BORROWED:
When it was finally released, then, I snapped it up, intending to write a review of it for Good Comics for Kids but, alas...but then I remembered that my editor had already written an early review of it a few months back...and it was also highlighted as one of the books of interest in a column on the site the week of its release. There's no rule that says we can't offer multiple reviews of the same book, of course, but it seemed like overkill for me to review it too. I mean, it's a fine book, and there are some interesting things about it that differentiates it from the pack—it's printed in full color rather than black and white, it's from Scholastic rather than a publisher better known for their manga offerings—but I don't think it's so extraordinary that readers need a third post about it on the site.
So, I'm writing about it here.
Hamachi Yamada's series stars Mizuki, who runs away from home—and the pressures to succeed academically in school, and her demanding mother who is doing the pressuring—to the small, seaside town of Akita, where her aunt lives and runs a small cafe.
While there, she meets an intriguing boy Akira, and shortly afterwards she sees him enter a school gym from which loud and strange noises are emanating. She looks inside, she finds the school's marching band rehearsing, and the poor girl, who is afraid she's wasting her whole youth on studying but has never found anything to really interest her when she's not studying, is awestruck.
Her aunt offers some advice: "Once you find something that sets your heart racing...DON'T LET GO OF IT. You'll regret it when you're older."
And thus before too many more pages pass, somewhere in the second chapter, Mizuki, who has never even held an instrument before, is transferring to Senshu High and joining the marching band. Specifically, she'll be playing the trumpet, the same instrument that Akira does.
The rest of the volume follows her as she learns more about the trumpet and marching band, discovers just how challenging it actually is, meets some of the other members of the band and prepares for their first public show.
Readers, of course, will learn all about marching band along with her, and, personally, as someone with no real experience with the subject, I found it a bit of a revelation. There's some metaphorical stuff about keeping your head up (not unlike Haikyuu's repeated references to volleyball being a sport where you're always looking up) and being part of and in synch with a group, but there's also just all sorts of literal stuff about how complicated it is. I mean, not only do you have to play your instrument, not only do you have to play it with a bunch of other people playing there's, but you have to do so while marching, which means there's a degree of physical challenge (the holding of the instrument, the marching) and a high degree of choreography, so that everyone stays in step, and you don't, say run into the person in front of them and cause them to cut their lip on their instrument (As Mizuki does to Akira at one point).
I was surprised to see all of this—and maybe I shouldn't have been, but, again, I don't know anything about marching band—and was thus intrigued to see the band members running laps and doing sit-ups (Which maybe isn't universal; that friend I mentioned said they only had to run for punishment sometimes) and the pages and pages of choreography Mizuki finds herself being asked to memorize.
Like other, similar manga and American comics for young readers I've read, then, this book is about its subject in multiple ways...while also telling dramatic story related to the subject. Will Mizuki find herself through marching band? Will she fit in with this new community? Is she going to end up falling for Akira? (They've already done the manga/anime trope of falling together, so that he lands on top of her)
I mean, I imagine.
As I said, the book is in color, which is in and of itself rather unusual, and it gives the proceedings not only a vibrancy, but also a particular mood and tone, and helps communicate just why it is that Mizuki is so taken with the band when she first encounters it, as well as the various charms of her new town.
...
Also, I'm kind of curious about the "DANGER BEARS" signs near the school. I guess this is because the school is out in the country, meaning it's possible there are bears around...?
It's yet another "crisis" story in the DCU, it involves messing with continuity to some degree yet again, and then there's the big, dumb premise, which seems to be that Circumstances have forced the heroes into a video game-style fight-to-the-death tournament (in which no one will actually die) in order to save the universe (Say, where was Scott Snyder when the brain geniuses who came up with Injustice were brainstorming ways to do just that? DC KO's version seems better than the grim half-the-heroes-are-fascists-in-a-parallel-universe one they settled on).
Despite curiosity about the Plastic Man/Lobo fight* (and a couple of questions), I had planned on skipping it. But, if I did, would I be able to make sense of the latest volume of Mark Waid and Dan Mora's Justice League Unlimited, which, as the subtitle suggests, is apparently a tie-in to DC KO...?
It was with some trepidation that I cracked the cover, but I assumed I would be alright. I mean, I've been reading reviews of some of the DC KO issues as they came out (and just read a review of the collection a few days before I sat down to write this) and, again, the premise doesn't seem that complicated. Besides, Mark Waid has been writing big event series and tie-ins to such series for about as long as I've been reading comics; if anyone knows how to script a comic so that it ties into an event yet still stands on its own, it's gotta be him, right...?
To my surprise, the big DC event that this arc seemed to tie-in to wasn't DC KO, but rather an entirely different one from long ago: Waid's own 1995 Underworld Unleashed.
See, while the book acknowledges what is going on in DC KO—Earth is falling to Darkseid again and thus the heroes are trying to evacuate the entire population of the world somewhere safer, most of the big guns are busy elsewhere—the plot here is that many relatively minor and/or silly villains have been given power-ups by the devil Neron in exchange for their services (here, though, without the accompanying redesigns), and, in order to stop them, a team of heroes must journey to hell itself and attempt to trick Neron by preying on his inability to resist making deals. (It also, to a lesser degree, reminded me a bit of 1994's Zero Hour; I'll get to that in a moment).
How does this tie into DC KO? Well, it seems pretty clear that it doesn't actually have to, and that Waid is basically just marking time with this arc, filling a certain number of issues of his ongoing series with something that won't interfere with DC KO, and at least gestures towards relation to it. He does manage some connective tissue, though, so much so that a less cynical reader—like, say, the Teenage Caleb who read Zero Hour and Underworld Unleashed—might not see the strings.
Essentially, with so many heroes starring in DC KO proper, the remaining Justice Leaguers are meant to be helping with the evacuation of the world, but all the villains villain-ing is keeping them from being able to do so, and thus the distraction needs to be dealt with. And as to why so many villains are willing to work with Neron at all—even those like Captain Cold and Heatwave, who got screwed over pretty badly by him once before—well, they are sure that Earth has really had it this time, and Neron has promised them sanctuary in Hell if they just do his bidding here at the end of the world.
Waid divides the arc into two real plotlines. One, set on Earth and the Watchtower above, where we see series regulars like Red Tornado, Blue Beetle Ted Kord and The Challengers of the Unknown do satellite stuff while Mary Marvel, Kid Flash, Doctor Occult, Martian Manhunter**, Cadejos, Boruka and Golden Frog and Airwave fight with the villains on the ground (And there, as per usual, plenty of cameos, although here there more from villains than from heroes).
The other involves Mister Terrific taking a team of heroes to Hell to confront Neron. But with the heroes spread so thin, who is left to go on a suicide mission with Mister Terrific? Well, luckily there are all those time-lost heroes from the past and the future who have apparently been hanging around the Watchtower since the end of "We Are Yesterday", some of whom I know and some of whom I don't. (Conveniently, assembling a League of random heroes from different timelines for the space of an arc also means Waid can tell a JLU story without actually using any heroes who are busy elsewhere in the event and its tie-ins.)
These guys are actually a pretty perfect team for Terrific to use too, as he tells them that they aren't actually their real selves, but "remnants" of those selves plucked from the timestream, distinct entities that will cease to exist when everything is straightened out. (And here's the bit that reminded me of Zero Hour, as these heroes know that saving the day ultimately means they're own deaths; in Zero Hour, it was slightly different, but some time-lost heroes knew that fixing the timestream meant they will return to their own timelines, and, in at least some cases, that's a death sentence of sorts.)
Of course, telling them this is probably not all that smart on Terrific's part, even if he does now claim to be the "smartest man on the planet"—not the third smartest, as per usual, but the smartest—as it means they spend their lives a little too freely, and, in at least one case, the looming threat of non-existence leads one to actively hamper Terrific's mission. But I suppose Waid wants us to know just how expendable these guys are, so we don't feel quite so badly when they start sacrificing themselves during their journey through Hell.
So which time-lost heroes are we talking about here...?
Waid makes a decent enough attempt at giving each of them a moment or so, either in the hours before they embark on their mission, or during that mission itself, at least gesturing towards some form of characterization (like Guy going to see the modern-day Ice and finding out they are no longer together, or Power Girl recording a video message for her current self, the repeating panels of the sequence giving me a flashback to Heroes in Crisis). It's a nice attempt, but it mostly boils down to a character trait apiece: Alan Scott has been doing this a long time, Tim Drake is scared, etc.
As they journey through Hell, they take turns sacrificing their lives in one big action scene after another, until, by the time they arrive at Neron's throne at the climax, Mister Terrific is there with just one other hero.
DC's Hell is different here than any I've seen, but then, DC has a lot of versions of Hell, and it's rarely consistent; this one doesn't much resemble that of Underworld Unleashed or Day of Judgment, both of which were Hells ruled by Neron. It's built of some DC stuff (The Demons Three are there to greet the heroes when they first arrive), some stuff from classic mythology (Charon and his ferry) and some stuff unique to this comic; there's a lot of weird monsters with bug-like forms.
The journey seems to go on perhaps too long—Waid and Mora spend several issues having the heroes fight their way to Neron, whereas Waid and pencil artist Howard Porter did so in less than an issue in Underworld Unleashed #3—and I suspect that had as much to do with marking time as any other aspect of the arc.
Still, Mora is a great artist, and it is, as always, worth one's time picking up comics like this just to see him draw stuff. I certainly enjoyed seeing him revisit some costumes from the '90s—he really makes that temporary Superman costume sing, for example—and getting to draw weirder, scarier stuff than usual.
As with the first volume of Matt Fraction's Batman, as I read this, I wondered if I maybe I have just been reading DC comics for too damn long now, given how much of this felt overly familiar, with Waid covering ground I have seen covered and re-covered before. I mean, I've lost track of how many times I've seen DC's superheroes journey to Hell since I read Alan Moore's story of Swamp Thing doing so. Of these ten heroes, I've seen Superman, Alan Scott, Aquaman and Guy Gardner all do so before.
So, when they first arrive, and Electric Superman starts stuttering in disbelief, while Alan Scott narrates that, because Superman doesn't believe there is any such thing as an irredeemable soul, "of course his mind is reeling," I thought of the image of a weeping Superman in Neil Gaiman and company's 2000 Green Lantern/Superman: Legend of the Green Flame, which may or may not be canonical, and 1999's Day of Judgment, another time Superman went to hell (That latter trip to hell would have been from a point in his life after which this time-lost version existed, though).
Somewhat disappointingly, while Waid tries to give a bit of characterization and a big action moment to each of the time-lost heroes, he doesn't quite do the same with Terrific...except, of course, for one scene where he uses a logic paradox to trick a gatekeeper and then when he tries to make a deal with Neron. At no point, however, does Waid address how Terrific might feel about the concept of Hell, given that he was, at least earlier in his history, an avowed atheist and skeptic of the supernatural, something he would argue with his fellow members of the JSA about (This despite, of course, that his origin involved The Spectre).
Maybe later writers addressed the matter of Michael Holt's faith in the years past—Heck, maybe Geoff Johns did so in past pages of JSA or Justice Society of America, and I've read and forgotten about it—but given that Mister Terrific is the one character on this journey who is "real" and stars in Justice League Unlimited, and that he at least had a very strong opinion about the prospects of the afterlife before, I think that might have made more interesting ground to explore than, like, I don't know, seeing an alternate future Tim Drake freak out about being in Hell and trying to live up to the legacy of his Batman, you know?. '
Ah well. It's become clear for a while now that this book is going to be a sort of narrative string around which the beads of various DC event series and crossover events can be strung, an ongoing title in which the mega-story of the whole DC line can play out 20 pages a month. While that isn't very appealing to me, it does have a couple of strong selling points.
This is, after all, a "toy box" comic in which we can see Mark Waid and, often, Dan Mora play with DC's heroes and villains, and one in which we can hope to see unexpected cameos from random, little-seen characters (Check it out! There's a panel featuring Jack O' Lantern in this!).
Though nothing much new or exciting or imaginative happens in this volume, it still has those elements going for it.
And hey, I was able to follow it, even without having read and/or caring about DC KO...!
REVIEWED:
But I want to take this opportunity to talk about an aspect of the books that I didn't mention in the reviews. And it involves a sizable spoiler to them, so, if you haven't read them—and if you like The Hulk, the Marvel Universe and funny comic books, you should definitely read them—please stop reading this post and go away. You can come back and finish this post after you've read both Hulk Teach books.
Okay, so in the first book Banner meets Mr. Museler, a very peculiar fellow teacher who is something of a foil and rival to Banner...so much so that he acts like a foil and rival, despite the fact that the two are, you know, both middle-school teachers.
Mr. Museler is a curious character. Not only is he a sort of negative example of a teacher, strictly teaching his class to the test so that they can score the highest in the school (and win a pizza party), rather than prioritizing their learning, but he's also pretty weird. He says he's independently wealthy, and only teaches middle-school as a hobby, rather than it being a job he needs to do in order to make a living (Or it being a vocation).
And the source of his wealth? A hat factory. Indeed, he is always wearing a comically large hat.
Here, for reference, is Mr. Museler...or "Hat Man" as The Hulk calls him:
And yet Hulk Teach ended without ever revealing that Museler was hiding a very tall head under his very tall hat, and so I decided I was wrong after all. Brown did not create Museler—French for "to muzzle"—as a middle-school teacher alter ego for Hullk villain The Leader afterall, it seemed. I guessed that the mustache was just a coincidence, and that Brown just drew that particular hat like that just because he thought the taller hat was funnier than one that was more standard hat size and shape..
Anyway, in A Tale of 2 Teachers, Museler is once again there to bust Banner and The Hulk's chops—as well as the chops of the ever-lovin' blue-eyed Thing—competing with them while teaching his class in ways that are suspect, like having them watch movie adaptations of classic works of literature rather than having them reading or using AI to help them writer their speeches.
I was shocked—shocked, I say!—by the events of the climax. Both Banner's class and Museler's class have built robots, and these are fighting in a robot battle royale. Museler's class's robot destroys all the other robots and kind of goes crazy, leaping out of the "Robactagon" at one point, and damaging Museler's signature hat:
At this point, Museler/The Leader's dialogue bubbles turn green, the same color as the dialogue bubbles of the gamma-irradiated Hulk and She-Hulk, Banner explains to the kids who The Leader was and how he came to be, and The Thing states the obvious:
Bravo, Jeffrey Brown.
*Actually, from what I've heard on Bluesky, that fight doesn't actually occur in the main series...or, um, anywhere else, aside from the marketing. That sucks...but it also feels sort of appropriate that the most compelling element of a Big Two event comic isn't actually in the comic or its tie-ins, but the marketing for them.
**Wait, is Martian Manhunter really not in the tournament...? That seems...weird, as he is not only one of the most powerful heroes, one who could swat down the majority of the participants without breaking a sweat, but he's also one of the few who could go all the way. I mean, if anyone in the DCU could take down Superman in a fight, it's J'onn, right...? At this point, one thing I am curious about the tournament aspect of the main series is how Snyder might convincingly sell us on Superman winning rather, I don't know, the last match being The Spectre eliminating Martian Manhunter...
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