Batman: Contagion

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Batman: Contagion (DC, 1996).



There might be two ways to look at this book, but the question of why in the world I own it should probably be raised. When I lived in Athens in the late 1990s, I would occasionally visit the J&J Flea Market a little north of town. There, one vendor had a very impressive room full of very inexpensive comics. Most of them were three-for-a-dollar and probably worth even less, but he also had several boxes of more entertaining 1970s books - Superman Family, Metal Men and the like - for not more than two bucks each. Occasionally, a trade paperback or graphic novel would slip in for the same very low price, and I would usually snap it up, thinking $1 a quite fair price to sample a very long story from comics with which I was unfamiliar.

I also suffered from that foolish malady common to collectors where I wished to have shelves full of books. The quality could come later; first, I wanted the shelves to look impressive and full. This sometimes meant that I would spend an occasional dollar or two on books that I normally would not, just to swell the shelves. You know the greatest thing about swearing off the bloat of my material world a year and a bit ago? I'm no longer tempted by dumb things like that.

At any rate, I suspected that I wouldn't enjoy the book, and I was proved right. I disliked it from the start, as the designer evidently chose to blow his budget on a long lunch. The very first page of the book is the first page of story, and it opens very abruptly, without any kind of scene-setting or even credits. Parsing out who wrote and drew what, and where this material originally appeared, is like a jigsaw puzzle. On the inside back cover(!), there's a list of comics where these chapters were originally serialized. I count twelve, but there are thrteen chapters inside. The twelfth episode is labeled "part ten." The original covers of these twelve comics are reproduced at the size of postage stamps. Alan Grant is credited as one of the five writers on the inside front cover, but because some of the interior credits are edited out, I'm unable to tell what pages he actually scripted.

In other words, this is yet another slapped-together, thought-free, half-assed cash-in to rip off as many Batman readers as can be suckered in by it. Having said that, it is certainly possible that the $19.99 edition presently in print might have addressed some of this volume's deficiency. That is, after all, a price 50% greater than the $12.95 that DC originally charged for this book. We know that DC is capable of so much better - see their astounding series of Starman Omnibus volumes - and so it's just pathetic seeing how they can just crap out books with the barest minimum of work and get away with it.

But really, all the tinkering in the world couldn't turn these comics into anything readable. DC, like its principal rival, often creates "crossover" stories which wind their way through several loosely-related titles over the course of a couple of months. Indeed, "Contagion" was a management-decreed storyline, mostly (apparently) written by Chuck Dixon, and given to the comics' regular creative teams to tell. For my readers unfamiliar with this practice, it would mean that on one week, you could read part one of the story in Batman # 529, and parts two and three the following week in Catwoman # 31 and in Azrael # 15, and so on. There is, bluntly, no way in the universe that this could ever result in a satisfying read for anybody. It never has worked, and it never will. The closest that it has ever come was in a Grant Morrison-led crossover called One Million, and that worked because DC suspended its normal operations for a single month and let the story, as directed by Morrison, take over its entire line through individually-labeled and designed titles, and even that epic was fraught with pointless, unnecessary moments and melodramas that fell on their faces.

Well, maybe it worked somewhere else. Sometime soon, I'll try looking at a similar Superman crossover event from the period and see how well it reads.

This time out, the five writers attempt to tell a story where a lethal, no-known-cure plague called The Clench is brought to Gotham City and many of the city's wealthiest are trapped with it in a luxury high-rise. They send word to the city's underworld that they will pay five million for a cure, leading Robin, Catwoman and a bounty hunter in a race to find one of the only known survivors of the disease. Meanwhile, Batman, Huntress and Nightwing try to keep order in the city after the Clench escapes into the population, and the untrustworthy Poison Ivy, who is immune to all diseases, is recruited to help.

The patchwork story, with its artificial cliffhangers, just does not engage in any way. Dixon's installments are the most energetic, and Denny O'Neil's the most somber and humorless. At one point, Robin starts to succumb to the Clench, leaving no doubt as to how quickly this plague will be cured. Unresolved subplots from these books wander through and just confused me. Commissioner Gordon has been outed from his job when the book opens, and his replacement is a dim buffoon. The Clench has evidently been dumped into the population, deliberately, by a gang of Azrael's old enemies. I'm sorry to spoil that, but telling you that the rogues' gallery of an already-forgotten C-list supporting character is behind this allegedly important story might best explain why this book is not recommended at all.

Showcase Presents Bat Lash

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded, and maybe you'd like to think about reading them as well. This time, a review of Showcase Presents Bat Lash (DC, 2009).



I was looking forward to this book for several reasons. For starters, I hadn't read a single page that's been reprinted in it before. I was familiar with the character of Bat Lash, a Western dandy of a gunslinger, from some appearances he'd made in some of DC's other cowboy comics in the early 1980s. I enjoyed at least the concept of a flower-loving drifter who repeatedly gets caught up in violent skirmishes in crowded saloons, but never saw his original appearances.

Much later on, I learned the character was co-created by the great Sergio Aragonés and drawn by the great Nick Cardy, and DC has finally reprinted all of his original adventures in one handy Showcase Presents volume, and it's a cracker. I've always enjoyed Cardy's work, but there are some pages in here which knocked me on my socks. Most memorable is a great splash page where the camera is above a crowd of kids scampering around the roof rafters looking down on a big mob of people below them with their guns drawn on Bat Lash, and it's just a marvel to see such a vibrant, original composition in what could have been a much more humdrum drawing.

Most of the stories are co-written by Aragonés and Denny O'Neil, and they're all incredibly entertaining. Bat Lash is, at his core, a hippie a hundred years early. He just moseys from place to place playing cards, picking flowers and romancing the ladies, not wanting to get into trouble but finding astonishing amounts of it. He's not too far removed from Maverick, which remains, more than half a century later, one of the nine or ten best shows ever made for American TV, so I think that's a good comparison to make. It's got that same sense of subversion, putting a protagonist in play who really doesn't want to do anything heroic, but acts out of self-interest and a rascally desire to undercut authority.

Bat Lash was not a hit back in the sixties. The character first appeared in an issue of the original Showcase anthology before getting his own series, which only lasted seven issues and was canceled in 1969. This collection reprints all eight, along with two later appearances. One of these was a 1978 story that appeared in a later anthology series, written by O'Neil, and another was a three-part adventure scripted by Len Wein that appeared as a backup feature across three issues of Jonah Hex in 1981. Even without Aragonés and Cardy, these are still very good, entertaining stories.

The collection is one of two currently available in DC's Showcase Presents line which have gained the fan nickname "Skinny Showcases." Instead of the usual 500 pages for $17, these reprint about 250 pages for ten bucks. It's an ideal solution for characters like Bat Lash who don't have a great deal of material available for reprinting, but the stories are so darn good they deserve to be seen again. Honestly, the originals are clearly among the best comics that DC published in the 1960s, and so ten bucks is a pretty small price to pay to see them again. Highly recommended.

Showcase Presents Justice League of America Volume Four

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded. This time, a review of Showcase Presents Justice League of America volume four (DC, 2009).



When I was a kid, devouring whatever comics I could find, Justice League of America was my favorite book, and I've learned that those 1970s adventures hold up surprisingly well. However, getting to those heady days of the book's best run was occasionally quite a chore, as this run of Showcase Presents collections has shown. The title spent most of the sixties being as tedious as superhero funnybooks can get, with the usual team of Gardner Fox, Mike Sekowsky and Sid Greene turning out increasingly weird, convoluted, hard-to-follow plots starring a bunch of identikit circus strongmen. The stories were baffling and the art was boring. I found myself flipping through most of the third Showcase collection without really reading any of it.

Mercifully, the fourth volume in this series, covering the book's 1968-70 run, is when it finally gets good. It starts with the final few stories from this team, showing just how ridiculous and ugly this book had been. The first of these was covered in hilarious detail by J. Caleb Mozzocco over at his Every Day is Like Wednesday blog earlier this month. You should go check out that review to see what I'm talking about, then pop back here.

After a few of these nutball comics, Fox is replaced as writer by Denny O'Neil, who chose to emphasize character over plot, and this, finally, is the beginning of the JLA I fondly remember as a boy. Fox's League was a gang of clones and any panel's thought balloon could be attached to any character's head; O'Neil, who was writing Green Arrow's solo adventures at the time and turning him into the strident liberal loudmouth we all know and love, starts with the character's differences and lets their personality clashes fuel the drama.

The other huge, long overdue, change is with the art. Sekowsky is replaced as penciller by Dick Dillin. The change isn't instantly evident, because Sid Greene's inks still overpower what the penciller wants to do. Greene isn't a good match for Dillin - he uses two lines, heavy or light, when Dillin's art screams out for someone who can bring all the tricks he wants to life. However, Dillin's layouts are more interesting, and the characters no longer have that barrel-chested torso that Sekowsky used for the whole cast. When Greene is replaced by Joe Giella, the book finally looks as good as it should, with vibrant artwork that just sings off the page. A few years later, Frank McLaughlin would become Dillin's principal inker, and it was their work that thrilled me so much when I was a kid, but Giella's just about as good.

So in the 500 pages you get in this book, you'll see about 100 pages of the original team, about 200 of the transitional period, and about 200 very solid, very entertaining pages of superhero/sci-fi fun. I can't recommend this as strongly as I could the eventual next volume in the series, which will be essential, but if you enjoy superhero comics, this is certainly worth checking out.