uatublog / in-between the lines

I hopped on the NEW MUTANTS bandwagon about two seconds too late to snag the first appearance of Deadpool (a personal fave) in issue no. 98. Deadpool has the distinction of being maybe the only cool thing, and probably the only enduring concept, that ever came out of a comic plotted by Rob Liefeld—and who really knows how much of the credit should truly belong to the scripter, Fabian Nicieza?

That sounds mean and it probably is. Rob Liefeld has gotten a lot of grief in recent years, and I’m not quite sure that he deserved it all. In a way, his biggest crime is that he was popular enough that the house style at Marvel became “draw like Rob Liefeld” for a while; perhaps it isn’t fair to hold him accountable for that.

Taken on his own merits—though his draftsmanship was (and continues to be) poor by any professional standards (Rob having, apparently, learned his trade by reading comic books rather than by studying such artistic trivialities as anatomy and perspective)—there must have been something to his art that kids in the early 90s found invigorating. And if that style had only been confined to a title or two instead of running rampant over the entire superhero line, I’m disinclined to say that it would have been such a bad thing.

So that said, I try to avoid being a hater—let’s face it, cheap shots at Liefeld are a dime a dozen, so much so that it has become almost passé. Like fish in a barrel, Liefeld’s deficiencies as an artist make him a broad target for a few easy laughs. Though at the same time, in retrospect, it’s just damn hard to understand what all the fuss was about back around the time of THE NEW MUTANTS. In March of 1991, I was 12 years old—theoretically a perfect mark for the Liefeld brand—but somehow I never truly bought into the hype, though ironically, hype is the only reason I own THE NEW MUTANTS No. 99. I’ve never been a fan of the characters.

I did pick up THE NEW MUTANTS No. 100, but then gave up on Rob Liefeld after X-Force No. 1 or thereabouts, and it was saddening when an army of imitators commenced coming out of the woodwork displacing genuinely talented artists for a while.

Ye gads—this comic is only valued at about $2.50 these days! Does anybody own an Overstreet or something from circa 1992? I guarantee you this was fetching $10 to $15 easy.

Admittedly, the cover isn’t too bad. As I looked at this, I thought, “Maybe Liefeld wasn’t total rubbish. This cover has a nice compositional element to it with its use of forced perspective.” Then I noticed the signature box in the lower right-hand corner of the cover.

Ahhh…Rob Liefeld’s best idea for this comic—naturally it was cribbed from a vastly superior artist, John Byrne (X-MEN No. 138).

Byrne’s cover resolves, by the way, a small problem that I have with Liefeld’s rendition: Liefeld’s background characters are all penciled with Rob’s usual superfluity of detail (read: “cross-hatching”), but if they are far enough away from the foreground figure to create such a dramatic difference in scale, they should be rendered fuzzier somehow if only to draw your eye to the one element on the cover that actually matters.

By comparison, on the Byrne cover, the team are rendered in a deep blue, almost making them shadows in the wake of the departing figure of Cyclops in the foreground. Granted, this is perhaps something that Liefeld’s colorist could have recommended. I do think that the stark whitespace works pretty well, however.

Anyway, there’s nothing that I could say about Rob Liefeld that hasn’t been said by many others both sharper and wittier than I am, but I do feel the need to get this one thing off my chest.

What the hell, Rob? Why just one mouth?

Okay, that’s a lie—Rob Liefeld did keep a variant mouth in his artistic repertoire. It’s basically just the same thing as this, but open. Whether the character is sad, angry, amused, frustrated, pensive, whatever, he or she will be showing some gritted teeth.

I don’t know if you’ve ever attempted it, but it is literally impossible to reproduce Liefeld Mouth in an actual human face without the use of CG.

I gave it the old college try by attempting Cable’s face in the above panel, but as I’ve now made it painfully obvious, you basically can’t pull it off without looking like an extra from a George Romero film. Imagine if people walked around making that face all of the time? Spooky.

If, by some marvel of will power and genetic facial pliability you could do Liefeld Mouth, you still wouldn’t be able to—at the same time—suck your cheeks in to provide your visage with that anorectic aspect with which Rob endows all of his characters. If anybody could do it…maybe Jim Carey. But I doubt it.

God, when my wife sees this image on the left, she’s going to cry. I assure you, I’m not that hideous. For her benefit, I’m putting up a photo of myself on a normal day.

In this self-portrait I’m thinking, “Really, Rob Liefeld? Is that the mouth you’re going to go with for the eighth straight panel in a row?”

Okay, I should say something nice about Rob Liefeld…for good measure.

How’s this? Some of his character designs aren’t bad. Some are actually pretty good. Example: others have refined Deadpool’s costume over the year (who designed the bitchin’ belt buckle, I wonder?), but Rob did pretty well with it the first time around, though I think some would say it’s derivative of Spider-Man’s costume. Apart from the obnoxious leg pouch thingy, it’s mercifully free of Liefeld’s typical excesses. So good on you, Rob.

See? A little positivity doesn’t hurt every once in a while.

Steve Ditko seems to be coming up often lately in my regular diet of blogotainment. Well, three times in about a two weeks. That constitutes “often”, I guess.

Blockade Boy recently posted a couple of panels from “Baron Weirwulf’s Haunted Library” No. 50 in which Ditko cribs from…well, Ditko, in the form of Doctor Graves, who as Blockade Boy explains it, is “totally not…Doctor Strange”, even though, “[w]ith his white temples and painstakingly-trimmed facial hair, the natty Doctor chills in a New York home crammed with scrolls and grotesque objets d’art; fires goopy, Tinker Toy-shaped mystic blasts from his arthritically-contorted hands” and so on. This probably goes without saying, but I will say it anyway: if you’re not reading (the Unbeatable) Blockade Boy, you should be.

And just this morning, Mike Sterling’s Progressive Ruin steered me toward this weird little nine-panel comic about a young artist attempting to meet Steve Ditko as a birthday present to himself. As anybody acquainted with Ditko’s self-imposed hermitage might presume, the young artist’s plan bore no fruit (though technically, he did meet Ditko, I suppose).

Finally, there’s a short review by Michael Rogers over at the Library Journal blog (In the Bookroom) of an upcoming coffee table book from Fantagraphics Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko, by Blake Bell. It’s less a review, actually, and more of a Ditko primer for the unitiated, though Rogers does mention a (possibly apocryphal, though he admits that he’s reporting on hearsay) point of comics trivia that I swear I never considered.

“Spidey also was the only successful super to wear a full face mask. There were others before him, but they didn’t last.”

I’ll be damned if I can think of another that proves that assertion erroneous.

Even now with half a century or more of superheroes behind us, only a few full-face masks come to mind, and if you disqualify the masks that are really more of an armor (e.g. Iron Man, Night Thrasher) than they are necessarily intended to conceal the wearer’s identity, that reduces the list further. Let’s see…

• Spider-Man
• Black Panther
• Union Jack
• Deadpool
• Batgirl (the current one)
• Atom-Smasher (this one)
• hmm…I was going to say Rage, but apparently his nose sticks out (somebody please save this guy from himself)
• uh, Spawn
• um, uh…Rorschach?

Hell, I suck at this. Anybody want to help me out?

The full-face is, for superheroes, difficult to pull off for, I think, obvious reasons—it implies you have something to hide, more so than your identity, since apparently, all you really need in order to conceal your identity is a domino mask within the realm of comic book reality. Full-face masks…well, if you’ve got that much to hide, you’re probably a supervillain…or an egomaniac and a neurotic trouble-maker. Just ask J. Jonah Jameson about that.

In 2002, writer Doug Moench and artist Paul Gulacy, probably best known jointly for their mid-70s work at Marvel on THE HANDS OF SHANG-CHI: MASTER OF KUNG FU (one of the longest and absolute best comic book titles ever), got together once more to do a clever little six-part, self-contained, futuristic espionage adventure, equal parts cyberpunk, James Bond, and invasion thriller. A fan of Moench ever since collecting and reading his original run on MOON KNIGHT, I dutifully picked this up off the newsstands, read it, enjoyed it, bagged and boarded the floppies, dropped them in my “S” box, and never thought about S.C.I.-SPY again.

You should know, my comic book boxes are stacked about three-high in the bedroom closet underneath my wife’s clothes, unfiled papers, and other miscellanea, and it’s just generally a pain to get into them, so I’m not often poring over my back issues. But as I’ve been looking for crap to unload before I move out of town next month, I’ve been going through everything slowly but surely, and as I arrived at S.C.I.-SPY, I paused.

The tagline beneath the masthead on the first issue reads: “He likes his war cold…and his champagne colder”. It’s one of these catchlines that I imagine some well-meaning editor probably slapped on there at the last minute thinking it sounded clever even while it doesn’t quite mean anything or bear much relation to the plot, itself.

But while corny, it is simultaneously rather a good fit for this mini-series, which does aspire to a sort of B-movie level of banter while nevertheless dealing in high concepts and slickly rewarding escapism. So I would say that it adequately captures the flavor of adventure that Moench and Gulacy have served. If you can’t appreciate cold wars and cold champagne, then you should probably just stop reading now.

Anyway, I paused upon this series because it occurred to me that though I hadn’t given it much thought in the six years passed since its completion, the details had stuck with me. I should tell you that I’m not one of these people who still recalls every panel of some Batman comic I read when I was ten. For some reason, my memory is for shit when it comes to fiction. Hey—I’m not complaining—it just makes everything more enjoyable when I read it a second time, or even a third, fourth, etc.

Yet as I read that silly catchline, S.C.I.-SPY flooded back into me as though I had just read it last week, and initially that surprised me. Though as I started ticking off the bits that afixed themselves so vividly in my memory, it seemed less surprising that I should have filed this away so well, since the narrative is in my opinion something of an underrated gem that pulls genre standards from sundry corners of the escapist literary landscape and combines them to form something at once both strange and intriguing.

I’ve actually never heard anybody talking about this title, so I may take some flack for this if it turns out that everybody else in blogdom thought it was shit (not that too many will read this post, anyway)—I don’t know. Maybe everybody who talks about comic books in an open Internet forum simply missed it. I would have expected somebody like Dave Campbell to have pulled this one out of his longbox at some point back when he was still doing that blog, since it seems to run about his speed.

In any case, whatever. I’ve read it again, now, and it holds up pretty well against my memory of it. Intriguingly, it begins with this narration:

One thousand years after the destruction of Earth, the remnants of humanity found refuge on 17 planets in the Arcturus System…

Only 5 of the 17 planets have been fully Terraformed to ideal human living conditions. The other 12 planets — the Outer Worlds — have achieved only partial Terraforming to marginal life-sustenance levels. This is seen as oppressive by most of the Outer World and has been the cause of consistent tension throughout the last 50 years.

All attempts to defuse the situations have only led to further escalation and outbursts. Previous protests and riots have begun to flare into overt terrorism and sabotage, threatening the entire Arcturus System’s safety…

Joss Whedon must have read this before devising the historical background for his “Firefly” series, right? Also like “Firefly”, the universe of the future seems to be the sole domain of humanity, though in this case, some have wandered fairly well astray of the standard gene pool, willfully making themselves into freaks of nature either for advantage or variety. Our narrative focal point is not one of them, in more ways than one.

Protagonist Sebastian Starchild is, let’s face it, glaringly similar in method and appearance to James Bond, somewhat combining the impetuosity and ruthlessness of Ian Fleming’s original vision with the tongue-firmly-in-cheek smarminess of the Roger Moore portrayal.

Moench and Gulacy certainly weren’t breaking any new ground here, and neither Starchild nor his compatriot, the shapely Isis Nile, see any particularly vivid character turns and can barely be said to have dramatic arcs of their own at all. Yet they do work well with each other, both in story and as subtle counterpoints for the purposes of the plot.

I appreciate that Moench eschewed the tendency often exhibited by writers working in these sorts of male spy fantasies to have the man behave condescendingly toward the woman. Neither can they be said to “meet cute”, as it were—resentment does characterize their initial encounter: on Starchild’s part because he feels disconnected from the rest of his species and is a notorious loner being required by Motherbank to take on a partner for a job that is bigger even than he is; and on Isis Nile’s part because Starchild is so secretive that she considers him an unknown quantity, as well as a bit of an incomprehensible anachronism. See, Sebastian Starchild is a “flesh-pure”, or a human who refuses to accept any surgical or genetic enhancements. More on that later.

What I enjoyed about S.C.I.-SPY, however, is that the narrative never dwells upon that resentment—in fact, it rarely dwells upon anything for very long in its headlong rush toward its action-packed denouement—and within a couple of pages, these two are like old war buddies, riffing off of each other like nobody’s business, having discovered a mutual respect for each other’s skills and guts. It isn’t competitive between them as they’re very evenly matched, and the team dynamic is happily unhampered by the ego conflicts that are are often par for the course in these espionage thrillers.

In any event, these characters are almost in spite of themselves fairly interesting in a comfortably familiar kind of way, and they’re certainly great protagonists in the sense that they keep the plot moving like a runaway freight train.

Ultimately, the story hangs together so well owing to what I consider to be a masterly combination of high concept and momentum. Really, there are strong ideas enough in S.C.I.-SPY to support two books; Doug Moench stuffs it full with one interesting wrinkle after another; even the throwaways are pretty appealing.

Just to name a few clever notions to be found crammed within the pages of S.C.I.-SPY:

• Sebastian Starchild, himself—a baby found in cryogenic sleep, floating in a capsule through vast outerspace, origin otherwise unknown—raised by an artificial intelligence;
• a topsy-turvy paradigm for normality in which remaining flesh-pure is a justification for descrimination—how retaining your biological humanity has become, as Starchild puts it, a taboo—maybe the last taboo in a civilization in which anything goes;
• Motherbank, the governing computer of the inner worlds and Starchild’s boss in S.C.I.-Spy, programmed with the thought patterns of an original colonist a thousand years since deceased and bearing the moral burden of a fabrication that underlies the entirety of humanity’s colonization;
• Starchild’s private retreat, tucked away inside of a tesseract space, and fashioned after an old Earth beach resort;
• the Wizard, S.C.I.-Spy’s equivalent to Q Branch, a character more machine than man who kits Starchild out for his missions and retrofits Starchild’s orb (sort of a technological familiar/partner/protector who follows Starchild everywhere) with a tesseract compartment for storing mission tools;
• Shadow Black, a featureless dark mass in person shape—Starchild’s opposite number, essentially, on the outer worlds, leader of a terrorist organization whose memory is almost as long as Motherbank’s. Shadow Black makes a pact with the devil (but not literally) to stick it to the inner worlds, only to have a change of heart of sorts much later when the shit has truly hit the fan;
• Chaxx, Shadow Black’s right hand/black-ops guy, who keeps an army of clones (of himself) to do all of his dirty work and rarely gets into it, himself;
• the nanotechnological world-eating plague, that infests the inner worlds decimating by consumption all organic matter for reproduction purposes, and, when they run out of food, even cannibalizing themselves.

I could continue on in this vain—and that’s just the first two issues—but suffice to say, most of the concepts hit. The only sort of disappointing thing is that because the series is so plot driven and moves forward at such a whiplash-inducing clip, we don’t get a better idea of daily life in the cosmos of S.C.I.-SPY.

Paul Gulacy’s artwork is something of a mixed bag—his draftsmanship is, I would say, old fashioned in some ways, and not really advanced enough to overcome that—though on the whole, I like it, and when he gets the opportunity to portray the more colorful inhabitants of Moench’s universe, he shows a lot of inventiveness in populating these installments with all manner of weirdos.

Actually…the more I consider it, I think I think I like his work on this book quite a lot. His storytelling skills are in fine form, and his layouts are are very energetic even though he’s not pulling a lot of flashy tricks out of his bag. He gets a lot of mileage out of what are, very simply, just smart decisions. For example, he might connect a couple of action panels with a panel merely containing the characters’ running legs. For another example, Gulacy will illustrate the precursor to an action in one panel and in juxtaposed panel illustrate the outcome, laying that juxtaposition within a larger panel demonstrating the ultimate outcome. He’s not trying to make you a flip-book, you know? Though there’s never any question about what you just saw. He’s cutting to the chase, just like the characters in the book, and as a result, the pacing rarely lets up. Smart.

On the whole, I think it’s all a ripping good yarn, and I admire what Moench was able to accomplish in six little issues, packed to the brim with dialogue and visuals though they may be. I enjoyed Sebastian Starchild and Isis Nile, two characters who, when faced with a problem, take the most direct route to confronting it. And I really enjoyed the change-up that Moench pulls in issue three; he does a great job of setting you up to believe the story is going to one place, and then pulls a big reveal that, the more you find out about it, you realize he had been setting up all along, even with something as central to the narrative as his protagonist’s origin. All right beneath your nose.

Anyway, great fun.

Well, ever since screening this most recent version of the Hulk (purely for your benefit, of course), I’ve been wishing that I could plunk myself down in front of the 2003 Ang Lee-directed film, at least once more…for old-time’s sake.

Given my tendency to watch the same movies over and over again—especially ones with tank tossing and Josh Lucas exploding (not enough of these out there, sadly)—ideally, I would prefer to add this one to my personal collection. I find myself further spurred in that direction owing to the collective dialogue upon the new film, which has made me nostalgic and a bit rebellious to the point that I actually want to throw money at the old film as some sort of futile statement: “Hey! Stop acting as though The Hulk was a total failure, assholes! Some discriminating people actually thought that it had its merits!”

Regrettably, Universal Studios seem to have allowed The Hulk to fall out of print on DVD. In fact, I even went so far as to check with the supplier that my library uses, and they’ve got this for the publish status: “MORATORIUM/NO Activity allowed”. What’s that all about? That’s Universal Studios saying, “You had your chance, now get lost, Johnny Come Lately.”

The only stores that even kept a few of these things in reserve seem to be these possibly shady, fly-by-night joints—who knows if they’re legit or not? I sort of hate dealing with unknown vendors. I’ll spend a couple of extra bucks to deal with a known quantity, like Amazon or even Deep Discount DVD, anyday.

Was The Hulk really such a dreadful failure that even with a new Hulk film in the theaters sitting in the number two box-office spot in its second week, and with Hulk-related merchandise flooding the market like the levies just broke, nobody considered that they might score a few quick bucks by making the 2003 film available again?

But the most galling thing of all is that the film is still available on HD-DVD. Not even Blu-Ray! I don’t have a player for either format, so it’s moot for me in any case, but still! Keeping the film available on an abandoned HD standard is just like flipping the bird to the fans. Just go ahead and release it on Betamax, Universal—you know you want to.

I’m cataloguing my comic book collection, so I’m getting into some dusty old boxes and looking at some comics that I haven’t picked over in…hell, maybe a decade. I started collecting around 1990, so it’s inevitable that I’d have purchased a few gimmick comics in my day.

As those of you collecting at the time will recall, the glut of titles on the market in the first half of that decade pretty much ensured that style would trump substance any day of the week. Speaking solely for myself, I wasn’t nearly as discriminating at the time, and I tended to buy into the hype—at least, initially. If a comic sucked, however, I never bought the next issue, so I guess I had a little sense in me. Consequently, I own a whole bunch of early Image Comics of which I only purchased a single installment.

Foil and hologram covers. Bagged “collector’s” editions. Alternate, limited edition covers (the companies still pull this rabbit out of their hats, though mercifully, not as often as they used to). If the major companies could convince you that some comic they printed had some intrinsic collectability that other comics on the stands lacked, they wouldn’t be subtle about it.

Case in point, ROBIN III: CRY OF THE HUNTRESS.

I don’t recall ever reading these comics, so I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I had opened the bags at the top. Phew! If I had left them sealed all of these years, I’d have had to take a trip to the confessional. Which is weird, because I’m not even Catholic.

ROBIN III was a six-part limited series, but it looks as though I only collected the first two, so I couldn’t tell you whether or not they carried this gimmick through to the end. For the record, comicspriceguide.com has these issues at $3. Dayumn, son! That’s a 50 cent appreciation over the past 16 years. So accounting for inflation of three percent per year…yeah, even if it had only been five years since release, that would be a depreciation in value.

The first issue came with a pretty neat Mike Zeck poster (at right). So did issue two for that matter, though I’m not wild about that one. Zeck’s Robin is a little rough, and it just generally isn’t up to his usual quality.

The story is by Chuck Dixon, pencils by Tom Lyle, the same creative team behind the four-part ROBIN II: THE JOKER’S WILD, of which I also have the first issue and none of the others. I’m not sure why. Looking back on it, it’s not bad. Dixon is employing a sort of Frank Milleresque tone, with its noirish phraseology and brief, unembellished sentences.

That’s forgivable here, because I don’t think it had quite gotten totally played out yet, and also because I’m willing to cut Dixon a little slack, since he doesn’t allow it to become a narrative crutch—Chuck Dixon is no poseur and his ability to tell an entertaining story isn’t hinged upon the tone he adopts.

One of the old-line mobsters, Batman thinks it’s the mystery man named Blackmask, has called in some out-of-town thugs. They’re a biker gang called the White Wolves. A bunch of nazis and hate geeks. A gang war must be coming if the mob’s calling in reinforcements into Gotham. There’s a body count already. A new homicide every day. A lot of the victims are innocents. Caught in the crossfire. It’s only going to get worse.

The whipping sound of ‘copter blades. We didn’t call the police.

…

These guys aren’t fooling. They want the wolves on the endangered species list.

…

Batman knows this city. For him it’s alive. He knows its rhythms. It’s like he can take its pulse. I’m still learning about what Gotham has to offer. And what it has to hide.

Okay, a little corny, but remember, that’s how Batman comics were supposed to sound back then.

So here’s a dirty little secret that I imagine comic book store owners would prefer you never discover: Silver Age bags and boards can easily accommodate two modern-size comics, front and back, with even less constriction of the floppy (including that occasional curl that sometimes happens after a few years as the plastic shrinks) than you see when you put one comic in a modern age bag with board. Sadly and to my chagrin, it took me years to figure that out.

By cutting your number of boards in half, it also gets you a bit more room in your box. I measured eight standard page length comics (enough, I thought, to get a significant measurement variance), two to a bag, at around 8/16″, while eight floppies separately boarded was around 11/16″. Yes, a measly 3/16″ seems to be not worth troubling about, but if you do the math, per 150 comics (maybe a well-packed short box all individually bagged), you’re gaining something near 3.5″, and that ain’t bad.

Yes, I know that I sound like a huge nerd, but what can you do? When you’re trying to cram a few years worth of collected floppies into one already stuffed short box, and you’ve got something like 25 other short boxes in your bedroom closet, you start to reevaluate your collection management tactics.

I’m never sure of the protocol when quoting somebody else from the Internet. Do I have to notify that person that I’m excerpting his statements for my own purposes? Aw, fuck it—I’m just going to grab it and link you back to the source.

Caught this on Usenet recently.

Rann Thanagar (Holy Crap its another Starllin religion) War

Doesn’t the whole thing remind you of Starlin’s Dreadstar?

I know that Starlin is writing it but please. How much can he recycle tepid religiosity with space opera before it becomes irrelevant? If you look back, he’s been doing it in some form since Warlock, and Warlock at least had Star Thief and an anti-hero subject matter which fit the times.

The Nova series from Marvel is a better way to show space characters in my opinion. A sense of scale and majesty would be appreciated, Mr. Starlin. The Rann Thanagar Holy War seems lacking in scale and perspective. I think I will not complete my collection of this series.

I weighed in. I’m sure you could puzzle out which poster I am; if not because I sign my posts “jgb”, then because my nickname is “TheWatcherUatu”. Yes, I have no imagination.

As to the scale and majesty of RANN-THANAGAR: HOLY WAR, I won’t speak. He may be right on that score but only two issues in, I’m loath to commit one way or the other. I’ve gleaned some enjoyment from the series so far, but it seems to be falling short, in mood and tightness of plotting, of the high standard I feel Starlin set himself with his previous two projects for DC: MYSTERY IN SPACE and DEATH OF THE NEW GODS.

There is much to like in HOLY WAR, to be sure, but some will invariably argue and produce some solid bones for contention, and I’m reserving my full judgment. In the end, I’ve found that Starlin rarely falters in these limited series situations. But I’ve been defending the guy for years, so take that for whatever you will.

Anyway, in a nutshell, I proposed in the above-linked thread that Jim Starlin’s facility and experience with telling stories of belief gone wrong have made him the natural go-to guy for these sorts of things. In this instance, at least, I don’t believe that Starlin even originated these larger story arcs. To my knowledge, RANN-THANAGAR: HOLY WAR resulted naturally from COUNTDOWN TO ADVENTURE, which itself came out of 52 and its Lady Styx subplot, neither of which project did Starlin have much of a hand in (correct me if I’m wrong, as I know that Lady Styx did factor into MYSTERY IN SPACE, though almost tangentially). My impression was that Starlin has simply been asked to tie up the dangling threads. Hard to argue with the logic of that decision on DC’s part.

Admittedly, that’s speculation—Starlin was, after all, setting up the Eternal Light Corporation (Starlin’s two favorite boogie men, religious fanatics and soulless capitalists, in one) as a recurring menace back in MYSTERY IN SPACE, so for all I know, this holy war was something that Starlin years ago proposed be dropped into the DCU timeline. No idea.

But whatever. Ultimately, I don’t really think it matters which person in the room proposed another series about religion being the root of all mayhem. And if I’m being fair, it’s difficult to argue that Jim Starlin doesn’t return to the well just a little too often. But really, I don’t give a damn.

Listen, all I really care is does the writer tell a good story? By and large, I feel Jim Starlin usually does. Why does it matter if he did the same thing in DREADSTAR? How many people reading comics today have even read a DREADSTAR comic?

I’m leaving town next month to start a new position in Reno, and to my chagrin, I actually verbalized the following thought to my wife yesterday after leaving the comic book store: “I wonder if the store owner will miss me when I’m gone.” Embarrassing though that is, it would be even worse if I thought he would miss me!

Actually, my first encounter with the store owner when I got into Fayetteville about four years ago was such that I’m lucky he ever let me back into the joint. In fact, I might not have returned for a few weeks…of my own volition, that is.

I distinctly recall that I was looking to pick up the current issue of UNCANNY X-MEN (one of the few phases in my life during which I was purchasing an X-Men title off the newsstand instead of out of the back issue bins—Chris Claremont and Alan Davis had only recently started working together again, and I had been a fan of their EXCALIBUR stuff). It had to be all of two weeks past its release date, and failing to locate it on the stands, I eventually discovered that the owner had already filed it away with his back issues and marked it up, like, a dollar fifty.

Yes, he and I did quarrel about that.

Look, I have to just preface this by saying that my reputation for being a damn nice guy often precedes me. Ask anybody! And yet, there was something that just kind of vexed me about this comic shop guy trying to put the squeeze on my wallet—for an issue of UNCANNY X-MEN, for crying out loud! What comic book store doesn’t chronically overorder on that title, anyway?

He lost a sale that day, but I wasn’t done with him. He got a good piece of my mind about his business practices. I think our conversation concluded something like this:

“Well, where I come from, a new X-Men comic costs what Marvel says it does.”

“Where do you come from?”

“New York.”

With that, his body slumped with a sigh and he muttered, “That makes sense.”

Not my proudest moment, though it’s sort of amusing to me in retrospect. Yes, I perpetuated the stereotype of the ugly New Yorker, and the problematic thing is that I can’t figure out just why I was being such a pain in the ass about a comic I didn’t even particularly desire with any ferventness. For the record, I wasn’t loving Claremont’s storyline (it was okay, it simply wasn’t loudly ringing my bell), and besides that, I own, like, five UNCANNY X-MEN comics, so it isn’t as though he had me over a barrel—like if I didn’t buy it I’d have an obnoxious hole in my collection. Really, he was doing me a favor by saving me three bones.

So go figure. He never seemed to hold it against me, though—largely, I would say, because he never had any idea who I was on successive visits. And of course, I didn’t go out of my way to remind him of what an ass I had been. In truth, I kinda warmed up to the big lug after a time, but I was in there weekly for about three years before he’d start to recall little conversations we had about such-and-such new title or so-and-so creator.

And it wasn’t until a few months ago that he started recognizing me consistently, albeit as “That guy who came in for, like, four weeks in a row asking if UNCLE SAM AND THE FREEDOM FIGHTERS No. 4 had come in yet” (his shipment got messed up, and it was literally weeks before it eventually arrived). On that one he really did have me over a barrel. I probably got as annoying as this dude.

Anyway, I wouldn’t say we have a warm friendship or anything, but I’ve been a loyal customer for four years. I rarely spend more than seven dollars, and I don’t keep a box or any shit like that. But still, loyalty must count for something, right? I’d like to think he’ll miss me.

So getting to the point of this post, here’s what I bought yesterday.

BATMAN AND THE OUTSIDERS No. 8.

Apart from a totally gratuitous guest appearance by Nightwing, this was more of the same. And that’s damn good. The action rarely slows on this title, and this installment doesn’t let us down on that account, with Chuck Dixon managing to generate a lot of humor from the interplay of these disparate personalities. As in the scene at left in which Batgirl offers her team the option to die fighting instead of like lambs for the slaughter in front of a firing squad.

Green Arrow: “That’s a plan?”

Also, I’m thrilled to see this subplot with the REMAC (a modified OMAC, its artificial intelligence supposedly scrubbed) finally coming to fruition, and the visual jokes that artist Julian Lopez works in there as REMAC enters the fray are solid every time. Related to that, there is a particularly great pay-off to the Batman-serving-finger-sandwiches scene from the previous issue that made me laugh out loud.

I’m probably preaching to the choir here, and to anybody else, you may as well wait until the end of the storyline anyway if you intend to begin picking BatO up. But for the matter of that, I probably wouldn’t recommend it seeing as how Chuck Dixon is off the book with issue 11. Speaking of which:

I’ve worked under tyrants and I can say that I’d prefer to work under a talented, knowledgeable tyrant with a successful plan than a directionless gladhander with a ouija board any day of the week.

Chuck Dixon is my new hero. That said, he’s kind of a queer duck in that he’ll make a comment such as this one, and then say, “But I’m not going to talk about it.” He makes a good point of course in that the Internet gossip mill loves a vacuum, but if he wanted to keep the cat in the bag, I would venture to say he should have allowed the vacuum to persist a while longer.

But in any case, we’ve all had idiot bosses in our lives, so I say, “Rip into him, Chuck.”

Crossovers are not the problem.

I’ve been involved in a bunch. When they go well, they’re great with lots of creative energy for all. When they go bad they’re a soul-sucking experience. But I’ve never let one break me. And a good leader at the helm can keep even the most rebellious and riotous egos together. Trust me, keeping comic book writers in line can be like herding cats.

[later]

BG1, I simply stated that I was off my titles and that I did not quit. This was to get out in front of the rumors. I have a career and a reputation to maintain and I’ve had it maligned before in situations juts like this where I took the high road and the other party used it as an occasion to smear me.

Then posters on several sites began blaming my editors and I came to their defense.

Am I supposed to let that happen to folks who were very good to me and that I consider to be friends?

Hmm…nothing you want to add maybe about Dan Didio snacking on aborted human fetuses or bathing in the blood of a thousand koalas? Is that really the best you’ve got?

Oh well.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY No. 2

I love a good “suiting up” montage.

Starlord. Gamora. The fake Quasar (sorry, but I’ll never accept it). Drax the Destroyer. Rocket Raccoon. Adam Warlock. A few weeks before this series launched, the comic book store had freebie Guardians of the Galaxy posters, and I looked at that line-up and said, “I’m there.” On the surface of it, it seems as though I should love this comic. And actually, I do love it! I just miss the sense of scale of the ANNIHILATION storylines, though perhaps it was time to narrow the focus somewhat. Anyway, a minor quibble.

This is a very straightforward series so far: the team gets wind of a problem (basically, a computer looks for space-time disruptions and sounds the Klaxon when found, sort of like when the movie sign would go off on Mystery Science Theater 3000), they go there, they fight something, and the problem is addressed. Nothing wrong with the formula as long as Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning throw a few surprises at us along the way, and they do pull that off in this second issue, which has the Guardians (at this point, still a nameless cosmic team) teleporting to a giant ice cube in outerspace—a chunk of rocky matter not native to the team’s dimension that has been frozen in time.

Adam Warlock: “…Limbo Ice. This chunk of rock has passed through the deepest and coldest extra-dimensional voids imaginable.”

Okay. Sure. I’ll bite.

Adam Warlock has gone all mystical. I didn’t remember him weaving spells prior to this, though it’s possible I simply overlooked it. Part of his new powerset, I suppose, post ANNIHILATION: CONQUEST. It works within the scope of his character, I think—Adam has always seemed to be connected to facets of reality beyond the immediate material plain—but it’s still jarring to some extent watching him conjure these talismanic mystical constructs.

Discussing this further would put me in a position in which I would almost have to give away a spoiling plot detail, so I will keep this simple. Captain America’s shield (shown on the cover) turns out to be authentic. Plus, it has an owner, and now would probably be a good time to break out your back issues of the first volume of GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY. Or, I suppose, you could visit Wikipedia. By the way, don’t click that link if you are attempting to avoid a spoiler.

I’ve got a sizable collection of the original GotG comics around here somewhere that I pulled off of eBay some ten years ago when I would pretty much buy any lot of comics that was a good deal. “Oh damn! Fifty issues of Guardians of the Galaxy for eight bucks!?” *click* *click* *click* “Yes! High bidder! Who the heck are the Guardians of the Galaxy anyway?” As impulse buys go, that one wasn’t too bad, though I haven’t read them in close to a decade, so if I can find their box, I may have to dive in as a refresher.

Let’s be honest here: you already know if you’re going to enjoy this series. Either you dig these bizarre space characters or you don’t.

At last—the promised follow-up to yesterday’s post. I assume that you were waiting with bated breath. I know I was.

The Times Online Literary Supplement earlier this month published an article, “The rise of fan fiction and comic book culture”, by Michael Saler. Surprisingly, this has nothing to do with Kirk/Spock slash fiction, but rather the title comes from a passage in Michael Chabon’s new book Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands in which Chabon proposes that “All literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction.”

Fan of Chabon though I am, I read a particularly scathing review of this new book—a collection of non-fiction essays—so I’m wary about it. Saler is considerably kinder in his review, which in general seems positive. Truthfully, I haven’t any real interest in reading it regardless—principally, I care about Chabon as a writer of fiction, though for the matter of it, he can be an entertaining pundit, and he never fails to rouse himself to the defense of graphic storytelling as a literary art form. So in that sense, I suppose I take an interest in what he has to say as long as I’m not required to read an entire book.

Clearly, he thinks about all of this quite a bit, and as a result, his weighing in upon the nature of comics can on a good day elevate the level of the dialogue depending on where you do your dialoguing (though if you listen to this audio feed in which Chabon discusses the problem of the polymer weblines on the movie Spider-Man’s costume, it will be clear to you that he’s not above even the tritest fanboy indulgences).

Most recently, I recall that Chabon wrote an article for The New Yorker about “the unitard theory” of superhero costumes, “Secret Skin” (the text counterpart to the just-linked audio feed). For an article about costumes, it’s fairly lengthy, so make sure you have some time set aside if you intend to read it through. A quote to give you an idea of its substance:

The explicit lesson of the story was that what was found between the covers of a comic book was fantasy, and “fantasy” meant pretty lies, the consumption of which failed to prepare you for what lay outside those covers. Fantasy rendered you unfit to face “reality” and its hard pavement. Fantasy betrayed you, and thus, by implication, your wishes, your dreams and longings, everything you carried around inside your head that only you and Superman and Elliot S! Maggin (exclamation point and all, the principal Superman writer circa 1971) could understand-all these would betray you, too. There were ancillary arguments to be made as well, about the culpability of those who produced such fare, sold it to minors, or permitted their children to bring it into the house.

Maps and Legends would seem to be a longer form response to those so-called literary purists who turn up their noses at genre fiction in general, and maybe escapist fantasy in particular. Again, I haven’t read it.

What actually caught my attention about Saler’s article—and coincidentally enough, the above passage from Chabon dovetails nicely into this—is that it also contains a discussion of the non-fiction book The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How it Changed America by David Hajdu, which I’ve just recently begun reading, myself. I’m not far enough into it yet to make a substantial comment of my own except to say that any comics blogger interested in how the comic book came about owes it to himself or herself to give Hadju’s book a read.

The early days of comics, especially, were a bit like the wild west, and the personalities that suckled the nascent industry (or more often, perhaps, simply attempted to exploit comics for all they were worth)—mostly immigrants and ethnic and religious (Jews, primarily—there were a lot of them in the early days) minorities from the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder—were as colorful as the outrageous four-color funny books with which they seduced young American boys.

Let’s excerpt a bit from Saler’s review, shall we?

At first glance, this sad episode of censorship and paranoia seems to coincide with the chilling climate fostered by McCarthyism. There were clear overlaps: the panic was promoted by Dr Fredric Wertham who, like Joseph McCarthy, found a cause that would bring him the national attention he craved. Wertham’s scientific credentials in psychiatry seemed to legitimate his specious claim that comic books caused juvenile delinquency, and made oracular his pronouncement that “Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic book industry”. His Seduction of the Innocent (1954) led parents to believe that Superman promoted Fascism, Batman and Robin homosexuality, and Wonder Woman sadomasochism. (Wertham wasn’t entirely wrong about the last: Wonder Woman enjoyed using her “golden lasso” and “bracelets of submission” on villains; her creator, William Moulton Marston, claimed she “satisfies the subconscious, elaborately disguised desire of males to be mastered by a woman who loves them”.) Politicians, such as Senator Estes Kefauver, joined Wertham in order to advance their careers.

Hajdu notes these similarities, but argues that while McCarthyism represented anti-elitism, the crusade against comics was “anti-anti-elitism, a campaign by protectors of rarefied ideals of literacy, sophistication, and virtue to rein in the practitioners of a wild, homegrown form of vernacular American expression”.

…

Because comics were intended for children, it was easy for critics to mock the medium’s lack of literary sophistication. What many of them missed was the visual sophistication of such pioneering artists as Will Eisner, Jack Cole and Jack Kirby, or the brilliant stable of artists at EC Comics, which popularized horror comics in the 1950s. (Hajdu’s book can be faulted for having too few illustrations.) Critics also missed the singular aesthetic pleasure that comes from the sequential narration of words and images working together. And while they insisted that comics were dangerous because they promoted juvenile delinquency - a catch-all complaint - they were often oblivious to the genuinely subversive content of some. For example, romance comics challenged gender norms by portraying young women as active agents in stories like “My Mother Was My Rival” and “I Joined a Teen-Age Sex Club”.

I bet that last tale isn’t half as awesome as it sounds. But then again, how could it be? What actual story could measure up to such a roundly absurdist title? Regardless, somebody please tell me this one is archived online somewhere!

Anyway, read the article, and if it interests you, check out Hadju’s Ten-Cent Plague.

First off, Maxis released the free version of its Creature Creator application for their upcoming PC game Spore. If you don’t know about this and you’re a gamer, be ashamed of yourself. Spore is the much anticipated new game from Will Wright, the iconic game designer behind SimCity and The Sims. Check it out.

Moving right along…

I’ve currently got 131 unread articles sitting in Google Reader, and that’s after a good amount of time spent last night trying to knock them out. In full disclosure, I don’t read most of these. By and large, book and music reviews (which I read for my job) make up the bulk of my subscriptions, and I tend to glance only in the briefest way over anything not of personal interest to me. Though I did stumble over a couple of articles that I felt were worth sharing.

The first is an article by John Hodgman very economically titled “Comics”, published in The New York Times Sunday Book Review. Hodgman you no doubt know as the avatar for the Windows PC in those ubiquitous “I’m a PC and I’m a Mac” commercials, though you may also recognize him as a correspondent on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He is also an author: he published a book in 2005 titled The Areas of My Expertise. Hodgman’s comedic voice (know-it-all who “magnanimously” imparts his phony knowledge not realizing or perhaps caring about quite how condescending he’s being), while droll, isn’t such that I felt compelled to check that one out, so I can’t really speak to what it’s about, though I do know he has a sequel of sorts on the horizon entitled More Information Than You Require.

Hodgman’s article is a combined review of the Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus volumes, Kirby: King of Comics by Mark Evanier, Age of Bronze by Eric Shanower, and whatever the latest Y: THE LAST MAN trade paperback is called—I guess it’s the last of them, bringing the trades up to final issue 60. I keep hoping they’ll announce an omnibus of the Y: THE LAST MAN series, containing all 60 issues, but that’s likely just an ill-considered pipe dream, and I should probably just pick them all up in pieces some day soon before the earlier trades begin falling out of print.

I was pleasantly surprised to find Hodgman play this article fairly straight, and I find that I’m actually tempted to investigate the Fourth World Omnibus set even despite the fact that I really haven’t got a lot of interest in the Fourth World outside of some of the books that have been able to make an interesting use of those characters post-Kirby. Walt Simonson’s ORION series is a salient example. I also enjoyed the recent DEATH OF THE NEW GODS series by Jim Starlin. I haven’t particularly got anything against the New Gods—they simply never quite clicked with me.

From Hodgman’s review:

In 1970, Superman went down a rabbit hole: a secret tunnel on the outskirts of Metropolis leading to a bizarre underground world inhabited by hippies, drop-outs and mutant creatures.

“Welcome to the wild area, brother,” announces the first person he encounters, a bearded young man meditating atop a giant mushroom that spits poison gas. “You are now free to do your own thing!”

This was issue No. 133 of “Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen” - the first to be written and drawn by the comics legend Jack Kirby. And so, without knowing it, Superman (and the reader) had wandered into what would come to be known as Kirby’s “Fourth World” - a weird saga of warring gods that for a brief moment hijacked the normally staid line of DC Comics and plunged it into bracing, beautiful oddness…

I’d be surprised if Chris Sims or some other blogger with a tendency to enjoy having his mind blown by the spectacular weirdness of JIMMY OLSEN comics hasn’t already mined this issue for comedic gold.

It was a cosmic “epic for our times,” with one foot in ancient myth and the other in the wildest science fiction. And unusually for a comic book story, it was designed to be told slowly, over many years, and to come to an end.

It isn’t clear whether Hodgman was aware that even as he was writing this, Kirby’s New Gods saga actually was coming to an end of sorts.

I believe there are comics fans out there who always felt that Kirby’s New Gods were sort of an odd fit for the mainstream DCU. After decades of integration, I’m not sure that I can see that, and quite the contrary, they seem to fulfill a valuable roll in giving some character to DC’s cosmos, which otherwise I haven’t found to be quite as rich as Marvel’s. Before anybody bites my head off, I’ll concede that this last sentiment could have more to do with my personal affinity for Marvel’s characters, in general, over the Distinguished Competition’s (less so, however, in recent years) than with anything approaching objectivity.

The results were startling. Kirby fans already knew that his art was muscular and kinetic, and in this collection, he’s at the height of his powers. His characters are always in motion, leaping and punching at impossible angles, straining at the panels that try to contain them. Kirby’s writing was the same way. His stories were linear - even primitive. But there is something powerful and melancholy and personal that weeps in Orion’s epic, city-smashing rages.

At other times, though, the pages cannot seem to keep up with Kirby’s astonishing imagination. Concepts, characters, subplots and themes are wildly thrown into the mix like drunken punches and then abandoned, never to be seen again: A whole city “hewn from the giant trees of a great forest”! Space giants lashed to asteroids! Werewolves and vampires living on a miniature planet in a scientist’s basement (a planet with horns on it)!

…

It’s hard to know what a teenager would make of this. But Kirby was writing just as much for himself. He was 53 when he undertook the Fourth World, and a veteran of World War II. But as Evanier points out, and as is evident throughout this book, Kirby was deeply inspired by the young generation that was renouncing war around him. His understanding of the youth movement was perhaps idiosyncratic (in Kirby’s world, the “Hairies” built their perfect society in a giant missile carrier they called “The Mountain of Judgment”). But they too were forging a new world; and the pleasure he clearly took in their efforts seems to have balanced the bouts of Orion-like rage. In one moment, Highfather of New Genesis turns to one of the young boys in his care. “Esak,” he asks, “what is it that makes the very young - so very wise?”

“Tee hee!!” Esak replies. “It’s our defense, Highfather - against the very old!!”

This is probably the only passage in the English language containing the words “tee hee” that has actually moved me.

This optimism pervades the first two volumes of the “Fourth World Omnibus,” and it helps the reader forgive its occasional excesses. It also lends poignancy to the failings of the second two volumes. For these are the books that document the premature death of the New Gods. By the 11th issue, as sales flagged, DC withdrew its Kirby mandate and the story ended, long before it was finished. Kirby was forced to wrap up as much of his saga as he could, in one rushed issue of Mr. Miracle, and then the wild area was closed.

I never really thought about reading Kirby’s Fourth World stories in context of the times in which he was writing, as well as in the context of what the man, himself, was thinking and experiencing at that point in his career. Admittedly, they’re somewhat more interesting to me in that light.

Anyway, I’ll just quickly hop over to Hodgman’s discussion of Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra’s Y: THE LAST MAN, because I think he nicely encapsulates what I, myself, have loved about the series—or at least, what I’ve read of it so far.

No, Yorick surely didn’t see it coming, anymore than I did. For by the time you know him well, you realize that Yorick, alas, really is a dope. This in part makes up for the fact that this story about billions of women remaking the world ultimately follows the journey of a single boy. Worse: a fanboy. For while Yorick may be immune to the man-killing disease, he’s woefully infected by another contemporary plague - unceasing pop-culture references.

“Bad news, Frodo,” he tells 355, explaining that the unusual engagement ring he bought for his girlfriend is not secretly the reason for his immunity, as he had thought. “Any delusions I once had about me being the protagonist of some predestined epic quest have gone the way of boy bands.”

The story is told in real time, over five years, and as they pass, the initial reasons for the journey fade, like Helen, in memory. Yorick’s search for Beth gets backburnered again and again. The need for an explanation of the plague becomes less pressing. Instead, the plot stops and asks its characters for directions. And where does it lead? To a graceful world in which women are getting along just fine, thank you. (Hint: In a world where the Roman Catholic Church is pretty much kaput, cloning becomes much less controversial.) Yorick realizes that his great escape amounts mostly to pure, dumb, Elvis-y luck. He realizes he is not particularly strong, nor particularly important, and in so doing he becomes what we used to call a man - and what I will now call: an adult.

Think I’ll leave it there for today. There’s another article that I meant to share, but tomorrow is another day.

Yesterday, I sang the praises of Chuck Dixon and his scripting work at DC (I’ve got a beautiful baritone, and I’m sorry if you missed it). Today, I discovered that a few days before said singing, Dixon announced that he is severing his ties entirely with the company.¹

And that’s what I get for being enthusiastic about something. C’est la vie!

It’s difficult for me to imagine that the new writer to hop on board will be able to execute the adventures of this group with the same degree of panache, but I don’t want to be bitter about it just because I’ve always tried to prop Chuck Dixon up. Strangely, however, the way Dixon phrases it, it sounds more like a dismissal than a resignation. In which case, I think I shall reserve the right to be bitter.

All it took was a quick, no-nonsense statement by writer Chuck Dixon to set the discussion boards alight. On the night of June 10th, Chuck Dixon wrote on his messageboard: “I am no longer employed by DC Comics in any capacity.”

The news caught Dixon’s fans by surprise, but seemed to underscore recent, sudden editorial changes at DC, including the recently announced replacement of Dixon by Frank Tieri on Batman and the Outsiders #11-#12, a “Batman R.I.P” tie-in. Dixon himself came on the series in much the same way, replacing the series’ original writer, Tony Bedard after Bedard’s first issue had been solicited.

…

Dixon’s upcoming work includes Simpsons Comics #142 - #144, the currently running Frankenstein: Prodigal Son adaptation at Dabel Brothers, Big Badz at Platinum, and will be reprinting some of his own material under his own imprint, Bruno Books.

As a reader, I don’t have any kind of relationship with Frank Tieri, having managed to miss…well, everything he has ever written. I recall he was writing some Wolverine book a couple of years ago, though I don’t believe I ever heard anybody say anything nice about it. His Wikipedia article says that as a boss of one of the biggest crime families in the U.S., Tieri died two months after conviction under the RICO act, so really, good for him that he has managed to amend his ways. Surely, he must be the most successful of reformed zombie comic book writers.

Oh wait—wrong Frank Tieri. Frank Tieri the comic book writer’s article stub reports that: “His style is gritty, yet usually laden with pop-culture references and black humor, and as such has kept on writing the books spotlighting villains.” On the face of it, this seems like an odd fit for BATMAN AND THE OUTSIDERS, which I think of more as an espionage adventure comic, but who knows? For the benefit of my wallet, I imagine I’ll drop it after Dixon’s last installment.

Sorry about the lame post title. Best I could do. Well, more accurately, it was the first thing that popped into my mind, and the fact that it made no sense didn’t bother me enough to come up with anything better.

I’m a big fan of Chuck Dixon, having sort of hopped on his fandom bandwagon around the time he was handling scripting chores on NIGHTWING, and I try to follow him around from book to book when I can. Whatever other adjectives you may wish to ascribe to his work, the man is dependable in the adventure genre, and it’s the rare book of his that I haven’t found to be at the very least diverting.

Dixon has never risen to stardom in the ranks of comic book writers, though I’m not quite sure why. You don’t often see his name associated with the mega-crossovers in superhero comics, and maybe that’s an indication that as a writer, Chuck Dixon is simply in his element working on a smaller scale. There are few universe shaping concepts in his stories—as he tends to write nearer to the street level—and yet, he’s one of the best in the biz at getting from point A to point B without dropping the ball in between. Just a solid storyteller who understands pacing inside and out.

For some reason I took a pass on the current volume of BATMAN AND THE OUTSIDERS when I first saw it on the shelf. When I see “Batman” in the title, I tend to fret over the possibility that I might have to purchase eight other books merely to follow the plot in the one book I really want to read. But my temptation was great enough that I sought out a torrent file containing scanned versions of the first couple of issues, and found myself fairly well drawn in.

From my reading of those installments, I understood enough to see that Dixon was clearly doing a Batman book that seemed to pretty much stand on its own two feet, and thank god for that. In theory I love Batman, but in practice, I haven’t bought any of his books since Aftershock—or whatever the hell that storyline was called—in the late 90s, and I didn’t even purchase many of those.

Back to BATMAN AND THE OUTSIDERS, my impression was that rhythmically, Dixon was going for something like an Ocean’s Eleven fluidity. As I said in a Usenet posting at the time, you can almost hear a Dave Holmes soundtrack playing in your head as you read issue one, “The Chrysalis”. Batman’s Outsiders, like Ocean’s Eleven, function as a well-oiled machine with a bit of jazz-like improvisation as the situation demands. Basically, it’s just cool.

I filed this one away in my brain to pick up the inevitable trade paperback, but recently, with the end of the second UNCLE SAM AND THE FREEDOM FIGHTERS volume, I found that I was feeling antsy for a new title to sate my appetite for pure fun in superhero comics, as opposed to the melodramatic, continuity wanking that at the moment runs through a lot of the bigger publications done by Marvel and DC. Anyway, as I opened the mental filing cabinet for my action fix, I think this scene of Martian Manhunter calmly strolling through a hallway full of guards firing automatic machine guns at him immediately presented itself.

J’onn J’onzz is bad ass, and I will fight anybody who says differently. (Well, I may just sick this guy on you.) In the following panel, he turns intangible and walks right past them all. There’s something all the more awesome about the fact that he allowed them to expend all of their rounds before becoming ghostified. That’s some veteran heroing shit right there. (I understand that Martian Manhunter recently bought the farm in…was it FINAL CRISIS? I can’t say that I was too enthralled by his recent change in attitude…and clothing, but that’s still a huge loss to DC’s superhero stable. Here’s hoping it’s just a fake-out. Maybe somebody who actually read it can give me a sense of how likely that is.)

Unfortunately, the trade on this doesn’t drop until September, so I began scouring eBay, only to discover that the BATMAN AND THE OUTSIDERS lots haven’t been going for cheap, so the advantage of picking them up off of some guy trying to charge you $8 to ship six comics was nonexistent. So I just bit the bullet last week and purchased the back issues (1 through 7) at retail price from the local comic book store.

Great investment, really. Chuck Dixon basically writes as good a Batman as I’ve read—at least in the mainstream interpretation of him. He’s not an insufferable prick, he’s not infallible, he’s just supremely prepared and he knows how to pick the right people to help him do the job that needs doing. The Outsiders follow him not because they have to or even because he’s paying the bills, but because he’s just that good at this sort of thing. Plus he serves finger sandwiches.

Honestly, I sort of prefer Batman the planner to Batman the invincible loner who can take on any threat single-handedly. That gets pretty boring after a while.

Anyway, it’s a hugely entertaining book from month to month. Dixon’s at the top of his game here, hitting most of the beats dead-on. My only concern is that the slickness of pacing doesn’t always allow for the most thorough of exposition, but it’s just a quibble, since by and large, it’s easy to follow, and is rather smart about the way that this plot is developing.

Check it out in trade someday if you missed it the first time around.