A brief comic review

Countdown: Arena #1.

It's like Secret Wars, but with extra death.

Or, I don't know, maybe one of those tedious threads that crops up on every comics message board before long where people debate who would win in a fight between hero X and hero Y, and you know it doesn't matter how carefully they analyse the relative powers and skills, it all comes down to what story the writer wants to tell.

Or it could be a videogame. One of those dull fight games where the plot is just a thin excuse for the fighting. It's like watching someone else play one of those.

Plus DC get to kill off a whole bunch of Elseworlds characters that were minding their own business.

The Paris Hilton of the superhero set

No, not Supergirl. The other one; Stormy Knight AKA Phantom Lady. When I was first introduced to the current Phantom Lady I was intrigued to find that beyond the cliché hot bod, at age 22 she also had a degree in quantum physics. I've been waiting for the last year for Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Grey to develop the physics nerd side of her, but they seem to have forgotten that whole aspect in favour of making her a drunk, embarrassing, airheaded party girl, drowning in cliché.

Add to that Renato Arlem's lazy art, and I am fast losing all interest in Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters. It's bad enough when you see cut and paste in webcomics; to see it in a DC comic is simply wrong. I had been intending to do a quick count of how many panels in the latest issue reused elements from previous panels, but when it became apparent that there were several examples on almost every page, I gave up in disgust.

This comic has too many characters, which means you get very little depth to any of them, and the story is trying so hard to be "torn from the headlines" that it just comes across as tabloid cliché conspiracy theory with extra superheroes. It manages to be extremely wordy without saying much of interest, and the whole thing is a big disappointment.

Oh, and if you want to get an emotive image of someone slashing their wrists, you need to a) make them sympathetic beforehand, and b) use an artist who is not going to get it so totally wrong. Anyone care to guess what's wrong with this picture (other than the dodgy perspective)?

Statuesque

After recent commotion about representations of female characters in miniature form, I'd like to take a moment to show appreciation for when they get it right.

Here's a manga-fied Wonder Woman.

She's holding a sword and shield, in a pose that suggests she's ready to use them. There's some stylish detail work (click on the image to see it larger) and the costume actually covers more skin than the regular version, though it may look more skimpy due to the optical illusion of her having considerably more leg than usually depicted.





And here's Wonder Girl. I'm not quite sure what she's supposed to be doing, but it looks like she's about to cheerfully tie someone up.



See, toy sculptors? you can get it right when you try.

Scott Kurtz cracks me up

See, it's funny because even though Brent is technically an adult and in a relationship, the mere sight of a fully clothed woman with large breasts makes him unable to function or think about anything other than boobies.

And when I say "woman" here, I mean cardboard cutout of a woman traced from someone else's comic, since it's the same image cut'n'pasted into every panel but with slight change of expression.

Surprisingly, this was not written and drawn by a 15 year old.

Win some, lose some

Remember Public Enemies #1, 2, and 3? Grant Morrison does, and as part of his ongoing plan to reintroduce the entire silver age back into continuity, Batman #670 polishes up Silken Spider, Tiger Moth, and Dragonfly for a new age, in an issue that also featured our old friend I Ching. Back in Batman #181 they were rivals, and if they had any super abilities, we were never shown.

I like them as a team, and now they have powers. Sort of.

On the minus side, the former most wanted are here merely served up as an entrée for Batman. They go down so easy that you can practically see Bats yawning. And they aren't all that impressive anyway.

Dragonfly has the ability to summon some white misty stuff from her arm. What this does, we never find out because Bats takes her out in two panels. And it's only that long because he pauses to give them a quick "sux 2 B U" speech.

Tiger Moth appears to have the power to shoot people.

With a gun.

This leaves only Silken Spider, who gets a nice visual, but then it turns out all she can do is some variation on the pheromone shtick that Poison Ivy worked to death years ago.

I'm left wondering quite what the point was. Why dust off an obscure concept from 1966 and give it a makeover, only to throw it away in seven pages?

Will we see them again? And if we do, will they ever be anything more than cannon fodder?

Update: Yes. We see them again in Nightwing #138. They are once again defeated as soon as they appear. Congratulations, girls. You've become a running gag.

The odd thing here is that they are referred to as has-beens, even though they've never been seen before in current continuity. This suggests that they were at least competent once. Shame we don't get to see any hint of that.

The simple answer to continuity problems

I haven't read the whole of Batman and the Outsiders #1, but I've seen scans of the pages where Batman claims to be unaware of a lesbian relationship among members of his team. Now this is Batman, the guy who is so psychopathically anal that he makes plans to defeat all of his friends and team-mates, on the off chance one of them goes bad. The idea that he would be unaware of a romantic relationship in a team he leads is laughable, unless you plan to do a plotline about him mellowing out or losing his grip.

Many fans have attempted to work out a rationale that enables this interpretation of the character to fit with how he has been generally characterised in recent years. It's something I've seen time and again where someone has acted completely out of character, or in extreme cases, appeared in one comic after they had died in another.

My advice is don't sweat it. Sometimes you just have to accept that the writer is a dick and let it go. It's not your problem that some writer has written a story that doesn't fit continuity, and it's not your job to fix it. The current run of Supergirl has contradicted itself so many times that most of her backstory up to the present issue is a pick and mix. Choose which parts you wish to believe and ignore what you don't. Don't try to make it all fit together because it doesn't.

Nobody can ruin Batman, or Superman, or Wonder Woman, or the JLA by writing them badly. These heroes will outlive any dumb characterisation, and if you want a rationale there will always be a Superdick Prime punching reality or a Mister Mind Chewing on the multiverse or whatever they hell they come up with next year to give them an excuse to disown all past mistakes. And with the afterlife having such a revolving door policy, it doesn't matter how dead a character is, they may come back one day.

So read the good stories and don't worry about the bad. Leave it those who are paid to do so try to make sense of it. Don't blame the character because the current writer is a lazy jerk with an agenda, and don't rescue him from his errors by attempting to rationalise them. It's not your job. It's his.

Duh

I have no idea how I missed it, but I only just found out that there's a Supergirl Showcase due out next week.

There is not enough squee in the world to adequately describe how I feel.

Excuse me. I have to go queue at my local comic shop now.

Or I could, you know, tell them to hang on to a copy for me. Which probably won't leave them one to put out on the shelves if I know them.

While I'm on the subject...

Maybe I'm expecting too much of DC. It's entirely possible that the murder of the entire team (except Cyborg) in Titans East is actually just part of the whole Death of the New Gods story. Though I can't see why exactly this would lead to the original new Teen Titans reforming, which is the whole point of it.

Thing is, Power Boy was already on the hit list because he comes from Apokolips. As an Apokolipian or possibly Apokolite, he's marked for the New Gods cull currently underway. Possibly Little Barda too. I have no idea where she comes from, but the name suggests a New Gods connection. So it may be the whole thing was simply a hit on Power Boy and everyone else got caught in the crossfire.

Either way, doing a story featuring the shock death of Power Boy is pretty limp. I mean, what's the shock? Power Boy killed by a different mysterious psychopath from the one you were expecting? And while I don't know there was anyone who cared enough to want him dead, I suspect he will be the least missed. It's not like anyone is going to admit to liking him when his defining characteristic was an unhealthy obsession with Supergirl, as Judd Winnick reminded us of here.

In fact he devoted several pages to a sequence about how funny it was that Power Boy was such a creepy stalker that he gets girls to dress up as the object of his obsession when he has sex with them.

Judd, a word of advice: you'd be more convincing with the "not a misogynist" argument if you didn't write things like this. Also, avoid writing humour; you're crap at it.

Dead Again

Can you guess which comic I want to rant about today?

Here's a clue: At least one hero is murdered in order to generate interest in another comic.

Still too many to choose from?

How about, it's a currently running storyline?

Wait, that's good for at least three comics.

Written by Judd Winick?

That narrows it down to two...

Okay, the answer is Titans East. A one shot that gathers together a group of c-list heroes and Power Boy*, and then kills them.

I could go on about how short sighted it is to keep blowing holes in the diminishing roster of unique characters that make up the DC universe. I could talk about how every minor hero has a few fans who will be upset at not just their deaths, but the careless way they were cast aside.

It baffles me what they hope to achieve here. If you liked the characters, it's just going to piss you off. If you weren't particularly interested in them, you're not going to care much that they are dead. As for bigging up the mystery villain by demonstrating that they are not only capable of killing heroes, but evil enough to do so for no apparent reason; fans of that weary old trope are already well catered for right now, as there are two other DC titles running the same plot, and at least one of them is taking out much more powerful heroes.

My only faint hope in all of this is that DC will eventually apply the same strategy to their own offices. If they expect to generate interest by killing off a few has-beens and c-listers, imagine the publicity it would generate if Judd Winnick was graphically murdered by a mysterious editor in chief.

Get some new ideas, DC. This is not only stupid, annoying, and wasteful. It's also starting to get embarrassing.

*Power Boy does not qualify as a hero unless your definition of hero is wide enough to encompass creepy stalkers and attempted rapists.

Night of the Living Snorefest

Am I the only one who's really, really bored of zombies?

I mean SO totally bored of the very idea that the mere mention of the "z" word sends me into a coma and the idea of some comic or movie warming over those rotting leftovers one more time with their hilarious and almost original idea for a zombie sitcom makes me want to strangle them with their own intestines?

I'd just like to add...

Props to Looking2dastars, who has provided a selection of icons to cater to fans of many of the characters Winick has written.

Winnick the Pooh

I love Amanda Conner's art. I hate Judd Winnick's writing.

Can I enjoy the Green Arrow/Black Canary Wedding Special if I just look at the pictures and ignore the text?

Not that I'm saying Steve Trevor is a creepy stalker, but...

Sense of Wonder (Woman)

Robert Kanigher wrote Wonder Woman in a peculiar steam-of-consciousness way that reads a lot like dreams in comic form. In the second story in the Showcase collection Steve Trevor is for no explained reason now piloting a rocket plane to chase and observe an experimental rocket. (1). Unexpectedly, Steve's plane accelerates faster than the rocket and disappears into space, so Wonder Woman gets her invisible plane a quick refit at Paradise Island and follows, also becoming caught by the strange effect and sent hurtling across space.

Once she's retrieved her wayward boyfriend, she observes the Earth being destroyed by a flaming meteor, except no, it's only a cardboard cutout of the Earth that evil aliens were using for target practice, because they feed on planetary fragments, and Earth is next on the menu, even though it's 200 light years away and there are plenty of uninhabited planets closer (2). And they appear to have brought the reluctant astronauts from their home purely to gloat at them (3). Tough for them that Wonder Woman can fashion a giant magnet out of the nearby landscape and use it to pull the meteors off course and send them crashing back to the planet that launched them (4).

Of course now Wondy and Steve are stranded in space, hundreds of light years from home, except what's this? Could it be a handy spacewarp that will return them to Earth space? You can bet it is.

It's only with the third story that some of Kanigher's less entertaining themes become explicit. The problem is the relationship between Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor. Personally I've never been able to understand why she puts up with his nagging. The situation is that Steve wants Wondy to marry him and settle down, i.e. stop going out and doing hero stuff. Wondy's response is that she cannot marry him until she is no longer needed to battle crimes and injustice. Only then can she think about herself.

This is a twist on silver age Superman's lame excuse for refusing to marry Lois Lane. Here Wonder Woman has to put the concerns of the whole world before herself until she is no longer needed, and her definition of being needed is impossible to fulfil, since it not only requires there to be no crime and injustice, but no natural disasters too. And yet rather than challenge this absurd notion, Steve instead repeatedly attempts to trick the woman he claims to love into marrying him. It seems to be far more about control than love, and it's my least favourite aspect of these stories.

But back to the plot: this story completely rewrites part of the origin story, with an entirely new telling of how Wonder Woman became Diana Prince and came to work at Steve's office in Military Intelligence. In this variation Steve bets Wondy that if he can find her three times in 24 hours, regardless of how she is disguised or hidden, then she will marry him. When she finds that he has tricked her, she gets her own back by applying for a job in his own office (5) so that she'll be right under his nose all the time without him recognising her.

Would I recommend this as a book to give to kids? On the one hand the stories are light and fantastic, bursting with sense of wonder and fairytale logic, while short and self-contained, but on the other they have some underlying values that I would be uncomfortable exposing to someone who was not experienced enough to recognise them as the BS they are and able to reject them while still enjoying the rest of the story. Don't get me wrong, I love this stuff, but that doesn't mean I don't see elements in it I don't like.

Notes.

1) We are told that the plane is slower than the rocket, so I doubt it can be observing it for very long.
2) I can only assume that Earth is a particularly tasty morsel on the galactic menu, since it seems to attract planet eaters from across the galaxy.
3) no better explanation is given, and that's all they actually do with them.
4) She never did have an actual code against killing, did she?
5) and only in a Kanigher story would an office worker have to take part in an underwater race as part of the application process

Showcase of wonders

For some, the publishing event of the year might be the final adventure of some schoolboy wizard, but for me it was the Wonder Woman Showcase. And although I wasn't queuing at my local comic shop for my copy at midnight (because I knew it wasn't going to be delivered until around 10am), I was there to pick it off the shelf before it had time to get comfortable.

Just to point out how important this collection is, I want to remind you that while Batman and Superman have enjoyed reprint collections from throughout their history, Wonder Woman has not been so lucky. There was a collection of golden age adventures published in the early 1970's, and four volumes of DC Archives that got up as far as Wonder Woman #9, but nothing has ever been reprinted from the late 1940's to 1986 in any substantial form. Robert Kanigher was writer on Wonder Woman for over 150 issues and yet there has never been a collection of his work available until now.

But be warned: before you read this book you will need to rise above all thoughts of logic and continuity. There is no place for them here.

The volume opens with Kanigher's retelling of Wonder Woman's origin in Wonder Woman #98. This is a good starting point as not only does it give us an origin, it's also the first issue with full art by long time WW artists Ross Andru and Mike Esposito, and is arguably the point where Wonder Woman enters the Silver Age.

As an origin story, it's quite different from the usual version; the Amazons hold their contest to decide who will be sent into the outside world before Steve Trevor even arrives, and to avoid favouritism, all the contestants are dressed in Wonder Woman costume, including masks of Diana's face so that they will all look alike. But having won the contest, our heroine must prove herself by turning a penny into a million dollars, to finance the building of a summer camp to be donated to children's charities, because Pallas Athena is very big on healthy summer fun for children in rich first world countries.

The more bizarre aspects of the story start to become apparent when Steve Trevor arrives on the scene, parachuting down from his stricken aircraft. Since men are forbidden to set foot on Paradise Island, our plucky heroine launches herself into the air, and then catching Steve, she blows his parachute all the way back to America.

If at this point you are considering how many laws of physics this breaks then you should probably stop now, as it only gets worse. Wonder Woman's adventures with the penny she has been entrusted with, and her ultimate solution to her dilemma are so bonkers that I'm not even going to tell you about them. I wouldn't want to spoil the fun.

And that's just the opening story.

No Batgirl review

I was intending to do a big review, or several, of the Batgirl Showcase, but I'm probably not.

Fact is, it's pretty much what I expected. There's some crashingly sexist bits, and a lot of it is silly, coming from the era of the Batman TV show, and occasionally it's quite good. But so far there's nothing I feel moved to dwell on at any length.

Of course this may be influenced by the fact that the Wonder Woman Showcase is due out next week, and I have been looking forward to that since before the Showcase reprint series began.

At least there shouldn't be a problem with the cover of that one...

Bland Gordon

Whenever I see an adaptation of some story I like, I play this game: how much would I have to change before it was so far removed from the original as to be not considered a copyright infringement?

Your mileage may vary, but the all time champion for me is the 1970's Doctor Strange TV movie, where I reckon that all connection to the source material could be lost by changing two (1) names. The new Flash Gordon TV show isn't up to that level, but on the basis of the first episode, it's not far off.

First off: this Flash Gordon may be a marathon runner, but he is still way too nerdy to be the kind of hero associated with this role. Flash Gordon needs to be big and dumb: physically strong enough to have boundless self-confidence in his own abilities, and dumb enough to have a narrow vision of what is right and to go for it undeterred by the more complex issues. This version is more Clark Kent than Superman. And then Doctor Zarkov now seems to be reduced to lab assistant comedy sidekick, whose wacky inventions are hit and miss, but which I predict will usually come through when the plot depends on them. And Dale Arden seems to be channeling Lois Lane.

And then there is Ming. No, this isn't Ming. Ming is grand and capricious. This is some cheap stereotype dictator in quasi military uniform from any number of bad SF TV shows. And of course he is white, because it would be racist to have one of the most entertaining character roles in Science Fiction be a non-white person (2). So he is white. His daughter is so white I have trouble telling her apart from Dale. The guards are white. Most of the various different races of Mongo I could spot were white but in different ethnic costumes. The evil scientist is white. In fact the only non-white characters are Flash's buddy who doesn't get to be part of the adventure, and a black Mongo woman who only appears long enough to give Ming an opportunity to show how mean and petty he is.

Now it's just a personal opinion here, but I think Ming ought to be oriental (3). He should be oriental and grand and wear lavish costumes and laugh a lot, and throw people to the crocodiles on a whim. And his daughter should be oriental too, and spoilt and slutty, and maybe sides with the good guys in the end for all the wrong reasons, or gets redeemed at the end if you really must. And quite a lot of other people in Ming's court should be oriental. Yes, they are villains. Well, Aura is sometimes a villain. Either way, I think it's pathetic and racist to recast iconically oriental characters as white, purely because they are villains. What next? A white Fu Manchu? (4) The way to make these characters non-racist is not by making them white, but by writing them well.

And there weren't any spaceships.

How the hell can you do Flash Gordon with no spaceships? They are an intrinsic aspect of the story, but here we just get a cheap Stargateish rippled air cgi effect. I realise this production is low budget, but then so was the 1930's serial (5) and it looked better than this.

Notes

1. or possibly three, it's a long time since I've seen it

2. Or perhaps the subtext here is that white people are evil and bad.

3. I'm aware that the term "oriental" is considered offensive by some in the USA, though I'm not clear why. To Americans "Asian" may have the same meaning, but in the UK it is used purely to refer to inhabitants of the Indian sub-continent. In the UK "oriental" has no negative connotations and is used by the BBC, which is good enough for me.

4. okay, technically both Ming and Fu Manchu have historically been played by white guys pretending to be chinese, but you know what I mean

5. By modern standards.

Strange and unusual

Fletcher Hanks: I shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets

The amazing thing about Fletcher Hanks' stories is how they are at the same time repetitive and unique. Fantomah and Stardust are essentially the same vengeful god figure in different trappings, Stardust the science hero fighting organised crime, Fantomah the jungle goddess with magic powers. In almost every story some villain has big plans, and often a private army to carry them out.

And yet even though they may claim to be guarding or protecting the planet/jungle it is not until after the villain has caused great devestation and loss of life that the hero steps in, utterly destroying the villain in bizarre and peculiar ways. The biggest difference between Stardust and Fantomah is that Fantomah often warns the villain that the path he is taking will not be tolerated. Not that anyone ever pays attention to the flying girl (often just a disembodied head), and by the time those long blonde curls are framing a skull it's too late to say sorry.

But it is within the basic formula that Hanks' genius comes alive. Villains seek domination using invisible vacuum tubes or giants, invisible except for their flaming purple hands, or by pausing the rotation of the Earth to cause the entire population to be flung out into space. New York is a favourite target and gets bombed three times in this collection, as well as being attacked by a giant artificial tidal wave and a whirlwind, and in a Fantomah story, overrun by giant panthers.

If there is one thing that marks the storytelling out as being from the earliest days of the artform it is the lack of conflict. Hank's heroes are always so much more powerful than their enemies that the question is not so much "will our hero triumph?" as "what peculiar and ultimately terminal punishment will our hero hand out today once they have utterly crushed the villains' plans?"

And the punishment is often a big feature of the story. In some cases inflicting strange and unusual punishment on the villain takes up as much as half the pages.

It's a collection of strange and unusual ideas wrapped up in formulaic storylines.

But I still like Fantomah best.

A match made in...

If you were going to create a comic book specifically to put me me off ever reading it, what would it contain? How about attempted rapist Power Boy written by non-misogynist Judd Winick, who we all know is all in favour of feminism and not the rape apologist suggested by Green Arrow #57 (or whatever. I can't be bothered to check again), with art by Ian Churchill, who can only draw one female character, who is blonde, with a big chin and ankles so thin you expect them to snap at any minute.

I begin to wonder if there aren't meetings at DC that start with "What can we do to piss Mari off?"

Similar meetings at Marvel involve Jeph Loeb and Greg Land but are less effective because there are so few of their comics I can be bothered to read anyway. In fact the only Marvel titles I've read in the last six months or so were written by Jeff Parker, who understands the concepts of both fun and telling a story in 20 pages.

Civilized planets, your days are numbered

I'm now working my way through Paul Karasik's book of Fletcher Hanks comics I shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets. It is a mighty collection of 15 stories, and I can only hope it is so successful as to prompt a second volume. There are another 9 Fantomah stories, and I have no idea how many Stardust, and others still languishing unseen for so many years.

Before I get on to tackling the individual stories I'd just like to get a little picky about the format of the collection. I can understand why Karasik didn't want to burden the reader with lengthy discussion of the work, but I would have liked to see some kind of introduction that gave basic information about the comics that are being reprinted. As it is all we have is an undated listing of where each originally appeared (in the contents page) and that's it. Not even a bibliography to tell us how many more stories are out there.

And then the order of the comics selected seems entirely arbitary. Although the volume opens with the first Stardust story, the Fantomah episodes are run in practically reverse order, which is a shame as there is a clear evolution in style as they progress, and this can only be properly appreciated by flipping backward and forward in the volume.

As a Fantomah fan I would have liked to see her first published appearance, but it's not included here. It may be that Karasik was unable to obtain a copy of it for publication, but as there is no accompanying text of any kind, we don't know. I'd also like to know more about how the character was taken in such a different direction after the departure of Hanks, and ultimately retconned into an entirely different character, but that's a personal thing and hardly within the remit of this volume.

What we do get is an autobiographical 16 page strip at the end by Paul Karasik about how he found Hank's son and interviewed him. It's an odd choice for the presentation of an interview; turning it into a comic makes it feel like a dramatisation, and I'm left wondering how much of it was fictional. Information about Fletcher Hanks seems to take second place to the author's slice of life adventure, and although it does convey his excitement about meeting Fletcher Hanks Jr. you are left feeling that if it had been done as a straightforward text piece it would have run to rather less than a page.

None of which takes away from the achievement of getting this stuff in print at all, but if there is a second volume I'm hoping it will contain some factual information like a bibliography and publication dates. It needn't be lengthy or intrusive, but it would be a nice extra for those of us that are interested in that stuff.

Enough with the petty complaints. Next I'll get on to the actual stories.