Review: Aquaman: Death of a Prince trade paperback (DC Comics)

[This guest review comes from dedicated Aquaman fan Wayne Brooks; Wayne's local comics shop is AfterTime Comics in Alexandria, Virginia.]

Aquaman: Death of a Prince has three things going for it. One, it’s a really great introduction to the Aquaman universe (it even has his origin in it). Two, it reprints for the first time the greatest, darkest, and important era of Aquaman’s history. Three, and most important, it totally entertains.

The death of Arthur Jr. was, and still is, one of the most profound moments in Aquaman’s life. At the time the original stories were published (circa 1974-1977) no DC hero had experienced this kind of heartache. In Death of a Prince you will see Aquaman the hero and Aquaman the king, but at the story’s heart we find Aquaman the father, who experiences a parent’s worst nightmare.

The irony is, to some, Aquaman’s adventures are not that interesting. They see him (thanks to Super Friends and comic writers with limited imagination) as a second-to-third tier character, if that much. Bottom line, Aquaman is not cool. But every so often the comic book stars align and an editor selects an excellent creative team and proceeds to show what many fans knew from day one: when crafted with care, Aquaman can definitely have some excellent adventures and carry a book. Starting in 1974 Adventure Comics editor Joe Orlando did exactly that! If you are expecting the fish yappin’ boy scout from Super Friends or the “outrageous” hero from Cartoon Network’s Brave and the Bold you are going to be disappointed. What you get is a story that presents all the sides of Aquaman; you also get one hell of a great trade.

Death of a Prince collects Adventure Comics #435-437, 441-455, Aquaman #57-63. The entire creative talent involved is top tier. Paul (Justice Society and Legion Of Super-Heroes) Levitz, David (Iron Man) Michelinie, Steve (Aquaman) Skeates, Martin (Superman) Pasko, Gerry Conway (creator of Firestorm and long-time Justice League of America writer), and Paul Kupperberg handle the writing, plotting, and scripting. And there’s the art -- pure gold! We start with Mike (Legion Of Super-Heroes and Warlord) Grell, and then proceed with Jim (The Brave and the Bold) Aparo, and close with Don (Batman and Marvel Family stories) Newton. Now that’s quality.

One of the interesting aspects of Death of a Prince is several of the stories show the many different roles Aquaman has to play. In “Day in the Life” we see Aquaman, the man, just trying to take a day off. In the story “H in for Holocaust,” we see the King of Atlantis protecting his people. A number of stories feature Aquaman as a traditional super-hero. This all comes to a head in “And Death Before Dishonor,” where Aquaman is torn between his kingship and his role as a superhero; in the “Sea King in Exile” storyline, the Atlanteans de-throne Aquaman, accusing him of being an absentee ruler

I also appreciated that we see the entire Aqua-family throughout this book, including Mera, Garth (Aqualad, and later Tempest) and Tula (Aquagirl, often unknown to post-Crisis on Infinite Earths readers), Dr. Vulko, and Aquababy (even before he was known as Arthur Jr.). In “H is for Holocaust," we're also (re)introduced to one of Aquaman’s best unsung supporting characters, NATO General “Hair Trigger” Horgan. I'd love to see Geoff Johns bring this character back; his "ends justify the means" approach (even if that means harming the seas) is a perfect foil for Aquaman, and could even involve Aquaman in stories involving the Navy and Coast Guard.

Beginning with “Dark Destiny, Deadly Dreams” we experience Aquaman’s greatest failure, the death of Arthur Jr. at the hands of Black Manta. I remember my reaction when I read this as a kid . . . it shocked the hell out of me! In 1977, killing off supporting cast was still somewhat rare for DC (I know Alfred and Steve Trevor each died, but both came back). But to kill a child? Believe me, nobody saw that coming! I don't blame Aquaman for his rage when he goes after Black Manta, but justice and mercy prevails and Aquaman turns Manta over to the Navy. We’re left with this exchange between Aquaman and the Navy Captain:

Navy Captain: “…So I guess your job is over!”

Aquaman: “No, Captain, not quite yet. You see, I took off after The Black Manta so fast that I left a bit of unfinished business behind . . . one that could well prove to be the hardest task I’ve ever faced!”

“Oh Yeah? And what’s that?”

“Telling a mother that her only child . . . is dead.”

Now that’s chilling.

While the stories in this book were first rate and contain some gorgeous art by Grell and Newton, the reason this trade is gold is because of the fabulous art work of penciler/inker/letterer extraordinaire, Jim Aparo. From Aquaman clocking The Fisherman with a haymaker (I would love a poster of the cover of Adventure Comics #447) to ordering a school of attacking Men-O-War, to depicting a whale slamming into a submarine, in Mr. Aparo’s hands the Aqua-world never looked better. When Aparo drew a hero throwing a punch, mister, you felt it. In one panel Aquaman even clocks two goons with a hammerhead shark!

Aparo also never let you forget we’re underwater. From Aquaman’s flowing hair to his swimming at super-speed (sorry Flash, Arthur could give you a “run” for your money), Aparo drew the briny deep for all it’s worth. His art gave Arthur the presence, strength, and dignity some artist miss. From the passionate embrace of husband and wife to the sight of Aquaman hold the lifeless body of his son with pure rage on his face, Aparo shows us why he is one of comicdom’s greats. Fortunately books like this help to remind us how truly lucky we are to enjoy his work.

With Aquaman: Death of a Prince, we have a hero and a king who endures triumph and tragedy, and a trade well worth owning. This book shows the unsung versatility of Aquaman, and why he's one of comicdom’s greatest heroes. I strongly recommend it.

Thanks Wayne! And a shout out too to one of my favorite blogs, The Aquaman Shrine -- have you seen the swag they brought back from NYCC? More reviews coming up!

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Trade Perspectives: The Invisible But Flexible Zenith of Collecting

[This guest post from Kevin Pasquino, who blogs at Words Flow Like Chocolate, notes a singular impediment to waiting for the trade: Grant Morrison]

Here are three great reasons why I should make a complete and irrevocable switch to collected editions of comic books: convenience, economics and, my personal favorite, common sense.

Because, let’s be honest, there really isn’t a good reason for me to continue to make my weekly journey to my local comic shop: the best of the week’s releases will be collected in hardcover or trade paperback within six months, the price for the collection inevitably seems to be slightly cheaper than buying all of the individual issues, and it’s much more cozy and comfortable to curl up with a collected edition of some 168 pages than it is to read six individual issues of a comic book.

Yet I still find myself going to my shop every single Wednesday.

And the more I think about it, the more I blame Grant Morrison for my on-going addiction.

There are a lot of great writers currently doing monthly comic books. Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, Geoff Johns, Robert Kirkman and others all do terrific work, but I do my best not to double dip and I can usually resist the weekly temptation of their books. Captain America, Iron Man, The Flash and The Walking Dead can wait for the publication of the collections before they see my cash.

As a matter of fact, Kirkman’s The Walking Dead is perhaps the greatest monthly series ever when it comes to waiting for the trade: it is a completely self-contained story, internet spoilers are easy to avoid and the book is a tremendous treat to read in its collected form. And the Walking Dead Compendium? – That book is pure gold. After finishing the massively thick collection, it’s almost impossible not to want more. And yet I manage to avoid the monthly temptation because it reads so damn well in its collected form. On top of all that, I don’t care if the book sees any delays in its monthly schedule as long as the trades keep coming out.

With other creators I live in hope (and fear) that what they write is allowed to stand on its own without a massive company-wide crossover meddling with their stories. I have little interest in the characters outside of the books that my favorite writers are handling. So I don’t care if Captain America has a major role in next summer’s Civil Secret Siege War as long as I don't have to purchase some extraneous book in order to understand what's going on with Brubaker’s work.

But all of my self-restraint gets tossed out the window when it comes to Grant Morrison’s work. I find myself unable to resist his monthly books even though I know that I will eventually be buying them again in their collected form.

And the irony is that Grant Morrison’s work is among the most collected of modern comic book creators. A person may argue with the schedule of hardcovers vs. paperbacks or worry that all of his Batman stories may not be reprinted in the same format, but it’s almost guaranteed that everything he currently writes will be collected. It’s not as if I risk missing one of his stories by waiting six months.

So, why am I unable to wait? Why this sense of urgency when it comes to Morrison’s monthly comics?

Much of the appeal is because Morrison is currently creating a huge mosaic for Batman which will act as a springboard that other creators can build upon. Rather than just reboot the character (a la Wonder Woman) or send him walking across America (a la Superman), Morrison is revamping and energizing the character by methodically revealing the parts of a puzzle that he’s been developing for years. It’s incredibly entertaining to see all of the pieces as they come together rather than wait to see the completed picture.

Seeing Morrison’s ideas unfold in individual issues is like having a new Harry Potter movie debut every month: I love the sense of anticipation and mystery as I wait for each issue. I’m not sure where the story is going, but I trust that Morrison will deliver. And there’s also a sense of community created as I delve into the various annotations of the stories and read what other people think of the story. The same thrill isn't there when a collected edition is printed.

This is not to say that my addiction to Morrison does not have its negative aspects. Editorial errors and publication delays have made the past couple of months frustrating, especially when one story concludes before its tie-in mini-series is completed. Waiting for the trades would eliminate the annoyance that these snafus create.

It has also become apparent with the most recent issues and their need for various artists to assist in completing the stories that Morrison is writing his scripts right up to (and perhaps past) deadline. And if multiple artists are needed to finish an issue it’s not unreasonable to infer that the artists who did single-handedly complete their issues were working at a hurried pace. None of this suggests that what’s being produced is anyone’s best or most polished work.

But unless DC decides to create new pages for the collected editions (which they have done for Infinite Crisis and The Invisibles, so it’s not unheard of) what’s being currently being published is as good as it gets. Morrison’s next major work is supposed to be a multi-artist mini-series that explores DC’s Multiverse. I can only hope that the editor will have the scripts in-hand and the artists have the opportunity to be well ahead of schedule before the books are solicited.

Having said all of that, I still find myself hooked on Morrison’s work. When he doesn’t have a (supposedly) monthly book coming out, my enthusiasm for serialized stories dwindles. So I’m thrilled that he’s going to keep writing the series with Batman Inc.

And because of Morrison and his Batman stories, I find myself buying other books on my weekly trip. Because, let’s be honest, there’s no point in going to the comic shop just to buy one book.

So his work acts like a gateway drug to further comic book addiction. Jonah Hex is a terrific monthly book, Freedom Fighters gets a try-out for at least a couple of issues, Knight and Squire gets a look, both of Paul Levitz’ Legion books are being purchased, and others comics are also being bought.

And, completely shattering my resolution, I also find myself buying Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ Incognito even though I know that I’m going to eventually buy the collection. After all, if I’m going to buy Batman & Robin, The Return of Bruce Wayne and the upcoming Batman Inc. in individual issues and then in trades, I may as well break that rule for other creators as well.

I blame Grant Morrison for my lack of resolve. And, to be honest, it feels good.

[If you're not subscribed to the Collected Editions comment feed, you're missing great tips on how to wait-for-trade in style! Have a happy new year -- new reviews coming next week!]

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Trade Perspectives: Aalok Joshi remembers The Judas Contract

[Indian Collected Editions reader Aalok Joshi sent these reminisces from Mumbai before the announcement of the New Teen Titans Omnibus editions]

After reading of The New Teen Titans Archives Vol 1 I felt that I needed another does of that Marv Wolfman/George Perez goodness from the 1980s.  When I discovered that the remaining Archive editions are out of print and the Showcase Presents volumes haven't caught up yet, I decided to start where New Teen Titans Archives Vol 4 ends and the paperbacks begin, with New Teen Titans: Terra Incognito. Just as I was about to buy Terra Incognito, however, I chanced upon a copy of New Teen Titans: The Judas Contract, and I just knew I had to pick this up. Terra Incognito may come first, but I had such distinct memories of reading just parts of Judas Contract in single issues that I couldn't pass up an opportunity to read the whole story.

The oldest Teen Titans issue I remember buying is issue 54 of Tales of the Teen Titans, which had a Deathstroke on the front testifying in court with the words "The Trial of the Terminator" on the cover. The story title was "Blind Justice" where Slade is on trial for the murder of Tara Markov or the kidnapping of the Titans or something ... I was a kid then, and I forget easily.

What was odder is that it began with a simple courtroom trial, and ended with an attempt by the Changeling to prove that Slade is innocent of a crime committed while there's another Terminator on the prowl. Changeling goes so as to use Steve Dayton's Mento helmet to prove Slade's innocence, all so Slade doesn't go to jail so Changeling can kill Slade himself to avenge Terra. Twisted? You bet!

The issue that follows, "Shades of Grey," is probably the best coming of age stories I've ever read, and to a reader who had missed previous issues, made the past comparatively clearer. When I chanced upon a single issue with the words "The Judas Contract Part 1," I realized, "This is it." But that was the end of it. I couldn't find any more single issues, and trade collections weren't available, at least in India.

Nowadays, however, I was lucky enough to find Judas Contract just waiting in my local comics shop. The book collects New Teen Titans #39 and 40, and Tales of the Teen Titans #41-44 and Annual #3.

When I began reading these issues in order I was shocked. I had assumed that the fact that Tara Markov or Terra, whom the Titans brought into their midst recently, would be revealed as the traitor in the final issue of the arc. This is revealed to the Titans later in the arc but to the readers in the very first issue.

The first issue sees Kid Flash resigning, while Robin stepping out of the Batman's shadow and taking the first steps to becoming his own man. The following issues have little to do with the overall storyline, featuring the villain Brother Blood, but I'm glad they're collected here. As Wolfman and Perez didn't create this story necessarily intending it for a trade collection, much of it reads as an ongoing should, with plot threads dangling from every issue. Some get resolved over a period of time, while some do not, as was the fashion then.

Here are some other things I noticed while reading the volume:

- The story remains very compelling, despite that the reader knows about Terra's treachery from the beginning.

- No covers are included, and the chapter breaks are montage images. These days I think what we would see would be the covers.

- Part of me feels that they could have included a few issues more in Judas Contract, as I don't think they're going to publish a separate trade of "The Trial of The Terminator" [but with the Omnibus editions, you might get your wish. -- ed.]. They are charging $19.99 for newsprint paperback containing eight issues worth . . . come to think of it that's not as bad a price point as The Question or 52 Aftermath.

[If you're not subscribed to the Collected Editions comment feed, you're missing great tips on how to wait-for-trade in style! New reviews coming next week -- everyone be safe and well!]

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Guest Review Month 2010 prize drawing and thanks

A gigantic Collected Editions blog thank you to our 2010 guest month reviewers: Azn Badger, Andrew Belcastro, Paul Hicks, Aalok Joshi, Zach King, Damien Lockrow, Chris Marshall, Adam Noble, Kevin Pasquino, Tom Speelman, Tim, and Todd Wagener.

Due to the overwhelmingly wonderful response we received to the call for guest reviewers, some of these reviews you saw this past month, and some will be coming at you over the next few weeks and early next year. Great job everyone, and much thanks.

You can read a wide variety of Collected Editions guest reviews by following the "guest review" post tag.

As I mentioned in the Guest Review Month 2010 introductory post, this year's special event was sponsored by Simon & Schuster's new Pulp History series of illustrated books. Devil Dog and Shadow Knights are both in stores now, and as a thank you to the guest reviewers, Simon & Schuster is sending copies of each book to one lucky reviewer, drawn at random.

And the winner is .... (drumroll, please) ... Andrew Belcastro! Congratulations Andrew -- your books will be on their way.

Thanks again to all our guest reviewers. Coming up on Thursday, a first for Collected Editions as part of our fifth year celebration. Don't miss it!

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Review: Batman: Strange Apparitions trade paperback (DC Comics)

[This guest review comes from Zach King, who blogs about movies as The Cinema King]

The best thing that I can say about Batman: Strange Apparitions is that it's iconic in many senses of the word. The worst thing I can say for it is that the whole is greater than the sum of its collected parts.

I'm more than a little surprised that DC has allowed the Steve Englehart/Marshall Rogers run of Detective Comics to fade into the mists like the ghost of Hugo Strange which haunts the pages of Strange Apparitions. There's a sequel of sorts, Dark Detective, still in print, but it's nowhere near as entertaining or significant (or even critically lauded) as the original yet out-of-print Englehart/Rogers collaboration. (The two most prominent chapters -- "The Laughing Fish" and "Sign of the Joker" -- are more readily available, in Joker: The Greatest Stories Ever Told, among others.)

If you asked one hundred Bat-fans to list the creators who most "understood" Batman in their work, a great number would mention Englehart and Rogers; they probably wouldn't lead the pack due to more high-profile work by Frank Miller, Jeph Loeb, and Grant Morrison, but Englehart and Rogers recontextualized Batman for a new generation of readers. Eschewing the kitschy 1950s and the campy '60s styles, the 1977-78 run reintroduces Batman as a detective first, with a sharp intellect and an irresistible allure that women can't resist (unfortunately for Bat-purists, his romantic scenes have nary a Neal-Adams-hairy-love-god-chest in sight). Englehart and Rogers have practically been canonized by comics fans for "saving" Batman from what he had become.

I think, though, it's time to reevaluate the position of Strange Apparitions in the Bat-library. No, I'm not out to try to pin it down continuity-wise; that's a feat I'll leave to the readers, if they so desire (but I think it's "in" since Hugo Strange's unmasking of Batman got a reference in Arkham Reborn). As a movement, the Englehart/Rogers dynamic duo is undeniably important, with a moody overtone and genius-level detective at the forefront; as a collection, Strange Apparitions reads as incredibly uneven, with formulaic plots punctuated by moments of high characterization and inventive storytelling. It's almost as though the collection were written by two different people -- oh, wait, it was.

Bafflingly, Strange Apparitions is marketed on the backs of Englehart and Rogers, yet they're only together for six of the eleven issues collected; we also get two issues written by Len Wein (with Rogers illustrating) and three issues illustrated by Walt Simonson (with Englehart writing). Structurally, this is a little jarring. The Englehart/Simonson issues are essential to the narrative, but Simonson's pencils and paneling lack the polish that Rogers would bring; conversely, Wein's Clayface issues have nothing to do with the overarching storyline (except for ephemeral references to Silver St. Cloud) and seem like a less successful version of Alan Moore's work with the same character, but Rogers's work is fine and pristine.

The highlight of the collection, of course, is the six-issue run of Detective Comics that paired Englehart with Rogers. Long-time Bat-fans unfamiliar with Strange Apparitions will be surprised how much of it feels familiar, since it's been appropriated by other Batman titles left and right; Hugo Strange's unmasking and subsequent auctioning of Batman's identity, the presence of Rupert Thorne as Gotham's resident crime boss, and the infamous "laughing fish" Joker caper were all translated (sometimes verbatim) into the fantastic Batman: The Animated Series, and the "laughing fish" stories have been collected every time the Joker's name is invoked.

These are the greatest moments in the collection; these stories read quickly and delectably, with Englehart's breakneck pacing challenged only by the absolutely gorgeous artwork by Rogers that demands you linger over the panels even as the narrative demands you move forward.

But I came to Strange Apparitions expecting eleven issues of legendary greatness, and I just didn't get it. Aside from the issues that pair Englehart and Rogers with other creators, there are two other issues that just don't feel right. In separate issues featuring the Penguin and Deadshot, Englehart and Rogers both feel like they're phoning it in; the stories are more Batman '66 than Batman '89 with an emphasis on elaborate schemes and stagey fight scenes atop gigantic typewriters. These stories are so hit-and-miss that it's difficult to believe that it's the same team throughout the middle of the collection.

The only strength of these two issues is that Englehart seems to know that the main plotline is ultimately a one-and-done, so he sprinkles in tantalizing clues toward the larger story arc at work; the ghost of Hugo Strange stalks his murderer, and the Joker lurks ominously in the shadows, laughing maniacally but ultimately unseen.

Perhaps it is precisely these moments that make the better issues in the collection a success. The Joker's appearance in "The Laughing Fish" has been teased throughout Englehart's preceding seven issues, such that his grand appearance in the copyright commissioner's office can't help but feel epic (and the iconic full-length panel filed with "HAHAHAs" doesn't hurt, either).

The collection itself is bookended by a kind of filler, but the meat of the collection is itself bookended -- this time by the two best and brightest Englehart/Rogers stories (featuring Hugo Strange and the Joker). For these two stories alone, Strange Apparitions is worth the price of admission, because when the book is closed that's what the reader takes away: the high caliber of artistry displayed in those four chapters.

That's why I say that Strange Apparitions is not a perfect collection -- because there are only a few stories in it that are as delightful as advertised. But despite a few low-quality chapters, for a few shining moments Strange Apparitions touches that Platonic ideal of what a Batman comic book should be.

[Does not contain full covers, disappointingly. Printed on non-glossy paper. For these two reasons alone, Strange Apparitions deserves a new printing.]

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Review: Adventures of Superboy Vol. 1 hardcover (DC Comics)

[This guest review comes from Todd Wagener of Brown Bag Comics]

The Adventures of Superboy hardcover collection from DC came out recently and I was thrilled! I had only read a few of these stories due to the fact that DC has not reprinted them before now, and was really feeling quite antsy to get them. Superboy was a mainstay favorite of mine, due in no small part to the fact his adventures were more fun and bound by the mind of a child, and not by the grown-up standards placed on him as an adult in Superman. Also, Superboy helped found my favorite team ever, the Legion of Super-Heroes!

That said, this book should have been one of my most valued collections, but it fell short. DC has decided that the hardcovers of classic Golden Age and Silver Age material should be printed on newsprint instead of a nicer, glossier or slicker paper. I know that these are not DC Archives, which are quite wonderful on their own, but when you reprint material that is available only in books from the 1940s and has not been seen in a modern reprint collection, you have a duty to make the presentation as nice as possible.

After all, DC is charging $39.99 for this book, and for only $10 more, it could have been an Archive instead. I, for one, would have been happy to purchase it as a DC Archive for $50, but that wasn't to be. Heck, if you were going to put it on low quality paper, why didn't DC print it as a DC Showcase like it was initially going to be? You must give the consumer quality if you are going to charge a quality price.

Now for the other drawback to this book: the binding is so tight that actual panels are obfuscated beyond readability! Knowing that Golden Age pages were larger than Silver Age or certainly Modern Age pages, DC should have decided to shrink the images slightly to avoid putting panels within .75 of an inch of the binding. As it is, most of the time you read Adventures of Superboy, you have to break the spine to read the words of important dialogue. In fact, it seems the writers of Superboy at the time had an edict that the third panel on a page was the primary dialogue/exposition panel and thus, all important data is in that panel.

I normally read my books and enjoy them, but I treat them like the library books I borrowed from the library when I was a kid and was told to treat them gently since they were not mine! So now as I have been purchasing these hardcovers, it really hurts me to break the binding or even push it to the limit just to read the story. I value my hardcovers just like I value my individual comics as more than just reading material, but rather as collectibles that others will want to buy or trade for. And who wants to buy books that aren't neat and have the spine looking like someone who got forty lashes!

The stories are dated but fun, and I liked the fact that they are presented in order from the first appearance in More Fun Comics #101 up until the change in title to Adventure Comics - all from the Golden Age. These are not the more science-fiction-y, young Superman versus young Lex Luthor-type Superboy stories that most readers are familiar with from the Silver Age. In these, the writers make a specific point of how a young Clark Kent showed morals and good upbringing to a generation of readers long before Fredric Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent! The style of these stories was always to entertain first, and provide moral/ethical leadership second. Personally, I enjoyed seeing Superboy play along to help a man pose as Santa Claus to give unfortunate children gifts -- it's a classic, timeless concept that many artists and writers have re-used over the past sixty-plus years.

In 2010, these kinds of stories might even seem naive, but in 1945 the goal was to teach children to be civil and not to judge people based on race, creed, or financial circumstances. In the story "Happy Birthday," for instance, Clark is going to a schoolmate's birthday party that has apparently been ruined because her father has been questioned for a crime and exonerated -- but this causes none of her schoolmates to come to the party except for Clark. Superboy decides to make this right by seeking out the inspector in charge of the case and taking him back to the classmate's houses to tell them that the girl's father was questioned by mistake and the real robber was already apprehended. All of the mothers call one another to make sure that the classmates go to the party. To top it off, the day is also Clark's unofficial birthday. Sweetly amusing, that is why this book is such a gem: it shows the distinct difference in society's innocence between 1945 to today.

Also, you won't find any villains or even characters that populated the Silver Age Superboy, with the notable exception of a very young Perry White. Perry makes an appearance in "Perry White, Cub Reporter" (originally from Adventure Comics #120). You see the future-editor of the Daily Planet get his job at the Daily Planet and how a young Clark Kent helped him do so, even though the story never actually became part of DC continuity (though it is echoed in the current Smallville mythos -- ed). Even more notable is that, though Perry is recognizable, this early Superboy's parents in this series aren't the Ma and Pa Kent we're so used to.

I can't really say I had favorite stories here, but it is a favorite era of mine. The 1930s and 1940s were a better time to be an American and to be a kid. This is a time when kids played on the river on homemade rafts and people having to go to the sheriff instead of phoning him. It's the time when doctors made housecalls and might even have performed surgery on the kitchen table, as shown in "Weather, Hurricane!" from Adventure Comics #106. There's stories here of kids making toys to sell for money for an operation in "Toytown, U.S.A." from Adventure Comics #104 and a story about careless driving in "Super Safety First" from Adventure Comics #112. That story uses the headline "Careless Driving Kills And Maims More Than War," which is interesting since it was published in 1947!

As for the issues included in this volume, they include all of the Superboy stories from More Fun Comics #101-107 and Adventure Comics #103-121. This covers almost three years of stories from DC's archives. And the work of such writers as Jerry Siegel, Bill Finger and Don Cameron along with the art of Joe Shuster, John Sikela, George Roussos and J. Winslow Mortimer bring to life this wonderful time. But the cover by Michael Cho, while evoking the time, does not really help "sell" the collection to newer readers. At a time when groundbreaking covers by Alex Ross are being done for other collections, DC used a light-hued cover of Superboy carrying a wagon with a boy, a girl and a dog in it. The color palette is a little weak, and will look washed out on the book shelf alongside your copies of the current Blackest Night collection or Absolute Crisis on Infinite Earths volume.

Nonetheless, this is a book made for fans to love and admire the early work of the World's Greatest Hero. Event comics, in my opinion, are short-term excitement, but good writing is a long-term prize. The Adventures Of Superboy is that long-term prize to be read, enjoyed and re-read again for years to come.

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Review: Savage She-Hulk trade paperback (Marvel Comics)

[This guest review comes from Adam Noble]

Marvel has been putting on a good show lately of branding themselves as the lady-friendlier of the Big Two Superhero Companies, with its recent releases spotlighting female characters (the Rescue, Namora, Sif, etc. one-shots, the awkwardly named mini-series Her-oes), female independent comics creators (Girl Comics) and the upcoming Women of Marvel Omnibus. Nearly all solid efforts, some of which I've really enjoyed (Kelly Sue DeConnick is poised to become a recognized A-List writer with her upcoming run on the upcoming supervillain prison comic Osborn, and it's a conferral that's long overdue).

However, I have to confess there's a serious lack of female characters at Marvel that I'm all that interested in reading about regularly. There's lots of brooding ladies (this is Marvel, after all), eternally patient mother-sidekicks (looking at you, Sue), women who seem to bring about the apocalypse on a semi-regular basis (I wouldn't get too attached to Hope or her Generation, everybody). There's a lack of fun, funny, fully-realized distaff characters at either DC or Marvel these days. I mean, U-Go Girl's still dead, Kitty Pryde's a mute ghost and Jessica Jones has been doing the Jodie Foster "Stay away from my child" thing for the past couple of years, right?

The very reason that Jessica "The Sensational She-Hulk and Attorney-at-Law" Walters made for such a great character and ongoing title when written in the 1980s by John Byrne and again in the 2000s by Dan Slott was that both writers realized that the character's very essence has comedy gold built into it ("She's like the Incredible, Rampaging Hulk... but more ladylike!"). Slott and Byrne (and Jen) broke the third wall and made for great meta-commentary on the silliness of superhero comics. Basically, she's the only Marvel character I can see fitting in seamlessly with the Giffen/DeMatteis-era Justice League. That should tell you everything you need to know right there.

But that was then, back when mainstream in-universe superhero comics were permitted to be at all silly. Now I'm a pretty huge Fred Van Lente fan -- anybody who can write a cartoon primer to almost all philosophical thought ever (Action Philosophers) as well as a great all-ages Wolverine/Kitty Pryde team-up book (Wolverine: First Class) is aces. So it was pretty exciting news when his She-Hulk miniseries was announced initially -- it sounded like a great pairing of character and writer. Surely Van Lente could make liberal use of Walters' sense of humour and intelligence and bring us another all-time great She-Hulk story?

Except... this wasn't Jen Walters? It was apparently some alternate future daughter of the Hulk and... Thundra? I guess? My knowledge of the Hulk and his foes are pretty much limited to the ones who've appeared in the movies, or who have been mentioned in other Marvel Universe titles, so I had no idea what Thundra's deal was.

So what of the trade itself? The All-New Savage She-Hulk (TANSSH?) is written by Van Lente with art by four or five boilerplate superhero artists who draw with stiff anatomy and bland faces. Van Lente pulls off a few clever flourishes, including having TANSSH, or Lyra, travel back in time to modern-day Marvel NYC armed with a feminist-lingo-spouting reprogrammed Tamagotchi as her sidekick on a quest for the DNA (ahem) of the world's greatest "hero" Norman Osborn (then masquerading as good guy Iron Patriot during the utterly uninteresting status-quossover Dark Reign).

Lyra's grim quest to overcome the edicts of a bleak alternate world is given a shot of lightness, mercifully, when Jennifer Walters shows up and helps convince her that Osborn's team of Dark Avengers are Not Okay Dudes and Lyra totally should not have carnal knowledge of the ex-Green Goblin. Despite the fact that Lyra was created by typically fun-loving and inventive writer Jeff Parker, Lyra is basically Green Lady Cable, so it's nice that Jen is able to inject bring make with some jokes. Despite the revelation that Lyra actually loses her strength when she gets mad, the concept isn't explored to its full ironic potential. The extent to which this superpower demonstrates itself is limited to Lyra using words like "supple" and "flow" and the phrase "bend like a reed" while deploying Zen Future Kung-Fu against the Dark Avengers.

There's a back-up story featuring the second appearance of Lyra written by Paul Tobin, but it's odd that her aforementioned first appearance by Jeff Parker (Hulk: Raging Thunder) isn't included here, especially since it's heavily referenced in the roundtable discussion between Parker, Tobin and Van Lente.

The following year I was once again optimistic when Marvel published a sequel mini-series written by Parker and illustrated by Salva Espin (Wolverine: First Class, Exiles), one of the best superhero artists working today. Alas, the trade paperback's title is at least as convoluted as the plot: Hulk: Fall of the Hulks: The Savage She-Hulks. The first half of the TPB re-prints the Van Lente-written backups featuring Lyra working for an interdimensional patrol agency fighting leftover villains from Seven Soldiers of Victory (seriously!) and low-powered female versions of Hulk enemies. It is not very distinctive or good, and leads directly, albeit awkwardly, into the "Fall of the Hulks" crossover.

If you've been reading this crossover this book might make sense to you, but as I said, I am not a huge Hulk fan, particularly when the title is being masterminded by a latter-day Jeph Loeb. So I enjoyed looking at Espin's art here (until it disappeared during a She-Hulk fight with an army of Red Hulks to replaced by a bad manga imitation style). The story itself is utter confusing nonsense – something about a Red She-Hulk, who according to Wikipedia, is [spoiler redacted -- ed.] Is there any Hulk supporting character who isn't themselves a monster at this point? And if I'm right and that's the case, doesn't that defeat the original point of the Hulk's outsider status? But I digress.

There's a token attempt throughout H:FOFH:TSSH by Parker to tie up Lyra's conflicted relationship with her mother, but it's a subplot that belongs in a better/less crossover-ridden book.

From what I can tell, the Hulk line of comics seem to be in a bit of chaos despite this crossover. In addition to Incredible [green] Hulks (yes, plural) and [singular, red] Hulk there's an ongoing She-Hulks title debuting in November written not by any of the writers mentioned above, but Harrison Wilcox, a newcomer to comics, but a veteran writer of TV's Heroes.

The teaming of Lyra and Jen Walters still has terrific potential and if the pair can manage to steer clear of crossovers and if Wilcox can make the odd-couple/surrogate-mother dynamic work we might see Savage She-Hulk Lyra become a breath of fresh air in the Marvel Universe and some newfound adult responsibility for Sensational She-Hulk Jen Walters. My advice for fairweather She-Hulk fans like myself? Wait and see how the reviews for the new ongoing turn out, then maybe go back and pick up these trades to fill you in on who exactly the redheaded She-Hulk from beyond the future is.

Otherwise, hang tight for the new John Byrne run reprints coming in early 2011. Now that's some girl power.

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Uncollected Editions #1 - The Atlantis Chronicles

[The first in a new series of posts called "Uncollected Editions" by Paul "Hix" Hicks]

Welcome to "Uncollected Editions," the first of what I hope will be an infinite series (at least six or so) where I highlight the gold that has never made the leap from staples to spine. I might even highlight some of the more tarnished stuff too, as even ordinary stories can be significant.

Exactly twenty years ago there was a mini-series (or was it a semi-maxi-series?) called The Atlantis Chronicles. There were seven issues, all running around forty-four pages, very few ads on quality paper-stock. It was written by Peter David and featured the sublime work of a single artist, Spain’s Esteban Maroto.

This comic stood apart from almost all of DC’s output at the time and since, in that it was a multi-generational fantasy epic. The only comics I can think of that are remotely similar are Age of Bronze and Camelot 3000. The premise for the book is it is an adaptation of the archeologically recovered manuscripts written by the various royally appointed chroniclers of Atlantis. This book follows seven generations of Atlanteans and covers thousands of years.

The story begins with Atlanteans living on the surface, packing lasers while the rest of the planet has spears. Their superior technology is a major impetus for the series of tragedies to come, as the king, Orin want to share the benefits of their knowledge and resources. His blond-haired brother Shalako, an isolationist, has major issues with rational, technological ways and believes in the power of the gods. The book shows us, without a doubt, that the power of the gods is very real and this sets up one of the themes of the book -– faith versus science.

Orin is a very modern character with a single wife in contrast to Shalako and his harem. Both brothers are arrogant and their conflict starts from Orin’s contempt for religion and Shalako’s conviction that science offends his gods. A skull-shaped speck in the heavens is the first hint of impending doom for the peoples of Atlantis. The reader is left wondering if the rapidly growing meteor is coming because Orin has offended the gods, or because Shalako is demanding their punishment of the secular king. Shalako’s fanaticism leads to him taking the next big step and reaching out to the dark gods for assistance.

Trouble with the locals leads to Orin commissioning a protective dome over the main city of Atlantis -– Poseidonis. Shalako’s subsequent interference in a peace negotiation with the neighbouring tribes leads to the death of Orin’s most trusted advisor and to Orin's harsh retaliation against the natives. Here’s the big theme emerging -– brother against brother. While possibly highly offensive to the sky gods, this dome is to keep out the hostile tribes, but it also serves as Poeidonis’ salvation when the meteor hits the ocean and sinks the known world. I don’t want to keep telling you the plot, but I am especially impressed with the bleak picture Peter David paints of what it must be like to go from living in the sunshine, to suddenly being trapped in a dome at the bottom of the ocean surrounded by decimation.

There is a rotation of narrators as the Chroniclers live and die, and this provides contrasting voices to the narrative. The first Chronicler is a staunch supporter of the fanatical Shalako, the second is a wannabe poet, third is a young woman obsessed with the gossip of the court, and so on. Some are unreliable, some are biased and some are salacious.

In a wonderfully organic way, Peter David shows the development of Atlantis and the adaptation (some technological and some magical) required of the survivors
Along the way many of the frequently asked questions about Atlantis in the DC Universe get some natural answers:

* How did they come to breath underwater?
* What about the mermaid-type Atlanteans?
* How does this all fit in with DC’s earlier Arion stories of Atlantis?
* What about the Idyllists (Aqualad’s people)?
* Where does telepathic communication with sea-life come from?
* Why is it bad to have blond hair?

The book isn’t a dry (heh) and clinical work, however; it’s packed full of human foibles and epic drama; there’s nudity, rape, violence, murder, betrayal, redemption all on show, but never gratuitous. It’s like AMC meets Shakespeare.

Maroto just rocks on the art, as his characters are all easily recognisable, even as they grow from children to old men and women. His strength in making the character’s faces "act" sells every bit of drama that David is going for. His architecture, fashion, interiors and sea-life are all wonderfully done, making the book a fantasy that you can believe in.

The book takes era-sized leaps to show the Atlantean response to the surface world and their impact on ancient Greece and Egypt. Had this story been written today, I’m sure we would have seen cheesy cameos by Black Adam and Dr Fate, but this book shows that the expanse of history is far greater than just some touchstone moments with familiar characters. Eminently suited to being read in a single volume, Atlantis Chronicles had varying chapter lengths within the issues and stories ended at the right moment, rather than fitting the page count available.

The book ends with Peter David giving you everything you need to know about Arthur Curry’s parentage and the details of his abandonment on Mercy reef. This was setting up his Aquaman ongoing series, which commenced with the Aquaman: Time and Tide Year One-esque mini series. The brother vs. brother theme is one that works very effectively in Aquaman lore but don’t be put off by that continuation, as The Atlantis Chronicles can be enjoyed completely independently of what comes after. It is also clearly superior to David’s Aquaman work, and every other comic I’ve ever read by him (even Young Justice? -- ed.).

I don’t know Peter David personally; I know he’s prone to strong opinions but I don’t know if he’s prone to bitterness. If I was him I would be incredibly bitter that DC never collected this book. At the time it was probably seen as a huge risk to put out a 300-page book when the sales weren’t guaranteed. Now, any buzz about this title is long dead. Original series editor Bob Greenberger was long associated with DC’s collected editions area and I can’t imagine he didn’t try to get it collected. I’m certain DC has missed out on a lot of sales from this decision.

These issues are some of the first I grab when an outsider expresses an interest in comics, right up there with Batman: Year One and Watchmen. This book could have made David and Maroto names akin to Morrison and Quitely, Millar and Jansen, Moore and Gibbons even. DC should have been releasing the Twentieth Anniversary Absolute edition this year -- this book was meant to have a significant legacy and that was very sadly stillborn.

I highly recommend that you find these issues if you can. Read ‘em, share ‘em, pass ‘em to your children.

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Review: Chicken and Plums graphic novel (Pantheon)

[Guest review by Tom Speelman]

Marjane Satrapi is, to me, the new Alan Moore. Though she’s only been around comics for a decade, she has produced a story of such monumental achievement in her two-part graphic novel memoir Persepolis, that any other work she publishes will be judged based on that. That’s a real shame, because Chicken With Plums is a fantastic book, and one that deserves to be noticed.


Satrapi is back in the well of biography, but not her own story, although she does have a cameo at the end; instead, this is the story of her great-uncle, Nassar Ali Khan, a renowned tar player in Tehran, Iran in the 1950s.


What is a "tar?" Well, it’s hard to say really; it looks like an elongated lute mixed with a guitar and sounds like a mix of a banjo and a violin. I’m listening to tar music as I write this and it’s fascinating. If you look it up, the tar’s an instrument with much cultural history in the Middle East.


[Contains spoilers]


The book is structured in an unconventional manner. At the beginning, in 1958, Nasser, after encountering a woman on the street (the full importance of this isn’t revealed until the end) heads to a music shop and tries several tars out over a period of a month to replace the one broken by his wife. Eventually he journeys to the city of Mashad and buys a tar said to be the best in the world. He goes home, plays it, and through a beautiful sequence, the music is ruined for him and to quote the text itself, “Since no other tar could give him the pleasure of playing, Nassar Ali Khan decided to die.” The next page? A shot of his funeral. 


That’s it. We know how it ends. But it’s not over; Satrapi tells us that he died eight days later after the events of the opening. But we see through Satrapi’s gorgeous black-and-white pencil-and-brush-ink artwork that Nassar Ali is flashing back and forth between his past, his present, and his dreams, and it’s utterly captivating to read.


The story is told mostly in flashback, and a reader’s only way of distinguishing between the two is that the panels in the flashback sequences have dark backgrounds, whereas the present-day ones do not. There are a lot of these flashbacks: some are funny, some are strange, and a lot are tragic. A very profound sequence is the one in which his wife snaps at him for not picking up his son from school and, enraged, breaks his tar. The panel of her breaking the instrument over her knee while angrily proclaiming “There!” is so stark, it gives you a jolt.


The title of the book is a reference to Nassar’s favorite food, but when his wife makes it in hopes of reconciliation, he spits it out in disgust. This incident gives you just the tip of the iceberg on just how much animosity there is in their relationship and it’s heartbreaking to watch their love unfold with such promise but soon fade away. 


This is a book that drives home the reality and finality of death, as well as that sense of the unknown that always lurks about the subject. It’s no wonder Satrapi won the Best Album award at the Angoulême International Comics Festival in 2005. She is a master of the comics form and if Persepolis suggested it, Chicken with Plums proves it.

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Review: Kill Your Boyfriend graphic novel (Vertigo/DC Comics)

[This guest review comes from Zach King, who blogs about movies as The Cinema King]

I was ecstatic when I took a trip out west and by serendipty found a copy of Grant Morrison's out-of-print Kill Your Boyfriend on the dusty shelves of an LCS that looked halfway toward going out of business. The shelves were full of old hard-to-find books that Amazon users sell for upwards of $90, but Kill Your Boyfriend jumped out as one of the last Morrison books I needed to complete my collection (all I need at this point is for The New Adventures of Hitler to be reprinted).

After reading Kill Your Boyfriend, I was surprised that it's been allowed to go out of print, especially now that Morrison's an undeniable A-lister in the comic world. It's not that Kill Your Boyfriend is touted as one of Morrison's greatest works -- it's that, as a simultaneous distillation and reexamination of all his major early themes, it very well ought to be.

In Kill Your Boyfriend, we're introduced to our unnamed protagonists, commonly referred to as (simply) The Girl and The Boy. The Girl, bored with the rote mundane life she's been given, runs away from home and joins up with The Boy, a local hooligang with an anarchist bent. After learning of The Girl's disappointing relationship with her dorky boyfriend Paul, The Boy takes it upon himself to kill Paul, an act which sparks a wild rampage of sex, drugs, and countercultural violence -- in other words, exactly what one would expect from Grant Morrison.

Even without reading the 1995 copyright date, one can tell that Kill Your Boyfriend is very clearly early Morrison; its emphasis on anarchy and a subterranean countercultural movement sets it apart from Morrison's recent emphasis on mythos and superhero deconstructionism in Final Crisis and Batman. The Boy is a classic distillation of Morrison's "last angry man" figure, with a chip on his shoulder and a loaded gun in his jacket pocket; despite his violent nature, there's something so disarmingly charming about The Boy that it's a wonder Johnny Depp hasn't played him in a movie yet. In all honesty, Kill Your Boyfriend is as close to a screenplay as Morrison's written; gleeful smash cuts and fourth-wall shattering monologues from The Girl seem ready for the silver screen -- which, hopefully, might spark the book back into print circulation. (Seriously, DC: option this property next.)

Morrison's script is tight as always, but any comic book literati knows that a good script isn't entirely good if it's not backed up by a decent illustrator. Philip Bond -- not a name that gets tossed around a lot, unless you're reading Tank Girl (who gets a visual shout-out here in the character of Billy) or other similarly eclectic reads -- creates a perfectly off-kilter atmosphere throughout, his style a blend between the cartoonish realism of Chaz Truog and the sketchy edges of Frank Quitely. Everything feels normal, but the art has a nice tilt to it that puts just the right amount of unrealism on top of the derailing outlandishness of the story. It's a credit to Bond that The Girl's in-panel narration to the audience feels perfectly natural, like a moment out of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, without losing the subconscious surprise of a similar moment in Morrison's first-rate Animal Man series.

There's a fun parallel invoked with the Dionysian myth, but what's more interesting about Kill Your Boyfriend is that Morrison groupies won't help but read the book as an odd kind of interrogation of The Invisibles, Morrison's seven-volume magnum opus. Like The Invisibles, Kill Your Boyfriend follows a ragtag group in their fight against the establishment, but here the establishment is less markedly evil. Sure, Paul is more interested in sci-fi/fantasy porn than in The Girl, and policemen steal crematory urns for use as ashtrays -- but we don't have any time-bending chaos lords or beetle-women pulling the strings. Consequently, it's a little more difficult to slap down a "good guys/bad guys" label on any of it.

Compounding the connection to The Invisibles, the bus full of anarchic artists (or are they artistic anarchists?) is filled with characters who seem straight out Morrison's other work; white-haired Cleverly visually recalls the renegade Invisible John-A-Dreams, and the portly homosexual Fudge might as well be the Marquis de Sade (I'd have to reread The Invisibles to see if it's possible that Fudge is the Marquis; knowing Morrison, I wouldn't be surprised if he is, and I'd be disappointed if he weren't). What's more, The Girl dolls herself up like Lord Fanny, remarking of her red dress and blonde wig, "I feel like a transvestite."

But appearances can be deceiving. Kill Your Boyfriend is filled with people who are not what they pretend to be: The Girl's demure schoolgirl image conceals a hungry sexual appetite, while Paul's sexual prudery masks his own perverse addiction to pornography; policemen steal human remains, high-ranking political officials wear feminine undergarments beneath their trenchcoats, and the bus full of anarchists turns out to be little more than self-indulgent aspirants who are more interested in a government grant for the arts than in real acts of destruction, an act that turns The Boy's stomach. The climax at the Blackpool Tower explodes off the page (quite literally, at one moment) with a stunning apex reached when The Girl aims a gun directly at the reader. It's a climax that ultimately asks, "Is there really anything to fight against? Is it worth it to fight for fighting's sake?"

And the answer comes back, resoundingly, "Yes, of course it's bloody well worth it!" (Hey, it's still a Morrison comic, after all.) There's a one-page epilogue which explains the fate of The Girl with Morrison's classic tongue-in-cheek nature, and while she never tells us directly what's become of her, she remarks (with what I can't believe Bond didn't pencil as a wink), "You know the rest." Bond's paneling and deft depiction of facial expression (never more prominent here and in the Blackpool scene) tells us all we need to know; sometimes, all it takes to shake up the system is something as simple as killing your boyfriend. The rest, they say, is easy.

Worth far more than the $5.99 cover charge, Kill Your Boyfriend feels a lot longer than the scant 56 pages it runs. It's a work that you'll want to reread as soon as you've concluded -- not for fear that you've missed something or might pick up on a new theme, but because it's such a fun ride that it's worth reliving -- provided you can find a copy. Just don't do anything rash to get it.

Or maybe, do.

[Contains an afterword by Morrison and a fold-it-yourself origami fortune teller. Printed on semi-glossy paper.]

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Review: The Atomic Knights hardcover (DC Comics)

[This review comes from Todd Wagener of Brown Bag Comics]

Let's talk about the Silver Age of comics and the recent spate of collections from that time-period, as well as the Golden Age. DC Comics has finally decided that their vaults are no place for some of the best comics produced during the 1940s, '50s and 60s, so they have brought them out into the light of day and cleaned them up for everyone to consume. That is why we have gotten collections of the earliest Superboy stories, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon's Newsboy Legion, and now this, Atomic Knights!

After being teased for the last decade that DC would finally collect the sixteen stories from John Broome and Murphy Anderson's premiere team, Atomic Knights, DC finally released this in hardcover. Of course, we had expected them to collect it in the Showcase Presents format, along with the Hercules Unbound stories and the like for The Great War collection that was promised years ago, but instead they decided to concentrate on just presenting the tales of Gardner Grayle and the gang from 1960 through 1964 appearances in Strange Adventures (a wonderful anthology that DC is presenting from the early days in a Showcase Presents volume before the Knights were introduced). The issues we have in this volume are Strange Adventures #117, 120, 123, 126, 129, 132, 135, 138, 141, 144, 147, 150, 153, 156 and 160.

In the early 1960s, most Americans feared nuclear holocaust, especially after the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis. This fear forms the basis of Broome and Anderson's Atomic Knights stories. In the days after the Great War, after the last H-Bomb exploded and left humanity without adequate food, water or shelter, the book finds Gardner Grayle and schoolteacher Douglas Herald protected from a bomb attack by six suits of medieval armor. Finding that all technological weapons are useless against these irradiated suits of armor, Gardner decides to form a band of knights to foil the despotic local leader, The Black Baron. This became the Knights primary mission -- fighting ruthless despots throughout America to get communities back on their feet and thriving.

Grayle completes the Knights with Hollis and Wayne Hobard, two farmers, a scientist named Bryndon (science caused the weapons of the Great War, so scientists are for the most part considered evil here except Bryndon), and finally Marene, Douglas's sister. Marene is used as a backup in most stories, since this was the 1960s and women were treated not truly as equals especially in the military, so Broome made a point of catagorizing the sixth suit being too small for a man to use.

The villains of the story include the reoccurring Khagan of Atlantis, and then one-off appearances by cavemen from below New York City, electrical giants created from mutant brains, mutated plants that walk, aliens looking to be our overlords, mole-men (my favorite because they can only fight you at night), a King of New Orleans who has his city hypnotized, and the marauding Wild Boys. One of my favorite parts was when the Atomic Knights, while fending off an attack by Khagan, find a crashed spaceship containing giant dalmations, which they (naturally) harness to use as horses.

Basically, these are great stories and should be appreciated by everyone who reads them. My review would be all positive except for two things: the paper quality and the use of bad art for the cover. The lower quality of paper is to DC's shame: they can do trade paperbacks in a slicker quality and even make other hardcovers use the good stuff (Starman Omnibus), but they use newsprint for a book that collects these timeless classics. At $39.99 for this volume, I'd think some of that money could go toward paper that's not so cheap!

My other complaint about the bad art is not a dig at the wonderful Murphy Anderson. No, it is a dig at the fact they used a small image of Gardner on a dalmatian and blew it up to 500 times its original size for the back cover. And instead of the wonderful line-work of Anderson, you get huge lines that make the image look like a poor imitation of his work instead. DC could have used images from other panels or maybe even the cover of Strange Adventures #144 with the Knights and those wonderful Mole-Men. Heck, if they had to, DC could have used art from someone current as a re-interpretation. But instead, they used that one poorly reprinted panel to represent some of the best sci-fi stories that ever appeared in comics.



Overall, I can honestly say that this Atomic Knights volume is one of my favorite books that DC has produced. My memories of these stories are great and seeing them in this one book made me so happy, I have read it three times since I got it in August. Paper and cover aside, this is a wise investment as well as an interesting one.

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Review: Dark Avengers Vol. 1: Assemble hardcover/paperback (Marvel Comics)

[This guest review comes from fellow blogger The Azn Badger]

Let it be known folks: I am not a reader of “team books.” I find them clunky, muddled, and more often than not, inaccessible due to the inevitable inclusion of a team member or two whose continuity I am completely unfamiliar with. (That’s right, I’m looking at you Metamorpho and Tasmanian Devil . . .)

In recent years though, I’ve run across several team books that have not only held my interest, but have proven to be truly excellent reads throughout -- Marvel’s Thunderbolts and Dark Avengers, and DC’s Secret Six, for instance. All three have two elements common among them: They’re all relatively new series, and all of them involve teams that are comprised of villains and/or anti-heroes. I suppose that, given my massive collection of Punisher and Wolverine comics, I probably should’ve seen that coming . . .

That being said, let’s take a closer look at Dark Avenger’s first story arc, Assemble.

Essentially serving as the first major story beat under Marvel’s recently wrapped company-wide storyline, "Dark Reign," Assemble serves as the origin story for the Dark Avengers.

Who are the Dark Avengers? Well, they’re basically the normal Avengers, but DARK.

Just kidding.

The Dark Avengers are a team of super villains, “assembled” by head of H.A.M.M.E.R. (presently S.H.I.E.L.D.), former-Green Goblin and media/political darling Norman Osborn. Their role in the Marvel Universe is to serve as the public face of Osborn’s regime. On the outside, they don the costumes and titles of recognizable and time-honored heroes, meaning Venom is now “Spider-Man,” and Wolverine’s spiteful, vengeful, bisexual, over-exposed and Punisher-killing son, Daken, is now masquerading as “Wolverine” himself.

(Sorry, I still haven’t quite forgiven Daken for the whole “chopping the Punisher to pieces” thing. For the record, though, that was an awesome fight , well worth reading for any fans of John Romita Jr’s art, or brutally violent scenes of superhero violence.)

The whole point of the Dark Avengers is that, their actions -- however beneficial to the people of Earth -- ultimately adhere to the will and nefarious machinations of Norman Osborn.

Writer Brian Michael Bendis manages to cover a lot of ground in this first story arc, all while managing to keep continuity neophytes up to date (including me). In order, we get the obligatory “how they all came together” sequence, immediately followed by the team’s first field deployment. Being as this is a book about villains masquerading as heroes, it’s only appropriate that the Dark Avenger’s first mission is to rescue Dr. Doom, a member of Norman Osborn’s recently installed string-pulling Cabal organization, from the wrath of the vengeful time-traveling sorceress Morgan Le Fay.

Casting Morgan Le Fay as the villain of this first story arc in the series turned out to be a wise decision, as her magical abilities make her a formidable opponent to everyone on the Dark Avengers roster (the Superman power-leveled Sentry included). As well, it adds an interesting dynamic to the story to know that, despite Le Fay wanting to kill the central characters of the story, her intentions are righteous in the sense that she’s trying to prevent the formation of the Cabal, and thus pre-empt the entire "Dark Reign" storyline.

The protracted battle sequence set on Dr. Doom’s home turf of Latveria that dominate most of the pages of this story, with art by Mike Dedato, is exciting and beautifully rendered, with some genuine drama throughout as the heroes battle the demons and monsters at the command of Morgan Le Fay.

Despite what could have been a confusing mess, the plot is well-structured, with wonderfully kinetic pacing that makes the book hard to put down. I particularly enjoyed the two independent sub-plots involving Norman Osborn and The Sentry and each's questionable grasp of reality. Both characters have always been a little loopy, but in this instance, Brian Michael Bendis puts these issues front and center, causing the reader to question both whether Osborn’s going to put on the Goblin costume again, and whether the Sentry has any clue just what he is or how much power he has at his command.

It’s a thing of beauty watching Sentry repeatedly perform the superhero equivalent to miracles, only for the next panel to cut back and show the Dark Avengers, his teammates, wide-eyed and quaking with fear over obscene power wielded by their unstable comrade.

My one gripe with the story progression in this arc was the fact that some characters definitely could’ve used so more air time for us to get to know them better. In particular, Daken (the dark "Wolverine") and Marvel Boy ("Captain Marvel") seemed to get the short end of the stick in terms of characterization, while characters like Ares were at least given a panel or two teasing the reader of future plotlines.

As is the norm for Bendis stories, the dialogue is a highlight.

While his forte seems to lean more towards the humorous and childishly immature, Bendis’ dialogue is, at the very least, always entertaining. Some characters, like Bullseye (“Hawkeye”) and Ares, are played for laughs, but on the other side we’re given characters like Moonstone (“Ms. Marvel) and Norman Osborn who speak with an uncommon level of measure and articulation. It goes a long way towards legitimizing Assemble as a serious story arc.

In other words, though you’ll sometimes find yourself rolling your eyes and snorting at the silliness of the some of the exchanges and asides, you’ll never be bored reading Dark Avengers.

In particular, Bendis’s use of Mac Gargan’s Venom as a comedic element is just about spot-on perfect.

All of the Dark Avenger’s series is pencilled by Deodato, whom I first took note of when I started reading he and Warren Ellis’ Thunderbolts series. Employing much of the same style he used there, and indeed throughout the past decade or so, Deodato’s art is that of a semi-photorealistic painting style, with an emphasis on detail and motion being the order of the day. His lines are fluid and borderline “smudged,” such that characters don’t so much have outlines as they do “silhouettes.”

Deodato was an excellent choice of artist for Dark Avengers, if not for his realistic style, which is wholly appropriate given the political nature of the story, then for his versatility. Whether the characters in his panels are fighting demons and dragons, or sitting in a TV studio doing an interview, everything is brilliantly rendered, and framed in an effective and cinematic fashion.

By the way, you’ve probably read it elsewhere, but I suppose it’s worth noting that, yes: Mike Deodato did in fact use actor Tommy Lee Jones as a reference for Norman Osborn. Some have complained that they find it distracting, but personally; I kind of liked it.

Come to think of it, I liked this comic. It was by no means perfect, but Dark Avengers: Assemble held my interest throughout with it’s roster of colorful, identifiable, and ultimately dysfunctional characters and the frequent shenanigans/interplay between them.

Excuse me as I step out to purchase Dark Avengers Vol.2, Molecule Man ...

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Review: Avengers: Under Siege Premiere Classic hardcover (Marvel Comics)

[This guest review comes from Chris Marshall of the Collected Comics Library]

I've always had a strange curiosity when it comes to death and comic book characters. Going back to my youth. I always thought that superheroes were immortal and nothing could hurt them no matter how evil the villain was.

This was proven to me when I watched the "History of Doom" episode from Challenge of the Superfriends. You may recall that at the beginning of the episode the Justice League and the Legion of Doom have decimated to the entire plant and all has been destroyed. Aliens visitor has arrived to find out what happened and in the end they reverse the war and set things right. Thus no one died. Later that same year Christopher Reeve turned back time in Superman: The Movie basically doing the same to save lives including that of Lois Lane.

Later as I got more into comics, I learned of Gwen Stacy and her importance to Spider-Man, but the original comics were impossible to come by and a trade paperback of reprints was non-existence at the time. It wasn't until I was in my twenties that I read the entire Lee/Ditko/Romita story.

That brings me to 1996 when I was just starting to get back into comics after college. I had dabbled in the Image explosion and had gotten back into Batman but I was curious to see what I had missed in the Marvel Universe. I was in for a rude awakening when I picked up Onslaught. That was a persona of Professor X and Magento that devastated New York City and its heroes including The Avengers and The Fantastic Four, sending them to their death (or so we thought) They were actually sent to another dimension and the year-long Heroes Reborn storyline began.

In the wake (literally) of the apparent deaths, a new team of heroes came about to pick up the mantle of justice -- The Thunderbolts, headed by Citizen V, a descendant of the WWII superhero, and his team of MACH-1, Techno, Atlas, Songbird, and Meteorite. Not only was their origin a complex secret, which made you want more, they also came across as a team ready to kick-ass. And for a few issues they did.

Headed up by writer Kurt Busiek, The Thunderbolts took on criminals and even teamed up with Spider-Man. However, it was all a ruse -- and a damn good one at that. The Thunderbolts were secretly the Master Of Evil -- Baron Helmut Zemo, Beetle, Fixer, Goliath, Screaming Mimi and Moonstone (that is, the sixth incarnation of the Masters of Evil).

Then Marvel Comics did a very cool thing. To coincide with the release of the first Thunderbolts trade paperback, Justice Like Lightning, Marvel published a collected edition of their first appearances as their original villainous counterparts, Thunderbolt's Marvels Most Wanted. I was sent into a frenzy and wanted to know just who the Masters of Evil were. I did some digging online and purchased the Avengers: Under Siege storyline (The Avengers #270-277) off of eBay. It's now been reissued as part of Marvel's Premiere Classic Hardcover line.

For all intents and purposes, this is the origin of what would become the Thunderbolts. All the players are here including a few other villains like Blackout, Black Mamba, Grey Gargoyle, Mister Hyde, Tiger Shark, Whirlwind, Yellowjacket, The Wreaking Crew, and Titania and The Absorbing Man (who hooked up during Secret Wars). We see how Zemo along with Moonstone form the team that will take over and destroy the Avengers once and for all. The plan is seemingly brilliant and fool proof -- the more villains there are than heroes, then the task would be easy; the Masters of Evil would divide and conquer.

It also helps that the Avengers are not a very large team nor very strong at this point in their history. Captain America is second in command to the Wasp who is having a love triangle with the Black Knight and Paladin. Captain Marvel (Monica Rambeau) is having trouble with her new-found powers, Hercules is half drunk and whining about humanity not treating him well and Namor flees just as the team needs him to avoid a court ordered summons. Add in that super-heroes pals like the Fantastic Four are off of Earth; neither the West Coast Avengers or Black Panther wi;; pick up the phone; Vision and Scarlet Witch are on vacation, and no one can find Daredevil or Spider-Man (but no one really looks); the Iron Men (Tony Stark and James Rhodes) are busy battling A.I.M.; only Thor eventually shows up to help save the day. But the worst excuse is that the Falcon can't help because he has the flu.

Even though the story is eight issues, nothing really gets going until Avengers #273 when Zemo arrives. The first three issues acts as an epilogue to the Prince Namor, The Sub-Mariner four-issue series from 1984. Writer Roger Stern had to do this not only to tie up loose ends with Namor, himself, but to spread the Avengers even thinner than they already were. )

I feel that Stern, and to an extent artist John Buscema, does his best here to show DC Comics that the Masters of Evil of the most formidable foes in either universe and to show how it's done in a simple, concise and powerful manner. There is absolutely no doubt that it worked and Avengers: Under Siege has become the go-to story when it comes to one good team vs. one evil team. Even now twenty-five years later it is referred to and copied over and over.

Stern created this version of the Masters of Evil to pay homage to Lee and Kirby. Then Busiek paid homage to Stern by reinventing the team into The Thunderbolts. This seems to me one of the hardest things to do in comics. It's not recycling old material -- it's taking a good idea and turning it on it's head to make it better. Ed Brubaker (Captain America) knows how to do this, so does Geoff Johns (Green Lantern), and to a similar extent JJ Abrams did it with Star Trek.

In the end it's no spoiler that the Avengers win and Zemo and his Masters lose. But the twist is why Zemo is doing this in the first place -- he blames Captain America for the death of his father. It's not an unfamiliar plot; it's laced throughout comic books, novel and movies and the theme is no different here -- family. The Avengers are a family built up with trust through time. Zemo on the other hand tries to quickly buy his family to help him get revenge for his father. He comes closer more then any other villain up to this point. The Avengers are down and out for the count and even though the mansion crumbles, it's about the people that occupy it and not the building itself. The Avengers will always come out on top.

I almost feel sorry for Zemo at the end of Avengers: Under Siege. Here he lies defeated and his master plan thwarted. His father is still dead at the hands of Captain America and there's nothing more he can do about it except wait for Kurt Busiek take over.

[Introduction by Roger Stern]

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Guest Review Month 2010

Hope everyone's been enjoying the recent doings at Collected Editions, including our first-ever live event and the Collected Editions review of Superman: Earth One.

We've got lots more great stuff coming up before the end of the year, including a few surprises. But starting tomorrow, we're going to continue a grand tradition of handing the blog over to some guest reviewers for a while, to give the Collected Editions readers some new perspective on books old and new from DC, Marvel, and a host of others. It's going to be a blast!

And I'm happy to mention that this year's Collected Editions Guest Review Month is sponsored by the new Pulp History series of illustrated books from Simon and Schuster. The first two books in the series are Devil Dog by David Talbot with illustrations by Spain Rodriguez, and Shadow Knights by Gary Kamiya with illustrations by Jeffrey Smith.

Devil Dog, by Salon founder Talbot and Zap Comix's Rodriguez, is the biography of decorated US Marine Major General Smedley Darlington Butler. Butler both served in the military and later fought for veterans' rights, overthrowing a plot to kill the President Roosevelt along the way.

Shadow Knights, by Salon co-founder Kamiya and ilustrator Smith, tells of Britain's Special Operations Executive operation that fought against Hitler in World War II. The sabotage and spy missions of this volunteer group -- many of whom were women -- greatly influenced the war and hasn't been widely recorded before this title.

In recognition of this series, and as a gift to the guest reviewers, Collected Editions is going to pick one guest reviewer at random who will receive a copy of each book from Simon and Schuster. Thanks to all of this year's guest reviewers, and to Simon and Schuster for the contribution.

Guest reviews, surprises, and prizes, too! The Collected Editions Guest Review Month starts tomorrow ... don't miss it!

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Review: Chew: International Flavor trade paperback (Image Comics)

[Guest review by Tom Speelman]

In my review of Chew: Taster’s Choice, I said the series was an intoxicating blend of old-school Marvel and modern-day cop show, with Taster’s Choice favoring the latter -- moving briskly and swiftly and never feeling dull. I suppose it’s hard for a series that has a pitch along the lines of “A cop who sees the thoughts of whatever he eats which occasionally includes corpses and it’s all in a dystopian world where chicken has been banned” to ever feel dull, but I digress ...


The second volume, Chew: International Flavor still follows that original equation, but grabs its inner Classic Marvel and jacks it up to 11. We’ve got cyborgs, we’ve got vampires, we’ve got a fruit that looks like the love child of a pineapple and an octopus and tastes like chicken. That’s just for starters.


[Contains spoilers]


There is a lot of plot advancement here and a lot of questions get answered. The dynamic of the series has also shifted a bit with the treacherous Mason Savoy replaced by John Colby, Tony’s old Philly PD partner. Colby has joined the FDA after having cybernetic implants put in to replace the part of his face that was hacked off last volume. He’s requested not to work with Tony (surprise surprise) but their boss, Applebee -- who’s even more of a hilarious jerk here -- has paired them together anyway.


Tony is upset at first, but we quickly learn that the two do in fact care about one another in a hilarious bit about driving (“You want me to get in a car with an Asian driver behind the wheel? I’d rather take another hatchet to the face, thank you very much.”) and a bit where John prevents Tony from having to eat crap (literally). This brings out a very buddy-cop vibe and I keep thinking of Starsky & Hutch whenever I read these scenes.


The aforementioned scene with the poo leads Tony to discover the gallsaberry, the also aforementioned pineapple-octopus spawn. The thing about it is that when you cook it, it tastes like chicken. This leads Tony to the micro-nation of Yamapulu, where the plant is grown. He’s accompanied by his brother Chow, who’s taken up a job as a resort chef, seeing as how the island is famous for looking the other way when it comes to consuming chicken, which is forbidden in the Chew-verse. Of course that’s all changed now that the gallsaberry has shown up.


By the way, that strange little man in a riverboat hat who showed up with a box asking for Amelia Mintz? His name’s Nomi Haupai and he runs this island. He’s got a big plan and it involves Ameila, the world’s best chefs, and the gallsaberry. He takes the villain role this volume and his efforts are the focus of the book. Mason is hardly mentioned at all here, except for a wanted poster in the background and a phone call another character tries to make to him. It's sort of a letdown that I didn’t get to read his wonderful dialogue again, but hey -- we get to witness a civil war break out on the island over a champion cockfighting rooster, so I guess that evens things out.


Another interesting revelation this time around is that the FDA isn't the only government branch with police powers. The USDA has them too, and they’ve had Agent Lin Sae Woo (and her cyborg rat!) working undercover for months following a string of grisly murders. Lin thinks Tony has been sent to horn in on her case so she corners him in an elevator and beats the crap out of him! Just when you’d thought we’d hit a love triangle ...


Also, this time around we meet “The Vampire,” the guy referenced by the Russian woman last volume, and boy, is he nuts. Seriously, some of the stuff he pulls is downright shocking. Personally, I think he might be the third cibopath mentioned by Mason in Taster’s Choice but with a series like this you can’t be sure -- Mason proved that himself in the last book.


But by far, the biggest surprise in here is just where the gallsaberry really originated, and we get to find out in another one of those brilliant grid drawings that Rob Guillory does so well. Guillory's art is great here, and it's easy to see why he landed a Harvey Award nomination for Best New Talent.

With International Flavor, Chew proves once again it can tell a serious story with a lot of humor thrown in. The only other series I can think of that can pull that off is the belated Cable & Deadpool, which I just started reading, and given that the House of Ideas is ripe with Deadpool-mania these days, I’m surprised they haven’t approached John Layman and the folks at Image about a crossover. Time will tell, I suppose ...

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