible Hulk #397.

I guess it’s possible to take a less generous view of this and assume David just did something easy rather than coming up with something new. The fact that he uses the same joke in a battle between the Hulk and Avengers of the Secret Wars mini Secret Wars 2099 could support that, but not in light of all the other references found in Future Imperfect to his previous work.

David introducing Maestro as a false Odin, the journey to Nornheim, and all the references to pagan gods are reminiscent of Incredible Hulk: The End. In that one-shot David compared the Hulk and the other, long-dead heroes of Marvel to gods and titans. The Hulk was specifically compared to Prometheus who gave fire to humanity and who was punished by being strapped to a rock and having his insides ravaged by birds every day, only to survive and have the process repeat. To reproduce this in Hulk: The End, David gives us a swarm of irradiated cockroaches who constantly hunt the Hulk and tear him to pieces though he survives because of his healing factor. In that one-shot, David waited toward the end to compare super-heroes to figures of myth, but in Future Imperfect, he does it as early as the first page. As she walks through the desert, Ruby Summers’s narration tells us about the myths of the world that existed before Battleworld: myths she doesn’t believe in. Her attitude is echoed a few issues later in Nornheim’s blind Hoder, who laments the downfall of the gods.

The ending of the first issue is a surprising and clever reference to the original Future Imperfect mini. In the 1992 series, the first issue ended with the Hulk of the present and the Maestro meeting nose-to-nose in the underground rebel base and saying in unison, “Doctor Banner, I presume.” Again, in the 2015 Future Imperfect, the issue ends with the Maestro having found and infiltrated the rebel base, but the issues ends with Maestro not facing another Hulk, but facing Thunderbolt Ross as the Thing.

In light of everything else, this seems like it could almost be a tribute to not David’s own work on Hulk, but to Jeph Loeb’s. Or, if not tribute, then some kind of commentary. The reason why it should have been a surprise to no one that Thunderbolt Ross was the Red Hulk in Loeb’s Hulk was that, through the eyes of Betty Ross, Loeb had portrayed Hulk and Thunderbolt Ross as two sides of the same coin in the first significant work he did on the character: the 2003 retrospective mini-series Hulk: Gray. And here, David puts Ross in the Hulk’s shoes. The absence of a heroic Hulk, like the intelligent Hulk of the 1992 Future Imperfect, is the biggest absence felt in this newer series. We have a Maestro, but no Hulk to counter him. Thunderbolt Thing is the closest we have and he’s a poor substitute. Like the Hulk of the original mini, Thunderbolt Thing’s battle with Maestro ends in his defeat. He is captured, just like Hulk in the original mini. The difference is when the Maestro offers the Hulk an alliance, he tells him to go to Hell, eventually only appearing to give in so he can lull Maestro into a false sense of security. Thunderbolt Thing, on the other hand, isn’t awake five minutes before he bends over and gives in.

The Maestro’s ultimate fate in the 2015 Future Imperfect should remind Hulk fans of one of David’s tie-ins to the 1996 Onslaught event. In Incredible Hulk #445, an egotistical Hulk led a small team of Avengers in hopes of taking down Onslaught, all in defiance of Captain America’s plans. In the scene that unfolded, the Hulk defeats Onslaught, but only after the villain kills everyone else. As the Hulk cheers over his triumph, it’s revealed that the battle never happened. Just like Maestro’s “triumph” over Doom, the battle with Onslaught is an illusion Onslaught psychically created to fool the Hulk. When the rest of Hulk’s team sees him celebrate his victory in spite of what he believes to be their grisly deaths, the last few of Marvel’s heroes who feel any trust toward the Hulk turn their back on him.

The very quest for the Destroyer armor is a reference to David’s original Hulk run. At the end of the original 1992 mini, the Hulk defeats Maestro by sending him back in time to ground zero of the original gamma bomb blast that created the Hulk. The Maestro was so powerful, however, that some piece of him survived the blast. We eventually learned toward the end of David’s original Hulk run that the mysterious call back to the gamma bomb blast Hulk had felt over the years was, in fact, a summons from the Maestro. He was calling the Hulk there to feed off of his gamma energy in hopes of one day resurrecting. In Incredible Hulk #461, the Maestro did return but not in his own body. With the help of some vengeful trolls, the Maestro possessed the Destroyer armor and used it to go after the Hulk.

But the loudest echo back to his original work on Hulk is David’s handling of the ancient, wheelchair-bound Rick Jones.

In David’s Hulk finale, the story is told from the perspective of Rick Jones ten years after the events of the previous issue. David’s departure from the title was not a happy one and was over a passionate disagreement of the future direction of the title. David speaks through Jones of his own situation at many points in the story. Speaking of the disagreement in the title’s direction, Jones says the events of the previous issue were, “the day the Hulk started down the road he never wanted to travel.” Toward the end of the issue, he says, “I could keep on telling stories about the Hulk…keep on going…but there’s other things in life, you know?”

It’s tempting, then, and perhaps fitting to see Jones’s words in the same light at the end of Future Imperfect. Maestro’s quoting of Ozymandias certainly seems like a direct signal that we should do that. And, if we do, it does not exactly put a positive spin on David’s return to this story.

In spite of working for 12 years on Incredible Hulk, subsequent Hulk writers rarely referenced David’s run. It seems likely this is at least in part due to what used to be some fairly public conflicts between David and Marvel’s Powers That Be. It’s always been surprising to me, for example, that of all the wonderful villains David created during his tenure as Hulk writer, few have popped up elsewhere. It’s only been in very recent years that we’ve seen them surface. Mark Millar killed off Speedfreek in the opening pages of Civil War. Daniel Way brought back David’s villain Mercy for his Thunderbolts revival.  The Maestro, in the meantime, has appeared a couple of times, but considering the success of the original Future Imperfect, it’s surprising how rarely it’s happened. Usually, he’s shown up only because David himself was writing him, like his appearance in a time travel issue of Captain Marvel. Perhaps because the conflicts have cooled over the years, Maestro is just now peeking out of the sand. He appeared in an issue of A+X, and Gerry Duggan gave his new Flowers-for-Algernon version of the Hulk nightmarish visions of his transformation into the Maestro. And now, with Secret Wars over (again), and Amadeus Cho replacing Banner as the Hulk in Totally Awesome Hulk, we have a Maestro appearing regularly in the mobile game tie-in Contest of Champions. In the pages of Totally Awesome Hulk, we so far we have been given only snapshots of what happened to Banner, and it seems like a good possibility we will eventually learn that the reason Cho replaced Banner as the Hulk is because Banner has finally become the Maestro. That’s only speculation, but the evidence fits.

You might think that this would give David some satisfaction; that his stories are finally being honored and acknowledged. But the ending of the 2015’s Future Imperfect may make you question that.

Once we learn that Maestro’s battle with Doom has been nothing but an illusion, Maestro transforms back to human form. We learn that the quest for the Destroyer armor has been an elaborate trap that Doom set for the Maestro. The now ancient Rick Jones is there on Doom’s orders. Just as she appeared in the original mini, Jones’s granddaughter Janis Jones is one of the rebels who accompanies Maestro to Nornheim.

When Janis asks Rick to leave with her and the rebels, Rick tells his granddaughter that Doom has tasked Jones to stay and watch over the deluded Maestro. “Me and him. Until the end of time.”

“That sucks,” Janis says.

Jones answers, “Eh. There’s worse ways to live.”

If we consider David speaking through Jones in Incredible Hulk #467, consider Jones’s appointed task, and consider the very fact that this new Future Imperfect series even exists, it casts a pretty dismal light on David’s opinion of the whole thing.

Jones says he has to stay with the Maestro until “the end of time.” Likewise, here’s David, tasked to return to a story he wrote over 20 years ago, with a character he set aside before the current century began. Not just tasked with writing the same character, but the same story. Not a sequel. Write Future Imperfect, David. Write it again.  

This week’s question: what’s your favorite introduction to a volume of comics?

Scott Cederlund: Reading Michael Chabon’s introduction to the Image/Dynamite American Flagg! collection, you’d think that AF creator Howard Chaykin was a spitfire of a comic book maker and you’d be right.  From that introduction, you can tell that Chabon has spent a lot of time poring over old issues of American Flagg!, trying to discover the source of the  alchemy that Chaykin was concocting.  His image of Chaykin rests somewhere between artistic genius and journeyman as he focuses a lot on the craft of American Flagg! Viewing AF as the perfect blend of pop, cynicism and an eye towards the future, Chabon’s piece on the comic identifies it as a great piece of American literature/art from the early 1980s.

This piece was first originally published as an essay named “The Killer Hook” in Chabon’s 2008 book Maps and Legends, a collection of essays on everything from architecture to Will Eisner and Sherlock Holmes.  In those essays, Chabon was trying to map out his own influences and idols within his own work.  There are a couple of essays that talk about comics in the book but the essay on Chaykin serves as much as an introduction to the creator as it does to the creation.  Chabon’s writing about Chaykin places Chaykin in a much broader pantheon of American artists than just among the small pool of comic creators.  Chaykin isn’t talked about in the context of Frank Miller or John Byrne.  Chabon compares and contrasts him to musicians like Brian Wilson and Paul Simon, to Orson Welles (and AF! to Citizen Kane,) and to writers like Chandler and Hammett.  

Chabon’s introduction to American Flagg! sings the book’s praises while making an argument for it to be considered among the great works of American popular art.  “American Flagg! stands at the glorious midpoint, at that difficult fulcrum between innocence and experience, romance and disillusion, adventure and satire, the unashamedly commercial and the purely aesthetic… Such balancing acts have always been the greatest feats of American popular art,” he concludes.  Chabon’s examination of Chaykin and his hinted at the disappointment that nothing Chaykin did afterwards found that perfect balance sets up the experience of reading American Flagg! as something more than just another comic book.  Yes, it is a comic book but it’s also Howard Chaykin, an American storyteller, right there on each and every page showing you the world but through his distinct and creative point of view.  

Joe Gualtieri: There are quite a few comics introductions I love. A few weeks ago, I wrote a little about how the intro and foreword help make the 1988 version of The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told a superior version of such a collection. With his introduction for The Dark Knight Returns, Alan Moore created a seminal piece of superhero comics criticism. The introductions to the different editions of early Justice League International collections create an indelible portrait of Keith Giffen as a serpentine figure, forever lurking around the corner and hissing “Jussssticcccce League” at editor Andy Helfer.

Arguably the one that’s made the biggest impression on me though, is Warren Ellis’s for Hellblazer: Fear and Loathing, which collects the title’s transition from DC’s non-imprint “mature readers” imprint to Vertigo. It is a fine example of a formulaic introduction. As Ellis himself notes, “where’s the checklist? I’ve pretty much covered the ‘I know Garth, which is why I’m writing this’ bit, done the quick bio bit, done the history bit, and the sad licrit bit.” What makes the piece particularly interesting is that “sad litcrit bit”:

What’s John protecting these things from? Authority. With the capital A. These are stories about what authority does to people, about the poison in its foundations. You can substitute Authority for Government, for the Establishment, even for God, and it all means the same thing: someone exerting control they did not earn and do not deserve, grinding lives into shit largely because they feel like it.

Three years after writing that passage, Ellis would be writing a superhero comic titled The Authority. Two to three years after that, Ellis would create a stir on his message board, The Warren Ellis Forum, by declaring that the Authority were the villains of their own comic. This is not really the place for a long, drawn out discussion about authorial intent, but the connection between The Authority and this passage has long fascinated me, especially given that The Authority is very much a liberal power fantasy in a way rarely seen in the genre since the early days of Superman in Action Comics. The passage arguably even anticipates the structure of The Authority, since the in the first arc they take on a singular government, in the second the corrupt establishment running an alternate Earth, and finally, they fight god. So it’s totally weird, but I love this intro because of how it connects to a completely different work by the same author.

Mike Sterling: I’m actually not one to read introductions, to be frank. I usually skip right over ‘em and plunge right into the funnybookin’ for which I actually purchased the book. There are always exceptions, of course, particularly when it’s a foreword by a person (or persons) of particular interest to me. There’s that Penn Jillette intro to a volume of Preacher, or an old college professor of mine writing the foreword to a Sandman volume…but the trade paperback introduction that sticks in my mind is not so much because of who wrote it but what it was about.

One of dopiest events to come out of the late '80s comics boom was the “A Death in the Family” Batman story, in which fans were encouraged to call actual phone numbers, in those pre-easy-access-to-the-Internet days, to vote on whether or not Batman’s latest iteration of Robin, Jason Todd, would survive his assault by the Joker. Of course, the majority voted thumbs-down, because who doesn’t like a good killing, and when all was said and done, demand was so great to read a story in which the Joker gained diplomatic immunity by becoming the Iranian ambassador (sigh…yes, really) that a cheap trade paperback was rush-printed. It was only $3.95 in its initial printing, so sure, it was terrible, but such good value! And adding to that value was a new introduction written, most likely, by editor Denny O'Neil.

The introduction was titled “The Death of a Boy Wonder,” supposedly written by “Dr. Socrates S. Rodor, Professor Emeritus of Twentieth Century History, Gotham University.” It was written an “in-universe” essay, commenting upon archaeologically-derived knowledge of the existence of super-heroes, and in particular the history of Batman and his multiple Robins. Of particular note is the emphasis placed on specific durations of time, such as noting that Dick Grayson’s tenure as Robin lasted about six years, and that Batman was partnerless for about a year and half. Such specific references are rare in the actual comics, so it was unusual and interesting to see them mentioned here. 
There is a sense of humor present as well, with some in-jokes and references that were probably borne of whatever insanely tight deadline under which this foreword was produced. It’s noted that in the time of Professor Rodor, much information about Batman’s period was lost in the “Great Implosion,” almost certainly a nod to the “DC Implosion” of title cancellations suffered by the publisher in the 1970s. There’s a footnote wondering why Robin’s brightly-colored costume contrasted so with Batman’s darker coloring, which is perhaps a reference to the old joke about “Robin, the Boy Target” (“he’s there to draw fire”). There’s the aside suggesting that Batman was was too dour a person to be as frivolous as to attach “Bat-” prefixes to all his equipment, and here’s the comment that Batman in no way would have encouraged Robin’s “Holy _____!” exclamations. 

This introduction, in an odd little way, is a deconstruction of sorts of the Batman myth, in line with Frank Miller’s own examination of Batman in The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ examination of the genre in toto in Watchmen. It looks at the specifics of the character, holds up some pieces of it for closer examination and near-dismissal, and as a whole is probably more entertaining and informative that the reprinted comics it prefaces. So of course this foreword has been removed from more recent editions of this trade paperback (along with O'Neil’s back cover quote about how it would be a “cheap trick” to bring Todd back…which DC eventually did). It’s worth seeking out the early versions of the A Death in the Family trade just for the introduction. You should read the comics, too, at least once, just to see the sort of thing folks would get excited about in the 1980s.

Whatever Happened to the Man of Miracles?

“As it transpired, I was quite touched: They made a bonfire on the wastelands that was once Trafalgar Square and on it heaped their comic books, their films and novels filled with horror, science fiction, fantasy, and as it burned they cheered; cheered as the curling, burning pages fluttered up into the night; cheered to be done with time when wonder was a sad and wretched thing made only out of paper, out of celluloid.”

from Miracleman #16 (December, 1989)

Alan Moore ended the era of the superman. He first did it in 1986 when he sent the Superman of Siegel and Shuster off into the realms of memory with the two-part “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” in Superman #423 and Action Comics #583, almost immediately following DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths which reset the DC universe and marked a clear departure from the old DC Comics. In that story, the Superman of the Golden, Silver and Bronze age is given one last adventure as all of those corny, aged villains come back, more bloodthirsty than ever. It’s one last remembrance of friends and foes before John Byrne reimagines the character into something not quite as magical. And then Moore finally ended the idea of a superheroic nirvana with the destruction and resurrection of London in Miracleman #15 (Nov 1988) and #16 (Dec 1989.) That conclusion of his “Olympus” arc accuses DC and Marvel Comics of every atrocity that allowed to happen within the pages of their comics and blithely ignored. Sure it was all imaginary stories but did that make them any less real?

Miracleman is such a product of its time that when Marvel Comics recently reprinted the long-out-of-print comics, it was basically ignored. It was like you could almost hear fandom’s collective yawn of “been there, done that.” After all, the Alan Moore of the mid-late 1980s directly influenced the tenor of comics for at least 10 years, that is if the strong reach of Moore isn’t still very active in the most mainstream of superhero comics today. Geoff Johns has spent a career trying to rewrite Moore so the general direction of DC is haunted by the ghost of Moore. Moore and Frank Miller wrote the textbook on superhero deconstruction that’s still used by the likes of Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar.

For Moore, that legacy is mostly cemented by Watchmen, his mic drop moment in superhero comic books. But Miracleman both predates and postdates Watchmen, begun as a serial in the British Warrior magazine in April 1982 before wrapping up over seven years later as a semi-monthly Eclipse Comics publication. If “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” was Moore’s gently rocking the Superman myth to a gentle and unending slumber, Miracleman counted off every sin of the superhero and laid them all down at the superman’s feet.

As Moore progresses through the Miracleman story, he begins it by wondering what a C.C. Beck Billy Batson character might be like if they suddenly found themselves in 1980s Britain with the power of a god? Middle-aged Mike Moran is a bit overweight, probably overworked, and wakes up from dreams of flying through space with pounding headaches. Rediscovering his magic word, “Kimota!” he becomes a blonde, chiseled god. Even his thinking is so much clearer that it’s like he’s a different person. From finding his maker, his “father,” to discovering others like himself, Miracleman’s story is about him becoming something more than human. He’s not just the next evolutionary step; he’s the next one thousand steps.

Moore and his various artists’ stories are about how a god operates first as a superhero and then as a man. But the twist isn’t that the god learns any real lesson. In the end, Miracleman accepts his godhood, his place above humanity and sets to reign from on high in his new Olympus. For all of the sins of the superhero, Moore judges them to be apart from humanity and unanswerable to them. This isn’t praise of the superhero; it’s a condemnation of them.

It’s odd that in all of Moore’s superhero work, the one character he remains somewhat sympathetic to is Superman. “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” gives Superman and Clark Kent the sendoff that they deserve. The story, drawn by Curt Swan, with inks by George Perez and Kurt Schaffenberger, sees the future in which these childish characters become more “grim and gritty,” more homicidal. The story is a mercy killing as much as anything else, protecting the original Superman from what comics would become in the late 1980s and 1990s. The irony is that this is the future that Moore himself created primarily in Watchmen. “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” serves as an apology for Watchmen but it also serves to protect the story of Superman, no matter what may happen to the characters afterwards.

In Miracleman, particularly in the final “Olympus” storyline (issues 11-16), Moore doesn’t show the character the same kindness. He’s far from being protective of Mike Moran, his wife, his daughter or any of the other heroes or villains introduced in the story. His Miracleman story shows a god remembering who he is and then taking his place among a pantheon. London and humanity are collateral damage in this world where middle-aged men and children wear the bodies of gods. Or are the gods wearing the bodies of middle-aged men and children and then discarding them in favor of their godhood? The damage done is both emotional and physical. The destruction of Liz Moran is no less frightening than the desolation of London.

It’s almost funny how much DC’s movies look like they’re embracing the ideas of Alan Moore’s Miracleman while Marvel chooses to ignore them.  The idea of cities falling out of the sky is commonplace in Marvel’s movie kingdom while DC’s The Man of Steel visually embraces parts of Moore’s “Olympus” storyline.  The final battle between Zod and Superman in Zack Snyder’s film looks an awful lot like John Totleben’s scenes of chaos and destruction.  But Snyder in that movie didn’t follow up on the consequences of the fight the same way that Moore did in his final issue. Once again, it’s the wrong lessons of an Alan Moore story applied to one of those future iterations of the Superman that Moore tried to spare the character of back in “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?”

Alan Moore’s Miracleman still remains one of the great superhero comics. But what once looked like the celebration of the superman now looks like its condemnation. John Totleben, the final artist in Moore’s run, ends the story with Miracleman in a military dress-style version of his own costume, sitting in the heights of Olympus, sipping on a glass of wine and looking down on mankind. It’s not a protective gaze of the character but more a gaze that puts Miracleman and mankind in their places, one sitting high above the other. “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow” ends with a wink and a nod to the reader, letting them in on the secret of the way that Moore saved Superman. Miracleman: Olympus ends with a warning about placing these characters to high on a pedestal.

And much like what we all took away from Watchmen, the lessons of Miracleman fell on deaf ears.

I miss the Silver Age Superman to this day.

– Scott Cederlund

It Takes A Villain is TWC’s semi-whenever-the-hell-Mick-wakes-up column about comics in which super-villains take the starring role, brought to you by your favorite cartoon animal, Mick Martin

Batman’s rogues’ gallery is a gold mine. The dark knight’s franchise has produced some of the most memorable and enduring bad guys in comicdom. Ask any random comic-book-uninitiated civilian to name as many super-villains as he/she can, and you’re likely to get at least half Bat villains. Joker. Riddler. Catwoman. Penguin. Bane.

There’s a lot of sexy and a lot of cool in Batman’s villains, but neither the sex nor the cool has touched Oswald Cobblepot. There are a few reasons for that. There’s his physical presence. He’s short, fat, and ugly. There’s his age. And there’s the fact that in the group therapy session that is the rogues’ gallery of Batman, Oswald Cobblepot doesn’t have as obvious a place. The villains of Batman - particularly the Joker - owe a large part of their popularity to their insanity. Whether they actually are as free as they want us to think, characters like the Joker evoke ultimate, unbridled freedom in their insanity. But Penguin has never seemed a true part of that fraternity. Sure, he’s eccentric. He’s got the outdated FDR thing going on and there’s the crazy gadgets and the penguin motif, but he’s always seemed like a gangster who was just slightly off-kilter because, after all, it’s a comic book so he needs a little crazy. He’s always seemed much more concerned about the dollar-and-cents than the likes of Joker, Two Face, the Riddler, or even Catwoman (whose motivation for crime is at least sixty percent thrill). Not to mention that while the villains of Marvel and DC are flush with animal themes, those bad guys usually pick a beast that’s scary or tough or at least sneaky. The Rhino. Doctor Octopus. Man-Bull. Hell, Catwoman. The predators. The behemoths. Oswald Cobblepot picked a short, squat bird that doesn’t fly. He seems like he should be in the world of The Tick and Squirrel Girl. He’s ugly, old, uncool, and unscary. He’s not the Joker. He’s a joke.

For those reasons - and because the wonderful mini Penguin: Pain and Prejudice was released around the same time as the dawn of the New 52 and was drowned by it (it’s actually not clear to me if this is a New 52 book or not; there was no “NEW 52” on the cover of the trade or the single issues, yet in some panels Batman’s outfit looks like his New 52 get-up) - there’s a good chance you never heard of Penguin: Pain and Prejudice. And that’s a shame. On the back cover of the trade is a pull quote asking if this is “Penguin's Killing Joke.” Look up the trade on Amazon and half the reviews make the same comparison. Most of them even use “Penguin's Killing Joke” as the review title. It’s kind of an annoying comparison. It’s easy. It’s obvious. But it’s not wrong.

The story opens on Cobblepot’s birth, and the first two pages tell us so much that if that was all novelist Gregg Hurwitz and artist Szymon Kudranski showed us of the villain’s childhood, that would be enough. Oswald’s father is so shocked by his newborn son’s strange face, he drops Oswald the first time he holds him. The toddler survives perhaps only because of the love of his doting mother, who is as blind to his ugliness as the literally blind woman Penguin falls in love with later in the story. His mother’s embrace is the only love Oswald knows and so, on the second page when we see the child forced to lay at the foot of his parents’ bed as they have sex, we see exactly how and where the Penguin was born.

Interlaced with Penguin’s past is his present. He rules over the Iceberg Lounge while dealing vengeance with the sadistic cruelty of a Keyser Soze; punishing not his transgressors, but their families, friends, lovers, etc. Batman gets the villain’s scent when Penguin hires some pros to steal unique, priceless jewelry from the rich and famous of Gotham. In fact, at least part of the first scene depicting one of the robberies – a man in a ski mask trying to tear a necklace from a rich woman’s neck – makes it tough to not think of the birth of Penguin’s greatest enemy. We learn that the bloody robberies are for nothing more important than providing treasured presents to Penguin’s aging – and seemingly vegetative – mother. While lording over his particular corner of Gotham’s crime world, Penguin meets a lovely blind woman named Cassandra who he romances. He refuses, however, to let her touch his face. She falls for him just as hard as he falls for her, and though he tries to protect her from the dark aspects of his life, eventually the authorities’ pursuit becomes impossible to avoid. His humiliation drives him to a self-destructive assault on Batman, Gotham, and the ghosts of tormentors long dead.

Kudranski’s art is gorgeous, and rather than letting the Penguin’s ugliness work against him, he uses it to great effect. The Penguin has never looked more chilling, more dreadful, or scarier. One of the most memorable sequences is in the first issue, when Penguin is tormenting a young man who insulted him earlier in the evening. He isn’t tormenting him physically, but describing to him all the things his small army of thugs and killers have done to his loved ones while he’s been oblivious. In one panel, Penguin is looking at his watch. In the next, he looks from the watch to the man who is crying on the floor. The only difference between the two panels are the lack of a dialogue bubble in the second panel, and the movement of the eyes. It’s simple, perfect, and quietly terrifying.

Sometimes – though not often – John Kalisz’s color choices take away from the art. Usually, they work perfectly. There are distinct differences between scenes in the present and those in Penguin’s tortured past. The scenes of Penguin’s childhood have a kind of faded amber hue. But everywhere, especially the present scenes, is saturated with shadow. Perhaps oversaturated. This is the only way the colors take away from the art, as it can sometimes confuse the action.

Batman is smartly kept even more in shadow than normal. We hardly even see his mask in most scenes, much less his skin. Batman is not only a target of Oswald’s envy, but he is the adult manifestation of the bullies who helped to make Penguin’s childhood a living hell. In the beginning of the second issue, after Batman crashes into Penguin’s Iceberg Lounge and questions him about the attacks, Oswald is literally transplanted to the past as we see Batman as one of Oswald’s bullying brothers and Oswald as a young boy cringing against a tree. After Batman leaves, the scene ends with a memory of a young Oswald cradling the broken body of a bird one of his brothers shot and killed just for fun.

Batman’s portrayal in the story is almost perfect. My only (very minor) complaint is a scene toward the end of the series. Talking with Gordon, Batman says something that seems to partly uphold Penguin’s argument that Gotham pursues him while ignoring the crimes of others. It’s not that I don’t think Batman would be that thoughtful, but that I preferred to see Batman through Penguin’s eyes for the duration of the series. As an unforgiving bully.

I don’t know if I would’ve necessarily doubted someone if they told me a skilled writer could render Penguin sympathetic and tragic while still being deadly honest about the monster he is, but it’s still a wonderful surprise. Hurwitz’s Penguin is ruthless, abominable, horrible, and yet exactly the man none of us could blame him for becoming. His treatment at the hands of his father and brothers is disgusting and absolutely believable. I wouldn’t say it makes you root for him. It doesn’t, and if it did it would make itmuch less of a story. The Penguin’s history is as real as it could be.

Just as Thomas Wayne is such a giant figure in Bruce Wayne’s history, Oswald’s mother is a giant in his. Similar to how Kudranski treats Batman, we never fully see Oswald’s mother. Most prominent are her full, red lips. We see them kissing Oswald’s cheek when he impresses her with a toy gadget that springs out a bouquet of roses like a jack-in-the-box. We see them framing her smile in the reflection of a snow globe he makes for her. While it is never inappropriate, the image of her lips is clearly suggestive. Oswald’s story is as Oedipal as you can get.

Just as Hurwitz’s story humanizes Penguin, Kudranski’s art makes the sillier aspects of the villain genuinely intimidating and scary. When Oswald launches rockets at Gotham filled with violent birds, we don’t think of the comical clockwork Penguin bombs of old. We think of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, and the terror seems all too real.

One interesting little touch that at first annoyed me but which I eventually warmed to were some well-timed Joker cameos. A couple of times, Penguin accidentally walks in on a private room in the Iceberg Lounge that Joker has apparently rented for some “private time.” We see the clown prince in situations as depraved and deadly as we would expect; like wearing women’s underwear while standing over a live goat tied to a spit. At first, it annoyed me because I thought it was just some easy humor. Then, because I thought “Oh of course we have to have Joker in it a little bit, don’t we?” But as I read on I saw a sharper point. As I wrote above, Penguin’s never truly seemed fully a part of the more truly deranged Batman villains. Penguin: Pain and Prejudice proves, I think, that we’ve always been wrong about that. Cobblepot is no more about the dollar-and-cents of the thing than Joker or Riddler or Catwoman. Penguin’s brief stumbles into Joker’s depraved little exercises are more than cheap gags. They’re occasional reminders to Oswald – whether he heeds them or not – just how batshit crazy he really is.

Penguin: Pain and Prejudice is forgotten gold. Find it. Read it.

Earlier today, I posted something about Alan Moore’s forthcoming novel Jerusalem. I titled it, “What is Alan Moore’s Jerusalem About?” Judging by the Tumblr notes, it’s one of the more popular posts on this site in some time.

In a sarcastic response to my post on Facebook, someone whose opinion I usually respect replied “I bet it’s about rape.” This is a common complaint about Moore’s work, because it often features incidents of violent sexual assault, and I wanted to address it.

No Alan Moore work that I am aware of has ever been ‘about’ rape, any more than Citizen Kane is ‘about’ running a newspaper or Synecdoche, NY is about producing a play. As Roger Ebert was fond of noting, it isn’t important what a story is about, what matters is “how it is about it.” How the telling of the story reflects our lives and experiences, and what emotions it evokes.

Many of Alan Moore’s stories have rape or violent sexual incidents in them, as indeed, many lives have such tragedies befall them. What matters most of all isn’t that his stories feature rape, or how many, or why. What matters is that he has never, ever depicted rape as anything other than an horrific event, as indeed it is in real life. Such incidents are sometimes key to a given story, sometimes they are one of the many events that occur in the lives of his characters. Rape is something that happens in the world, all too often. Should one of the best writers alive and working today not write about it? Would that other writers, and other people, were so committed to a realistic depiction of the truth about one of the worst things that can happen to a human being.

I know easily a dozen people in my life that have been the victims of rape or sexual abuse, and indeed, I had an abusive childhood myself, although not sexual abuse. I take it very seriously, and I believe Alan Moore does too. I don’t think he thinks it’s funny, and I don’t think it’s a part of his work for facetious or cynical reasons. I do think he intends to provoke thought, and in the case of Miracleman, I think he was, in his clumsy and then-primitive way, trying to empower abuse victims. His more recent works, particularly Lost Girls and Voice of the Fire, have been far more confident and effective in addressing the subject.

I hope this site attracts readers who are smart enough not to join the crowd of Moore-haters that latch on to any easy slur they can aim at him in the hopes of taking him down a peg. Moore is very often the subject of insults and derision in the comics community because he has been so critical of its unfair and legally questionable practices for so many years now. It would be hyperbole to say Moore has been raped by the comics industry, but it is certainly worth noting that his trust has been abused, and that he understands what it feels like to be violated. I think that understanding comes through in his work in a powerful way, even if it does provide weak-tea ammunition to those who wish to diminish his standing as a writer.

– Alan David Doane

Photo by Mitch Jenkins

Alan Moore’s new prose novel Jerusalem has long been in the works, and now we know when it will be released: September, 2016. Less than a year from now, we will once again enter the mind of Alan Moore through language alone, as we did through his masterful first novel The Voice of the Fire (available from Top Shelf Productions).

Gosh London has published Moore’s promotional blurb for Jerusalem, and it sounds like readers are in for more of a mind-blowing experience than even Voice of the Fire provided:

In the half a square mile of decay and demolition that was England’s Saxon capital, eternity is loitering between the firetrap tower blocks. Embedded in the grubby amber of the district’s narrative among its saints, kings, prostitutes and derelicts a different kind of human time is happening, a soiled simultaneity that does not differentiate between the petrol-coloured puddles and the fractured dreams of those who navigate them. Fiends last mentioned in the Book of Tobit wait in urine-scented stairwells, the delinquent spectres of unlucky children undermine a century with tunnels, and in upstairs parlours labourers with golden blood reduce fate to a snooker tournament.   

Disappeared lanes yield their own voices, built from lost words and forgotten dialect, to speak their broken legends and recount their startling genealogies, family histories of shame and madness and the marvellous. There is a conversation in the thunderstruck dome of St. Paul’s cathedral, childbirth on the cobblestones of Lambeth Walk, an estranged couple sitting all night on the cold steps of a Gothic church-front, and an infant choking on a cough drop for eleven chapters. An art exhibition is in preparation, and above the world a naked old man and a beautiful dead baby race along the Attics of the Breath towards the heat death of the universe.

An opulent mythology for those without a pot to piss in, through the labyrinthine streets and pages of Jerusalem tread ghosts that sing of wealth and poverty; of Africa, and hymns, and our threadbare millennium. They discuss English as a visionary language from John Bunyan to James Joyce, hold forth on the illusion of mortality post-Einstein, and insist upon the meanest slum as Blake’s eternal holy city. Fierce in its imagining and stupefying in its scope, this is the tale of everything, told from a vanished gutter.

This week, Trouble With Comics Question Time asks “What is the greatest comics gift you’ve ever received?” It seems appropriate to share Alan David Doane’s response today, on Stan Lee’s 93rd birthday. Happy birthday, Stan, and thanks for your part in creating and maintaining the Marvel Universe for so many years.

I’m pretty sure I was 11 years old and it was 1977 the year my mom gave me Origins of Marvel Comics for Christmas. I had seen it in stores and it had become my Holy Grail, but at $5.95 it cost about twenty times what a single comic book cost, and even though my mom was generous with my comics allowance, “generous” in those days was defined as maybe three bucks a week, which was enough to buy a dozen or so comics, which I did, week in and week out.

Marvel, DC, Charlton, Archie, and Harvey were the main comics publishers of my childhood. The first time I saw Origins of Marvel Comics in a bookstore (my family was full of readers and had hundreds if not thousands of books in bookcases long before I showed up on the scene), I had already been reading comics for half my life, having been given a stack as consolation during recovery from having my tonsils removed at the age of six. One of my earliest memories, maybe the second earliest thing I remember, actually, is being told to count backward from 100 as they put the anesthetic mask over my mouth and nose, and thinking to myself “I won’t breathe, I’ll fool them.” I didn’t want to lose consciousness. I remember getting as far as 97 in my count.

When I woke up, my mom had given me some comics to read while I recovered in my hospital bed. I don’t remember what most of them were, but I remember one of them was Amazing Spider-Man, during the Ross Andru era, and just like that, Spider-Man became my first favourite superhero.

I was a devoted follower of both Marvel and DC’s oversized Treasury Edition comics, and was able to read some of the reprints of old stories in those pages, and was particularly fascinated by the complexity and, forgive me, seeming reality of the Marvel Universe. I wanted to know it all. And nothing promised to deliver on that curiosity more than the big, fat book of reprints that was Origins of Marvel Comics.

Sure, having Stan Lee’s name alone on the cover was a bunch of bullshit at best and a criminally unfair exclusion of Kirby, Ditko and others at worst. Sure, the introductions Lee wrote to each chapter were self-serving and only vague representations of genuine comics history, but at 11 I didn’t know that. I didn’t idolize Lee like some did (and still do), because he was just Stan Lee Presents in the credits by the time I started reading comics, not Stan Lee Writer or Stan Lee Scripter. I think I have been a process junkie as long as I have been reading comics, so the people I thought were responsible for the comics were the credited writers and artists. I probably assumed Stan Lee Presents meant he was the boss, which at that point was still true, but not for much longer.

But before I say anything more about the book, I should tell you how it came into my possession. As most parents probably are in this regard, my mom was coy about whether I would likely receive Origins of Marvel Comics for Christmas. So when I awoke that morning, before anyone else in the house, and approached the fully-lit tree and saw that shape all wrapped up in festive holiday wrapping, well, I was probably the happiest I had ever been up to that point in my life. My memory could be faulty here, but I swear to you I think I opened it and read it by the light of the tree while everyone else in the house slept. And I was absolutely enthralled by having in my hands one single, thick volume with the answers to so many questions about the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man and so many more.

It’s impossible for you to understand if you came of age in the graphic novel era, but Origins of Marvel Comics was a real breakthrough in how comics were presented (well, re-presented) in collected form. There were a handful of such experiments in the 1970s – DC had a comparable one, but it did not launch a book series like Origins did, being followed as it was by Son of Origins and Bring on the Bad Guys and The Superhero Women and Marvel’s Greatest Superhero Battles, as well as slimmer volumes featuring the FF, Dr. Strange, Spider-Man and others. Before Marvel partnered with Fireside Books to issue forth these wondrous books (they were trade paperbacks in the publishing industry parlance of the day, but the “TPB” as it is thought of within comics did not exist in any way), the only way to read those earliest adventures was either buy the expensive original comics (Amazing Fantasy #15 back then was economically out of reach to me, costing scores of dollars on the back issue market, maybe even a hundred in mint condition), or find them in reprints in the treasuries or the reprint titles Marvel jammed the stands with to knock their competition off the racks. But it was very hit and miss trying to track down reprints of first issues and first appearances, and Origins of Marvel Comics really addressed that problem.

Plus, with a beautiful cover by John Romita (no other identifier needed, he was the only one we had heard of at the time, the only one in the world, for all we knew or cared) and beautiful, thick white matte paper stock, man, the book was just lovely to look at, an art object in my 11-year-old eyes, one that likely plays a role in the subsequent decades of appreciation I have had for a nicely produced book.

Over the course of my life, my mom gave me many wonderful gifts, some of them far more expensive and important than Origins of Marvel Comics – like my first car, which got me to college, where I learned how to be a broadcaster, which allowed me to make a living for 27 years and raise a family ​and, of course, buy comics and even write about them from time to time.

But she gave me no greater gift, none that lives in my memory or affected my destiny like Origins of Marvel Comics did. That moment under the tree, reading by the sparkling Christmas lights while my family slept and I truly gained entry into another world, that moment is forever fixed in my mind and is as real to me now as if it happened yesterday, even though it was four decades ago. The memory of seeing Kirby’s first FF story, and Ditko’s first Spider-Man, and all the rest, and yes, even digging the rhythm and groove of Stan the Man’s puffed-up patter, all that fills my heart with light and joy and gratitude that is so profound, and so powerful, that the decades that have passed mean nothing at all.

Thanks, mom. For all you gave me, but especially for that. I lost her to Alzheimer’s and brain cancer less than twenty years after she gave me that book for Christmas, but when I think back to that morning, I have her again, her generosity and kindness, and I have the sense of wonder that she, and Stan and Steve and Jack and the rest, all presented me with that morning in December, 1977.​​ I am still there, under that tree. I am still in that moment, forever. ​

– Alan David Doane

This week’s question: What’s your favorite holiday-themed comic other than the infamous Alan Brennert Supergirl story?

Tim Durkee: The first book that came to my mind when the question was asked was Batman: The Long Halloween. Originally published as a 13-part mini-series by DC in 1996, the tale brings Batman and Harvey Dent together along Jim Gordon to track down a killer who strikes on holidays. If you have seen the Dark Knight film, you may find some influence the story had on the movie. It features the art of Tim Sale and was written by Jeph Loeb. Set in Batman’s early days following Batman: Year One. I find it to be a unique way of introducing the many enemies of Batman in one story while still keeping the emphasis on who is the mysterious villain committing the holiday crimes. Some may find it boring, as it is an origin tale as well. I won’t spoil it, maybe I already did letting you know some elements are in the Dark Knight movie.

Logan Polk: My favorite holiday themed tale in all of comics is The Long Halloween. For me Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s year long Batman series, in which each issue was somewhat themed around a holiday, encapsulated everything I love about the Dark Knight. It features one of the greatest assemblages of his rogues gallery, flawlessly folds the organized crime aspect into the costumed craziness and centers itself around a mystery, allowing for the detective aspect to come fully into play. While Loeb’s story ultimately doesn’t amount to more than a series of homages to some of the greatest crime noir stories previous, Sale’s art creates such a brilliant look and mood for the world these characters are operating in that it hardly needs to be more than that. I was fully wrapped up in figuring out who the Holiday Killer would be, and even after several re-readings over the years, I still find it to be a page turner.

Joe Gualtieri: Growing up, a key piece of comics education for me was finding random comics that I had never heard of before. Obviously, the infamous three-pack was the major component of such an education, but sometimes Building 19 would get long boxes or maybe a drug store would have a bunch of comics with gigantic “$3/$1.00!” stickers taking up a quarter of the cover. The most important comic for me I got that way was Ambush Bug #2 by Keith Giffen, Robert Loren Fleming, Bob Oksner, and Anthony Tollin. That bizarre little morsel prompted me to track down the rest of the mini-series, and I was thrilled to find that not only was there a sequel series, there was also Ambush Bug Stocking Stuffer.

As with the rest of the series, the Stocking Stuffer is loaded with jokes I didn’t get in early adolescence, but there are so many, I amply enjoyed it even at the time. Now? My favorite part is probably the two-page “How to Write Comic Books” sequence, which is a parody of Steve Ditko’s didactic comics. That is completely bizarre thing to stick in a Christmas themed issue, but it’s par for the course for Ambush Bug. Another highlight is a caricature of Julie Schwartz chasing around a Manga-ized Ambush Bug. AB is standing in for Keith and Fleming here, complaining to Schwartz that, “…we can’t possibly be funny for 40 pages!” and Schwartz responds “You quitter! My jokes aren’t funny and I’ve been around for 40 years!” Young me found the situation and art hilarious, now I can appreciate the portrayal of Schwartz, and frankly, I totally identify with telling bad jokes just for the sake of telling jokes to get through work.

I’m probably not doing a great job of selling the Stocking Stuffer, but it’s a comic light on plot (there is one, barely, about AB’s “dead” sidekick Cheeks the Toy Wonder coming back) and is practically a stream of consciousness-style series of jokes, parodies, and gags from Giffen, Fleming, and company. It also has Jonni DC, Continuity Cop making a rare appearance and I think we can all agree that’s the greatest gift of all.

Scott Cederlund: If we talked about favorite all time runs of comics, the Marv Wolfman/George Perez New Teen Titans would be highly placed in my list. But if we talk about favorite Teen Titans issue, my introduction to the original Teen Titans in Teen Titans #13 (1967) by Bob Haney and Nick Cardy actually has to be up there. And it’s Haney and Cardy riffing on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol that makes it so much fun as the Teen Titans fight against a Scrooge-like junkman.

I don’t know if I’ve ever actually owned an actual copy of this specific issue. As one of my earliest comics, I had a copy of Christmas With the Super-Heroes, one of DC’s early treasury editions. The only things I knew of any of these characters was that Robin was Batman’s sidekick and that I had Mego figures of Kid Flash, Aqualad and Wonder Girl. They were a bit like the Justice League but only kids. But they were incredibly awesome as they helped a wheelchair-bound kid and his father out of a tough situation during the Christmas season.

For a kid who was already at the age of 4 indoctrinated by Marvel and the artistic children of Jack Kirby (actual Kirby appreciation would come probably over a decade later), Cardy’s artwork is what really stood out from that Treasury edition. It was filled with Irv Novick and Dick Giordano (who I probably assumed at the time were the DC house style), Bob Oskner and Wally Wood, Win Mortimer and others, Cardy’s images in this issue still astound me.

There are ways that he drew superheroes, these odd angles that he used to frame the action, that look completely different than anything else I had seen before or for a long time afterwards. And his cartooning of Ebenezer Scrounge (their Scrooge,) Jacob Farley and Scrounge’s accomplices really gives this story a life other than being merely a superhero comic. The Teen Titans almost seem like an intrusion into this wonderfully drawn homage to Dickens.

Then there’s Haney with his silly attempts to be writing to the kids of the time, which is actually a bit more subdued in this issue than in his other Teen Titan comics. Wonder Girl is still “Wonder Chick” but like Cardy, Haney seems to be having more fun with the Dickens-like characters. Most of the comic is Scrounge being haunted by his past sins in classic A Christmas Carol style.

As an introduction to the Teen Titans, Haney and Cardy’s comics had a great love for these junior Justice Leaguers as their own characters. There’s nothing in this story that even suggests that these are just the sidekicks or the junior varsity other than a one-pager in the actual comic that shows them reading Superman, Aquaman, Wonder Woman and Batman comics (What? No love for Carmine Infantino’s Flash from Kid Flash?) Haney and Cardy treat them as heroes who are kids, which was a great thing to stumble upon in a Treasury comic that featured Superman, Batman and Captain Marvel. Even if Robin had been around since the 1940s by this point, here he wasn’t a junior partner but in important part of the team.

And honestly, this was probably my introduction to A Christmas Carol. Flipping through the comic now and still incredibly enjoying the Cardy artwork, Haney and Cardy take enough liberties with the story that I don’t think Dicken’s would recognize much of his work in this comic other than on the most surface level. But this would become as much of my A Christmas Carol experience as Dicken’s writing or any of the movies but most specifically the 1951 Alistair Sim version of the story. Nick Cardy’s parka-wearing Wonder Woman defines Christmas to me even now as much as any of the ghosts of Christmas past do.

Mike Sterling: I’d love to pick, say, an Arbor Day comic as my choice for my favorite holiday funnybook (and presumably this example from the Flaming Carrot Annual would be a good'un), but my holiday preferences are strictly plebeian. Christmas and Halloween are my events of choice, and as they tend to be the events of pretty much everyone’s choice, there is no shortage of comics to choose from.

Despite the current season, I’m going with a Halloween-themed story which actually gave me a moment of difficulty in trying to track it down. I believed it to be one of the classic Donald Duck stories cartooned by the Good Duck Artist himself, Carl Barks, back during the 1950s prime of his contributions to the Disney comics oeuvre. As it turns out, however, it’s a modern classic by the man who many feel is the successor to Barks, Don Rosa.

”Fit to be Pied,“ as it’s been dubbed (the comic itself is sans title) first appeared in 1987, early on in Rosa’s duck comics career, and hopefully I may be forgiven my confusion regarding its authorship as it is very much in the style of Barks’s 10-pagers. Donald, in competition with his eternal adversary Neighbor Jones, strives to win the local jack o'lantern contest, and and he and Jones engage in a chaotic war of one-upsmanship, involving disguises, thievery and outright vandalism. It's an exercise in escalating efforts and Jones and Donald attempt to outdo each other, as poor Huey, Dewey and Louie look on nearly helpless bystanders, appalled at the behavior of these supposed adults.

Ultimately (spoiler warning!), Donald achieves his initial goal in besting Neighbor Jones, but of course it is at great personal cost to himself, in the tradition of most of Donald’s Pyrrhic victories. Rosa's depiction of Donald’s vacillation between joyous triumph and angered defeat never fail to entertain, and easily match Barks’s own illustration of the ups-and-downs of comicdom’s most emotionally unstable fowl.

The story is reasonably easy to find – the original comic in which it appeared (Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories #526) is not so old and uncommon as to be prohibitively expensive, and the story has been reprinted recently in the Don Rosa Library Volume 1 from Fantagraphics. It remains a fine example of latter-day Disney comics, as does all of Rosa’s work.

1. Mike Mignola’s work.  Particularly Hellboy’s depiction of the Ogdru Jahad, but the Lovecraftian unnameable, unspeakable horrors permeate through much of his work, including:

2. The Doom That Came To Gotham.  Still one of my favourite Elseworlds stories and a mash up of Batman and Lovecraft.

3. The disturbing fishman rape in Alan Moore’s Neonomicon.

4. Ben Templesmith.  Just in general.  When I think of Lovecraftian unnameable things, at least one image is a bunch of tentacles from Templesmith.

5. Atomic Robo battling HP Lovecraft after he was taken over by an interdimensional tentacle monster.

BONUS: Before Watchmen.  It just should not be, not that it has any ties to Lovecraft.

The Art of Assassin’s Creed Syndicate is a look into the mind of the artists of the new Triple A videogame title Assassin’s Creed Syndicate. The Assassins Creed series may seem to be dwindling in the past few years, but that’s not what this review is about. This review is about the amazing work that the artists over at Ubisoft put into the game.

While turning the pages of this book, published by Titan, and seeing all the concept art, you really get a feel for the work that goes into making a work of art. All the time and planning and revisions that they would have to do. All of the work that they put into the game, most likely because they have a passion for gaming and art. It truly shows when you look at these pictures.

When you look at the initial designs and you think to yourself “Well, that doesn’t fit the character at all.” But as you go through the book you see the artists try to amend that issue. Whether it be fine tuning of a character’s coat or the way the character shaves. You get an idea of what was going through the artist’s mind as they try to make this model perfectly fit the character the writers have laid out.

While looking at the early pictures of the city, it’s amazing to me that the games come out on a yearly basis. With all the work that goes into this and the truly breathtaking art within the book, I would think this could take many years to make. But they get it done regularly, thanks to the hard work and the dedication from the artists to put out an amazing product for people everywhere to enjoy.

This work seems like it would probably go unnoticed because it’s such a behind the scenes thing that the artists behind the game might just get no recognition; well, this review is for them. I appreciate all the work they do to help make a game great. If you have a few bucks and are at all interested in game design, pick this book up and give it a look.

– Aaron Doane

A copy was provided by the publisher for review purposes.

We conclude our month long tribute to Alan Moore by asking, is he still relevant in 2015?

Tim Durkee: I feel guilty about even participating in this week’s question, since I am not familiar with much of Moore’s recent work. Then I figured I could answer this question just by how the majority of retailers that I have seen, hell, it’s all of them (what they carry and how or do they promote his material when released) and do consumers care for what is being published. My naked eye sees that Alan Moore is not relevant in 2015. I don’t think I have seen one piece of advertisement in any comic store (aside from projects based on his creations, that he had nothing to do with) making me aware that Alan Moore has a new release… ever. I have a feeling if he was to make an appearance at a store the owner would sell, “Come meet comic book legend Alan Moore this Saturday. The co-creator of Watchmen will be here from noon to 3pm.” Moore does his own thing with small publishers, so he will not be seen as relevant to the comic book fan. I’m sure any new material will have to be special ordered because the store owner does not see any sense in carrying it when his customer wants the super mega crossover that will change the universe forever first issue. He is still relevant to his fans? Of course. To the comic book fan in 2015? No.

Mike Sterling: So the question this time ‘round is if Alan Moore is still relevant to comics, now, in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Fifteen? Yes, he blew all our American minds when he dropped into our funnybooks back in the early '80s, after presumably blowing British minds in 2000 A.D. over there in Jolly Ol’. He reinvented horror comics using a character on the verge of cancellation. He wrote a superhero graphic novel that was a masterpiece of worldbuilding. He wrote a Joker story that he considers one of his lesser works but, decades later, still influences both comic creators and filmmakers in their interpretations of the character. He interwove an enormous number of preexisting fictional characters into a new interconnected narrative, and made it work as an entertaining story rather than a tedious intellectual exercise. He wrote a meticulously researched and terrifying Jack the Ripper yarn. He reinvented and revamped characters. He created new fun, lighthearted comics to counter his own involvement in the “grim 'n’ gritty” trend. He explored his belief systems, he parodied the art form, he challenged his readers, and he wrote and he wrote and he wrote.

But really, what has he done for us lately?

Yes, I’m being facetious. Alan Moore is still an active creator doing interesting work that attracts notice and discussion in his medium of choice. That alone makes him still relevant. And even if he wasn’t still working in the industry, his influence would still be felt. What was DC’s Vertigo imprint initially if not a sort of four-color Alan Moore cargo cult, hoping to recapture something like the excitement, the awareness that this is something  different, regarding Moore's writing but hopefully without the part where they alienate the talent into taking its toys elsewhere? How many of Moore’s one-shot ideas from various Green Lantern shorts are still being exploited in Green Lantern comics today? And how often is the answer "Watchmen!“ when the call goes out for the most outstanding achievements in the field?

Certainly a lot of that is indicative of the constant self-cannibalism of the comics industry, always looking back at its peaks and trying to scale them again, eventually wearing them down to tiny hills. But Moore’s writing is a pinnacle of the art form for a reason, and it’s no wonder that it casts as long of a shadow as it does. The vast majority of creative output in any field eventually falls to the wayside, forgotten, leaving only the giants who can endure the passage of time and the frailty of human memory to remain as examples. And even if most of Moore’s work fades away, if the comics medium survives at all, rest assured folks will still be talking about, or ripping off, Watchmen at the very least.

In an odd sort of way, even the idea that someone wants to ask "Is Moore still relevant?” shows that Moore is still relevant, that his work is still worthy of study. Who would ask, if he didn’t matter at all?

Alan David Doane: Alan Moore is still relevant to me, as a reader. In fact, the only comic book I currently have my comic shop hold for me is Providence, his current 12-issue miniseries with artist Jacen Burrows that is exploring the works of H.P. Lovecraft in ways both delightful and surprising even for someone who has been reading and thinking about Lovecraft for close to 40 years (me). Some of my favourite comics of the past few years have been Moore’s collaborations with artist Kevin O’Neill on League of Extraordinary Gentlemen projects like Century, which is the third volume of the ongoing saga of their Victorian superhero team, and the spinoff Nemo graphic novels, recently collected in a gorgeous slipcased edition from publisher Top Shelf Productions.

Moore is still relevant to me as a comics critic, because every time I read a comic book I can’t help but wonder why it exists in a world where it seems like so many great works have already been done. I always ask myself “Is this good enough and interesting enough to join the pantheon of great comics works?” So I might compare some new work in some way to that of greats like Krigstein, Kirby, Pekar, Ditko, Crumb, or Moore. Usually new comics fail to meet those standards, but what a delight when they do. What a delight when they even come close.

Moore is still relevant to me as an observer of the comics industry, because he created Watchmen, which even I think is somewhat overrated but which undeniably changed the entire industry forever from practically the moment it debuted. I look at how DC has spent decades first using Moore, then cheating him, then strip-mining his creative legacy for whatever else could be wrung from its rancid corpse (made rancid by their policies and misdeeds), and I think “How can anyone work for DC? If they will fuck Alan Moore, and not just once but again and again for decades, who won’t they fuck over?” And sadly, that’s true to a lesser extent of pretty much any corporate comics company: Stan Lee himself had to sue Marvel to force them to live up to their promises, don’t forget. So I see whoever the Flavour of the Year is, swelled up with pride at their great partnership with this or that company, and I wonder how long it will be before they, too, get the Alan Moore treatment. DC has even managed to turn many of the fans themselves against him, because who has time to actually think about the facts or consider context before deciding whether to side with a great writer who is just a human being or a megacorporation with the power to chew up and spit out anyone it wants, and which does so with alarming regularity?

As a talent, Moore gave me some of the greatest comics I ever read, from Swamp Thing to Miracleman to Top 10 and Promethea and LOEG and From Hell and the list goes on, and on, and on. The fans largely hate him because they can’t understand why he is so grumpy about getting screwed over by the industry. I love him because he gave me so many great comics that I cherish and re-read frequently, because his work never fails to challenge me and expand my mind, and because I will always, always, always side with a human being who hasn’t harmed me over a giant corporation that has spent nearly a century harming and cheating those whose imaginations and skills allowed it to ever even exist in the first place.

The incredible irony to me, as a reader, is that Moore’s best work isn’t even comics. His novel The Voice of the Fire is among the most extraordinary works I have ever read, and I have read it now nearly half a dozen times. I await his next novel, Jerusalem, with great anticipation. And I will buy it with the money I might have spent on comics, if they were still capable of entertaining and challenging me in the same way Alan Moore can do with nothing more than his imagination and the power of the written word.

DK1: The Dark Knight Returns

Imperfect, but good. Unfortunately, much like Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, its influence was detrimental to comics as both an industry and an artform, as the generation of comics creators that followed largely copied the surface elements of both landmark works, focusing on spectacle and violence instead of nuance, innovation and insight.

DK2: The Dark Knight Strikes Again

Miller was intoxicated by the freedom he found in the indy comics he’d been reading, particularly those of James Kochalka, who he cited as an influence. DK2 is absolute garbage, but Miller’s friends and apologists perfected the “if you don’t like it, it’s cuz you don’t get the joke bwah ha ha” defense. 9/11 happened during its creation, and Miller permanently lost his shit, so the end of it was both delayed and even worse than the beginning.

DK3: Holy Terror

A story so awful, so racist and insane that DC very likely refused to publish it (Miller claims it was his idea, but given how lousy his other DC work has been for decades, that claim is highly suspect), so Miller whited-out Batman’s ears and published it elsewhere.

DK4: All-Star Batman and Robin The Boy Wonder

Hilariously terrible, an obvious cousin of DK2 in tone, with sterile art by Jim Lee, who might have made a fine inker or architect, but is a terrible, terrible visual storyteller. Luckily, this one had no story to tell anyway, and was never finished, not that anyone cares, except the retailers who lost their shirts investing in all those comics that will never sell because it’s unfinished.

DK5: The Master Race

In stores this week, pretending to be DK3. Before Watchmen scabs Azzarello and Kubert turn in the best DKR fanfic you could hope for, not that anyone with good taste in comics was hoping for it. Perhaps the largest insult to comics that this unnecessary cash-in provides is stealing the name of the greatest short story in the history of the comics artform. The only good thing to come out of it will be inker Klaus Janson getting a paycheck, which he well deserves, since his partnership artistically with Miller in the late ‘70s and early '80s on Daredevil basically created Miller’s reputation, which hasn’t been earned much at all since Daredevil: Born Again and Batman: Year One, neither of which Miller even drew, because by then his drawing ability was already either deteriorating (if you’re a cynic like me) or “evolving.” I’m not including Batman: Year One in this guide, both because it is not really connected to the mostly-awful Dark Knight Saga Miller has foisted upon the world, and because it’s actually good comics, largely thanks to the subtle beauty and classic artistry David Mazzucchelli brought to it, along with a restraint from writer Miller that he literally would never be capable of again in his comics-making career. The point of this guide, really is to tell you what to avoid, and in what order, so Year One has nothing to do with it.

DK6: Frank Miller Won’t Go Away

Sadly, probably on the way eventually.

– Alan David Doane

It Takes A Villain is TWC’s (when I’m not a lazy moron) bi-weekly column about comics in which super-villains take the starring role, brought to you by your favorite sea monster, Mick Martin

Superior Spider-Man was refreshing in ways it had no right to be. At this point in the story of Marvel and of big company super-hero comics in general; an idea this mineable, this smart, this new yet classic, and this good seems almost criminally wonderful.

A dying Doctor Octopus does the ol’ brain-switch with Spider-Man. Ock’s mind goes in Spider-Man’s body, while Peter Parker’s mind is saddled with Ock’s dying shell. When Ock’s body dies, Peter Parker’s mind presumably dies along with it, leaving one of Spidey’s greatest enemies in control of the hero’s body without anyone realizing it. Octavius is transferred Parker’s memories and with the transfer comes at least a fraction of Parker’s sense of responsibility. Otto vows to live the rest of his life as Spider-Man, and as a better Spider-Man than Parker ever could be. The story of Otto’s attempt at the life of a hero is chronicled in Superior Spider-Man.

There’s a lot of great stuff in Superior Spider-Man I could talk about.

I could talk about writer Dan Slott’s masterful storytelling; how he knows our expectations, tickles them endlessly, and dashes them against the rocks. He knew, had to know, that as soon as the premise of Superior Spider-Man was announced that – along with the mobs of angry-email-writing fans who have been reading Marvel Comics for decades and somehow still manage to believe it when the writers tell them they’re killing off a headlining character for good – there would be mobs of nay-saying fans predicting the whole thing would last about five minutes before Peter Parker returned. So, Slott fed those expectations. By the end of the very first issue we learn that Peter Parker – or at least some remnant of his memories – has survived and follows Otto like an angry ghost. “I am Peter Parker,” the ghostly Peter tells us. “And I swear I will find a way back!” Ghost Peter follows Otto around the city, sometimes able to subconsciously affect his usurper and make him do good in spite of himself, and eventually is able to gain a fraction of physical control over his body and even make Otto hear his voice. Slott builds the story we’re expecting – the story of Parker regaining control of his life and his body through sheer force of will – and then he tears our expectations down around our ears, laughing. He stages a psychic battle between Otto and Parker in which Peter is not only defeated, but his memories are wiped from him utterly and we watch him die a second time, not heroically, but pathetically, stammering, unable to remember his own name as a psychic mountain crashes on top of him.

He does it again and again when the Superior Spider-Man clashes with the Avengers and later when he runs into Spider-Man 2099. We keep thinking, “Oh, this is it, he’s toast this time,” but Otto keeps the wool firmly pulled over everyone’s eyes. And what’s truly genius isn’t that Slott is keeping his new status-quo intact, but eventually we realize – like it or not – he’s got us rooting for Otto.

I could talk about how even though this is just about as new and refreshing a Spider-Man concept as you could expect, in some ways it returns the character to its roots. Over the years, plenty of characters have learned Spider-Man’s secret identity: lovers, allies, enemies and friends. Civil War made Spider-Man’s identity public, but then there was something with Mephisto where it all got rebooted, I don’t know, I blinked for that. Regardless, with Superior Spider-Man we get a Spider-Man who is once again juggling the dueling responsibilities of his personal life, his professional life, and his crimefighting life with literally no one in his life who knows his secret. Hiding your secret identity? It’s been done to death. But hiding your secret identity’s secret identity? That’s new. Otto may not share Parker’s sense of good or responsibility, but just as Peter was in the beginning, he is utterly alone.

I could talk about the art which, especially considering how quickly artistic teams shift these days, was remarkably consistent. Most of the series is penciled by either Ryan Stegman, Giuseppe Camuncoli, or Humberto Ramos. Stegman’s and Ramos’s styles are similar enough that in some cases when I wasn’t paying attention, I didn’t realize the penciler was different. Camuncoli’s style is the most distinct of the three. Stegman and Ramos share a Superior Spider-Man who is thinner, lankier, more naturally bent into his unnaturally wild and cool mid-swing impossible poses. Camuncoli’s Otto-Spidey is more buff. The overall design of Superior Spider-Man’s outfit is impressive. I didn’t even really notice at first that there was that much of a difference. Rather than going all dark like the classic black symbitoe costume, they keep red prominent while shifting most of the classically blue areas to a black that could, without close inspection, very well be just a darker blue. The way Stegman draws the eyes of Otto’s Spider-mask is one of the most distinct and interesting differences. Otto’s Spidey-eyes aren’t just cloth, but some kind of goggles that display info or allow Otto to see in different spectrums; kind of reminiscent of Batman’s goggles in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. Stegman draws the eyes more prominent on the mask than usual, and very white, and ironically in spite of the fact that this isn’t the “real” Spider-Man, it has the effect of making his eyes seem more like an insect’s than ever.

But rather than a pure pros and cons review, I want to talk about what Superior Spider-Man may very well be about even though I doubt Slott never meant for it to be.

See, from start-to-finish, there was something about Superior Spider-Man that I found simultaneously compelling, frustrating, and impossible to define. There was just something about it; something that I felt like it was telling me, that maybe it wasn’t necessarily meaning to tell me, but was coming through anyway. It was on the tip of my mind. It was only when I remembered the following story – a personal story that I will tell as briefly as I can – that I realized what it is that, more than anything, stands out for me about Superior Spider-Man.

I have an addiction and the object of my addiction was something I was trying to avoid when, on the way home during heavy, traffic-killing snow in the winter of 2013, I stopped at a liquor store and bought a bottle of crème liqeur and a bottle of tequila. To be clear; I have an addiction, but I am not an alcoholic. I have never been a habitual or heavy drinker. I had no conscious purpose to buying the liquor. I just had money and it was on the way home. By the end of that week, I had been drunk at home, alone, every single night. One morning, at the end of the week, finally honest with myself that what I was doing was scaring me, I dumped the remaining liquor in the sink.

When I talked to my therapist – a recovering addict herself – she said it was more than normal; it was expected. When you put one addiction down, you try to replace it with something else. It was like, she said, “putting an octopus to bed.” You tuck one arm under the covers and seven more pop out.

Now I’m not saying Superior Spider-Man is about addiction. I don’t think it is about addiction.

I think it’s about insanity.

The series opens with a scene that quickly becomes a joke. Not funny ha-ha, but just plain ridiculous. Otto Octavius in Peter Parker’s body stands over his own (Otto’s) grave. “I’ve come to say goodbye to my old life,” he tells us in the narration. “From now on my name is Peter Parker.” Otto’s symbolic rebirth is interrupted by an emergency alert that draws him into his first super-battle with the newly formed Sinister Six, and his reaction to the new Six is just the first of many signs that Otto’s promises that he is letting go of his own life are empty. Rather than a heroic battle cry or a Spidey-quip, the Superior Spider-Man swings into action pissed off that the name of his old team has been co-opted: “Well, I guess they’re letting ANYONE call themselves the Sinister Six these days.” He battles the vigilante Cardiac to a standstill – almost causing the death of a little girl in the process – when he learns Cardiac has stolen one of his old Doc Ock inventions. He literally doesn’t know how to not act like a super-villain. On a date with Mary Jane he says about the date, like a Bond villain, “Everything’s proceeding according to plan.” After his first battle with the new Sinister Six, he commandeers their robot, The Living Brain, for his own personal assistant. He creates a horde of “spider-bots” to patrol the city, watch the populace, and alert him of any crimes. When he learns that Peter Parker never earned a doctorate, he shoves all of his priorities aside in order to get that D and R back in front of his (such as it is) name. When he takes on the Kingpin, he doesn’t accost Kingpin’s underlings or sneak into his home to snoop for clues. He attacks Wilson Fisk’s base of operations with an army of mercenaries supported by giant freaking spider robots. Toward the end of the series, when Green Goblin – who has learned Otto’s secret – offers Otto the chance at a partnership, Otto’s refusal has less to do with any moral dilemmas or even any grudges, but at the indignation of being offered the chance to be Green Goblin’s “second.”

Most interesting is the Superior Spider-Man’s takeover of The Raft. The villain Spider-Slayer is scheduled to be executed at the super-prison right before its decommissioning. Jonah Jameson requests Spider-Man’s presence at the execution. Just before he arrives at The Raft, Otto tells us in his narration, “I’m the Superior Spider-Man. And I will be free.” Otto was a prisoner aboard The Raft when he took over Parker’s body. Before the execution and the inevitable escape attempt, Otto tours the prison, remembering the indignities and pains he suffered there. Regardless, after the smoke clears, Otto blackmails Mayor Jameson into letting him keep The Raft as his own headquarters.

So, right after declaring his freedom, Otto not only willing goes to a prison where he was once an inmate, but he willingly makes that prison his home. He actually goes out of his way to blackmail a public official into making it his home.

Earlier in the series, Otto corners the mass murdering villain Massacre; a villain with no powers but also with no apparent capacity for emotion. After Massacre casually lives up to his name dozens of times, Otto incapacitates him and gets ahold of his gun. Massacre suddenly feels afraid, and in doing so is amazed he is capable of such an emotion. The Ghost Parker – not yet defeated at this point – tries to stop Otto from killing Massacre. But seeing Massacre’s fear and the resulting tears of joy, Otto says, “This changes nothing. You are who you are. The killer will always be hiding inside you. There is only one solution here.” And he murders Massacre, shooting him point blank.

When he says what he says to Massacre, it feels distinctly like Otto’s talking about himself. But how could there be “only one solution” when Otto is claiming to have solved the problem of his own life by usurping Parker’s and trying to be a better hero? How could he say this unless he knows that he’s living a lie inside a lie?

The tragedy of Superior Spider-Man is that, from start to finish, Otto Octavius is a prisoner. He’s a prisoner of his lies, a prisoner of the role he’s usurped, and a prisoner of his own identity. Even though he shows us good qualities, even though he genuinely cares for people like Aunt May and Anna Marconi, Otto can’t be the hero and his failure really has nothing to do with morality or weakness of character. Otto is the villain because Otto is the villain. He does not know how to operate differently. He is a prisoner of himself, he knows it, but he keeps going to the inevitable crushing end.

But he’s not the only one.

One of the most truly surprising and clever elements of Superior Spider-Man is just how valid that “superior” can seem at times. Not in terms of Otto’s more brutal style, we all expected that. But particularly in the beginning of Superior Spider-Man, Otto seems not only able to handle the hero/real-life balance better than Peter ever could, but he’s actually able to act as Spider-Man much more sanely than Peter in spite of his obvious insanity. He knows things Peter doesn’t. He knows that the world does not revolve around him and he can’t fix everything. When Otto races across the city to save MJ from the Vulture’s goons, Ghost Parker goes with him. Otto spots a mugger accosting a man in an alley, and while Ghost Parker characteristically invisibly urges Otto to stop the mugger, Otto pushes on saying “A petty crime at best. I must focus on the task at hand!” In spite of Ghost Parker’s constant urgings, Superior Spider-Man will contact the fire department about blazes or the NYPD about crimes rather than necessarily tackling them himself. Even in the middle of the manhunt for Massacre, Otto makes time for a dinner with Anna Marconi while Ghost Parker screams at him, “Go on patrol you idiot! Chase down leads! Do something! Nothing’s more important than this! Nothing!”

Otto, in other words, demands time for the personal life that Peter so quickly tosses aside for the sake of dropkicking another mugger. He knows he can’t save everyone. He knows he doesn’t need to. It is not what we expect from the Hollywood or comic book kind of heroism when heroes save – or at least try to save – every last person, puppy, and twig, but Otto’s approach initally is closer to sanity than anything from Peter’s own web swinging.

When Superior Spider-Man first came out, I saw it as something of a conceptual spawn of Kraven’s Last Hunt: the classic JM DeMatteis/Mike Zeck crossover in which Kraven the Hunter not only shoots Spider-Man and buries him in a grave, but takes his costume and briefly acts as Spider-Man in order to prove that he can be better than his prey. Now, I see it as more of a child of Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s Batman: The Killing Joke.

While I don’t guess it was Dan Slott’s intention, what Doc Ock’s hostile takeover of Peter Parker’s life most successfully exposes – like the Joker’s flashlight punchline at the end of The Killing Joke – is the mutual, endless, and futile insanity of the super-hero and the super-villain. Peter Parker’s life is so insane that even Doctor Octopus can run Parker’s life better than Parker can. Doctor Octopus is so insane that even when he finally defeats Spider-Man in every possible way, it isn’t enough, it’s never enough. Both are not only prisoners in their roles, they embrace their prisons. They demand their prisons.

There’s that quote that’s attributed to so many different people (Mark Twain, Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein) that I may as well say it was Stephen Wright. Or even me. The quote about the definition of insanity being doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. That’s why addiction is insane. Because you keep doing the same thing you know is killing you, that you know will never produce the result you want, from which you eventually don’t even take even the most temporary pleasure. Otto describes something like it as early as the second issue of Superior Spider-Man. When he finally breaks things off with MJ, he says, “Because the two of us—together—it’s insane. I can do the math. You love me as Peter and Spider-Man. But you can’t be with me because I’m Peter and Spider-Man. It’s a recursive loiop. An equation that can never be solved.”

And so go the good guy and the bad guy. Round and round and round. And the octopus gets no sleep tonight.

New Avengers #1 by Al Ewing, Gerardo Sandoval, and Dono Sanchez Almara

Sandoval and Almara’s art here is pretty appealing, with a nice blend of traditional superhero art and Manga influences. I have real issues with this comic, but none of that has a thing to do with the art.

Ewing’s script is terrible for quite a few reasons. First off, there’s the characters. None of them are really distinguished from one another, aside from Squirrel Girl. White Tiger’s sole characterization is that she’s hitting on Power Man, despite him not being interested. Songbird, Wiccan, and Hulking are all more interesting than they’re portrayed as being here. Then there’s the odd set-up of this book, where the Avengers are operating out of AIM Island. This is, in a way, the opposite complaint I had about Invincible Iron Man #1, where everything felt like a retread. Here, Ewing does nothing to acclimate the reader into an odd status quo, despite this in theory being a big jumping-on point for new readers after Marvel’s Crisis. Finally, there’s the plot. After all the inter-dimensional shenanigans of Hickman’s Secret Wars, does anyone want more of that? The one positive I can say here is that I’m thrilled to see Songbird finally join the Avengers after Busiek foreshadowing it 17 years ago in Avengers Forever.

Invincible Iron Man #2-3 by Brian Michael Bendis, David Marquez, and Justin Ponsor

These are much better than the bland first issue. Doom is not a character I’d expect to be in Bendis’s wheelhouse, but he made it work in Mighty Avengers years ago and does so again here. Aside from the overly abbreviated and too-vague examination of Stark’s past with Madame Masque, these issues are breezy fun for Bendis fans.

Howard the Duck #1 by Chip Zdarsky, Joe Quinones, and Joe Rivera & Chris Hastings, Danilo Beyruth, and Tamara Bonvillain

Howard picks up pretty much right where it left off before Secret Wars, but provides ample background material for anyone jumping on—Howard’s a PI, he has a new shape-shifting gal Friday, and Aunt May is working for him part time. Plus, he’s kind of depressed and wants to go home, which leads into a fight with the Wizard and Titania. I cannot imagine anyone jumping on here having an issue following what’s going on. Zdarsky’s writing on Howard continues to be stronger than Jughead, which feels muted and less funny by comparison. Quinones, meanwhile, remains one of the best-kept secrets in comics; why he isn’t a bigger star is a mystery. His Howard isn’t Gene Colan’s Howard, but it works amazingly well. Howard is completely believable within Quinones’s milieu, and there’s this odd, almost Peter Lorre-ish touch around Howard’s eyes that really gives off the world-weary vibe Zdarsky’s script is going for. If not for the book up next, I’d be tempted to call this the best book Marvel’s publishing today.

Before the next title though, I suppose I should touch on the much-hyped Gwenpool back-up. Well, it exists. Normally, I’m a fan of Chris Hastings; Dr. McNinja and Fear Itself: Deadpool are both hilarious comics. Based on this first installment, Gwenpool seems to be little more than Deadpool’s fourth-wall breaking elements ramped up to eleven. It’s a little amusing, but it doesn’t feel like there’s a real reason for this character to exist right now other than as a cash grab. Danilo Beyruth’s pencils are mostly OK, and recall a budding Farel Dalrymple. Unfortunately, the art serves as an example of how hard it can be to integrate an alien presence like Howard into a comic, as Beyruth’s take is less successful than Quinones’s.

Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #1 by Ryan North, Erica Henderson, Joe Morris, and Rico Renzi

This comic opens with a parody of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s famous opening to All Star Superman, where they turn Superman’s origin into almost a minimalist poem, “Doomed planet./Desperate Scientists./Last hope./Kindly couple.” North and Henderson similarly catch the reader up, “Partially squirrel blood./Talks to rodents./Powers of a squirrel.” It does not have quite the same ring to it, but it’s a lovely re-introduction. Unlike Howard, Squirrel Girl does not just pick up where it left off pre-Secret Wars. Time has passed, and our titular heroine is starting her second semester in a new off-campus apartment. It serves as an excuse for North and Henderson to debut SG’s mother, Maureen Green, who in turn revises her daughter’s origin to be, “medically and legally distinct from being a mutant, and I can never take this back” which is hilarious from both a metatextual standpoint of the issues with film rights for Marvel characters, and a nice callback to Dan Slott’s GLX-Mas special, where the Watcher saw Squirrel Girl defeat absolutely the real versions of Marvel’s most powerful villains.

Essentially, Unbeatable Squirrel Girl is exactly what I want from most Marvel comics; it is truly all ages and for all sorts of fans. Obsessives like me will appreciate the references to older comics and the main plot, where Squirrel Girl takes an unusual route to defeat what looks like a menacing Hydra cyborg, is perfect for younger fans and the new generation making the likes of G. Willow Wilson’s Ms. Marvel such a hit. When the news leaked out that the pre-Secret Wars Squirrel Girl was being forced into oddly sized trades, I was worried it wouldn’t be coming back for the relaunch. I’m thrilled that my fears proved unfounded and that the book picked up right where it left off.

Carnage #1 by Gerry Conway, Mike Perkins, and Andy Troy

Apparently, Conway quietly returned to the Spider-Man franchise a couple years ago and worked extensively on Spider-Verse. Still, it’s a surprise to see him writing this book. Conway’s 1991 exit from Spectacular Spider-Man occurred just before the franchise became all-Symbiotes all the time. I picked this book up incredulous about its prospects as an ongoing series, and I remain that way. The issue is mainly set-up to get Cassaday and a team of soldiers (including John Jameson and former Venom Eddie Brock) into an abandoned mine for Cassaday to pick off the non-named characters one-by-one. Conway’s execution of all this is fine, but it still feels more like a limited series than an ongoing. Perkins and Troy’s art is functional; though I wish they found a way to make the symbiotes feel more disruptive to the setting. This book is the opposite of Howard the Duck, where Howard needs to blend into the Marvel Universe. Carnage is primarily a gritty action book, except for the one fantastic sci-fi element, but Perkins and Troy fail to make it feel fantastic.

Spider-Woman #1 by Dennis Hopeless, Javier Rodriguez, and Alvaro Lopez

This a pretty good comic overall. Hopeless does an excellent job conveying Jessica Drew’s frustration with being on maternity leave and shows a range of reactions to her pregnancy among the superhero community. Still, there’s little here beyond the basic solicitation pitch for the series; Hopeless pretty much just establishes the idea that Drew is now pregnant and that the identity of the father is mystery. That’s fine, but it doesn’t really hook the reader to pick up a second issue. The art by Rodriguez and Lopez falls squarely into the realm of contemporary superhero art aiming for neither gritty realism (Mike Perkins) nor cartoony (Erica Henderson), and it perfectly fits the tone, except for one minor hiccup. If not for the recap page, I’d have no clue that the person helping Drew train the new Porcupine is Ben Urich; Rodriguez’s version looks way too young for the character.

Extraordinary X-Men #1-2 by Jeff Lemire, Humberto Ramos, Victor Olazaba, and Edgar Delgado

Well, that was wholly inaccessible. I probably sound like a broken record about this with some Marvel books, but how can you make your big debut X-book coming out of Secret Wars so new-reader unfriendly? People love to joke about ‘90s X-Men comics being a mess of crossovers and unresolved plots, but at least two of the protagonists weren’t time displaced from alternate realities (only one of which was mentioned). If you don’t know what the Inhumans and Terrigen Mists are you’ll be completely lost, and that’s to say nothing of little throwaway things like Limbo. That’s without the bold new direction for the X-books apparently being a regurgitation of the post-House of M status, which Marvel undid three years ago. Jeff Lemire’s done a lot of good work elsewhere, so it feels safe to chalk this up to editorial. 

– Joe Gualtieri

1. Batman Always Wins.

2. Although definitely not the most famous, longest, or even necessarily the “best”, my favourite run will always be the one in the early to mid ‘90s by Doug Moench and Kelley Jones.  When not interrupted by catastrophic life-changing “everything will never be the same events,” their run focused on some of the weird and supernatural aspects around Batman.  While not an outright horror title, they did touch the darker corners of the DCU, even managing to pull of a “kind of” crossover with Vertigo’s Swamp Thing at the time.  It also was decidedly fun.

3. Keeping with this theme, I always thought that Batman stories tended to work best when either touching upon the horror/supernatural or straight-out mystery/detective genres.  Stories that pay homage to his pulp inspirations always seem to pop better for me.

4. I really liked what Grant Morrison was trying to do with Batman and the story he was trying to tell.  It really seemed to come together with Batman & Robin but I still feel interruptions and then a linewide reboot/relaunch/reshuffling really messed up the pacing, timing, and endgame.

5. Legends of the Dark Knight is probably my favourite Batman series.  Just so many good stories including “Shaman”, “Masks”, “The Sleeping”, “Prey”, and “Gothic” were told in that series.

As we continue our tribute to Alan Moore during his birthday month, this week we asked our QT contributors to name their favorite original Alan Moore character, other than John Constantine. Constantine was excluded from consideration to try and throw a spotlight on other, lesser known Moore originals.

Scott Cederlund: I think one of the main problems with Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen may be that, depending on which character you focus in on, you come away with different and possibly misguided lessons of the book.

Focus too much on Dr. Manhattan and you can lose touch with the humanity of the world.  Spend too much time on the Comedian and everything becomes a tragic joke. Ozymandias could make you think everything that is horrible and ugly in the world may also be strangely transformative. (Okay, maybe that last lesson isn’t so misguided and more time and ink should be spent on the possible moral repercussions of Ozymandias’s actions.) The biggest lessons though that we seem to have learned from Watchmen are Rorschach’s violent lessons, and even there we focused too much on the means rather than the causes or the questions.

Among these gods and madmen sits the simple people, Dan Drieberg and Laurie Juspeczyk. Here are the people who aren’t touched by a god in any type of way. They’re not super powerful or deluded with a moral superiority that most of the so-called “heroes” of the story possess.  Sure, they are superheroes in a very basic way, but the sense that Moore and Gibbons build around them is they were superheroes once upon a time like some of us were punks, stoners or goths.  It was something that they once did and then they grew up.  For the longest time in my readings of Watchmen, they were also the most unexciting characters of the book. They were what I had to wade through to get to Mars or a prison break or an arctic Xanadu.  They were the distraction from the misidentified coolness of Rorschach.

But as I’ve gotten older, Watchmen has become Dan’s story and that’s a bit of why the book gets more absurd as I get older but it also gets more humane. Now in ways that I couldn’t before, I see Watchmen as a story about people trying to find their way through a crazy world. It’s the silliness of the plot and Ozymandias’s almost mustache-twirling machinations that continually compound the unreality of Watchmen. The EC Comics dystopian vibe is practically infantile in 2015 as we watch the nightly news and see these type of actions performed on a regular basis in the name of religion.

Watchmen is a comic filled with madmen, vigilantes and terrorists. And yet within that storm of absurdity rests two of Alan Moore’s most human characters and maybe even Laurie’s backstory stretches the boundaries of that thought too far. But in Dan, Moore builds a character who is searching for some kind of certainty in this uncertain world. The memorable image of him isn’t an action shot or even anything related to the threats that are facing the heroes of this world. The most memorable image is after Rorschach accuses him of quitting, Dan sitting alone in his basement, staring at the Comedian’s bloodstained smiley face button as his unused costume hangs in a locker just a foot away from him. It’s easy to read in that moment that Dan is a loser, out of touch with the superhero he should be.

Dan’s story is so much more than that. He’s the everyman of the comic. It’s not a sexy part but it is an integral part to it. Dan is the solid rock that the story is built on. He doesn’t need an origin story like everyone else gets because it’s important that he doesn’t have much of a story. He doesn’t have a horrible childhood or a traumatic accident that forever alters his destiny. He doesn’t even have a point of view other than he wants to do what is right and good. There’s no moment when an owl flew into his study and he said, “I shall become like an owl.” He just likes birds and thought he could do some good as one of these superheroes.

One of the biggest problems with Zack Snyder’s Watchmen movie is that as he tried to remain so faithful to the text, he completely misinterpreted Dan Drieberg. The way that Moore and GIbbons portray him is slightly schlubby. He’s let himself go a bit since his crime fighting days. When he and Laurie get attacked in an alley, his can still fight but he’s terribly winded at the end because he’s out of shape. In the movie, as soon as he puts on his costume he’s back in fighting shape, fighting and moving more like Batman than the Dan in the comics ever did. The Dan of the comics isn’t a superhero. He was one a long time ago but now he’s just trying to figure out his place in a mad world.  

And that’s what my 30 year old reading of Watchmen is. How I read it in 1986 is very different than how I’ll read it in 2016. Back then, Dan was the lamest character of the book. He didn’t do anything cool. But now it’s the rest of the book that’s kind of dumb in a comic booky way but in Dan I find a character who looks at the world as confused and unsure as I am.  He may find that he feels alive only when he’s looking for a thrill and excitement but that’s a fleeting memory of his own immaturity. That excitement is as fleeting as the safety any of us may feel in the world today. Even at the end of the world, he lives in a moment of Nostalgia that runs metaphorically throughout the book.

Joe Gualtieri: I made this question even harder for myself by refusing to consider anyone from Watchmen (aside from Veidt, they’re too similar to the Charlton originals) or From Hell (since most of the characters are based on real people). Evey Hammond and V from V for Vendetta are probably Moore’s best original characters with my self-imposed restrictions, but favorite? There are several characters from Top 10 who are just amazing.

Detective Synaethesia Jackson is amazing. As her name states, she possesses synesthesia, but in Top 10, rather than being a hindrance, it gives her a near-supernatural ability to solve cases. I could read a whole series about her. Unfortunately, the only times Moore lets the reader behind her professional façade is to discusses her love life, first her former involvement with Smax and then to reveal her current crush on her married partner. So she’s out.

Joe Pi only appears in two issues of Top 10, but makes a tremendous impression. The scene were Pi convinces the anti-robot Shockheaded Pete that he is sexually molesting Pi’s vending machine cousin might be the funniest scene Moore’s ever written. While Pete is the worst about it, most of the cast displays some level of anti-robot prejudice, particularly in terms of how they expect him to react to human emotions, yet at every turn he impresses with how empathetic he apparently is. In terms of actual police work, Pi comes across as hyper-competent and able to do the job of both an officer, a forensic pathologist, and even has his own built-in body camera. The result of this, however, is that Joe Pi actually seems to prove Shockheaded Pete correct—a precinct of nothing but Joe Pis would be as good or better than the cast the reader grew to love over the ten issues prior to Pi showing up.

And then there’s the more sinister side of Joe Pi. One would hope that robot cops would be more honest and law-abiding than the worst of the real ones, but Joe Pi is not. The body camera and recording device I mentioned earlier? There is nothing prohibiting him from shutting them off whenever he wants. The series presents his decision to do so when a fellow offer talks about killing a pedophile is presented as one of those moments of surprising empathy, but it is quite disturbing, if thought about. And then Pi proceeds to talk that same pedophile into committing suicide, rather than going to trial and getting released after a few years. Moore never shied away from displaying the warts of his police cast in the issues prior to Pi’s arrival, but none of the street-level police do anything on the level Pi does, and it functionally darkens the series for the reader in a way similar to what happens to Swamp Thing in “The Anatomy Lesson.” That Moore was able to pack so much into the character in just two issues makes him my favorite original Moore character. Other than Constantine, of course.

Mike Sterling; So the thing about picking a favorite Alan Moore-created character is that he created a whole bunch of great characters for 2000 A.D., some serious (Halo Jones, Skizz) to the bizarrely peculiar (Abelard Snazz), all of which I enjoyed, but my favorites may be D.R. and Quinch.

Being North America-bound as I am, I didn’t encounter this pair of extraterrestrial delinquents until they were reprinted stateside in the color 2000 A.D. comic book series in the 1980s. The scrawny, violent D.R. and his oversized stoic partner Quinch were introduced in a story that had them traveling through, and seriously interfering with, Earth’s history, and things went hilariously downhill from there in the subsequent all-too-short series of shorts that were to follow. Drafted into military service, becoming movie moguls, D.R. falling in love…wonderful set-ups for a great series of anarchic calamities, and it was all beautifully and expressively illustrated by Alan Davis.

It wasn’t until much later that I found out D.R. and Quinch may have been inspired by the similarly anti-social O.C. and Stiggs, who had appeared in National Lampoon. Despite this, I still have a soft spot, in my heart as well as in my head, for these alien troublemakers and their brief funnybook lives. Thanks to them, the phrase “Mind the oranges, Marlon!” will forever be fixed in my memories.

This week marked the birthday of Alan Moore, on November 18th. To celebrate the birth of The Magus, TWC will be running themed Question Times for the rest of the month alongside a few Moore-specific articles.

This week’s question – what do you think is Moore’s most neglected work?

Rob Vollmar: Talking about Alan Moore’s most neglected work is kind of like trying to identify people’s least favorite Beatles album, but for me, it’s got to be The Birth Caul. This spoken word piece, later adapted for comics by From Hell collaborator Eddie Campbell, strikes chords not often found in Moore’s other work and, not surprisingly, it hits them masterfully.

Unabashedly autobiographical, Moore uses the occasion of his mother’s death to superimpose a map of his own life over that of the audience (and the reader) with just enough universal themes to make it feel both intensely personal and profound on a broader scale. Here, Moore keeps his occult themes (which dominate his other spoken word pieces) beneath the surface but performs something of a magick trick in the work itself by telling the story in reverse, beginning in the middle age and looping backwards in each succeeding section until he arrives at the beginning…which in this case is prior to conception. Though The Birth Caul is a very human work, it’s also intellectually ambitious, using memoir as a vehicle for exploring challenging ideas - how language shapes perception, how geography dictates destiny, how the tiniest causes can avalanche into the most devastating effects. The emotions in this piece are so raw and, for my dollar, it puts all of the look-I-spank-it-into-a-sock autobiographical comics of the 1990s Western Hemisphere to utter shame. The recording catches moments where Moore is on the absolute verge of tears and, man, it’s like watching Aslan die..

The Campbell adaptation is the perfect companion to the audio recording and helps to make the work more accessible by blending in visual components that bring a generational identity to some of the things that Moore is saying about his own life. Campbell produced the piece immediately after “The Dance of the Gull Catchers” (the epilog to From Hell) and the ten years he’d spent interpreting from inside of Moore’s words prior sing from every panel. Though rendered in black and white, Campbell throws in everything he’s got to capture the dizzying range of ideas from painted brush strokes to collage. I hold Campbell’s work in very high esteem and I’m pretty sure this is the most ambitious piece he ever attempted and possibly the most impressive of his career.

So, yeah, if you liked From Hell and don’t mind having your guts torn out, by all means, read The Birth Caul. It’s kind of a big deal. The CD features music from David J. (Bauhaus, Love and Rockets) and frequent Moore collaborator Tim Perkins. Unfortunately, it is often challenging to find and I don’t think it’s streaming legally anywhere but the whole package is best consumed in tandem like an old-school book and record set. The basic sum effect is a lot like what’s offered in this incomplete video sequence bringing the two together.

David Allen Jones: Alan Moore’s most neglected work?

Well, while on a scale of “neglect” it doesn’t necessarily seem more ignored than early works like sadly unfinished Ballad of Halo Jones or more recent ones like his Lovecraft homage Providence, the series I have in mind has not really been examined as much as I would have hoped; it seemed to be written from a very personal point of view and was staggering in the scope of its ambitions, and would seem to provide endless fodder for discussion and speculation. Perhaps it’s because of the lesser regard that Mr. Moore seems to be held in among readers of a certain age and younger; his public behavior over the last ten  years, generally speaking, has been erratic at best and offputting at worst. He has seemed to withdraw and lay low for generous stretches of time, only sporadically presenting new works that sell to a select few acolytes and not a wide audience. The name Alan Moore now perhaps suggests “’90s writer of Watchmen and V for Vendetta” and little else for today’s comics buyers.

The series I’m thinking of? The America’s Best Comics series Promethea.

Initially presented as a Wonder Woman pastiche and tricked out with a lot of gentle superhero satire, this series evolved into far, far more; it turned into an examination of Moore’s (mostly) occult beliefs about the nature of fantasy vs. reality, magic(k) and religion, old reliable good vs. evil, life/death, sexuality and male/female gender roles…a huge cornucopia of concepts and notions and ideas that impressed jaded old non-believer me with the sheer imagination involved in the way he presented his convictions. While I cant say there weren’t times when it seemed that Moore was disappearing right up his magickal arse in the course of the narrative, he usually managed to bring it home in a satisfactory fashion. Of course, the remarkably detailed, equally imaginative and nuanced art by J.H. Williams III and Mick Gray, often in styles cleverly imitating well-known fine and genre artists, helped him visualize his concepts…but the mind of Moore was the driving wheel. It wasn’t even my favorite ABC series; that would be Top 10…but Promethea was right up there with Watchmen, Swamp Thing, and V in my estimation and I’m a little disappointed that it’s rarely mentioned in the comics discussions I see online and in print. Perhaps it was too sprawling, perhaps many aren’t comfortable with the questions it raised…but I think the best examination of this series has yet to be written.

Mike Sterling: Now, it’s hard to describe this particular Alan Moore work as being particularly “neglected” as such, as it was reprinted, but we’re approaching nearly thirty years since the books in question were in print, so I think it’s safe to refer to these as being among those Moore works that have been left behind. I’m talking about, of course, Maxwell The Magic Cat.

This was a series of four black and white staplebound books, measuring 8 ¼ by 11 inches, reprinting Alan Moore’s comic strip from The Northants Post. The strip ran about seven years, written and drawn by Moore under the homophonic pseudonym “Jill de Ray” (after a particularly nasty serial killer).

A lot of the strips were metatextual examinations of the very idea of a comic strip and its format, but the strip ran the gamut from simple sight gags, to real groaners of puns, to political humor, to outright absurdity (such a favorite sequence of mine, where a snake carries on a torrid affair with Maxwell’s tail). Occasionally…well, mostly…Moore’s artistic reach exceeded his grasp, but his gag-writing is solid and usually clever, and the general roughness of the art is just part of the charm. If the drawing were more polished, it just wouldn’t be Maxwell the Magic Cat.

Now, I’d originally bought volumes 1 through 3 as they were released, in the mid ’80s. I never saw volume 4 on the shelf, and at the time I just assumed it never came out. Eventually, I discovered that volume 4 had been released, but for some reason it appeared to have limited distribution. I don’t know if it actually did, or if it was just hard to find in my neck of the woods, or what the deal was, but several years of casual eBay and Amazon investigations seems to bear out my belief that the fourth book is the rarest of the volumes.

Luckily, a few years back at my previous place of employment a collection arrived that contained the Complete Maxwell the Magic Cat Set of Volumes One Through Four plus a protective folder, so at last my collection was complete. Given that even the initial three volumes weren’t so easy to find when they were brand new, all four are certainly obscure items in Moore’s bibliography nearly three decades on, and deserving of some sort of reissue. Maybe not Moore’s most important, ground-breaking, or significant work, but certainly a lot more laughs than The Killing Joke.

[APOLOGIA: this is a reworked post from my regular site…please forgive me if this bit of business is familiar to you.]

Joe Gualtieri: My pick for Moore’s most neglected work is a comic he did for Eclipse. No, not that one. Unlike Miracleman, Brought to Light: Shadowplay—the Secret Team is not currently in print. Commonly just known as Brought to Light, that book is actually a 60 page compilation and flipbook. One side consists of Flashpoint—the La Penca Bombing, which is an unvarnished examination of a press conference bombing with CIA involvement by Joyce Brabner and Thomas Yeates. It is a fine example of comics journalism, but it pales in comparison to Shadowplay.

Written by Moore and illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz, Shadowplay is arguably the second most important comic of Moore’s career. By 1989, he was the biggest thing in comics, all of his projects were ending or about to, his feud with DC would see Twilight fall apart. The initial chapters of From Hell would also appear this year, in the Taboo anthology, making Shadowplay the fulcrum of the switch from one phase of Moore’s career into the next.

As a story, Shadowplay is quite straightforward. The comic is told solidly from the reader’s point of the view, and the reader goes on a journey into the heart of darkness to meet the anthropomorphized embodiment of the CIA, which is naturally a humanoid eagle. The eagle details the messy, sordid history of the CIA, all the killings, drug-dealing, and other questionable acts. What makes Shadowplay so remarkable is how despite mainly being a 30 page info dump, it is never, ever boring. Moore’s voice for the eagle is remarkable, a perfect example of the arrogant, privileged thinking that led to the horrors he recounts as if they were rarely anything other than good times (so long as there was not a Democratic president). Sienkiewicz’s work here isn’t as innovative as the roughly contemporary Stray Toasters, but his versatility is perfect for the comic, as he blends the surrealism of the eagle narrator with many different styles of cartooning to depict the CIA’s various atrocities, ranging from abstract cartooning to infographics. The latter provided one of the more lasting legacies of the work. On page five, there is a chilling image of the eagle, wearing sunglasses and a bathing suit, atop a floating pool cushion. The pool is filled with blood, as the eagle explains, “Average body holds a gallon. Big swimming pools hold 20,000 gallons, so imagine a pool filled with blood.” Throughout the rest of the story, Moore and Sienkiewicz use the image as a motif to show how many people are killed in different CIA programs. Stanley Donwood credits the swimming pool of blood with inspiring part of the album artwork in Radiohead’s Kid A.

Shadowplay concludes with the reader running away from the eagle, outstretching a hand, and disappearing into the mist. Rereading it now, the sequence foreshadows the fantastic sequences in From Hell where Gull travels through time, hand similarly outstretched, connecting the major completed Moore work of the period back to its beginning. I say major completed Moore work, because Moore and Sienkiewicz would collaborate again on Big Numbers, and well, if you don’t know the story behind that, stay tuned.

To paraphrase Stan Lee, this is a novel-length column adventure, True Believers, as I’m trying to ramp up production and get to a place where I’m covering a full month’s worth of ‘60s Marvel issues in each column. We had a few January 1963 stragglers, so we’ll get to those as well as all of February. I suppose I could split it up again, but March 1963 is a very special month and I really want to do it justice next week. So here we go.

Last time we saw Loki, Thor had sent him to Asgard, where he would come face to face with Odin. Odin sentences Loki to never leave Asgard. But you can’t keep the God of Mischief down, and so in Journey into Mystery #88 he disguises himself as a snake and sneaks past the eagle-eyed Heimdall on the Rainbow Bridge. We next see him at Donald Blake’s office, disguised as an old man and hypnotizing Jane Foster before seeing Blake, who by this point should know not to trust anyone in a green suit.

Loki has him change into Thor and throw his hammer, then creates the illusion that Jane is in danger, and, unable to get his hammer back within 60 seconds, he reverts to Blake again, and Loki puts a force field over the hammer. Loki then goes on a mayhem spree both silly and chilling – cars and buildings turning to candy and ice cream, while humans become blank white outlines of themselves. The world slowly starts to learn of, and believe in, Loki’s existence, and Loki for his part makes no demands, asks no ransom. He even spoils a secret Russian atomic bomb attack on the U.S. for unexplained reasons that probably boil down to his want that any destruction start with him alone. 

Don Blake finally gets an idea, and Loki learns from the newspaper that Thor has vowed to defeat Loki within the week. A nervous Loki goes to check on the hammer and finds Thor. Loki falls for the ruse (it’s not Thor but a plastic dummy) and removes the force field, giving Blake time to grab the hammer and change for real. To escape, Loki turns into a pigeon among many in the park, but Thor again outwits him, throwing a bag of peanuts that real pigeons would find irresistible, separating Loki from the other pigeons and capturing him to return to Asgard. Not a terrible issue, but it feels like the team doesn’t quite have a handle on Loki yet – is he an evil mastermind or annoying prankster? Does he want to have fun or really kill Thor? Can he come up with a complete plan or just wing it and see what happens?

Journey into Mystery #89 sure seems to be winging it, sporting a very generic cover, just Thor standing with a caption saying he’s going to battle the forces of evil. Probably an inventory job? We then get another rote recap of how Thor got his power and the continuing lack of romance between Donald Blake and Thor-obsessed Jane Foster, with the addition of her fantasizing about being his mate, polishing his hammer, ironing his cloak, and trimming his hair down to 1963 American male standards. It’s dull and silly, and then we’re introduced to the issue’s villain, one Thug Thatcher, the mob leader (was Lee afraid of the Italian Anti-Defamation League or something? Thatcher?), a fiend so low he was caught selling sub-standard steel! A real Carlos Marcello, this one. 

Thatcher’s gang helps him escape his prison sentence, and two of Thug’s thugs enter Blake’s medical office and take him and Jane hostage, as they need medical help for Thatcher’s gunshot wound. Blake does his job, which means he has to now be killed so he doesn’t talk. Blake can’t get to his cane, so he uses the part of his brain that belongs to Thor (or something) and sends a distress call to Odin, who creates a force wave that makes one of the goons drop the cane for Blake to pick up, then changing into Thor.

There’s kind of a fun chase where Thor flings his hammer, knocking down a row of roadside trees that fall and trap the getaway car. Thatcher is still on the loose, and somehow recalls the gossip that Thor and Blake are always seen in close proximity to each other, so he and his gal go to Blake’s office, where Jane is still tied up. Why they want to go where Thor is more likely to find them, I couldn’t tell you. For the sake of Jane’s safety, Thor relinquishes his hammer, but before the 60 seconds are up, he uses his “super developed vocal cords” to throw his voice and make Thatcher believe the cops have him surrounded, giving Thor a moment to retrieve his hammer and postpone the era of Thug Life from happening for a few decades. Thug’s not quite captured yet, though: he abandons and even shoots at his gal in his attempt to escape, climbing up one of his unfinished buildings. Thor uses lightning to weaken a girder, and Thug falls into his arms. Being a loving Norse god, he asks Odin to remove the girl’s memory of Thug, so she can live her life without his destructive influence. Whatta god! Aside from that nice touch at the end, the issue, like Thug’s steel, is sub-standard, and it’s not a great sign that the creative team keep coming up with new powers for their heroes whenever it’s convenient. Super-Ventriloquism sounds like something more suited to a ‘50s issue of Superman. 

Strange Tales #104 introduces one of the all-time loser villains, Paste Pot Pete (who nonetheless shows up a lot over the years, eventually getting a new name and costume as The Trapster), a guy who Kirby designs with a blowsy green jumpsuit, baby blue Captain America gloves, and a big purple beret. His gimmick is a gun that shoots glue, which he uses to rob banks without really hurting anyone. As we saw in Fantastic Four #9, which introduced us to Namor’s electric eel and radar powers, we’re in the Lee/Kirby make-shit-up-as-we-go-because-no one-will-read-this-again phase, so here we learn that Human Torch can track people by their heat waves. So, one successful bank robbery down, you expect Pete to elevate to, like, the Cadbury Chocolate Diamond or something, but no, he’s going to rob a military base and steal their new missile to sell to the Reds, because of course he is. Being a criminal in the Marvel Universe in this era means you’re either a Communist or willing to sell out your country to them. 

Pete barely arrives in time to glue the missile as it takes off, which seems like a poor plan (how do you get anywhere with a truck with a thirty foot glue pole and missile hanging out of the back?). Torch follows, throwing fireballs at the tires, but Pete has great reflexes, not avoiding them, but instead doing some crazy thing gluing planks to make a bridge over a trap Torch makes. Torch’s flame wears off, and Pete glues him to the missile, deciding to set it off rather than sell it to the Russians, but the heat of the missile revives Torch’s powers, so he carefully extricates himself with one hot finger before he can fully flame on. Torch comes back hard, melting the truck, and the resourceful Pete barely escapes, losing both the missile and the bank loot. Despite his dumb name and costume, Paste Pot Pete is arguably more impressive in his debut than Doctor Doom.

Strange Tales #105 makes me think, How can I miss The Wizard if he won’t go away? Stan Lee advises us to all settle back and get a tight grip on ourselves (way ahead of you, pal!), and we catch up with Wiz easing on down the prison yard, planning his escape and revenge. Good behavior gets him a choice assignment at the prison hospital, where he has access to chemicals, creating a serum to melt through his cell wall (nice going, Warden!). When Human Torch learns of the escape, he goes looking for Wizard, leaving a flame facsimile of himself to fool sister Sue (add “dummies” to the list of Lee/Kirby tropes being dangerously overused, along with knockout gas and every villain being on the Russian payroll if they’re not aliens). When Sue figures it out (phony flame brothers don’t answer back, to quote Jim Morrison), she calls Mr. Fantastic, who tells her he and Thing won’t interfere and Johnny needs to stand on his own two feet, which, you know, is the whole point of him having a solo book, Sue. 

Tales to Astonish #39 is another Lee/Kirby/Lieber take on a ‘50s Atomic horror movie, as radiation causes a lowly scarlet beetle to gain human intelligence and the ability to communicate with and manipulate all insects. It leads to Ant-Man getting overpowered and captured, while Scarlet Beetle uses his growth gas to become human-sized and plan an attack on humans involving stolen dynamite. Ant-Man, with the help of his ants, fights off beetles, grasshoppers and bees.

The climactic battle occurs in a toy store, which, while not as fun as the toy train fight in the Ant-Man film, is still pretty charming. And it’s one of the better endings the book has had so far, too, with Pym shrinking the beetle down to normal size and intelligence and letting him go, even if it brings down Ant-Man’s reputation a notch, with the police thinking he wasn’t around when they needed him most. 

Fantastic Four #11 shows Stan Lee and Jack Kirby reveling in their success, the cover announcing it as an offbeat “collector’s item” issue and an opening sequence showing folks lining up to buy the latest Fantastic Four comic, kids dressing up like the team, and the F.F. themselves reading stacks of fan mail. We also get the first appearance of mailman Willie Lumpkin, here called “Lumpy” several times. We also get the Yancy Street Gang taking their first action against The Thing, sending him a package with a spring-loaded boxing glove in it. 

Things get even more meta, in a weird way, as Reed starts to recall his college days with Ben, and Sue says, “Perhaps our fans would like to hear this, Reed,” as if the comic was some kind of reality show and their lives were lived on camera. We then see that both men were heroes in WWII, Ben as a Marine pilot and Reed working with the O.S.S. We’re reminded that Sue is still conflicted about her feelings for Reed and Sub-Mariner, but Reed is philosophical about it: he loves Sue without any doubt, but he knows life doesn’t always turn out as one expects. 

We get another brief recap of the team’s origin – this time with Sue not being quite so manipulative in getting Ben to volunteer for the mission – and then Lee/Kirby seemingly (well, not seemingly – Lee admits it at the end of the story) address the fans who write in complaining about Invisible Girl’s supposed lack of contributions to the team. Both Reed and Ben are outraged at the letters, recalling how Sue was critical in their battles against the Skrulls and Doctor Doom. Ben becomes The Thing again, Reed’s latest serum lasting just a few minutes longer than the last, and the the three men surprising Sue with a birthday cake.

We then get the main story, introducing The Impossible Man, a bullet-headed green alien, an innocent who quickly commits a bank robbery for money to buy food, an act of naivete rather than malice. The F.F. find him, chowing down, and he tells them he comes from Poppup, a planet full of dangerous creatures, and that his people have the ability to change into almost anything. Impy doesn’t like the F.F. harassing his buzz, and realizes he’s maybe the most powerful creature on Earth and can pretty much do what he wants. Kirby has fun with kooky manifestations of his power, and it seems like it’s impossible to stop The Impossible Man with physical force or superpowers, so Mr. Fantastic uses psychology, telling everyone – law enforcement, broadcasters – to just ignore Impy, since all he really wants is attention. It works, and he leaves Earth out of boredom. Essentially, Impossible Man is Marvel’s version of Mr. Mxyzptlk, but without the gimmick that you can only stop him by making him say his name backwards. It’s a lighter issue (no fighting among teammates this time!), but pretty enjoyable.

Next week: The fledgling Marvel Universe kicks into another gear with Amazing Spider-Man #1 and the debut of Iron Man in Tales of Suspense, the usual Human Torch, Ant-Man and Thor stuff, and a double dose of Hulk in the last issue of Incredible Hulk (for a while) and Fantastic Four #12. 

Inspired by the most recent Graphic Language podcast, in which Yan Basque and Alan David Doane discuss paradigm-shifting comics creators, we asked the TWC gang what comics creator they think has most changed the way people think about comics.

Tim Durkee: I feel that John Byrne’s Man Of Steel along with the Superman books that followed for several years made the shift. I was one who thought that it was foolish for any villain to try any criminal activity in Metropolis, or the world for that matter. Unless you had kryptonite, “How could you possibly beat Superman?” As a young reader during a show in Saratoga Springs, NY, I started a debate over “who would win, Superman or Galactus?“ During this period (’90-’91), I was the only one who thought Supes could take him. The others all said the same thing, "Before Crisis…maybe.” Superman was never a favorite of mine yet I found myself reading more and more after the reboot and this was before the revelation to Lois about his identity and his “death.” I also feel Byrne’s take made all who were and are involved in comic character creations take notice that if The Man Of Steel is more vulnerable to the threats he experiences, whoever they are working on is just as, if not more susceptible to danger and defeat. I have not read any Superman titles with the exception of All-Star in a very long time, so I am not sure if DC is still using the same origin and strengths and weakness after the original Crisis.

Roger Green: “Paradigm shift.”  I have the Weird Al Yankovic song Mission Statement stuck in my mind. If I was forced to pick one person, and one title, it would be Todd McFarlane and his stint on the Spider-Man book, which he both wrote and illustrated.

That first issue sold 2.5 million copies, partially because there was a gold cover, and a silver cover and a regular cover, and other variants, for all I know. There were customers at Midnight Comics, where I had just started working part-time, who were buying ALL of them. And I didn’t know why.

Oh, I’d seen comic collector mania before when I worked at FantaCo in the 1980s, over the Claremont/Byrne X-Men, and the Miller Daredevil titles.This level of collector avarice, though, was different. Spider-Man #1 is considered by most people as the start of the comic speculation boom of the early 1990s that practically destroyed the industry.

The problem for me was two things, really: 1) I LOVED the character Spider-Man, and especially his alter ego, Peter Parker. 2) I did not like the McFarlane version of Spidey, but DESPISED his Peter Parker. It was the first title this Marvel zombie had dropped in years. It was unreadable. That McFarlane left the book because of “creative differences” in a year and a half was not surprising. 

What took me unawares was that it brought him and his Image colleagues to new commercial heights. I read his Spawn #1, and realized why I hated his Spider-Man book so; it was of the same formula. I can’t get more specific, but whatever I disliked in the Marvel book was even more manifest in his Image title.  
I have noted how difficult it is to figure out a comic book order. Image was particularly problematic with its special #0 issues.  And it’s worse when titles are late, as the audience loses interest.  Some of the Image boys, especially Rob Liefeld, were killing customer momentum. Ultimately all the wild speculative buying led to the Great Comic Book Bust.

John Belskis: This was a tough one. It’s hard to look past certain creators and what they contributed to change the way people look at comics, without mentioning names like Siegel and Shuster or Lee and Kirby. Also art styles like Steranko and Adams, should always get a nod. I’m taking a retailer perspective answering this though, and will take Frank Miller and Dark Knight Returns.

In and of itself, it was the first original story meant to cultivate the adult Batman fan. The art and story were dynamic, and the prestige format was formally exposed to the major market for the first time using a core character. More than just the book though, Dark Knight transformed how comics were to be written and reprinted. It was the first book to be marketed as a hardcover and trade paperback reprint, and really opened the publishers’ eyes as to how profitable the miniseries-into-trade-paperback could be. Within five years of the Dark Knight trade, many mainstream comics were being written in 4-6 issue story arcs to be reprinted as a self contained trade paperback reprint. This changed continuity in comics and ordering patterns of retailers, who could no longer rely on overstock to generate back issues sales. It also allowed creators to move freely from title to title much easier than in the continuity focused 1960s and 1970s.

Today everything produced by the big two has adopted this format, good or bad. To me, this was by far the biggest change to comics, as an adult market for core characters was advanced and the bookstore format in comic shops became much more prevalent. Obviously, Miller himself had little to do with the publisher changes, but that team was maybe the best group of talent ever on one mini series, and the result had a huge impact. Today, Dark Knight remains a staple in almost every comic store, as a testament to how powerful it was and remains.

Mike Sterling: I’m going for the easy answer on this one: Frank Miller, with The Dark Knight Returns. It’s hard to think of something in recent memory that’s had more impact than that mid-1980s work of Miller’s. Even Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, with which it is temporally and often critically paired, didn’t have the impact on the industry that Miller did with his work.

In general (and this is the impact fans of the medium prefer to remember) The Dark Knight Returns was the book repeatedly held up as the example of comics as a medium for adult storytelling. Well, yes, sure, there were plenty of examples of mature comics work prior and concurrent with this, but this one had Batman, so this one counts, man! …But despite my sarcasm, this is a mature, fully thought-out examination of the character from a perspective we hadn’t seen before, and one that rewards multiple rereads.

An unintended consequence of The Dark Knight Returns, resulting in a paradigm shift no one really expected, was the misreading/misunderstanding of the work, particularly by Miller’s artistic contemporaries. “The Dark Knight Returns is a popular adult comic because it’s so grim and gritty!” some folks apparently decided, and then away they went, flooding the market with dark, violent comics that mimicked the appearance of Miller’s story without the thought that had gone into it, and certainly without the parodic and self-critical underpinnings that everyone seems to forget when reconsidering what it was Miller had actually done with Batman.

Another aspect of the industry The Dark Knight Returns forever changed was packaging. Suddenly, the squarebound 48-page color comic book because the format of choice for the more upscale, the more (of course) “grim and gritty” short-form stories. Such was the impact that even DC’s crosstown competitor Marvel Comics briefly referred to their comics released in this fashion as “Dark Knight format” until someone realized “oh, wait, maybe we shouldn’t do that” and then started calling them “bookshelf format” or something similar. Sometimes the comics put into this format approached, kinda sorta, the mature-esque levels of Dark Knight (such as the mostly awful but it means well Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters), and sometimes they were just your standard issue, nothin’ special dopey superhero comics put in this format to soak readers for a few extra bucks (“New Universe” tie-ins like The War or The Pitt). The format stays with us today, but the once-implied “maturity” it promised has been stripped away long ago.

Despite the abuse the story and its format has undergone over the years, The Dark Knight Returns is still held up as the golden standard of “comics aren’t for kids anymore!” and doesn’t seem likely to be dethroned anytime soon. Miller forever changed the way people think about comics, even if those people don’t quite understand just what it is they’re thinking about.

Topics  covered this week: Some new(ish) Marvel comics, the problem with superhero comics trying to deal with real-life issues, Jim Steranko’s Captain America vs Jack Kirby’s Captain America, what happens when a strong new creative team takes over a title mid-run, Jimmy Olsen as he appears in the new Supergirl TV series, and more.

Direct Download: Graphic Language Ep. 004

Yan Basque and Alan David Doane’s Graphic Language is Trouble With Comics’s weekly podcast, although recent technical issues have messed with that schedule. We’re back, though, and we hope you enjoy this latest episode. We welcome your questions, suggested subjects and feedback. You can email us anytime.

1. Mark Bagley.  Whenever I think of Spider-Man, he’s drawn by Bagley.

2. I actually think that the Clone Saga was a good story…initially.  It just got incredibly drawn out when it proved popular and it seemed like they didn’t know either where to go with it or how to end it.

3. His run on Amazing Spider-Man soured me on J. Michael Straczynski’s writing.

4. I hate the idea that Peter Parker always has to lose.  Actually, this transcends Spider-Man.  I hate the editorially mandated idea that heroes have to “suffer” in order to be interesting.  While conflict creates interesting stories, if someone loses all the time or has Pyrrhic victories, it becomes incredibly depressing.

5. Peter David’s original run on Spider-Man 2099 with Rick Leonardi will probably always be my favourite incarnation of Spider-Man.  Even if it isn’t Peter.  And set in the future.