BOUGHT:
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That is a time that spends hundreds of years and, despite his relative immortality, would take Dracula from a still-vital young man, involved in the day-to-day activities of ruling his small chunk of Europe and its people, to an aged old man who looks near death (but still looks pretty good for 400!), haunting his crumbling castle.
The book opens with Dracula feeding, telling us how the blood of a young woman is the best blood, and then disposing of the remains of his victims, lest they rise as the sort of shambling revenants that we met in the first volume, strigoi, which seem more zombie than true vampire.
Most of the book is devoted to his brides; how he meets them, how he makes them his (which is more and more difficult with each one) and how he turns them. In each case, he gradually becomes disillusioned with them before setting his sights elsewhere.
By the end of the book, he finds that his life pretty much revolves around "maintaining" them, hunting on their behalf, as finding new victims becomes increasingly hard, many of his followers having moved on and the neighboring population growing increasingly superstitious and wary of him. In fact, this weird, gothic domesticity, in which Dracula has become something of a hen-pecked husband toiling on behalf of his wives, seems to be what drives the saga on to its next novel-like installment, as he looks to England as a new challenge to be conquered (and a much-needed new hunting ground).
In addition to Dracula, at various ages and attitudes and in various monstrous forms, with his ever swirling, billowing cloak and blank red eyes below a furrowed brow (eyes given an unsettling light by colorist Jose Villarrubia), Jones get to draw wolves, bats and rats, ghosts and a werewolf, multiple strigoi, and more gore and violence than one usually sees in vampire narratives, images that would probably prove truly upsetting if they weren't drawn in Jones' highly expressive, usually exaggerated style, which is more cartoonish grand guignol than modern cinematic torture porn.
Given the particular subject matter of much of this volume, Jones is also called on to draw a lot of women, often nude or in states of undress, and the drawing of beautiful women and sexual content is not something I usually associate with Jones' work, perhaps given how much of it has been devoted to corporate, mainstream comics like Batman. Still, he acquits himself well, here.
The erotic nature of a vampire feeding is prevalent throughout, and there are certainly sexual scenes involving Dracula and/or his brides (one licking the blood from another while gently caressing her breast, for example, another on her knees sucking blood from Dracula's extended fingers for another), but there's no sex-sex. Indeed, although there are a couple of panels showing Dracula lying next to a naked bride or two, it's unclear if Wagner and Jones' vampires can have or are even the least bit interested in literal sex, as they are so focused on the metaphorical sex of feeding on blood.
As with all of Jones' comics work, the book is full of striking, memorable images. The bricks really stood out to me, given this era of mainstream artists taking technologically assisted shortcuts. There was one example late in the book, where Dracula stood posing on what looks like a pile of rubble, his courtyard in the background, Jones seemingly having inked in hundreds of books. I paused to marvel at the remarkable image, and then turned the page, only to be confronted by a two-page spread of the castle, some four times the size of the panel that had originally stopped me cold with its great detail.
There's a climatic sequence in which villagers storm the castle, holding aloft their church's cross, intent on putting an end to the monstrous Dracula once and for all, in which he unleashes his sorcerous powers, and the wild imagery contains shock after shock: Lightning from the sky tearing chunks of the castle and dropping them on victims, a mass of rats pouring like a loathsome avalanche over the invaders (there are some real squirm-inducing panels in this sequence which, again, if drawn in a more realistic style than Jones, would likely prove nauseating) and a swarm of bats, one of which tears a woman's face apart.
And then there is an image of red-eyed wolves in the foggy forest, the top of their heads breaking above the surface of the mist, like crocodiles peeking above the water.
Unsurprisingly then, the book is full of potent imagery.
"And thus I became...COUNT DRACULA", those final two words lettered by Rob Leigh in big, ornate gothic font.
If that weren't enough to clue readers on what to expect next, there's the last page, reading "The blood drenched history of the vampire lord continues in Dracula Book Three: The Count...Coming Soon."
I mean, you would have to be under that assumption in order to drop $125 on an 800-page hardcover, right?
Still, I was surprised at just how good the book actually was. I don't think the word "masterpiece" is too strong a word to apply to it, and I would include it among the best DC Comics ongoing series I've ever read, like Swamp Thing, Sandman, Hitman, Hourman and maybe Grant Morrison's JLA.
Another story arc involves The Spectre mulling over whether or not to destroy all of humanity, a threat made all the more serious after we see him pass judgement on an entire (fictional) country riven by civil war, by killing every man, woman and child that lived there.
Later, in one of my favorite visual sequences, gunmen target a victim and shoot hundreds of rounds at him. A tiny little Spectre appears between the intended victim and the first bullet, which he stops in mid-air. He does so for all of the other bullets, too, and then re-directs all of the bullets like a swarm of angry bees, knocking aside the shooters and then raining the deadly bullets down like hail on the car in which the man who ordered the killing was waiting.
It's hard to imagine such images in other media. Surely computer-generated imagery would make such scenes possible in a live-action film, for example, but there they would look weird and likely fake. But in comics? It all seems perfectly natural.
There is a brand-new introduction by Ostrander, a reprint of the introduction Ostrander wrote for a 1993 trade collecting the early issues of the series (trades being much rarer back then, DC only published two collections prior to this omnibus) and, most rewardingly, seventeen pages of original commentary by Ostrander, in which he talks about the book, issue by issue.
Finally, there's about 20 pages of behind-the-scenes art, including the sketches of the principal characters by Mandrake that were included in the original pitch (Interestingly, in his original sketch of the lead character, Mandrake gives The Spectre his traditional collar with buttons, which he would lose by the time of the first issue).
Now I realize this makes about 20 paragraphs devoted to the book, which is plenty long enough for a review but, um, well, I still have a lot to say about it. Given the length of the collection—again, 32 issues and some 800 pages—I plan at discussing it at greater length in a future post. Actually, two posts, as there's a particular aspect of the book, I also want to spend some time on. So, look for those in the near future, I guess...
And I would certainly warn you against reading this; it is easily the worst comic book I've read in recent memory. Not just poorly conceived or somewhat problematic in its plotting, not simply lacking here or there. Rather, I found every single page hard to force myself through, and the overall package careless in its production.
At various points I found myself marveling that a professional editor approved of the work that was turned in, and that any publisher would go ahead and publish it, let alone DC Comics, one of the two biggest names in superhero comics and one of the biggest forces in the North American comic book direct market.
This is mostly the fault of the art, and perhaps I shouldn't have bothered reading it at all given what I saw on the cover, or during a quick flip-through, as it certainly didn't look good (You may note that Captain Atom is off-model on the cover that DC chose to use for the trade paperback collection; the artist or colorist forgot to include his gloves and boots).
But I thought Justice League Unlimited Vol. 1 was if not really a great comic, a well-made one with an interesting premise, and so I was interested in seeing how its spin-offs might use that premise to tell different stories.
Mike Perkins is responsible for the art on the book. Chances are you have encountered the British artist's work before, as he's been professionally making comics for over 30 years now, for 2000 AD, Caliber, CrossGen, Marvel and DC. Reviewing his bibliography, I imagine he's now best known for his work on Captain America, as he was drawing portions of Ed Brubaker's seminal run (along with artist Steve Epting).
I've read some of his past work, but I don't recall it being...like this. In The Atom Project, Perkins doesn't merely rely on photo reference for his art, but he seems to incorporate it into his art, ala Greg Land. So, every single panel appears to be a photograph imported into a computer program and manipulated, with, say, superhero costumes drawn over the source images. The backgrounds—settings, cars, rubble, even background figures—don't seem so much manipulated as simply dropped in, a form of visual "sampling", I guess.
The result is a comic book that looks like a rather rushed, extremely careless photo-collage, rather than something a human being might have drawn with their hands.
Had Perkins been exacting in his reference/source material, then I think his work here—colored by Adriano Lucas—might have worked better, but there's no consistency in the imagery at all. The main character, The Atom Ray Palmer, might look like Matthew Smith's Doctor Who in one panel and like Hugh Grant on the next page. I swear I saw Bill Pullman in The Atom's costume at one point. Basically, as photorealistic as the art might be, it's completely fluid. Ray Palmer is a white guy with brown hair; every other characteristic about his face differs panel to panel (The same goes for the other major character, The Atom Ryan Choi, who usually looks like a younger Asian man with black hair...but his face changes panel to panel too).
Now, the pages are broken into panels and one can read those panels and the dialogue balloons and narration boxes as sequential art is usually read, but the individual pictures in those panels? They're just barely sequential, and if it weren't for the colorist and the fact that superheroes wear such distinct costumes, it would be impossible one wouldn't be able to read it in the way one normally does comics art at all.
The script is written by Ryan Parrott and John Ridley, and the book's premise is rather odd. This seems to be a six-issue miniseries specifically commissioned to resolve a dangling plotline from Mark Waid's earlier Absolute Power event series—specifically, that when the superheroes got their stolen super-powers back, the proper powers didn't always end up with the proper person—but then, that plot point was sort of tacked on to Absolute Power's ending, as if Waid had written it just to set up a follow-up like this one (That is, the plot point wasn't left dangling, but a dangling plot point was grafted on).
It is, as we have previously seen in the pages of Justice League Unlimited, up to The Atom Ray Palmer and his one-time successor-turned-colleague The Atom Ryan Choi, a pair of super-scientists, to solve the problem and make sure that the right people end up with the right powers.
In this series, it doesn't go at all as smoothly as it did in JLU, though. In the second issue of that series, we see The Atoms restore Atom-Smasher Albert Rothstein's lost powers to him in the space of a few panels, and though he complains about the process being excruciating, it seems to work. But in The Atom Project, Al in being kept in a cell on the Watchtower by The Atoms, and he's seriously deformed, his size-changing abilities resulting in a hideously over-grown right arm and an Elephant Man-like head.
Parrott and Ridley divide the story into two timelines and jump back and forth between the two throughout. One is set in the present, wherein The Atoms are hunting Captain Atom, as is the U.S. Air Force and, eventually, a third party. In the other timeline, set in past, we see what led to the conflict between the heroes.
The split timeline isn't necessary, of course, but it does allow for the sort of in media res opening that comic books have long been fond of, and it help keeps one interested, perhaps even invested, in the first half or so of the story.
The book opens with a conversation between two unseen characters, their dialogue appearing in two sets of narration boxes, one red and one blue, as they comment on the action, which involves Nathaniel Adam on the run from the military, eventually being confronted by Palmer, who floats down from the sky somehow, as if he could maybe fly now...?
One might assume that the two speakers are Palmer and Choi, given what we know about The Atom Project from JLU, what we see on the cover of the trade, and the fact that both characters used to wear red-and-blue costumes. But it is not them. The actual identity of the speakers won't be revealed until issue #5; during the first 100 or so pages, the mysterious voiceovers will come and go and are often accompanied by the presence of a weird-looking, sometimes green-ish fly.
Here is what is happening. Captain Atom never regained his powers back at the end of Absolute Power and has turned to The Atoms on the Watchtower for help (The Watchtower is here eerily dark and devoid of other heroes. While scenes set there in JLU and Titans showed backgrounds full of cameoing DC heroes going about their business, here the only hero we see aside from Captain Atom and The Atoms is Dr. Light. Ray talks to an off-panel Red Tornado at various points and, in the very last issue, The Question and Mister Terrific put in appearances, but throughout a majority of the series, it's just Atom, The Atoms and their human lab rats).
Meanwhile, The Atoms have been tracking down various civilians who have gained stray super-powers, apparently as a result of the events of Absolute Power, although the exact mechanics of all this aren't really clear (Palmer and Choi refer to "meta-energy" a few times, and even though we know the origins of the powers of every hero in the DCU is more or less unique, here they are treated as if they are all, at their root, the same thing. That's fine; a degree of hand-waving is likely necessary. I mean, the way Amanda Waller stole all the powers in the first place was via Amazo technology, so we're talking about Silver Age comic book science from 1960 here).
I suppose I should here note that neither Atom much looks like they originally did upon their comic book introductions, nor like they have traditionally been drawn. Gone is the dynamite red and blue costume that Gil Kane designed for Palmer, and the pretty-much-the-same version of it that Choi wore.
Now Ray wears a black version of that costume with red boots and gloves, and a white layer over his torso. He's also got shoulder pads for some reason. It's not as good as his original costume but, as Dan Mora drew it in the pages of JLU, it didn't look that bad...I mean, it wasn't as bad as The Flash's new costume, at least.
Choi, meanwhile, wears a costume that seems to be inspired by the goofy armor-like one the CW gave Brandon Routh in the "Arrowverse" TV shows, complete with shoulder pads, a helmet and visor. It's mostly blue and black.
These costumes are not Perkins' fault, at least, not as far as I know; the characters showed up dressed like that in the Mora-drawn JLU first.
The Atoms perform painful experiments on Captain Atom, trying to restore his powers, while presiding over cells full of maybe a dozen or so other civilians who have gained unwanted powers, civilians they hope to remove the powers from. Oh, and poor, deformed Atom-Smasher.
Eventually, they track down Cap's missing powers, restore them, and then Captain Atom develops or discovers a new ability, I guess. Somehow, he is able to "take" powers from others the way that an Amazo robot can and add it to his own power set. Later we will see that he is then able to gift copies of those superpowers to others.
And so, Captain Atom becomes something of a superpower battery/superhero factory, able to grant powers to others at command.
And General Wade Eiling, who is apparently no longer in a shaven Shaggy Man body and is back to being an Air Force general does so command (I suppose one benefit of DC doing something like a half-dozen continuity reboots in a decade or so means that nobody knows what actually "happened" before, and so writers are free to ignore any developments they like when using many characters). He tells Cap to bestow super-powers to various Airmen serving under Eiling, which he does, since he feels compelled to follow orders (I guess Captain Atom is still an active miliary man? The writers nod in the direction of this weirdness by having Captain Atom tell Choi, "My status has always been a bit...fuzzy.")
Obviously feeling conflicted about cranking out super-soldiers for Eiling, Captain Atom goes on the run...and The Atoms team-up with the U.S. military to capture him, so that he can keep making them super-soldiers. This, needless to say, seems a little...fraught, and the sort of thing one might imagine someone else in the Justice League might have something to say about (Again, though, I don't know if we're meant to remember Eiling's actions from, say, Grant Morrison and company's JLA run. But still! One might think Superman, Batman or Wonder Woman would maybe want to have a meeting about giving the U.S. a bunch of super-soldiers).
Eventually, Eiling calls in Major Force and, to complicate things further, two hooded, cloaked figures from the "super-terrorist" organization Inferno, which was introduced in JLU, also show up to take Captain Atom for their own purposes.
Great lengths are taken to keep these hooded figures' identities hidden for a bit, to the point of being a little silly. The one with pink hands wearing a yellow ring on his finger, for example? He doesn't use his normal powers, which would reveal his identity; instead, the pair seem to use high-tech forcefields and weaponry, even when they're trying to kill their foes.
Okay, I am now going to spoil the identity of Inferno, which was previously revealed on the last page of the Justice League Unlimited Vol. 1: Into the Inferno trade (and thus I think I spoiled it previously on here), so stop reading if you haven't yet read that book and want to be surprised.
Inferno is actually just The Legion of Doom...but! In a twist, they are a Legion of Doom from the past, specifically from when Waid's Batman/Superman: World's Finest series is set (So, the pre-Crisis 1980s, our time). (They also, incidentally, include a new villainess I didn't recognize. Her name is used once, and when I looked her up later, I learned she is apparently a new character.)
The time travel doesn't really come up here, though. The two cloaked figures, and the two voices that we heard talking about Captain Atom in the very first scene of the series? They were Lex Luthor and Sinestro.
With help from Choi, Captain Atom battles his way out of The Legion's clutches (and then the villains and their headquarters relocate, as detailing the real fight with them is actually taking place in the pages of JLU, I'm not entirely sure why they are in this series at all) and Palmer belatedly decides to stand up to Eiling regarding the manufacturing of super-soldiers.
Fortuitously, in the closing pages everyone learns that Captain Atom's newfound ability to grant others super-powers is actually temporary—that is, the powers he gives others soon fade away—resolving the book's core conflict just as suddenly and randomly as it began.
(I should perhaps note that over at Atomic Junk Shop, Greg Burgas said of this book that "It's fine" and "mildly entertaining, but that's it," and that "Perkins does nice work on the art," so perhaps your mileage may vary on how readable the art actually is? Maybe my revulsion to is a Caleb problem more than a Mike Perkins problem?)
As to why these two books are crossing over at all, other than the fact that Waid writes both of 'em, I'm not entirely sure. Given that they are set in two different time periods, with World's Finest seemingly set somewhere in the early 1980s/late Bronze Age and JLU set in the present, it's not a terribly natural crossover, and thus necessitates a time travel element.
Now the mysterious "super-terrorist" organization Inferno, which vexed the new iteration of Justice League throughout the first volume of JLU (and part of the Justice League: The Atom Project miniseries), were revealed at the end of that volume to be a Gorilla Grodd-led iteration of The Legion of Doom. As we learn, though, this Legion isn't a modern one, but one from the past.
Suitable partners are scarce.
Alas, those who once formed our "Legion of Doom"--Luthor, Joker, Manta, others--are equally useless to me.
Some have reformed. Some have degraded. Still others are now too psychotic to be allies.
I'd need evil in its prime.
But first, the past! In this first chapter, set in the time of World's Finest, Waid and artist Clayton Henry has the title team, Flash Barry Allen and a ring-less Hal Jordan (There's a funny moment in which Bruce Wayne learns that Hal doesn't wear his power ring when piloting) thwart an attempt by Grodd to take over Gorilla City. It has nothing to do with "We Are Yesterday" really, but serves as a decent prologue, and one that introduces Grodd and his basic deal to anyone who might be unfamiliar.
In the Travis Moore-drawn present of the second chapter, at which point Waid is joined by co-writer Christopher Cantwell for the rest of the proceedings, Grodd comes into possession of some of Martian Manhunter's free-floating mental powers, boosting his own (This follows a weird plot point in Waid's own Absolute Power, wherein superpowers stolen by Amazon robots are lost or swapped). This gives the super-gorilla a little rainbow-colored, butterfly-shaped crystalline-looking tiara for some reason.
He then manipulates young Leaguer Airwave into thinking the League is bad, spying on them for him and, ultimately, allowing him to travel back in time to the pages of World's Finest to gather the Legion from that time and bring them back to the present, where, armed with "time guns", they will storm the Watchtower satellite in pursuit of a power source introduced in All In, one capable of transforming Gorilla Grodd into the Gorilla God.
In addition to Waid's titles, some of this will surely come into play in the upcoming event series DC KO, as the copy of the trade I have sitting in front of me right now, unlike the image above taken from Amazon, has the words "The Road To DC KO" on the cover near Luthor's fingertips.
As a long-time comics reader who is also interested in cryptozoology and monster folklore, a series about the Jersey Devil is one of those occasional works that I feel was made just for me. Quite coincidentally, I had just finished James McCloy and Ray Miller Jr's The Jersey Devil (Blue River Press, 2016), a slim volume recounting much of the lore of the monster, last week, so when Let This One Be a Devil showed up at the library, I was pretty primed for it.
Essentially humanoid in shape, Kowalski's Devil has the head of a goat with long, curling horns, hooved legs, a large pair of bat-like wings and a long, rat-like tail. He will draw many other Devils throughout the book, as whenever Henry hears a story of the Devil, Kowalski will draw that story's version of the Devil in the panel illustrating the story, so we also see Devils that look a little like large owl with horns and red eyes, or a dragon, or a smaller, less menacing winged goat man.
This leads to a section on the Leeds family, the controversial almanacs of Daniel Leeds and Benjamin Franklin's weird feud with Titan Leeds, and some of the most famous historical Devil sightings, like that of Joseph Bonaparte (brother of Napoleon).
As the book reaches its climax, young Roy and his friends take up rifles to hunt the Devil at night, against the advice of a man we see telling a crowd not to, as they are more likely to shoot one another in the dark than to bag a monster, and Henry rushes out in an attempt to save his brother.
This leads to that climax I referred to earlier, and a woods that is at once full of devils, and also completely free of devils...and then a little coda, wherein we return to the/a story of the Devil, a story that lives on as a story, regardless of what the Naughton boys (or anyone else) might actually think.
I liked this book a lot, and I hope Tynion continues to make comics on Fortean subjects and with such interesting creators. Especially comics about cryptids, although there is probably no monster as woven into American history and the American psyche than the Jersey Devil, not even Bigfoot, really.
It's also noteworthy for its representation, I think, with an Asian lead, a popular best friend who is of a bigger build than such characters usually are and, I think, a trans character in a major role...although that character is presented in such a they-just-so-happen-to-be-trans way that there's only a single line that makes me think they are supposed to be (the character mentions choosing their name), so do correct me if I'm wrong.
Anyway, it's a very good comic, and, like all of Nguyen's work I've seen so far (he's also done some superhero stuff for the Big Two between books), it's gorgeously drawn. More here.
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