THE GOON: Nothin’ but Misery was the second volume in Eric Powell’s series, in which the Zombie Priest begins to realize the Goon is more of a threat than he thought and the roughneck and the necromancer continue their running war for control of the city. Some funny bits, but this still doesn’t click with me the way it has so many others.
MODESTY BLAISE: The Girl in the Iron Mask by Peter O’Donnell and Enric Romero is a collection from around 1990 with two adequate strips and the really good title tale: A couple of corrupt millionaires trap Modesty inside the title helmet, only to discover that even blind and trapped, she’s more dangerous than they can imagine. Good enough to make up for the so-so other strips.
BLACK PATHS by David B. has a WWI veteran and a singer falling in love in the early 1920s in the short-lived independent city state of Fiume. The writer/artist has some fun with the political currents of the time, but this didn’t grab me.
As part of DC’s efforts to make its reboot universe more diverse, they took Mr. Terrific—a black super-genius and super-athlete who’d been a Justice Society member pre-reboot—and spun him into his own series. Reading MR. TERRIFIC: Mind Games by Eric Wallace and Gianluca Gugliotta I can see why it only ran eight issues: It’s certainly not bad, but it lacks any spark to distinguish the story of Terrific coping with a mind-destroying fiend, corporate skullduggery and oppressed ETs never really catches fire. Having him lose control and almost beat his wife’s killer to death has minimal effect, for instance, as I don’t know the character well enough to be shocked.
(Cover art by Pete Woods, all rights reside with rightful holders)
Likewise LEGION LOST: Run From Tomorrow by Fabian Nicieza and Pete Woods isn’t a bad story—a handful of Legionnaires get trapped in the present trying to stop a time-traveling terrorist from contaminating the 21st century with a super-mutagen—but even with familiar Legion members (Timber Wolf, Wildfire, etc.) it feels like they could have used pretty much any super-team or made up a new one and gotten much the same story.
Jeremy Bastian’s CURSED PIRATE GIRL is much more distinctive as an abandoned waif convinced she’s the daughter of a pirate captain befriends the daughter of the governor of Jamaica, much to the governor’s horror. Then the CPG sets out onto the sinister Omerta Seas to find her dad, only to encounter knightly swordfish, a potato with a mustache, a wise sea cook and various other odd characters. Bastian’s stylized whimsical art makes this stand out—it’s different, and in the good way.
Back in the 1940s, Marvel teamed Bucky and Toro (sidekicks to Captain America and the original human torch) up with some ordinary boys to create the Young Allies. CAPTAIN AMERICA: Forever Allies by Roger Stern and Nick Dragotta is a follow-up alternating between the end of the war, as the team comes up against the mind-controlling Lady Lotus, and Bucky (during the time he took the Captain America role) confronting her again in the present. A good series, accompanied by the original first issue of Young Allies (be warned, the black member of the time is hideously stereotyped, which Stern explains in the later series as the writer having no interest in what the “real” Young Allies were like)
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