big box of comics: The Sandman — Overture

Tags

big box of comics, Dave Stewart, DC Comics, Dreaming, dreams, JH Williams III, Neil Gaiman, overture, sandman, Vertigo Comics

I am a child of Time and Night,
and this place will prove my end.

—Morpheus; Overture #5.

Last month’s Big Box of Comics featured Sandman: Endless Nights. This month, thanks once again to this blog’s readers, I filled in another gap in my Sandman collection with the superbly illustrated Overture. While I enjoyed Endless Nights, it didn’t quite earn a place among my all-time favorite Sandman stories, but Overture definitely made my top five. Let me share with you why.

First, the art by J.H. Williams III—assisted in no small part by colorist Dave Stewart—is probably the most awesome art to ever grace the pages of a Sandman story. It has incredibly inventive panel layouts that re-imagine what is possible with the very concept of panels and are perfectly suited to this story’s journey through numerous levels of reality and dreams. Williams employs a variety of art styles for the various realms and characters, even going so far as to draw multiple styles in a single panel, such as the four-page fold-out mega-splash page in the first issue where many incarnations of the Lord of Dreams gather in a single place.

Longtime fans of Sandman since the 1980s might recall the days when the original issues were printed on cheaper paper with more primitive printing processes and the colors often lacked vibrancy. But in Overture, with Dave Stewart’s colors on high-quality paper, the vibrancy is turned all the way up to eleven. Overture is a visual feast that must be seen to be believed.

Second, Overture brings back all the elements that made so many of the original long-form story arcs into instant classics. We travel through all kinds of fantastic realms, meet fascinating characters whose infinite depths we barely have time to explore, converse about weighty and poetic concepts, re-imagine mythologies, and create new mythologies on the fly as only Neil Gaiman can do.

Some reviewers have posted negative comments about the story, but those reviews only make me wonder if the reviewers remember story arcs such as the wandering Brief Lives from the original series. Sandman was always content to spend a lot of time on journeys that at first appeared aimless, was never in a hurry with the build-up, and reached unexpected and often quiet conclusions that left you scratching your head thinking, “WTF was that about?”—until you re-read the entire thing and grasped the meaning of it all.

Some reviewers complain about a lack of dramatic tension, since you know that somehow all of Overture’s complicated plot must eventually resolve into the events of the first issue of the original series. After all, it’s obviously a prequel. But I found the high stakes kept me engaged in wondering how Morpheus could simultaneously succeed on his quest and yet find himself captured at the end, and the outcome was anything but predictable.

One of the joys in reading Overture is how it connects to so many ideas and stories that were alluded to in the original series but were never fully explored or explained. Some reviewers say Overture is a bad place to start with Sandman because it requires you to know a lot about the original series for context. I disagree. I would absolutely recommend this as a starting point, because even though a new reader won’t totally understand all the context, the same could be said about starting with Sandman #1 and saving Overture until you finish the original seventy-five issues.

Sandman always had a lot of unexplained back-story about major events that were only alluded to in a couple of panels of dialogue. Overture gave Gaiman a chance to go back and fill in or expand on what might have seemed like throwaway concepts forty years ago. After reading Overture, I re-read the original series and found a new appreciation for so many small moments. Here are a few examples.

Overture gives us a more complete tale of Alianora, a former love of Morpheus who only briefly appeared near the end of A Game of You. Reading her scene in A Game of You made so much more sense to me after Overture. Likewise, when Morpheus recalls in just two panels of The Doll’s House how he failed to properly deal with a Vortex a long time ago, you know what he meant after Overture.

In Brief Lives, Delirium tells Destiny there are things that don’t appear in his book that contains the entire universe, and there is a single panel which mentions how Morpheus was weakened after some major episode that left him vulnerable to being captured in the first issue of the original series. Both of these brief moments are explored in much greater detail in Overture.

Overture also harkens back to one of my favorite standalone issues: Dream of a Thousand Cats. Morpheus appears differently to different species, such as when he appeared as a fox to the fox in Dream Hunters, and Dream of a Thousand Cats showed that he appears to cats as the Cat of Dreams. Overture explores this idea in its opening pages where Morpheus appears as a sentient carnivorous plant to an alien lifeform, and it also features the Cat of Dreams. Plus, a major plot point centers on having one thousand beings dream the same dream to create a new reality—a central concept in Dream of a Thousand Cats.

Overture builds on the idea of stars-as-conscious-entities from Endless Nights, giving the stars an entire cosmic city you don’t want to mess with, and developing the antipathy Morpheus feels for his androgynous sibling Desire as a result of that story.

You also discover the origin of the weird gasmask-plus-spinal-column thing Morpheus sometimes wears, another item whose origin was only ever mentioned in a couple of panels of the original series. DC Comics geeks know the real reason for the gasmask is that the original golden-age Sandman wore one while he was gassing his foes with chemicals that made them sleepy, but Gaiman took an old idea and ran with it—much as he did with the subsequent Jack Kirby version of Sandman in The Doll’s House.

Those are just a few things I picked up on, and other fans of Sandman will undoubtedly find more. So, as to the question of whether this is a good place to start with Sandman, I say it is. New readers won’t always understand what is going on, but that’s the same experience they get if they start at Sandman #1. To read Sandman, you must be willing to not have everything explained to you, to put together pieces of a puzzle, and to read the stories more than once to pick up all the clues and see how everything ties together. You must also be ready to indulge Gaiman’s love of leaving many mysteries unsolved, and many endings ambiguous.

I loved Overture, and it made me love the original series even more than I already did. The art will blow your mind, the story will deepen your appreciation of the original series, and it works not only as an overture but a coda to one of the finest examples of what can be accomplished in comic books. A huge Thank You to this blog’s readers for helping me add this missing gem to my big box of comics.

Collector’s Guide: Get the Sandman: Overture 30^th Anniversary Edition on Amazon in Kindle or paperback formats. It’s a little harder, but not impossible and certainly rewarding, to find all the original single issues in stock.

Cretaceous Carnage with Lobo

Tags

Alan Grant, Carl Critchlow, DC Comics, dinosaur, dinosaur comics, hunting dinosaurs, Kamandi, Lobo, Mark Propst, time travel

Here at Mars Will Send No More, one of our favorite things is traveling time to hunt dinosaurs. We just can’t get enough of prehistoric poaching, saurian slaughter, terrorizing pterosaurs, and wrestling a ramphoryncus. We relish riding rexes, accosting ankylosaurs, and disturbing the dimetrodons. It’s just what we do.

But nobody does it better than DC Comics’ Main Man: Lobo!

In issue 38 of Lobo’s 65-issue series that began in 1993, the homicidal heathen runs amok in a masterpiece of Mesozoic mayhem. The opening splash page parodies DC’s Kamandi, a Jack Kirby creation about the “last boy on Earth” in a post-apocalyptic dystopia populated by anthropomorphic animals.

But the parodies pile up as different characters arrive on the scene, including cowboys thrilled to be in Ray Harryhausen’s Valley of Gwangi and a bunch of aging 1970s rock stars ready to embark on a “Dinosaurs of Rock” tour.

With a cover date of April 1997, this issue was timed to appear just before the release of Jurassic Park: The Lost World in May, complete with a “Jurassik Pork” action figure of writer Alan “Judge Dredd” Grant. Somehow, this series was published without the “Intended for Mature Readers” warning on the cover, and the creative team pushes that boundary. It substitutes “frag” and “bastich” for more common profanities, creatively poses a butt-naked Lobo to avoid full-frontal nudity, and couches Lobo’s sexual exploits in puns and innuendos.

Even when Lobo gets his hand chopped off, there’s something cartoonish about it all. He can’t really be hurt for too long, and his hand is soon re-attached to his arm without explanation, much in the same way that no matter what horrible fate befell Wile E. Coyote, he always got patched up and came back for more senseless violence.

According to Lobo’s co-creator Keith Giffen, the character was originally intended as a satire of grim-and-gritty, hyper-violent comics. But the satire was so over-the-top that it was hilarious, and the more insane Alan Grant made the character, the more fun it was to read. Devoid of restraints such as ethics and empathy, and physically immune to any long-term consequences of his actions, Lobo is like a heavy metal Bugs Bunny with an attitude problem.

As you might suspect, things in issue 38 don’t end well for the dinosaurs, nor for anyone else who encounters Lobo.

The creative team seems to take just as much childish glee in the wanton destruction as the Main Man himself, and the illustrations are both gorgeous and silly at the same time. I have only read a handful of issues from this series, despite having read many more of the Lobo limited series and one-shots, but they were consistently entertaining, and I’d like to hunt them all down eventually. Just like the dinosaurs.

Collector’s Guide: From Lobo #38; DC Comics, 1997. I don’t believe the issue has been reprinted in any TPBs yet, but you might also enjoy the first Lobo TPB that collects several four-issue series and one-shots, including outrageous work by Alan Grant, Keith Giffen, Simon Bisley, Denys Cowan, and Kevin O’Neill.

We3: Home Is Run No More

Tags

animals, bandit, cats, DC Comics, Frank Quitely, Grant Morrison, pirates, science fiction, tinker, Vertigo Comics, We3

Every now and then, I read a tragic story that breaks my heart, but no comic-book adventure has ever broken me so relentlessly as We3. A friend who isn’t really into comic books got into Grant Morrison thanks to the live-action show Happy—based on the four-issue series of the same name published by Image—so I’ve been digging into the Morrison archives. Along the way, I realized I’d never read what many people consider to be one of Morrison’s best works, if not the best. We3 is an action-packed story brought to life by Morrison’s long-time artistic collaborator Frank Quitely, and though I’ve enjoyed Quitely’s artwork for years, he outdid his own genius on We3. Before we delve into the book, let me just say that this story features one of my all-time favorite things: a cat who absolutely kicks ass.

The cat’s given name is Tinker, but she is only referred to in the story as “2”. Tinker is part of a team of three normal animals who have been surgically altered and had their brains messed with so they can become killing machines encased in high-tech armor to perform military missions and assassinations instead of having human soldiers do the job. Joining Tinker in this horrifying experiment are the dog Bandit—referred to as “1”, and the only one of the three to re-discover his real name in the story—and a rabbit named Pirate (“3”) because of a black spot over one eye.

Each of these animals was someone’s beloved pet before the story began. Instead of telling the reader this fact through flashbacks or exposition, the creative team shows it much more powerfully with “lost pet” flyers on the covers of each issue. When you realize what has been done to these hapless animals, the covers hit like a punch to the gut.

When the higher-ups decide that these lost and kidnapped animals need to be killed—decommissioned, per orders—the three of them escape their containment facility and run away. Their combat modifications and training make them dangerous to society, so the military pursues them. One of the many tragic aspects of this story is that the trio doesn’t mean to be dangerous murder machines. These animals were forced against their will to become horrors in the service of the same humans who want to put them down.

Nowhere is this more strongly portrayed than through Bandit’s canine emotional crises. Bandit truly wants to be a good dog. He wants to protect his beloved animal allies in We3 and also help humans, but he is forced into situations where his combat programming takes over and he kills humans. In the aftermath of the killings, his simple, mournful repetition of “Bad dog” hits home more powerfully than pages of dialogue or narrative captions could ever do.

Tinker does not share the dog’s remorse. She thinks the whole thing stinks. When Bandit tries to save a human body to convince himself he is a good dog, Tinker bluntly tells him the man is dead. As the two animals fade into the horizon while arguing, the panels reveal the human is annihilated from the waist down. In a combination of graphic images and minimal, broken dialogue, Morrison and Quitely set up the tension between the cat’s no-nonsense and apparently correct assessment of the situation with the dog’s potentially delusional idealism.

Each animal’s cybernetically enhanced speech pattern says volumes about them. On the first read, I had trouble understanding their speech, but it all became clear to me upon the second reading. Bandit the dog is haunted by regret over what he has been made to do, and he struggles to lead his “pack” in a volatile and untenable situation. Pirate the rabbit is the most simple-minded of the trio, only speaking in one-word sentences, but that doesn’t stop him from delivering a heart-wrenching reminder to his comrades that they are friends and are all in this together. Sadly, Pirate’s speech degrades into mere electronic noise after he suffers an injury.

Cat-lover that I am, I especially enjoyed Tinker’s dialogue. Her feline disdain for just about everything is expressed through the word “Stink”, rendered as “ST!NK” or, when she is really angry, “!SSST!!!NKK!” Compared to the peaceful rabbit and optimistic dog, Tinker appears to be the least bothered by all the killing. She seems at times to revel in it. Tinker is also the group’s cynic who doesn’t believe the trio will ever find a home, because “home” no longer exists for any of them—a point of contention that leads to an argument with Bandit.

And what is home? What does “home” mean to Bandit after all the awful things the team has endured? To the dog, home is a simple concept. “Home is run no more.” Home is a place where these involuntary machines of war can find peace and rest, and that is Bandit’s hope for We3. But as the story progresses, it’s impossible to escape the feeling that Tinker is right, that home and peace will be forever denied these unfortunate animals because of what’s been done to them—and what of their lives and identities have been stolen from them.

Quitely employs many innovative and dramatic approaches to action. A video by Strip Panel Naked does a good job of analyzing the groundbreaking visuals in this story, so check that out. Regarding the page where Tinker hacks and slashes her way through a series of panels filled with her enemies, I am reminded of what Scott McCloud taught in his book Understanding Comics, where he asserts that part of the magic of comics is what happens—but is not shown—between the panels, allowing the reader to fill in the blanks. Quitely gives us two-dimensional panels rendered in 3-D with Tinker in action, demonstrating how the cat is a fast-moving agent of destruction. While Tinker’s opponents exist entirely within the panels, she flashes like lightning through the spaces between them.

Go, Tinker! As Bandit says in a dramatic moment, “Gud 2! 1 Protect!”

Quitely also does amazing things with panels-within-panels to show a sequence of fast-paced actions in a slow-motion strobe effect, and he often employs elements of the scene’s environment to create panel-like divisions, such as rendering trees in all black to create dividing lines, or using the metal structure of a bridge to divide a series of movements across that bridge.

For a few pages, Quitely captures the narrative in an insane number of more than one hundred tiny panels to show footage from multiple security cameras in the containment facility—only to present a spectacular release from all that claustrophobic tension by finishing with a two-page double splash where our heroes burst into the night.

We3 has been collected in paperback, hardcover, and a second hardcover “deluxe” edition with ten new pages of story. But I recommend you read We3 either in digital format or in the original stapled comic-book format so you can see all the amazing two-page spreads without any part of them disappearing into the gutter of a bound book. Like I said in my recent review of the Bendis/Maleev run on Daredevil, it is a rare and beautiful thing to see a comic book story where script, art, and overall design are perfectly married for maximum narrative and emotional effect. We3 is one of those perfect unions.

Collector’s Guide: It’s hard to find the original three-issue printing, but you can easily find a reasonably priced collected paperback on Amazon. Current prices on the deluxe hardcover are ridiculous. Instead, I suggest getting the $10 digital edition so you can fully appreciate the two-page spreads.

Come on and Give It to Me: A Ragman Memoir

Tags

Batman, Brave and the Bold, comic books, dad, DC Comics, joe shit the ragman, memoir, ragman, ragpicker joe

When I was a kid, Dad had a term for people who looked disheveled and messy: Rag-picker Joe. Eventually, I discovered it was a mild version of “Joe Shit the Rag Man”. Maybe Dad picked it up in the Marine Corps. It’s listed on a site of Marine slang, and Dad was a Drill Instructor in the early 1970s, when this phrase seems to have been at the peak of its popularity.

Rag-picker Joe made regular appearances in my childhood: sometimes as me when I couldn’t get my shirt tucked in or my cowlick to lie down, and sometimes as random people on the street seen from a car window, or someone in a retail store. Rag-picker Joe was everywhere.

In the summer of 2019, while looking through my late father’s personal effects, I found papers about a family tree that seemed to be the work of Dad’s mom—my grammy, who died in 2005. I’m sure it was her distinctive handwriting.

Back in the mid-1980s, I asked both sets of my grandparents for any information they could contribute to my junior-high genealogy project. They gave me next to nothing to go on, so I suspect Grammy gained additional information over the years.

Reviewing her notes was how I learned that Rag-picker Joe was not just a bit of slang. He was one of my ancestors.

I forget his last name, but his first name was Joseph, and he was from enough generations ago that I didn’t even bother to figure out the great-great-great or however many greats it was. His occupation of record? Ragman.

If you don’t know what a ragman is, don’t feel bad. I didn’t know either, and I had to look it up. A ragman collected what we might think of now as junk or scrap, and even bones. I don’t know why people would buy bones, but I assume it was either for their nutritious value (soup stock, perhaps?) or for their household utility as material for buttons and knife handles.

The cousin of Joe Shit the Ragman was the Bone man, and these nearly extinct characters from more than a century ago went from town to town, supporting themselves on what meager coin they could make from selling other people’s cast-offs and throwaways.

Bleak as it sounds, the rag-and-bone man was a mobile thrift store and scrap yard, and he was “upcycling” before any of us invented hipster words for re-using old garbage. I imagine that being a ragman required Joe Shit to be a salesman, and no song expresses that rag-selling energy as well as Rag and Bones by the White Stripes.

Sell me that old junk, baby. Come on and give it to me!

In the fifteen months that passed since discovering the ragman of my childhood was part of my family, I have often wondered if Dad ever put that connection together. I wonder if he knew Rag-picker Joe was his great-grand-uncle or whatever it was. Did he know this bit of information when I was a kid, when he used Joe as an insult on a regular basis? Or did he, like me, have an epiphany about Joe when he saw Grammy’s research?

I also wonder about things the genealogy documents didn’t tell me but seem apparent from reading between the lines. If you go back just a generation or two beyond my grandparents, my family tree is full of immigrants who came to this country and survived in abject poverty, somehow, even if it meant carrying bones and rags from town to town in a fucking wheelbarrow.

It upsets me to see our national attitude and policies becoming so obviously anti-immigrant and anti-poor. But this isn’t the first time. This always happens in our country whenever our economy is disastrous or when people feel threatened. Anti-immigrant and overtly racist attitudes flourish in times of economic trouble. The rich pit the middle-class against the poor as enemies, and the rich get richer. These aren’t mysterious ideas any longer; they are statistical conclusions verified with data from more than two centuries of U.S. history.

I only bring it up because I think of Joseph, my distant relative, a man who died long before I was born. A man who died before he became a piece of slang in the urban dictionary. A man whose station in life was used as an insult, even though he was family. A man who must have lived at the absolute ass-end of society, but somehow survived to be listed in my family tree.

In memory of Rag-picker Joe and Joe Shit the Ragman, I’ll share with you the complete issue of The Brave and the Bold #196, where Batman teams up with Ragman.

I had this comic when I was around seven years old. Coming back to it forty years later reveals why I loved it so much. The prose from Bob Kanigher could use a little editing for adult readers, but his captions are more fun than most prose I see in novels these days, and Jim Aparo’s artwork is in fine form here.

This is obviously a comic for boys and, though I was a boy once, I would not recommend it to adult women due to the short shrift the women characters get here. None of them pass the Bechdel Test. They only exist as motivating plot points for male action.

This issue also has some too-convenient plotting in the way that serious injuries take exactly as much time to heal as the plot requires. Is that how it works when falling out of a window? I should fall out of the motherfuckers more often. In spandex.

Also, the re-cap of Ragman’s origin is pointless filler and stupid. Getting electrocuted with other people does not give you their traits. That’s the lowest rung of idiocy on the ladder of superhero origins, right below “Holy shit, gamma-ray exposure makes me bad-ass!”

Actually, gamma rays kill you. I’d prefer that authors stop insulting me with bogus reasons for powers, and instead tell me a story about an awesome character who has powers.

For these reasons, I wouldn’t put this issue in my list of all-time favorite comics, but it’s a cool time capsule from the late 1970s at DC, and it stars one of my ancestors.

Now let’s see how my great-great-grand-uncle Joe Shit the Ragman teams up with Batman to kick all kinds of ass.

Collector’s Guide: The Brave and the Bold #196; DC Comics, 1983.

Big Box of Comics: Mister Miracle by Jack Kirby, Expanded TPB

Tags

Big Barda, big box of comics, book review, DC Comics, Jack Kirby, Mister Miracle, mister miracle TPB

For a few months in 2013, I had a complete collection of all the individual issues of Jack Kirby’s Mister Miracle series. When I sold it as a set on Ebay, I knew I would miss it. But thanks to this blog’s readers, I was reunited this summer with this classic series in the form of a full-color, collected edition. Many other reviewers have focused on the dynamic art and the high-energy storytelling that characterize this and other “Fourth World” Kirby stories, so I’d like to discuss a few things that don’t get talked about very much.

But first, this collection is a great way to own all eighteen of the original Kirby issues. It’s complete, compact without reducing the page size, and “remastered” so that the art, ink, and colors are crisp and perfect. It includes all the original covers, which are brilliant works of art on their own, and all the back-up stories about the title character’s childhood. Kirby did amazing double-splash panels for this series that unfortunately get their centers lost in the gutter in a paperback-bound book, but I scanned some of the originals for you way back when.

If there’s one thing that bugs me about owning the series in this format, it’s that same perfection. When I collected the single issues, I settled for many low-cost VG+ and Fine gradings where the paper was severely yellowed (which affected the colors), and the covers had a worn, tattered look with folds and even bits missing around the corners and spines.

Only a complete maniac would claim that as a plus. But I enjoyed it. Having Mister Miracle in its original but degraded printings felt like I was unearthing some prehistoric fossil of primordial comic book awesomeness. In pristine form, it feels more like a current book that should be judged by current standards.

But current standards aren’t quite the right lens to look through for this book. In terms of the garish colors, modern mainstream comics now employ far more sophisticated coloring techniques in even the most run-of-the-mill titles. But in the 1970s, due to the pulp-quality paper, using super-bright primary colors made a whole lot of sense. Many online reviewers praise the bright colors of this collection, but sometimes they seem a bit too bright for the darker, more sinister aspects of life under Darkseid’s fascist reign explored in this series.

A scan from the original series. “Get back to your hovel!”

Also by current standards, Kirby’s treatment of “hip” slang, female characters, and “ethnic” characters might seem clunky and awkward to modern, younger readers. But it’s important to consider the standards of the day and realize Kirby was making a serious effort to be inclusive and progressive in the mainstream. When Mister Miracle began in 1971, it was three years before women in the United States could have credit cards in their own name without a husband co-signing for them. It was four years before the TV show The Jeffersons broke media stereotypes to portray a financially successful black family and their interracially married friends.

In the pages of the Fantastic Four, Kirby had already created Marvel’s first black superhero: the Black Panther. And from his editorial columns in his comics—including his 70s work at Marvel on Devil Dinosaur, the Eternals, and 2001—we know he was genuinely interested in scientific and social trends and in creating stories that reflected not just the current culture but its progress and potential.

Kirby’s idea of an African king as a technologically advanced superhero resonated with movie audiences in recent years. Wyatt Wingfoot, mentioned here, is a Lee/Kirby creation based on Native American Olympic athlete Jim Thorpe.

For me, the standout character of Mister Miracle isn’t the lead, but Big Barda. She is lightyears apart from the Sue Storm character in the early Lee/Kirby issues of Fantastic Four, who was constantly talked down to for being female. Sue was a weakling whose biggest power was to go away, at least until John Byrne wrote the series in the 1980s and changed the Invisible “Girl” into the Invisible Woman whose power became formidable.

In contrast, Big Barda totally owns her scenes through force of character. Where Sue Storm was originally a shrinking violet to be protected by the males in her group, Barda is never less than a total bad-ass. She might have a soft spot for the title character, but she never hesitates for one second to beat some ass or carve a path of destruction through her enemies, and she has zero qualms about assuming leadership and telling other characters exactly how shit will go down on her watch.

A scan from the original series. “You kill-crazy she-wolf!”

Barda also has a somewhat evil all-woman crew of warriors — the Female Furie Battalion — with hilarious names like Bernadeth, Gilotina, Lashina, and Stompa. They deal damage in ways you can guess from their names. They’ve got sweet costumes and boss weapons, and they read less like villains and more like your favorite all-girl roller-derby team starring in a modern movie.

A scan from the original series. Just a typical day for the Furies!

Barda is so awesome that I even forgive Uncle Jack for giving her a gratuitous bathtub scene. You know your writer is male when he puts a female character into a naked bathing scene for absolutely zero plot-related reasons. As a male reader who thinks Barda is the greatest thing ever and would bet money that she could even kick Conan’s naked ass, I vote that we give a pass to Kirby for this one. And a pass to me for enjoying it.

A scan from the original series. “I find this kind of moment tranquil and soothing!”

It’s that kind of tension between “great female lead” and “gratuitous female bath scene” that marks this run. Kirby was both a product of his time and way ahead of his time. Mister Miracle stands on the cusp of American history in the 1970s where society was in the midst of a massive and progressive cultural shift, one that even today we have not yet fully realized. I like the direction Kirby was trying to push that shift.

A scan from the original series.

Kirby was a soldier in Europe during World War II, and his portrayal of the oppressive, fascist society on planet Apokolips might be read as a simple indictment of the Third Reich. But Kirby was no stranger to discrimination in the States, having changed his name from the Jewish “Kurtzberg” to “Kirby” to improve his chances of being accepted and making a living.

He was the son of two Austrian-Jewish immigrants in New York in a time when anti-immigrant sentiment, racism, and anti-semitism abounded in America. While the Third Reich turned those ideas into a massive extermination program, the Nazis did not invent those ideas, and they had many adherents in the States. Sadly, that is still true today. When I read Kirby’s 1970s works, I sense a subtext that he saw fascism and discrimination not as merely “foreign” problems but ones that troubled many nations, including his own.

A scan from the original series.

It’s easy to read Mister Miracle as a series of simple adventure stories full of gadgets and gimmicky escapes, and Kirby clearly wants us to be entertained, first and foremost. But we would do him a disservice if we didn’t acknowledge the socially progressive ideas he wrapped in that cloak of entertainment. Kirby didn’t finalize his ideas about humans and our place in the universe when he was a young man. He continued to explore new ideas and grow. He saw our knowledge of science, humanity, society, and ourselves as an ever-expanding field that had no lack of new horizons to explore.

And where there’s an unexplored horizon, there’s a kick-ass story waiting to be told.

Collector’s Guide: Mister Miracle by Jack Kirby, Expanded TPB; DC Comics, 2017. Also available on Amazon. Or, get the original issues.

indie box: Metalzoic

Tags

book review, comic books, DC Comics, graphic novel, indie box, Kevin O'Neill, metalzoic, Pat Mills, science fiction

This is the second time a book published by DC Comics has broken the rules and earned a place in my indie short box. This time, it’s Metalzoic by the legendary team of Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill, and there’s not much about it you can call “mainstream”. Metalzoic takes place in a future where the Earth is ruled by intelligent, mechanical beasts patterned after modern and prehistoric animals — and boy, do they love to fight!

Yes, you just witnessed a brutal showdown between a gorilla with a saw blade on his head, and a lion with a chainsaw for a tongue and metal skis for feet. Do I really need to say anything about the story’s plot, or is that cool enough for you? Two of my favorite pages show a shark attacking a caravan of wooly mammoths during a trek across the ice.

It’s like some sort of psychotic nature special! I can almost hear David Attenborough narrating it for a BBC documentary.

O’Neill always delivers wonderfully twisted artwork, but he pulls out all the stops to illustrate Metalzoic‘s endless mecha-menagerie.

The story is interesting, especially since the main character — the saw-blade gorilla — is a brutal, amoral hell-raiser whose brawn and ferocity might be the only thing standing between the Earth and total destruction.

And just look at him go!

When all this takes place and how it came to be are slowly revealed throughout the story. We don’t get a clear timeline until about 50 pages in. It might have been helpful to see a historic summary earlier in the story, so here it is.

If you’re like me, and you wish Godzilla movies would cut out most of the human-related nonsense and just show more monster fights, then this 64-page epic adventure is the book for you!

Collector’s Guide: Metalzoic; DC Comics Graphic Novel #6, 1986. Though it’s often out of stock at MyComicShop, you can usually find it on Amazon for between $15 and $30.

indie box: Scene of the Crime

Tags

crime, DC Comics, Ed Brubaker, indie box, Indie Comics, michael lark, scene of the crime

This week’s pick from the indie box isn’t even indie, having been published by DC Comics, but it has an indie feel and showcases the talents of two future superstars. Scene of the Crime is an early collaboration between Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark, who would later do an amazing run together on Daredevil at Marvel.

Scene of the Crime follows the adventures of a private investigator as he unravels an increasingly sinister and fucked-up story, and I wanted to love it. It would probably make a solid movie. But after the second issue, I was flipping through pages to see the big reveal. The narration in the captions starts in first gear on page one and never really accelerates, and the art is sometimes too clean when it could use more grit and grime.

The rainy, gritty noir feeling on this page rocks my world, I almost expect Marv to show up.

Scene of the Crime faces a structural problem in that we as readers get hints that the investigator has some past tragedy, but we don’t get told what it is until the final pages. This makes it feel more like a postscript than something crucial to understanding the character’s motivations, and by the time we get there, the main story is basically over. So, did it really matter? It feels like it didn’t.

Despite its flaws, Scene of the Crime is a glimpse into the early days of a writer and artist team who eventually crafted tightly wound, tense crime stories. The four-issue series shows the team has the ability to tell a complex tale of crime and mystery, and I see it as a stepping stone to later masterpieces such as the Brubaker/Lark run on Daredevil and Brubaker’s collaboration with Sean Phillips on Criminal, one of my all-time favorite works of fiction.

Collector’s Guide: Scene of the Crime; DC Comics, 1999

the saga of supergirl’s new costume

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action comics, Adventure Comics, costume, costumes designed by readers, DC Comics, hair, Jim Mooney, supergirl, supergirl project

As a guy, I can tell you that writing female characters presents some unique challenges—not the least of which is trying to sort out their clothes and hair! Back in 1969, Supergirl’s creative team rose to the challenge by engaging readers to come up with costume and hairstyle ideas. Both Action Comics #273 and Adventure #387 ran the following page about her hair:

By the time Action Comics #281 hit the presses, reader votes determined the winner by a huge margin. With nearly as many votes as all other hairstyles combined, the “Campus Cuddle-Bun” style won by a landslide. I would have preferred the “Contempo Cut” perhaps, but the “Pony Tail Sophisticate” really makes the most sense when half of your superhero time is spent flying through the air! As a hairstyle for Supergirl’s secret identity, any of these would work, but if I was flying faster than the speed of sound I would definitely want my hair tied back. And don’t ask me how the “Kitten Cut” would even work. How do you cut invulnerable hair? Maybe her stylist has a machine that pumps out red sun rays.

That settled her secret-identity hair. But as you can see from the fan letters below, Supergirl’s costume was the subject of much discussion. These letters appeared in Adventure #384-395.

Both male and female readers had pretty strong opinions about her costume. Who says guys don’t think about these things?

Here is the panel from Adventure #397 which reveals the winning design.

The next issue, Adventure #398, added to the costume saga by showcasing some of the different designs submitted for consideration. Supergirl speaks to the reader directly, explaining that the winning design was actually a combination of two designs submitted by two different readers. She even asks one to write in because the address got lost!

The final design looks pretty cool to me, but no sooner did it debut than it got drawn wrong! Look closely at the middle panel on the following page and see if you can spot what went missing.

If you said, “The dang S logo on her chest,” then give yourself today’s SuperVision Award!

Supergirl wraps it up in Adventure #398 by speaking directly to the readers again, naming even more contributors and suggesting she might adorn herself in different costumes now and then just to give all the great ideas a chance. How hard would you have geeked out if you got your name mentioned by your favorite heroine?!

Supergirl vs. Space Pirates

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Adventure Comics, adventure comics 415, bob oksner, DC Comics, John Albano, pirates, space pirates, supergirl, win mortimer

In this 1970s story from DC’s Adventure Comics #415, Supergirl gets abducted by evil space pirates to serve as their captain’s unwilling wife while the rest of Earth is destroyed. These creeps find out soon enough that they picked the wrong woman to mess with!

The Saturday-morning-cartoon tenor of Supergirl’s 1970s adventures makes them somewhat dull for an adult reader, but they are occasionally impressive in their portrayal of her character. This story shows of a range of heroic qualities besides her super-cute costume and classic beauty. Supergirl is powerful enough to hand out beat-downs to the pirates, but compassionate enough to try and reason with a misguided member of the crew. She uses her intelligence to deduce their plans, and her might to unravel them. Even the male-dominated Planetary Galaxy Patrol shows her respect, and suggests that word of her “innumerable accomplishments” has spread far beyond Earth. Supergirl is the only female in this story (other than in a panel on page 3), so you won’t find it passing the Bechdel Test. But she certainly commands the stage!

If you would like to see more scans of vintage Supergirl tales from the 1960s and 70s (including Action Comics, Adventure Comics, and her short-lived self-titled series from 1972), then head over to The Supergirl Project!

rima the jungle girl 7

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DC Comics, jungle, Nestor Redondo, Rima, rima the jungle girl, Robert Kanigher

Buy original copies of Rima The Jungle Girl.

rima the jungle girl 5

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DC Comics, jungle, Nestor Redondo, Rima, rima the jungle girl, Robert Kanigher

This was the first issue of Rima we ever read. We scored it in a 50-cent or 25-cent bin in our first year as comic bloggers. It made us want to read more about this white-haired woman who befriended all animals and feared nothing.

Buy original copies of Rima The Jungle Girl.

rima the jungle girl 4

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DC Comics, jungle, Nestor Redondo, Rima, rima the jungle girl, Robert Kanigher

Buy original copies of Rima The Jungle Girl.

rima the jungle girl 3

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DC Comics, jungle, Nestor Redondo, puma, Rima, rima the jungle girl, Robert Kanigher

This issue of Rima features an appearance from one of our all-time favorite characters: a puma.

Buy original copies of Rima The Jungle Girl.

rima the jungle girl 2

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DC Comics, jungle, Nestor Redondo, Rima, rima the jungle girl, Robert Kanigher

Buy original copies of Rima The Jungle Girl.

rima the jungle girl 1

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DC Comics, jungle, Nestor Redondo, Rima, rima the jungle girl, Robert Kanigher

DC Comics published seven issues of Rima the Jungle Girl from 1974-1975. The artwork by Nestor Redondo brings the story to life in a jungle which seems to include just about any species of animal that might make for a dramatic scene. As with Jack Kirby’s dinosaur stories, biological accuracy defers to entertainment value. Like Tarzan, Rima plays out an urban white male fantasy about jungles. But the hippie vibe is stronger in Rima than in Tarzan. The animals earn both Rima’s and the reader’s sympathy, and the idea of living in harmony with nature plays a central role.

Rima is a good female lead, morally superior to the other characters, with a deeper understanding of her world. The author, who is definitely Robert Kanigher for the later stories though uncredited in the early ones, shows us both her strength and her sensitivity. Rima is neither a conqueror of nature nor a helpless damsel in distress. She is a mortal woman, but one can easily understand why the lead male romanticizes her into something supernatural.

Rima has not been reprinted anywhere, to the best of our knowledge, but you can still buy original copies of Rima The Jungle Girl at reasonable prices. The series contained sci-fi backup stories which we have in our archive of Space Voyagers.
 

the history of the dc universe portfolio

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black and white, DC Comics, history of the dc universe portfolio, Swamp Thing

We bought this at a used bookstore for one reason and one reason only: the Steve Bissette portrait of Swamp Thing. But in all fairness, the portfolio has several stunning renditions of DC characters. It rarely appears in stock at MyComicShop, but you can find it on eBay for less than its original price of $15.

a world without men… except for superman and batman

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Batman, Bob Haney, DC Comics, dick dillin, saga of the super sons, super sons, Superman, world without men, Worlds Finest

Alright. This issue of World’s Finest is so incredibly whacked out that we almost lack words to describe it. Perhaps psychoanalysis would better suit this issue than description. You’ve got juvenile versions of Superman and Batman. Yeah, yeah, they’re sons of Supes and Bats… Whatever. Like that makes any sense. Who are their moms?

Then you have this dream-like story about a town filled with women who are NOT happy to see the boys, a giant one-eyed monster on a tower (dear lord, my Freud is aching), a scene where the guys get naked and put on each other’s clothes… You can blame it on author Bob Haney if you want, but maybe this comic book isn’t even real and you are just dreaming about it.

In which case, you need serious psychotherapy.

First, go schedule your appointment, then come back and take a peek inside these pages we photographed before listing this beast on eBay. What? You need your own copy printed on the corpses of trees where endangered owls used to make babies? Well, don’t let us stop you. Buy World’s Finest #233; DC Comics, 1975. It is also reprinted in the collection Saga of the Super Sons 2007 trade paperback.

demo 1 by brian wood and becky cloonan

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becky cloonan, black and white, Brian Wood, Dark Horse, DC Comics, demo, dreams, first issue, indie box, Indie Comics, Vertigo Comics, waking life of angels

These page come from the beginning of the first issue of DC/Vertigo’s Demo series by Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan. AIT/Planet Lar published a twelve-issue Demo series in 2003-2004 before Wood and Cloonan began with a fresh number one at Vertigo in 2010. DC/Vertigo published both series in two Demo paperbacks, and Dark Horse put them together in a single Demo Complete Edition which is 464 pages softcover.

I love Becky Cloonan’s black-and-white artwork and how she brings to life this dramatic first issue where dreams and reality intersect. Brian Wood is the author of DMZ, one of my favorite series. I did not feel like the target audience for the romantic drama of Wood’s New York Four and New York Five, but I have seen a few issues of Northlanders which interested me, and I enjoyed the three pointless punk-rock issues of Pounded.

DMZ

Tags

DC Comics, DMZ, Matty Roth, Vertigo Comics

Someone left a copy of DMZ #2 on the top secret fifty cent rack a few years ago. They inadvertently introduced us to a series we would now include in our Top Ten Favorite Comic Book Series. DMZ tells the story of young journalist Matty Roth’s increasingly tragic involvement in the next civil war on U.S. soil. Most of the story takes place in a war-torn New York city, a nominally demilitarized zone (DMZ) between the secessionist forces and the U.S. government’s forces – military, mercenary, and otherwise.

The 75-issue series breaks up into short stories lasting five issues with several shorter character studies interspersed between the main arcs. You can buy it as DMZ single issues, which other than a few early issues is not much more expensive than if you had purchased them new, or a series of trade paperbacks. Vertigo is, at the time of this post, three books into a deluxe hardcover edition which collects about 12 issues per volume. I had the single issues, which you can see in this post’s somewhat random photos.

Batman Black and White

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Batman, Batman Black and White, black and white, DC Comics

Today we flip through the wide assortment of art styles in Batman Black and White, a four-issue series from DC Comics in 1996. DC would later publish a series of four hardcover editions of Batman Black and White, collecting this 1996 series with two volumes of stories from Gotham Nights and a final volume of all-new material. You can usually find that collection in trade paperback format at about half the price of the hardcovers.

This series really knocked our socks off with so many inventive and beautifully-drawn takes on DC’s iconic detective adventurer. Joe Kubert’s classic approach rubs shoulders with Walt Simonson’s futuristic vision. In one story, a man fantasizes about assassinating Batman. In another, Batman and Joker are depicted as two actors who discuss each other’s wife and kids between their “filmed” fight scenes. In no particular order, here is a sampling of the interior pages culled from pics we took to sell our set on eBay. This is one we would like to read again.

DC Special Blue Ribbon Digest: Strange Sports

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baseball game, DC Comics, dc heroes and villians, DC Special Blue Ribbon Digest, digest, pocket sized, sports, sports comics, Strange Sports, the great super-star game

Today, we flip through the pages of DC Special Blue Ribbon Digest #13. Looking for information on the exact title of this tiny tome introduced us to the world of comic book blogs back in 2010. We didn’t know people did that, and it looked like it might be fun. It reminded us, too, of the book’s sports stories without superheroes.

We first read this pocket-sized production as little martians in the early 1980s. Though the baseball game of DC heroes and villains makes for classic bronze age shenanigans, the gems of this book are the reprints of the short-lived Strange Sports Stories #1-6 in 1973. The faceless basketball team. The boxing glove necklace heirloom which saves the day. The man who pole vaults over the world to travel in time. WOW. We have since read the original issues of that series, and commend the editors of this digest for picking the truly outstanding ones.

We have an archive of scans from DC’s original Strange Sports series. It appeared in The Brave and the Bold and predated both the baseball game’s original appearance (DC Super-Stars #10, 1976) and the second series excerpted in this digest. (Astute readers will notice Warrior of the Weightless World in this digest comes from those Brave and the Bold stories.)

Kamandi!

Tags

DC Comics, Jack Kirby, Kamandi, kamandi last boy on earth, Longbox Graveyard

A look inside a vintage issue of Kamandi, featuring the awe-inspiring extermination of Morticoccus… The Ultimate GERM!

Longbox Graveyard

Longbox Graveyard #143

Welcome to the Dollar Box, where I look at single comics issues or short runs of books that had an original cover price of a dollar or less. This time I turn my attention to Jack Kirby’s Kamandi — the last boy on Earth!

If Wikipedia can be trusted, Kamandi was born when DC Comics failed to land the Planet of the Apes license, and turned to Jack Kirby to create something similar. You can almost imagine the conversation, with Carmine Infantino saying, “Jack, can you do us a Planet of the Apes strip?” and Jack saying, “Never saw the movie — what’s it about?” Carmine: “A ruined future, where men are beasts and humanoid apes rule.” Jack: “Got it!” Of course, Kirby wasn’t going to content himself with drawing a bunch of human actors in ape-face. Jack’s post-apocalyptic world of tomorrow would be ruled…

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Weird War Tales 25

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Alfredo Alcala, black magic white death, DC Comics, George Kashdan, horror, war, Weird War Tales

We hope you’ve enjoyed revisiting Weird War Tales with us this month. We’ve posted many vignettes from this series over the past four years, and have now reached the end of our collection! We sold the last of them on eBay in 2014, but they live on in the digital archives of Mars Will Send No More.

Here are a few pages from Weird War Tales #25. Other than the wonderful cover, the stand-out of this issue is the rugged yet sumptuous artwork by Alfredo Alcala in the George Kashdan story, Black Magic-White Death! This issue also contained another fun Kashdan story called The Unseen Warriors with art by Alex Nino.

And that brings our Martian catalog of Weird War Tales to a close — unless of course you want to send us a box with more inside it!

Weird War Tales 23

Tags

Alfredo Alcala, Day After Doomsday, DC Comics, John Albano, Len Wein, Rich Buckler, war, Weird War Tales, weird war tales 23

Today, Weird War Tales #23 rises from the savage depths of the vintage DC Comics shortbox with a fairly famous two-page story by Len Wein and Rich Buckler: Day after Doomsday. The artwork by Alfredo Alcala in the opening story is also a worthy treat for the eyes.

Credits: The Bird of Death script by John Albano, art by Alfredo Alcala. Day After Doomsday script by Len Wein, art by Rich Buckler. Corporal Kelly’s Private War script by George Kashdan, art by Alex Nino.

Here are both pages of Day After Doomsday for you!

Weird War Tales 12

Tags

Arnold Drake, DC Comics, Don Perlin, egypt, Gerry Talaoc, nazis, Robert Kanigher, rommel, Tony DeZuñiga, Weird War Tales

Today we pull a copy of Weird War Tales #12 from the vintage DC Comics shortbox. This one has some interesting art by Gerry Talaoc in a Robert Kanigher story pitting evil Nazis against ancient Egyptian spirits. Another story has a couple truly trippy pages again with the ancient Egyptian theme. Let’s flip through this Bronze Age beauty.

Gotta love those opening splash pages in Weird War Tales.

The Tony DeZuñiga page above is really the most awesome one from the opening story, and a different style than what follows from the pen of Talaoc.

Things do not go well for anyone in this particular story, and carnage rules the day.

Credits: Cover art by Mike Kaluta. God of Vengeance script by Robert Kanigher, art by Gerry Talaoc. Hand of Hell script by Robert Kanigher, art by Tony DeZuñiga. The Warrior and the Witch Doctors script by Arnold Drake, art by Don Perlin.