Category Archives: Comics

The new DC FINEST reprint line enabled me to replace one of my black and white Showcase Green Lantern TPBs with the all-in-color The Defeat of Green Lantern by John Broome and Gil Kane (with a couple of team-ups by others), covering GL’s series from #19 through 39.

I think this is the peak of the Silver Age run (I count the Denny O’Neil/Neal Adams stuff as Bronze Age). We have a great lineup of supervillains (Hector Hammond, Black Hand, the Shark, Evil Star and more), multiple space adventures; the Green Lantern Corps (Hal Jordan teams up with several alien Green Lanterns); and human interest stories such as “The Amazing Transformation of Horace Tolliver” in which Hal accidentally turns a milquetoast office drone into a dynamic powerhouse.

Plus the ongoing romantic triangle in which Hal keeps trying to win boss Carol Ferris’s heart while she’s just as determined to win his other identity. All of Julius Schwartz’s superheroes had steady love interests — much as Iris used to nag Barry, she loved him — except Hal.

I look forward to the next volume which will enable me to wrap up the Silver Age in living color.

As a teen, I found Warren’s black and white comics magazines — Vampirella is the best known — interesting but too pricey for me to buy them more than occasionally. One of the most intriguing was Restin Dane, AKA The Rook, a time traveler whose TARDIS looked like a chess castle, hence the name. I recently jumped at the chance to pick up THE ROOK ARCHIVES Volume I by William B. DuBay, Budd Lewis, Jim Stenstrum and Luis Bermejo. My verdict? Not classic but interesting and engaging.

By the start of the book Restin is already a wealthy tech whiz with a robot butler, Manners, and a time machine. He heads back in time to the Alamo to save one of his ancestors from dying at the hands of those bloodthirsty Mexican troops — why yes, that part is unpleasantly racist — and winds up bouncing through a couple more adventures and bringing home his gunfighter grandfather, Bishop Dane, from the later 1800s. He has enemies — a vengeful widow, Granny Gadget, and would be master of time “Gat” Hawkins —and he has mysteries, such as why there’s an ancient alien base under his laboratory.

It’s good stuff, but it suffers from sloppy plotting. Restin can only stay in the past for a limited time or he ceases to exist; in fighting Gat he winds up staying too long and dissipates, slipping into limbo. And then he simply … gets out into the far future and makes his way home from there. WTF? The end result is, I’ll probably get the second volume and see if it improves but I’m not rushing.

SHADOW LIFE by Hiromi Goto and Ann Xu tells the story of Kumiko, an elderly Japanese-Canadian whose daughters have put her in some sort of assisted living facility. Finding the ordered life there insufferable, Kumiko runs away and tries living on her own. This leads to reconnecting with her long-lost love but Death has Kumio marked and isn’t taking no for an answer. I like the story but the art didn’t connect with me.

All rights to images remain with current holders. Green Lantern art by Gil Kane, Eerie cover by Enirch Torres

SUMMER KING, WINTER FOOL is one of the few Lisa Goldstein books I’ve never read and, as far as I can recall, her only secondary-world fantasy (most of her work is historical fantasy or contemporary). The protagonist is a nobleman exiled to a small village by his cousin’s scheming court machinations. There he discovers evidence in the vast, ancient library that he’s the rightful heir to the current king. When an invading force conquers the realm it appears that’s irrelevant — or does that make him the champion the kingdom needs?

This wasn’t A-list Goldstein but it’s certainly readable, and I do like some of the social details. Protagonist Val’s culture is hierarchical and climbing the ladder to a higher rung is everyone’s prime directive; the invaders are hierarchical but rising above your station is considered an insult to the gods. The magic, built on poetry, is strange and slightly chaotic and effective as Goldstein’s magic usually is.

THE MARTIANS: The True Story of An Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America by David Baron tells a story I already know but with enough detail to be worth reading. An Italian astronomer in the late 19th century sketches “channels” he’s seen on the Martian surface. In English that becomes “canals,” which implies canal-builders — and dilettante astronomer Percival Lowell became the prime advocate for the existence of intelligent life on Mars, insisting even in the face of contradictory evidence that the canals were real, ergo Martians.

This touched off a fascination with the Red Planet that still endures today, even though improved telescopes and scientific criticism killed the fantasy in the early 20th century. Baron does a good job on the details, which explain why so many authors such as Leigh Brackett and Edgar Rice Burroughs portrayed Mars as an older, dying world — by planetary creation theories, a smaller world would have formed out of swirling cosmic dust sooner than Earth and so be closer to extinction than we were.

I’m a fan of Paul Levitz’ long run on DC’s Legion of Super-Heroes but I was disappointed with UNFINISHED BUSINESS, a graphic novel he penned with artist Simon Fraser (no relation). A rabbi, a minister and a priest walk into a bar, only it turns out they’re all dead in a terrorist incident. The strangely mystical bartender informs them they have, yes, unfinished business so back to life they go … but for how long? It’s possible to make a story like this work, even though it’s been done many times, but Levitz didn’t pull it off.

MINOR THREATS: A Quick End to a Long Beginning by Patton Oswald, Jordan Blum and Scott Hepburn reminded me a little of Astro City in its take on D-list supervillains. Frankie Follis used to be Playtime, tech whiz sidekick to her supervillain mom (who’s now retired). Now, though, she’s trying to keep her nose clean enough she can see her little girl again (dad’s unenthused) and working at a bar for loser villains to make ends meet.

Then Stickman (think Joker) kills Kid Dusk, sidekick to the Insomniac. The latter vigilante is ruthless tearing through the underworld to find the killer, the other superheroes are locking villains up before Insomniac kills one of them. It’s a bad time to be a crook but hey, there’s a reward out on Stickman that could turn Frankie’s life around. Can she mold Mr. Pigeon, Brain Teaser and the others into a team that can take him down? This was a lot of fun

All rights to images remain with current holders.

Following DC’s Future Quest series mashing up most of the Hanna-Barbera 1960s cartoons, DC published 12 issues of Future Quest Presents showcasing various characters in solo adventures in the aftermath of the big crossover. Space Ghost gets a multi-part arc, followed by the Galaxy Trio (who were more interesting than I found them on TV), Birdman, Mightor, the Herculoids (the weakest arc) and Frankenstein Junior.

Without a running plot and with a variety of different creative teams, this doesn’t work as well as the original. Still, fun enough I’d have liked to see more (and some stories hint at the possibility) but apparently that’s it for this universe.

THE INVISIBLE KINGDOM is a comic book series by G. Willow Wilson and Christian Ward of which I recently read the first two collections, Walking the Path and Edge of Everything. It’s set within a small solar system dominated by a powerful church and an all-powerful Lux corporation (think Amazon for an equivalent). Protagonist Jess is a novice nun who discovers the church is in cahoots with Lux; Grix, a space captain who works freelance deliveries for Lux winds up allied with Jess against the sinister cabal.

This is a mixed bag. I honestly don’t care about the evil forces arrayed against our heroes, but the characters are strong enough to keep me reading — though the second book introduces too many supporting characters for me to care about any of them. I’ll be back for V3 though.

METAL MEN: Full Metal Jacket by Len Wein and Yildiray Cinar was DC’s attempt to revive “the robots who think they’re human” during the New 52 reboot (from the same Legends of Tomorrow anthology book as Metamorpho: Two Worlds, One Master). Surprisingly this was a lot of fun, Wein clearly knowing and liking the team.

As in the original series, the Metal Men are a group of self-aware robots who can shapeshift and use the natural abilities of their metal forms — Mercury can turn liquid, Lead is radiation proof, Tina (Platinum) can spin super-thin wire, etc. A sinister hacker, Nameless, is unleashing assorted robots built for the DOD to force Doc Magnus to turn his creations over to him: Nameless can access anything through the Internet but the responsometers that power the Metal Men enable them to operate independently off-line. He wants them under his control, by any means necessary.

The resulting arc is fun, though it suffers from the setting: the villain behind Nameless, Mother Machine, was apparently a big threat who’d already appeared in other New 52 books; as I never read them, the reveal did nothing for me. That ain’t Wein’s fault, though.

Art top to bottom by Evan Shaner, Riccardo Federici, Ross Andru and Francis J. Manapul. All rights to images remain with current holders.

Film critic Roger Ebert once observed that love stories are always a cliche; what makes them interesting is that the cast keeps changing. Case in point, the fake-dating rom-com RENT A BOYFRIEND by Gloria Chao. It’s obvious as soon as Chinese-American protagonist Chloe hires a fake boyfriend from Rent For Your ‘Rents (whatever your parents want for you, your fake boyfriend can fake it to a T) that she and Andrew will end up together. It’s still fascinating watching them navigate cultural issues, dysfunctional parents and their own personal issues to get to the HEA.

This was a fun romance and I give Chao points for not resolving the family dysfunction easily. I hate the “Oh, they really love their kid after all, let’s forget what awful parents they were” resolution (I’ve seen it a few times in movies and TV) and no, the story doesn’t hand-wave any of the problems. I’m not sure if Rent for Your ‘Rents makes sense (is one visit really going to satisfy your parents everything’s fine with your love life?) but thumbs up for this one.

Not so much SINGLE PLAYER by Tara Tai. The protagonist of this lesbian rom-com is a computer-game writer a gaming company hires to provide their soon-to-be-legendary next release with some romantic plotlines. That doesn’t sit well with the nonbinary game designer, who wants to avoid any such elements, and boy do these two find each other Obnoxious and Irritating … Sounded promising, but the first few chapters were so heavy into gaming talk and nerdy references that as a non-gamer I couldn’t get into it. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad concept — a lot of people do care passionately about gaming — but it’s not one that works for me.

As the climax of Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde is a blatant riff on King Kong — Bernie Casey as a now berserk Dr. Pride climbs the Watts Towers for a standoff with the cops before falling to his death — I decided to dig deeper and bought TRACKING KING KONG: A Hollywood Icon in World Culture by Cynthia Erb. The author looks at King Kong, it’s 1976 remake (Erb mentions that Peter Jackson is thinking about a remake of his own) and spinoffs such as King Kong vs. Godzilla and Jack Kirby’s Kamandi #7 (cover by Kirby). That makes me surprised by the stuff she doesn’t mention, such as the 1960s King Kong cartoon or the film Konga — though she’s not making an encyclopedic survey so I don’t think that’s a flaw in the book.

Erb argues that while King Kong was seen as a horror film at the time and a monster movie in the 1950s (after its rerelease inspired both American and Japanese kaiju films) it also has a romance element, a jungle-movie element and some similarities with director Merriam C. Cooper’s earlier documentaries. She also looks at the racial subtext, with a bunch of white adventurers invading the jungle and carrying a dark-skinned jungle dweller home in chains; his rampage through New York can be seen as embodying the dangerous black savage or a righteous pushback against the white oppressor

That material is fascinating but it bogs down in the heavy academese Erb writes in. A fair amount of space goes to discussing different academic interpretive schemes and the pros and cons of each; possibly this would have worked if I was in the same field as Erb … but I’m not. So a favorable review, but not an enthusiastic one.

Cover by Kirby. All rights to images remain with current holders.