Bring On the Bad Guys

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 Bring on the Bad Guys (Fireside, 1976)



In the 1970s, one of Simon & Schuster's divisions launched an annual collection of Marvel Comics reprints. I guess there were ten of these, reasonably priced samplers of mostly Stan Lee-scripted superhero smash-ups, and they were certainly the gateway drug for millions of kids who'd never seen much of the classic 1960s Marvel work.

These days, these sort of samplers seem pretty quaint and silly in the wake of so much reprinted material available. I found my copy of Bring on the Bad Guys - an extremely nice first edition for $5 - at the old Lakewood Antique Market in 2004, and there's nothing in it that hasn't since been collected in the pages of Marvel's Essential line. Each chapter has one or two stories, or some multi-part adventures, telling the tales of those nefarious nasties Doctor Doom, the Red Skull, Loki, the Green Goblin, Dormammu, the Abomination and Mephisto. These are names that should, if the 4-5 pages of introductory material for each chapter (penned especially and breathlessly for this edition by Smilin' Stan) have done their job, strike fear in the hearts of law-abiding citizens everywhere!

About half the artwork in this book is by Jack Kirby, and honestly, I was never really taken with his earliest work on Fantastic Four. This has got that odd little story where Doom forces our heroes to travel back in time and collect Blackbeard's treasure for him, and while the artwork is better than just about anything in mainstream comics today, it's not a patch on what he'd accomplish in just a couple of years. The sequence where the Red Skull kidnaps and brainwashes Captain America, and the climactic part of Thor's battle with Loki and the Absorbing Man, along with some short "Tales of Asgard" adventures detailing Thor and Loki's long enmity, well, those are jawdropping.

Just about the only thing in 1960s comics to come close would be Dr. Strange's initial, mindblowing battle with Dormammu and those Nameless Ones, which Steve Ditko co-plotted and drew, and it's just amazing stuff. I still think Marvel's criminally missing some sales by not packaging all of the Ditko Dr. Strange stories in a nice hardcover with good paper. There's sort of a bitter irony in that the Spider-Man adventure included here would be the one which Ditko refused to draw, in which the Green Goblin reveals his identity. John Romita drew this adventure in sort of a lackluster Ditko imitation before his own style really manifested, and it ends up, visually, being the weakest thing in the book.

The Abomination story is drawn by Gil Kane, and it's notable for the almost naive take on the Hulk's power, which kept being described in the sixties as limitless, but nobody ever seemed to believe it. I think that's why I prefer the comparatively low-powered 1960s Marvel Universe. One cliffhanger comes when Abomination just smacks Hulk in the head really hard and Rick Jones starts screaming that not even the Hulk could survive a blow like that. These days, I reckon you could split the planet in half and it wouldn't slow him down. Yawn. Finally, John Buscema draws a Silver Surfer adventure, and he draws the hell out of it, but I've always thought that this was the series, among all others, where Stan's dialogue reached its overblown, overwritten pinnacle, and so I just sort of tuned out and enjoyed looking at the pretty pictures.

As a sampler or an introduction, this book's just terrific. It's one of those books that every aunt and uncle in America should have handy for when younguns visit. I mean, really, if an under-ten isn't doing a double-take at the sight of Kirby's Cap beating the hell out of enough Nazis to completely pack a hallway, or Ditko's Strange crossing limbo voids where nobody ever heard of physics, then you need to get that kid checked out. Something's wrong with him. From a collector's standpoint, it's also pretty handy. The next time somebody tells you they're not interested in Essentials because they're in black and white, you can show 'em this and compare the aggravating off-register printing and limited color palate to the nice, unvarnished, untainted Kirby artwork in Essential Thor volume two and settle the argument instantly. Recommended, of course. Now how about putting together some new editions of this and the two Origins books and The Superhero Women and the others, so folks can buy 'em again, Marvel?

Fanboy

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 Fanboy (DC, 2001).



When Fanboy, a very silly miniseries by Mark Evanier and the great artist Sergio Aragonés, set in the sidelines of the DC Universe and featuring a hero-obsessed comic shop employee fighting censorship and being oblivious to the girl who loves him, was originally released in 1999, I was not interested in trying it. That's despite all the fun guest art by the likes of Russ Heath, Gil Kane, Dave Gibbons, Brian Bolland and Bruce Timm illustrating various fantasies and daydreams of our hero, the geeky Finster. I plead being a boring person and not really noticing it, and not having been led back to the usual Mad Magazine gang of idiots by my son yet.

Well, three months back, we went to see the artist give a lecture and receive the Jack Davis Distinguished Artist award at UGA and popped by Bizarro Wuxtry beforehand so that my son could get something new signed beyond the older books he owns. (You did read about that, didn't you?) Bizarro had the collected edition of Fanboy along with several of Sergio's other books, so I bought a copy for my son, and he finally let me read it a couple of weeks ago.

I think the most honest way to describe this book is that it's incredibly sweet, with a relaxed pace and a desire to make readers smile. I don't believe I laughed out loud while reading it, but I spent a lunch hour with it and grinned from start to finish. There are points where the motions are not at all original - hey, Finster, guess what, the girl you're crazy about will never feel the same for you - but it's all done with such style and such a light touch that it seems fresh and different. In some ways, it feels like the inverse of Kyle Baker's fabulous Plastic Man comic from a few years back. There, Baker was bludgeoning the sacred cows of the DC Universe in a wild, over-the-top manner. Aragonés and Evanier's decision to gently tease conventions results in something nowhere as raucous, but nonetheless very satisfying. Recommended for all ages.

Batman and Bad Company

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. This time, reviews, of sorts, of Showcase Presents Batman volume three (DC, 2008) and Bad Company: Kano (Rebellion, 2007).



More of the same. Depending on your opinion of mid-to-late 1960s Batman, agonizingly more of the same. The book features several television-friendly villains, even ones they never used in the 60s TV series such as the Cluemaster and the Getaway Genius, but sometimes in grandiose schemes that could never have been realized on that show's budget. It features the old-styled, retarded Catwoman who was obsessed with stealing anything with "cat" in the name, be it catamarans or catawba grapes. There's some nice artwork from the likes of Carmine Infantino and Gil Kane, but you'll probably like this book a lot more if you're one of us who love the show.



Oh, I wish I could recommend this a little more strongly. The first series of Bad Company, back in 1986-87, was really amazing. Peter Milligan's been a really uneven writer, ranging from utterly compelling (as seen in that first series and, say, Enigma), and then there's well, the last two years of Shade the Changing Man and most of this. The book reprints two storylines. The first, in which the battle-scarred Kano attempts to retire to a farming community beset by ghosts and by creatures in the forest, has elements of genius, but it's completely undermined by Brett Ewins' artwork, which is even more stiff than usual and colored in that garish watercolor he seemed to be using throughout the early 1990s. The second features far better, more vibrant black and white work that recalls the earlier adventures, but the story is Milligan on autopilot. There's very little here which will convince new readers just how amazing that first series was.

(Originally posted September 02, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

Green Lantern and Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. This time, reviews of Showcase Presents Green Lantern vol. 3 (DC, 2008) and Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service vol. 6 (Dark Horse, 2008).



Amusingly, this bunch of mid-60s Green Lantern adventures sees the book picking up an influence from the Batman TV series. There's a greater emphasis on real-world fisticuffs and recurring villains and a new job for Hal Jordan driving around the Pacific Northwest as an insurance investigator, not to mention two episodes that reference a popular TV series that everybody watches. One is a Green Lantern action series and one is about a criminal called the Dazzler who escapes each week to fight again another day. However, reflecting the naive innocence of the New Yorkers producing these comics, plot points in each hinge on the incredibly unlikely notion that these programs are transmitted live, which was pretty unlikely in 1966! The biggest selling point is that you get some of the earliest examples of Gil Kane inking himself, and damn, those pages look good. Recommended for readers who enjoy the Showcase Batman books.



Admittedly, it's part of the horror genre's rules that the plot is more important than the hapless people to whom the plot actually happens, but I've been chugging along with this series, enjoying the heck out of how morbid and surprising it can get, but I could not tell you the name of any one of the protagonists. On character kind of dominates the storylines, but there's a sense of anonymity and dullness about the five protagonists that occasionally grates. I can't give it an unqualified thumbs-up on that note alone, but this volume is actually more entertaining than the others, because after four of the usual 30-page episodes (it apparently appears first in a monthly, rather than weekly, anthology), the setting shifts back to the early 1900s for a completely bizarre and grisly adventure starring an amateur detective called Kunio Matsuoka. Hang the tales from the present day, I wanna see more of this guy!

(Originally posted July 20, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

Golgo 13 vol 10, Houdini: The Handcuff King and Showcase Presents Batgirl

Here's how this works: I finish reading a comic collection, and I tell you about it, and I try not to go on too long.



"Wasteland" is a nuclear-scare story from the early 80s, which really has not aged as well as the other stories in this series of reprints. On the other hand, the story does a stunning job depicting the absolute desperation of a team of engineers trapped in a nuclear plant, and the solution, using Golgo's unerring accuracy to find a way to shut everything down, is very clever. The second, shorter story, "Route 95," is more engrossing, and places our "hero" amidst a murder mystery, only to learn that he has a nasty, secret reason for being in the wrong place at the wrong time... Recommended for readers who've sampled some of the other volumes.



Jason Lutes and Nick Bertozzi (The Salon) look at a day in the life of Houdini, preparing for and executing an event in Cambridge. It is an entertaining and detailed little story, which weaves elements of Houdini's life and mythology in and around the spectacle, but in the end, I felt that the price point was awfully high for a story so slight, and was actively aggravated at myself for spending as much as I did, even with a generous discount. $16.99 might have been fine for a life story in 96 pages, but, and this may be the plot-heavy 2000 AD fan in me talking, there's an awful lot of space given over to scene-setting at the expense of story. Not recommended without a pretty substantial discount.



A pretty typical Showcase offering, about 550 pages which reprint every Batgirl appearance from her 1966 debut into the early 70s. For a time, she was a recurring guest character in the Batman stories before getting her own monthly series in Detective Comics, with a long stretch of two-part eight-page adventures. The character was semi-retired around 1971, and, in one of the most credibility-straining ideas in DC's history, Barbara Gordon was elected to represent Gotham City in the US Congress, which didn't leave her very many opportunities to break out the cape and cowl. There's some pretty good artwork by the likes of Don Heck, Carmine Infantino and Gil Kane in this volume, but the stories are pretty slight and not particularly engaging. Not recommended.

(Originally posted November 12, 2007 at hipsterdad's LJ.)