Comic books!

More catching up.
The second collection of MIDNIGHT completes Jack Cole’s original run on his knock off of The Spirit (he returned to the book years later) as Midnight, Doc Whacky and Gabby the talking monkey continue their somewhat eccentric war on crime. Reading these, I can see Cole developing his distinctive visual style and his sense of humor, but there’s no question it flourished more when he worked on Plastic Man.
BIRDS OF PREY: The Death of Oracle make me glad I dropped the Birds of Prey series when I did (almost a year before DC’s reboot). While I loved Gail Simone’s earlier work on the title, this run had a grim, dark tone that always felt wrong, as if it were building up to some shocking climax that never happened. The plot for this story arc—Oracle has to fake her death so that she can operate more in the shadows—felt like one of those big changes that doesn’t change anything (comics fans see a lot of those) and Simone never seems to know what to do with the super-hero Hawk on the team. Disappointing.
THE BATMAN CHRONICLES, Vol. 10, brings the reprints of Batman’s adventures almost to the end of 1943. This collection includes the final showdowns with Two-Face (though he would return eventually) and the thrill-junkie Crime Surgeon (he wouldn’t, though we got an Earth-1 version years later) and a new scheme by the minor but entertaining rogues Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The later stories introduce us to Dick Sprang, who was one of the definitive Batman artists for years (and his stuff looks great from the first). On the downside, the Joker’s one appearance is dull and new villain the Cavalier isn’t impressive either. Overall though, a very satisfying collection.
UNWRITTEN: Dead Man’s Knock is the third collection of DC’s Unwritten series by Mike Carey and Peter Gross. In this set, the publication of a new Tommy Taylor book (think Harry Potter) becomes an opportunity for the fiction-warping Cabal to destroy Tommy’s legend for good, while the real Tommy Taylor begins to learn a few facts from his father about the reason he even exists. Fascinating as usual, though the scenes of the Cabal warping current fiction were disappointing (about the level of any dictatorship’s propaganda arm).