The five best parts of Scott Peterson, Kelley Jones and Michelle Madsen's Batman: Kings of Fear #1

1.) The first panel. That image above is the very first panel of Scott Peterson and Kelley Jones' first issue of Batman: Kings of Fear. It's also a splash page. So you open the cover and you are immediately confronted with that.

What is it? Well, you won't know for sure until you turn the page, but that's The Joker's eye. He is peering into a hole in an empty crate in a warehouse--in other words, just peering into the dark--and calling out Batman, who he knows is lurking in the dark somewhere nearby, waiting to make his grand entrance.

That is one scary eye. Not just in the detail of the human eye itself, which is, of course, a weird and awful thing to look at too closely or in too much detail, but in the black furrows in The Joker's white skin around the eye. He is making a very intense, very emotional anger smile, as is apparent from the wrinkles in the area around his eyes.

2.) Batman's fight with The Joker's henchmen. Wow. That's all one page. The fifth page to be exact. So, as you'll already know if you've read the issue, the first page is a splash page featuring The Joker's huge staring eye looking directly at the reader through the jagged hole in the wooden crate. That's the page pictured above this one. The second and third pages are a double-page splash, showing the wide-mouthed Joker staring into the hole from the outside of the crate and worming his index finger into it, his henchmen gathered and posing all around him and he calls out to Batman. The fourth page has him summoning Batman through a sudden act of violence. And then you get this page. So after several pages devoted to scene-setting, the action starts, and we get a page crowded with all of these little panels, detailing Batman's battle against a roomful of opponents, each of which he dispatches with a single, discrete act of violence delivered in super-rapid succession. If the first four pages are timed to show a moment or so apiece, this page shows explosive action split-second by split-second.

3.) Batman's gas mask-holder-up mechanism. A little context might be required here. So after Batman knocks out a warehouse full of tough guys, he similarly dispatches The Joker in the space of just two panels. We then cut to the Batmobile, where The Joker is restrained in the backseat, talking Batman's gigantic pointy ear off until the Dark Knight has ultimately had enough, and so he decides to fill the interior of the Batmobile with some kind of knockout gas, after first putting on a gas mask. But rather than reaching down to his utility belt or his glove compartment to grab a gas mask, Batman has outfitted his car with a special button that, when pressed, extends a gas mask on a little arm (see the third panel above) that then holds the gas mask in front of his nose and mouth.

It's one of those almost Rube Goldberg-esque, overly-complicated things that Jones is always so good at emphasizing and detailing, but are inherent in the character. Seriously, just stop and think for a moment about how unnecessarily melodramatic and complex basically every single thing Batman does is. No artist makes that as readily apparent as effectively and as efficiently as Jones does.

4.) Batman's giant ear. The most immediate signifier of Kelley Jones' Batman versus Everybody Else's Batman is the ears. Jones gives Batman very long, sometimes ridiculously long ears, so that they more closely resemble demon horns or even rabbit ears than those of Batman's animal namesake. This is a fact not lost on Jones. Which makes this bit so cool. Just how long are Batman's ears? So long that they don't even fit in that panel, but break its borders and extend into the panel above it...and ultimately break that panel's borders too and comes out the top of it.

5.) Batman punches everyone. The one-page, 24-panel fight scene on page five is actually just the first of the 22-page issue's action scenes. At the climax of the issue, just as Batman has returned the captured Joker to Arkham Asylum and is arguing with one of its doctors about whether it's cool that he tracks down, beats up and then drops off any criminally insane escapees on a regular basis or not, there's a mass breakout of name villains. This leads to a five-page fight scene in which Batman simultaneously battles Killer Crock, Mister Freeze, Bane, The Riddler, The Joker, Poison Ivy, Two-Face and The Penguin. About halfway through, we get the above absolutely perfect panel, in which Batman rolls through them all like a big, black wave, seemingly striking them all with his fist in a single, wide, arcing punch.

It's...it's a really beautiful image, and the sound effects are unfortunate, as they only serve to block out some of the art, and distract from the fluid motion of the Batman figure, suggesting stops and starts to his attack in that panel, as opposed to him flying through his villains like a big, black comet, fist-first.

Anyway, they should take the sound effects out of that image, blow it up, frame it, take down the Mona Lisa and throw it in the garbage, and hang this in its place, as it is the best thing ever.

Happy Birthday To Me

So today was my birthday, meaning I am one year older, my mind and body bear the ravages of one more year's worth of entropy and I'm one year closer to my inevitable death. On the bright side, I get cake and presents.

Presents like this beauty, maybe my favorite birthday present of all time (I say "maybe" because, in my dotage there's a good chance I've forgotten a previous, more awesome birthday present). Now, that's not actually a genuine copy of 1940's Hit Comics #1 from long-defunct publisher Quality Comics, featuring the first appearance of The Red Bee, the single greatest superhero from the Golden Age of superhero comics (After Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Captain Marvel, Plastic Man, Namor, The Human Torch and Captain America, of course).

But it is the next best thing, a reproduction of 1940's Hit Comics #1, featuring the first appearance of The Red Bee! It's all the better a gift because I didn't know such a thing existed, and have always assumed I would never be able to read any of The Red Bee's original comic book adventures until I became an eccentric millionaire able to afford Golden Age back issues.

I can't tell you how excited I am to read this Red Bee adventure. Why, I'm practically abuzz.

Get it? Abuzz? Bee jokes!

I honestly had every intention of posting a new installment of "Comic shop comics" tonight.

But it turns out there were so many comics waiting for me at the shop this week, and I had a few pieces to write for places that aren't here tonight, that I'm just not going to be able to get to reviewing the 14 comics from the last three Wednesdays that I bought at the shop today. Hopefully Friday night. In the mean time, please enjoy this Ross Campbell drawing of a ninja turtle punching out a velociraptor, from the first page of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles In Time #1, one of the three best comics I read this evening, all of which I will tell you more about in the near future.

Shadoweyes is the Spider-Man of the 21st Century.

That's all I wanted to say about Ross Campbell's comic, which I would highly recommend to anyone who likes superheroes and/or great drawing.

....


Wait, that's not all I wanted to say about it.

While reading it, I couldn't get over how awesome Campbell was at drawing pipes and garbage, and I couldn't stop thinking about how fantastic his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles might have been. Oddly, seeing the pipes, garbage, graffiti, rooftops and fire escapes of the fictional city Shadoweyes is set in made me long to see a Campbell TMNT comic almost as much as seeing all those character sketches he had previously posted on his blog.

Also, as I alluded to the other day, I was reading Shadoweyes in the midst of DC's daily announcements of new comics suggesting often boneheaded, occasionally depressing publishing decisions. As one of the stated goals of DC's relaunch was to present a more diverse superhero universe then the one full of straight white dudes and a couple of aliens they started with, I was amused by the fact that almost all of the main characters in Shadoweyes are black and female, one of the main characters is Intersex, the sexual-orientation of a few seem to be leaning towards not-straight, and one of the main characters has ectrodactyly. How's that for diversity in a superhero comic? Suck it, Jewish Lesbian Batwoman!

Man, I love this page:

That's from 1997's JLA #7 by Grant Morrison, Howard Porter and John Dell. It may be my favorite superhero comic of all time, or at least the second half of my favorite story. It's the one where the League rescues the angel-made-flesh Zauriel, who is on Earth in part to warn of rogue angel Asmodel, "a King Angel of the Bull Host of Heaven," who is launching a rebellion while The Presence's attention is temporarily diverted by "a seemingly impossible event."

More than just about any other story in the Morrison/Porter/Dell run, save perhaps the final story arc, this is the one where the League-as-Apocalypse-fighters take seems most fully realized, and the characters featured in it all do super-superhuman feats: Fighting angels, lifting the moon when it begins to fall to earth, lifting an crashing angel "chariot," and, in the case of first Martian Manhunter and then Superman, battling an archangel in hand-to-hand combat.

I found a scan of the page online while I was looking for an image of Superman doing something Moses like to illustrate last night's post, and thought Superman repeating the feat of another Old Testament patriarch might be in the right ball park. I ended up not really needing to use it there though, and figured I'd just post it all by it's lonesome tonight.

After all, it's not like there's ever a bad time to take a page from that run of JLA and just marvel at it, you know?

If you only buy one superhero comic this week, make sure it's Tiny Titans #33

After all, it's the only one that's got Tiny Cassandra in it:

That's right, Cassandra: AKA, Batgirl II:
I know that Dan DiDio and other DC types have mentioned plans for the Cassandra Cain Batgirl in the near future, and always stress that they want to make sure they get the character right this time.

Well I hope those plans are letting Art Baltazar and Franco do pretty much whatever they want with Batgirl, because it doesn't get much righter than this.

Oh wow! Thanks, DC!

Here's a post I made at Blog@Newsarama in December 2008, asking Batman group editor Mike Marts to please think about integrating some of the awesome villains that appeared in the Batman manga of Jiro Kuwata that got collected in Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan:

Please introduce the following Bat-villains from Jiro Kuwata’s late-sixties Baman manga, partially collected in Pantheon’s Bat-Manga, into current DCU Continuity…

Lord Death Man

A master villain with a skull mask that cannot be removed who goes around in a skeleton costume he accessorizes with a cape and kicky boots, L.D.M.’s shtick is that he can die and return to life at will. Not a bad superpower really, as it allows him to be executed for his crimes repeatedly, or commit suicide to escape capture, and then crawl free from his grave later.

Also, his name is Lord Death Man.

And here's the just-released solicitation info for the December-shipping Batman, Inc. #2:

BATMAN, INC. #2
Written by GRANT MORRISON
Art and cover by YANICK PAQUETTE& MICHAEL LACOMBE
1:25 Variant cover by ANDY KUBERT

The dynamic new era of Batman continues! The Dark Knight and Mr. Unknown – the Batman of Japan – go up against Lord Death Man. It’s going to be a fight to the end that could see the failure of Batman, Inc. before it’s even begun!

On sale DECEMBER 8 • 32 pg, FC, $3.99 US

F Yeah Tiny Titans/Little Archie!

That's the cover of the second issue of the previously discussed Tiny Titans/Little Archie crossover, featuring Tiny/Little versions of EDILW favorites Josie and The Pussycats. I was pretty excited about this project when it was first announced, but I think I just got ten times as excited as I was then.

Also, I just noticed that the Pussycats—like Betty and Veronica on the cover of the first issue have Art Baltazarized versions of the little Dan DeCarlo upturned noses, while the Tiny characters are generally nose-less. Apparently Baltazar didn't just redraw the Archie characters in his Tiny Titans style, but filtered there designs through his Tiny Titans style?

That's pretty fantastic.





(Image spotted at and swiped from Johanna Draper Carlson's post on Archie Comics news)

You know who should draw Aquaman? Kate Beaton.

That's the second panel of a recent Aquaman strip the cartoonist posted here.

You'll notice that the Aquaman she draws is the 1990's version, from the Peter David-written volume of Aquaman, with the beard and the harpoon hand. Why that Aquaman? Here's what Beaton wrote under the strip:

As new as I am to learning about superheroes, everything that is well known to everyone else—like the fact that Aquaman is regarded as kind of lame—is new and hilarious. I read a bit about Aquaman growing a beard and having a harpoon hand and living in a cave and talking to spirits or something, and thought, how can anyone not like this guy? This crazy dude living under the water. Anyway that is the only version of Aquaman that I am really into.

I could definitely get into a "crazy dude living under the water" take on Aquaman, especially as drawn by Beaton. She certainly has a way with DC superheroes. If you missed it, here's her Wonder Woman strip from last fall.

Review: GoGo Monster

The cover of Taiyo Matsumoto’s GoGo Monster (Viz) features a beautiful parade of animal-like creatures, each composed of pieces that look like aspects of animals you’re probably familiar with and brilliantly bright colors. They’re packed close together among a few trees in a wide-open, white vacuum-like space, and they all seem to be marching toward Yuki Tachibana, a little school boy rendered in scratchy black-and-white and seemingly lacking the rounded suggestion of a third dimension that the creatures possess. He’s busily scribbling on his desk.

You won’t see any of the bright, purely abstracted creatures on the cover on any of the book’s 465 interior pages. Nor will Tachibana. Nor will anyone. It’s not just that Matsumoto didn’t draw any inside, but even if they were there you wouldn’t be able to see them.

You see, you’re a grown up. You’re all black and rotted inside, like all grown-up are. You’ve lost all ability to see the others and their otherworld and, if you’re like most people, chances are you won’t even be able to notice the effects these creatures and their interactions with one another and the natural world have on our visible world.

Tachibana’s only in his third-year of school, and while he’s exceptionally sensitive to a peculiar supernatural world’s intersection with his school, even he’s losing that ability. He can no longer see-see the others, and he never hears from the leader among them that once befriended him. He can still see the wake of mischief they leave, and aspects of a world unique to his perceptions, but he laments that as he grows older it’s getting fainter.

That’s essentially the core conflict in Matsumoto’s master work, or at least one of the core conflicts as I see it, and I wouldn’t necessarily trust me to navigate Matsumoto’s dense symbolism, invented mythology and long, long stretches of meditative image essays correctly, if there even is a correctly.

Besides, the great pleasure of GoGo Monster is doing so yourself.

Tachibana is naturally ostracized by his classmates and, to a certain extent, the teachers at his school as well. They’re a little afraid of him, but mostly just regard him as a weirdo, inventing visions for attention. Are the things he sees and the things he talks about simply the products of his imagination? Is he insane? Or is it all real? Is the school haunted by warring supernatural creatures, turning it into a nexus that touches a completely different world unlike any we’ve seen?

Matsumoto is awfully coy on the subject. When we first meet Tachibana, his only friend is Ganz, the kindly old school caretaker, who has seen other kids who have seen the things Tachibana has seen in the past. He’s quickly befriended by Makoto Suzuki, a new kid in school who is fascinated by Tachibana, and hasn’t built up the sort of resistance that the other kids in school has.

Around the edges of their story is “I.Q.,” a kinda sorta point-of-view character who seems weirder than even Tachibana. He always wears a box on his head, viewing everything through a single eye-hole cut in it, and seems to spend all of his time in the school’s rabbit run.

It may not be immediately apparent from the art (and certainly not from the storytelling or subject matter), but Matsumoto is the creator of Tekkon Kinkreet, and it says something about his considerable talents that GoGo Monster seems to be the work of an entirely different person.

His work is quite representational—to a point. He point-of-view, the “camera” shifts quickly from panel to panel, finding unusual angles, and the characters occasionally stretch or shift ever so slightly, a forearm looking a little too long here, an ankle behaving strangely, an adult’s face growing cartoonier than the perfectly (but never mechanically) rendered school grounds, airplanes, desks, objects and animals.

Matsumoto leaves a lot of whites in his art, and its rather light on shading, calling greater attention to the artist’s line work, which is here occasionally scratchy and remarkably loose. There’s a tactile quality to the lines here, making it easy to see Matsumoto’s pencil moving up and down the paper as you read, or imagining you can brush your fingertips across the surface and dust aside excess lead. Or maybe that was just me.

(Joe “Jog” McCulloch insightfully referred to it as “furiously cartooned” when discussing it in his best of the year piece. And McCulloch named it his single best book of 2009, by the way, if you need a more enthusiastic recommendation and knowledgeable opinion to check it out)

I don’t mean to spend too much time trying to pick the book apart though, separating various elements and trying to categorize and evaluate them. This book is what a great graphic novel should be—irreducible. Each and every bit of it serves the work as a whole, creates a world, evokes a mood, tells a story, proposes ideas, stokes feelings.

The word “perfect” can be a dangerous one for a critic to use, as it establishes an extreme terminal point on a scale or spectrum of that critic’s assessments of quality. It boxes the critic in, even if only a little bit, and thus I’m always hesitant to use it. I keep it behind glass with the word “emergency” printed over it, and usually leave it there, unused.

But I have to admit, after reading GoGo Monster, after spending some time staring at a blank Word document, after writing and re-writing pieces of this review, I’m sorely tempted to break “perfect” out.


********************

RELATED: While looking for a cover image to use at the top of the post that actually reflects the cover I was talking about—the book comes in a cardboard slipcase with different imagery, which is the image I ended up using up there—I came across this 2008 post at Same Hat!. Do check it out; it’s got lots of great images of the book, and will give you a much better sense of the visuals than my stumbling attempts to do so likely did. There's also a photo there of the cover I was actually talking about, the one on the book itself rather than the slipcover—the copy I read came from a library, so it was sans slipcover.

If there was a Law & Order: SVU comic, I doubt I'd want to read it...

...unless Sean Murphy were drawing it, in which case I'd certainly think about it.

Murphy's the artist of an upcoming Vertigo series with Grant Morrison, so if you haven't heard of him before, I'm sure you'll be hearing a lot about him in the near future. In the meantime, check out his deviantart gallery, which is full of great stuff, like the above image I stole from there, and his "Wolverine Alphabet" series (It was a Robot 6 post about the latter which drew my attention to his gallery in the first place).

Ralph Cosentino's Batman: The Story of the Dark Knight

Curlicue-shaped gusts of wind blow a few stray autumn leaves past an imposing wrought iron gate, framed by two scary, demonic-looking gargoyles. In the background, a huge, dark mansion rises up into the deep blue sky, every window illuminated with yellow light, but no exterior lights playing upon it. Bare, leaf-less black trees point their branches like jagged fingers in the direction of the house, and a large flock of bats flying in an undulating cloud pass over the bright, white full moon in the direction of the house.

The image is stretched across the first two pages of Ralph Cosentino's Batman: The Story of the Dark Knight (Viking; 2008). In a rectangular box in the lower right-hand side of the image floats what looks like a perfectly rectangular scrap of paper. It reads: "Wayne Manor is where most people think I live, but only bats know my true home."

Turn the page and you see that true home. Under a spotlight in the background, a familiar figure with pointy ears and a flowing black, serrated cape sits hunched in front of a massive computer of indeterminate vintage. The big open space looks a little like a sewer, a little like a cave, and a little like an industrial space. Under spotlights are a giant penny, a dinosaur, a Batmobile and Batplane with furious expressions, and suits of armor in glass cases.

This is Cosentino's Batman, and it's an All-Star approach to the character similar to Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's approach to the other most popular superhero in All-Star Superman—a contemporary take which cherry-picks the very best elements from decades worth of different interpretations of the character and synthesizes them into something that is at once modern and relevant, but also classic and iconic.

Obviously, Cosentino's book—shaped, formatted and priced like a kids picture book recommended for ages three and up, but in the medium of comics—is a shorter, less-ambitious and more straightforward story than Morrison and Quitely's 264-page series, but the method and approach are the same.

That story? Simply who Batman is and how he comes to be.

He's summoned from the cave by the Bat-signal, hops in the Batmobile and catches a crook while narrating about himself: "I fight all crime and evil. I am a creature of the night. I am...Batman! This is my story."

A strip of four panels tells of his parents and their death, a splash page introduces Alfred, a strip of three panels covers his training...

...and he tells us a bit about his villains, each of whom is introduced with a one-page splash followed by a series of four panels on the next page showing them in combat with Batman (The Joker, The Penguin, Two-Face and Catwoman, if you're curious).

"There will always be a criminal to stop... A victim to save... A monster to fight...and a crook to catch," Batman says of his life. That really pretty much sums him up, doesn't it?

The villains are mostly patterned after Dick Sprang's versions...Two-Face so much so that in a different context, I might have thought that was a Sprang drawing. Cosentino's design throughout owes an acknowledged debt to Sprang and, to a lesser degree, Bob Kane. Each panel, each page is a bold punch in the face of design, and Cosentino quite deftly references classic Batman images throughout, proving the power of them even while making them his own.

The cover, for example, probably looks awfully familiar. Here's the cover of Detective Comies #27, for comparison's sake:


Inside, there's a similar version of it:

(Sorry about the poor scanning; the line to the left is the border between two pages, as that image is another of the many two-page spreads).

Here are a few more images from Batman's origin sequence, and the original Bob Kane (I think...?) images they're based on:





The book ends with an image parallel to the one it opened with. The flock of bats fly over the moon again, while in the foreground there are two different menacing figures. To the left is a bat-winged gargoyle, and to the right is Batman himself, assuming a gargoyle-like position, and announcing his name again:


Wow. That is, like, and ideal Batman. If this looks like something up your alley, here's some good news: Cosentino has a companion book entitled Superman: The Story of The Man of Steel currently scheduled for release in April.

When exactly did Jack Kirby become awesome?

When one thinks of Jack Kirby and his awesomeness, one naturally thinks of the furious explosion of influential work he produced in the 1960s for Marvel. But when exactly did Kirby become awesome?

I haven't done any sort of serious inquiry into the matter, but as these panels of the Golden Age Vision blowing up dinosaurs with dynamite from Marvel Mystery Comics #16 (recently reprinted in Mystic Comics 70th Anniversary Special #1) clearly demonstrate...



...it was definitely at some point before 1941.

Because a J. Bone picture is worth a thousand of my words

This is what J. Bone's Doom Patrol, who guest-star in this week's issue of Batman: The Brave and The Bold, looks like. So you might want to give that book a look.

Eoin Haggerty should draw Batman

This is the picture he drew of the characters he found in the Lego Batman video game, a picture that appeared in the letter column of this week's Batman: The Brave and the Bold #5. You can tell Batman is the hero because he has the biggest head.

I'm not sure how old Mr. Haggerty is, but he doesn't seem to have any problem drawing feet, which means he's already got at least one skill that at least one recent Batman artist has lacked. He also draws a darling Catwoman; that's her swinging from the N, right? Looking all like an angry little panda person?

According to his letter to Johnny DC (in which asks where Alfred is at), Haggerty has even made his own comic, and it's called Mancat.

Johnny DC, you should totally publish Mancat; I really wanna see it!

At the risk of overstating my excitement, I think this is the very best idea anyone's ever had about anything ever.

Review: Jin & Jam #1

Hellen Jo’s Jin & Jam #1 (Sparkplug Books) is something a little better and a lot more rare than a good comic book—it’s a cool one. If it were a girl, I’d want it to like me, and if it were a boy, I’d want to be friends with it. If it were a garment, I’d want to wear it, and if it were a song I’d want to play it loud enough that other people could hear me listening to it.

I’m pretty sure I wore a goofy grin while reading it, and I’m certain I exhaled exclamation points as my eyes fell on certain panels. And, when it was over, I felt kind of like I did after finishing the first volume of Scott Pilgrim or the first issue of Street Angel—like I wanted to recommend it to people, not merely in the form of a comics review, which I’ll get serious about doing in the next paragraph, but, like, just stopping people on the street and saying, “Hey, you should check this comic out.” (Which would be a terrible idea, really; stopping people on the street to say anything is usually a pretty bad idea).

So, this comic Jin & Jam—it’s a pretty cool one. Jam is a scruffy little teenage girl eating McDonald’s on a curb in front of a church with her friend Hank, who is smoking cigarettes. Jin is a much girlier-looking girl, suffering through the sermon inside, who comes outside and happens to meet Jam there.

Is it a match made in heaven? Well, they sure seem to think alike:

Later, Jam and Hank are drawn to a parking lot when they hear the call “FFFFFFIGHT,” and there they find Jin, out of her church clothes and about to fight Ting and Terng, “a conjoined bitch and a retard” (In Jin’s words).

The fight is brutal. Ting and Terng smash Jin into a brick wall, and one of their fists cave it in. Jin hits them with a garbage can, and this is the page that follows:


Before a clear victor emerges, a cop shows up, fully prepared to brutally enforce a law I wish existed:

Oh man, if it were illegal for teens to be fucking annoying…

Jam rescues Ting, Terng and Jin, and when she hears that Jin has “never seen a band perform live before,” they try to go see a show, but they can’t because, duh, they’re just a bunch of stupid fucking kids, after all, and kids aren’t allowed in bars.

The end.

The book begins with a quote from Taiyo Matsumoto’s Black & White (which is perhaps more widely known as Tekkonkinkreet now): “We can beat ‘em…just you ‘n me!” I suppose the spirit of that quote, the two friends against the world theme of Tekkonkinkreet is what Jo was specifically evoking, and while the beginnings of that sort of story are certainly present, it’s also a preemptive declaration of influence.

The flatness of the art that sacrifices the illusion of depth (but not enough to hurt the images), the bold black and white art with little gradation, the character design, the weird angles, the violent fighting, the mentally challenged character whose head is always leaking liquids—there are a lot of bits and pieces that here that evoke Tekkonkinkreet, although the world it occurs in is more immediate and less fantastic than Matsumoto’s, while the violence and action are sillier and more fantastic.

While the art’s great, the swearing amusing and the fighting fun, what pushes this to the next level is how strongly Jo is able to render the characterizations—every bit as strongly as she renders them physically in the lines—and evokes the feelings of teenagerhood. The injustice of being denied into a club to see a band and being forced to loiter in a playground instead, not old enough to do grown-up stuff, but too old for kids stuff? Caught in between like that, and just hanging around, being angry and cool and destructive, hating and loving each other? Man, that’s exactly what it was like, isn’t it? And Jo’s caught it and put it all on paper, didn’t she?



RELATED: I really liked this detail. Jin, who doesn’t smoke, apparently takes all the cigarettes that are offered to her, and apparently makes some kind of necklace out of them:

That’s awesome. I’ve never smoked, but I remember handing out with bad kids who did and being offered cigarettes all the time. I was attracted to how cool smoking was, yet repelled by how it’s, you know, really fucking expensive and deadly and all (I was something of an old man even as a teenager). I like how Jin doesn’t smoke cigarettes, but is still approaching them as trophies—are these the first few she’s been offered? Is the offer of a cigarette still so fresh and new an experience that it’s something to be savored and celebrated, even if you don’t actually want to smoke the terrible things?

Four reasons you really oughta consider checking out King-Size Spider-Man Special #1

1.) It has one of the best recap pages in the history of Marvel' s recap pages, one that's right up there with the better ones from The Incredible Hercules.

Not only does it feature the Dumpy Spider-Man's six-word origin (which Chris Sims called "the single greatest origin recap in the history of comics"), but it also pre-empts continuity confusion, as if they were totally reading my mind: "WARNING THE FOLLOWING STORIES DID NOT REALLY HAPPEN! (...well, they're happening while you're reading hem, but they don't cout for the Spider-Man in Amazing Spider-Man, before or after Brand New Day, which is the only Spider-Man that matters.)"

And when I was flipping through this in the shop, I saw one of the stories—a Spider-Man/Falcon team-up—was set way back in the past, when The Falcon wore green and didn't have any wings yet, and I was already fretting over Spider-Man's fake history, which I don't understand any more thanks to the BND reboot.

As funny as this page is, I don't entirely agree with the last bit—"unless you just want to read a few fun stories. Then these count."—because while the lead Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover story is definitely fun, the rest of book isn't. The Falcon/Spidey story is by Keith Giffen and pencilled by Rick Burchett, but is just all kinds of okay; Burchett's art, which I'm a big fan of, looks decidedly un Burchett-like here, presumably due to the inking and coloring. And there's a Chris Giarrusso Mini-Marvels story, but it's a reprint of an older story I've already read two or three tims, so was a lot less fun this time around.



2.) It includes the above panel, which is my new favorite panel of anything ever.

It's even more amusing in context, as Spidey's just kinda crawling around the ceiling quietly for a few panels while MJ walks through the apartment, gets a piece of cake, and then finally proceeds to ask him what he's doing.



3.) There's a Patsy Walker shower scene, which occurrs right in the middle of her chatting with her friends Millie The Model and Mary Jane Watson.

This is welcome reinforcement of my belief that whenever models hang out together, they end up showering, bathing and/or changing clothes.



4.) And then there's the panel on the right, in which Marvel Girl announces a roll call that would make for a great Avengers line-up.

Dream Trades: The Complete Hitman

Garth Ennis and John McCrea's two-issue JLA/Hitman miniseries wrapped up last Wednesday, having served as both a welcome visitation to the characters from the old Hitman series, and a sort of belated epilogue to it.

The miniseries was, by just about any standards, a pretty good comic, but I do wonder why exactly DC published it. I mean, publishing pretty good comics doesn't exactly seem like their regular MO these days, does it?

It could be that it was a sort of test balloon for embarking on a trade program of the series, something Comic Book Resources’ rumormonger Rich Johnston has been pushing for.

I don't know how Hitman sold back in the late ‘90s, when it was still being published monthly, but from interviews at the time, I got the impression that it was a borderline title, not selling all that great, yet not selling poorly enough to be canceled. Rather, DC kinda suggested that maybe it could be canceled at some point in the near future, and afforded Ennis and McCrea time to wrap it up to their liking.*

When they did collect it into trade, they stopped at Who Dares Wins, about halfway through the series (the point where Tommy essentially has a mid-series crisis, and things start looking increasingly bad for our heroes). According to dccomics.com, only the last two of the five trades they did are still in print.

Considering that it's the work of Garth Ennis, whose name alone is enough to sell comics these days, I've always found it odd that the series wasn't a bigger hit, and a perennial seller in the backlist—a "from the creator of Preacher" likely should help sell some books, no?

Now that Ennis' name has been built into brand of its own, thanks in part to his adding a long run on the Punisher to his Vertigo credits, perhaps that’s changed.

And if you can get an Ennis fan, any Ennis fan, to crack open just one cover, I would think that a collection of Hitman collections would do quite well in trade, as it has the best of all of the attributes Ennis is known for: Superhero parody, action, crime, western and war movie tributes, homages, parodies and riffs, plus great character work, almost monthly celebrations of male friendships, and lots of guns, cigarettes and beer.

Of course, if DC were to give trade collections of Hitman another try after their first, aborted attempt, I would hope the would do it right this time around.

And to help ensure that they do, this installment of extremely infrequent EDILW feature Dream Trades is dedicated to laying out a blueprint for a practically obsessive-compulsive collection of all Tommy Monaghan stories.

Here's how I think it should go down...




Hitman Vol. 1 The first Hitman trade was a tad inadequate, featuring only the first three-issues of the series, a short Batman Chronicles story, and the Demon "Bloodlines" tie-in annual which introduced Tommy Monaghan.

Well, The Demon Annual #2 is a given, as it’s the first appearance and origin of Tommy Monaghan, a Gotham City hitman who gains superpowers after an attack by the “Bloodlines” aliens (Unimaginatively known in the DCU as “The Parasites”).

Monaghan had two other Demon story arcs, which should definitely be included. “Hell’s Hitman” ran through The Demon #42-#45, and it guest-starred Tommy Monaghan and Bat-villains Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The story revolved around a battle between Etrigan and Asteroth, and climaxed with the raising of the Gothodaemon, Gotham City’s own patron demon. I think this storyline is also the first appearance of GCPD officer Tiegel, who would become Tommy’s love interest in Hitman.

Monaghan also appeared in “Suffer the Children,” which ran from #52-#54, but I’ve never been able to track those singles down.

Both storylines would be good candidates for collection in a new version of Hitman Vol. 1, unless DC is planning on collecting Ennis and McCrea’s Demon run at some point (which they really should—it’s only 19 issues, and features a couple of Hitman stories and a three-part Haunted Tank story, introducing us to a legacy version of the tank’s commander, whom I don’t think anyone, even Ennis, has used since).

Following all the Demon appearances, but just prior to Hitman #1, Monaghan would appear in a short story in the “Contagion” crossover issue of The Batman Chronicles. Thanks to his mind-reading abilities and X-Ray vision, Monaghan’s able to get the jump on Batman, diss his Darth Vader vibe and, with some Bugs Bunny logic, trick the other one-third of their Mexican stand off into training his gun on Batman.

Monaghan escapes, and Batman follows him into the first three issues of Hitman. It’s a pretty good arc, about someone hiring Monaghan to take out the Joker, and Batman doing his level best to save his mortal enemy, an unrepentant mass-murderer. A lot of great moments, and sly observations about the DCU, although I was always a little disappointed that neither the Joker nor Batman ever fulfilled their promises of vengeance on Tommy. But I guess Ennis was just doing what he had to to launch a new DC series—start with a Batman appearance.

This first story amounts to the bait portion of a bait and switch, as the set-up for the series Monagahan gives us—that he’s a super-powered Hitman who only takes cases involving evil metahumans that normal hitmen couldn’t take—recedes to the background almost immediately (The fact that he even has superpowers is often unclear, based on how infrequently he uses them as the series progressing, occasionally vaguely complaining of them causing him headaches).




Hitman Vol. 2: Ten Thousand Bullets The next story arc is the four-part “Ten Thousand Bullets,” which I personally found to be the weakest of the lot, and I actually considered dropping the title with #4. Some big things happen to the supporting cast here, though, setting the tone for the rest of the series—in the world of Hitman, anyone could die at any moment.

It was followed by a one-issue tie-in to 1996’s big DC crossover, Final Night. I actually liked that one quite a bit. The idea was simply that the sun was going out, it was really the end of the world this time, and there wasn’t much chance of anyone saving the day. Obviously someone did, but a lot of the tie-ins just dealt with the heroes spending their last day with loved ones and so forth. In Hitman, Tommy and the boys at Noonan’s sealed themselves in the bar and told one another stories until the super-guys fixed the sun. This was the issue in which his social circle of killers—retiree-turne-barkeep Sean, best friend and unofficial sidekick Nat the Hat, Chow Yun Fat analogue Ringo, and big dumb guy Hacken—really started becoming sharply defined.





Hitman Vol. 3: Local Hero Next up was a four-issue arc called “Local Hero,” in which Tommy was forced to deal with some left-over Bloodlines crap courtesy of some shady CIA types, and has a very memorable team-up with poor Green Lantern Kyle Rayner, who takes a lot of shit from not only Tommy, but also Tiegel. I love that cover of GL reacting to the bill. I could seriously look at that thing all day.

That was followed by perhaps the two greatest issues of the series, “Zombie Night at the Gotham Aquarium.” It’s just what it sounds like. A mad scientist tests his zombie gas out on the fish and animals at the Gotham Aquariaum, and Tommy and the boys must fight their way through zombie seals, penguins, octopuses, dolphins and at least one great white shark.

It’s pretty much the greatest thing ever.






Hitman Vol. 4: The Ace of Killers Next up was a somewhat sprawling six-part story arc entitled “The Ace of Killers,” which brough guest-star Catwoman (rocking the Jim Balent suit) and Jason Blood and Etrigan into the mix, as The Mawzir, a six-armed monster made out of dead Nazis, seeks to procure the titular rifle, the only gun capable of killing demons. Featuring the debut of the Cat-Signal, and local drunk Sixpack’s very own super-team, Section Eight, which included such sensational character finds as The Defenestrator (who carries a window with him to throw people through) and Dogwelder (who, um, welds dogs to people).

“Ace” is followed by two done-in ones, which would round out a trade quite nicely. There’s the “Big Head” issue of Hitman (from a theme month at DC where every cover featured a close-up of the protagonists face, and a good-jumping-on-point story). It was one of the more charming issues, in which Tommy and Tiegel make it official (and Ennis still finds time for a Mexican stand-off gag that ends in wholesale slaughter). Steve Pugh handles the art, giving McCrea one of the few breaks he takes on the series.

Then there’s a one-issue Christmas story in which Tommy and Nat hunt down a radioactive guy in a Santa suit. I actually hate that issue; probably the weakest of the series.





Hitman Vol. 5: Who Dares Wins This five-issue arc sends SAS agents after Tommy and Nat, to wreak British vengeance on them for a friendly fire incident during the gulf war. I think this is the first Ennis story about Britain’s super-soldiers, which he’d follow with plenty more (see all of the WildStorm Kev stories, for example). Given that the first story established anybody can die at any time, this is a pretty dramatic story, in which our badly out-classed heroes flail against a superior force. (There’s also a scene in a restaurant where a morbidly obese man is pushed over and used as a bullet shield). This is where the last round of trades quit.

Hitman #28 is a nice one-issue epilogue to “Who Dares Wins,” in which Monaghan regrets his life of violence, and begins casting about for something good to do. And he finds it in the very next story arc…





Hitman Vol. 6: Tommy’s Heroes This five-issue storyline, interrupted by the #1,000,000 issue, finds Tommy leading Nat, Ringo and Hacken into Africa as mercenaries in a crappy little war there, one which involves evil superheroes. Ennis gets to indulge in his love of war comics and movies without having to leave the comfort of his regular monthly, and McCrea gets to draw our heroes in different outfits, and the color palette changes quite dramatically. One of the few times the boys get out of Gotham City.





Hitman Vol. 7: For Tomorrow From there, things get weird, and it becomes clear Ennis is starting to wrap things up. “Tommy’s Heroes” is followed by one-issue “Of Thee I Sing,” the Eisner-winning Superman issue And the best Superman story I’ve ever read. Believe it!), a dark, dark, dark two-issue story in which Tommy learns of his real father and mother and returns to Ireland to face a past he never knew he had, and another two-issue arc about vampires seeking to invade “No Man’s Land”-Era Gotham, with the Cauldron as their beachhead.

And that brings us to the first Hitman story I cried (Manly, manly tears) during, four-part For Tomorrow, in which the long-foreshadowed conflict between Tommy and Ringo finally arises.





Hitman Vol. 8: The Old Dog A one-issue epilogue is followed by another of my favorites, a three-issue storyline in which Tommy and Nat go back in time, and a pack of Tyrannosaurs led by “Scarback” come to the Cauldron and quickly develop a taste for human flesh. Tackling the dinosaurs, McCrea proves he really can draw anything he’s asked to, and Ennis riffs on the old Judge Dredd strips about the Tyrannosaurus whose name I forget, narrating the stories from the dinosaur’s perspective.

And then Sean gets his spotlight arc, “The Old Dog” and we get flash backs to his youth, allowing Ennis to work a war comic into the middle of this story about two old, retired killers facing each other one last time.





Hitman Vol. 9: Closing Time After the two-issue Sixpack spotlight arc “Super Guy,” we plunge into the eight-issue finale, “Closing Time.” Ennis does an incredible job of bringing things to a close here, dusting off surviving characters from throughout the run, some of which we haven’t seen for years, in a tale that deals with the Bloodline crap that spawned Tommy, and gives him the chance to do that something good, and, if he’s lucky, die in exactly the way he’s always wanted.

I admit it: I bawled.





Hitman Vol. 10: That Stupid Bastard and Other Stories Well, since most of the cast is dead as of the last volume, you would think that would be a good place to stop the trade collections. But it wouldn’t be. After all, JLA/Hitman was really an epilogue for the series—set years after, and flashing back to when Tommy was still alive, before revealing Superman’s personal memorial to and feelings toward the dead Tommy. Surely that needs traded, and it should be somewhere after Closing Time. Hence, a post-Closing Time trade.

To fill out the rest of the trade, DC could stick in the various Hitman crossovers and specials that have nowhere else to go.

For example, this would be where you’d want to put Hitman/Lobo: That Stupid Bastich! #1. This 2000 one-shot was reportedly something Ennis wrote under duress, having no real affection for or interest in the character of Lobo. And oh boy, does it show. Essentially 38 pages of making fun of Lobo, the story has the unstoppable bounty hunter from outer space stopping in Noonan’s to drink a few pitchers of beer after completing a contract on Earth.

“I hated him on sight an’ I wasn’t eve lookin’at him,” Monaghan narrates the first panel. “He dressed like an idiot, talked like a moron, an’ smelled like he wore his bowels outside his body.” Artist Doug Mahnke helpfully draws some cartoon flies orbiting Lobo’s head, just in case it’s not clear that the character stinks.

So Lobo’s spouting catchphrases, all “Main Man” this and “Frag” that, until he notices there’s a cape in the joint:


(I love this panel, and that sentence gets funnier the longer I think about it, with each Leaguer having their own dubious sphere of influence. I can just see Oracle staring at a bank of monitors, and calling things in along the lines Sixpack established: "Batman, we have a rabid raccoon in Chicago that needs your attention! Wonder Woman, there's a bank robbery in process in Chicago—and the culprit's a she! Green Lantern, hostile aliens have just touched down in L.A., and they have green skin, so they’re all yours!")

When he starts picking on ‘Pack, Tommy pours a bottle of cheap whiskey all over himself, shoots out Lobo’s eyes, and takes off running. That’s page 7. The next 31 consist of Lobo, tracking Tommy by scent while waiting for his eyes to grow back, chasing him spouting increasingly ridiculous phrases based around the syllable “frag.” (“Gonna give ya a taste o’ Lobo’s frag a l’orange—served with a side dish o’ frag!” or “Ground control ta Major Frag!”).

Drawing inspiration from Luney Tunes once again, it’s essentially one big, long chase scene, with lots of mafia gangsters getting in the way. Now, given that Lobo is in Superman’s weight class, how does Tommy take the Main Man down? With a little help from Section Eight, a wedding dress, a video camera, and a promise not to tell if he just goes away. Mahnke handles the art, and his experience as a great superhero artist and a great comedy artist made this a perfect project for him. His Lobo is a mountain of a man, towering over everybody and everything, and Mahnke is quite creative as well as detailed in his gore.

This issue is actually a lot like JLA/Hitman in the way it blends the world of Hitman with a DCU regular, and flashes back to do it (The first panel contains an editorial box saying, “Clearly, this story takes place before most of the cast was slaughtered.”)


This hypothetical volume would also be a good place for Hitman Annual #1, which featured Ennis riffing on westerns in a story entitled “A Coffin Full of Dollars.” This was part of DC’s “Pulp Heroes” annual event, which is the best kind of DC annual event—one that’s thematic instead of part of an interlocking crossover.

The idea was basically to put the various DC heroes in genre stories of the sort the old pulps might have featured, although the main distinguishing detail was the cover dress and the fact that each of 1997’s annuals had a painted cover.

Hitman got “Weird Western Tales,” and we got an extra-length story about Tommy heading west to kill some guys for money, as drawn by Steve Pugh and Carlos Ezsquerra.

This might also be a good place to put Hitman #1,000, 000, which featured Tommy traveling to the 853rd century, meeting the heir to the Gunfire legacy, and discovering the ways in which the future is better than the present (mostly pertaining to vomiting).

There’s also supposedly a Sixpack/Superman short story from a Superman special somewhere, but I’ve never been able to find it.

As for non-Ennis Hitman appearances, there’s only one that I think would be worth collecting, and a sort of grab-bag trade like this would be the place to do it, if DC wanted to bother with the non-Ennis stuff.


That would be Resurrection Man #9-#10, by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning and Jackson Guice, which featured DC’s two trenchcoat-wearing, costume-less super-heroes of the time crossing paths. In addition to some great art, Abnett and Lanning write Tommy and Nat just right, and have a great scene in which the pair exploit Mitch “Resurrection Man” Shelley’s peculiar power—every time he dies, he comes back to life with a different super power.

There are a handful of other appearances of Tommy outside his own title, but the Resurrection Man ones are really the best of the lot.

Grant Morrison wrote a fun few panels of Tommy trying out for the Justice League in JLA #5, but Martian Manhunter was unimpressed with his sales pitch (“I kill people for money”) and his smoking. Not bad, but certainly not enough to justify reprinting that whole issue in a trade.



The Denny O’Neil written Azrael #35 features a team-up between the one-time Batman stand-in and Tommy, but it’s pretty inessential, and doesn’t actually read like a Hitman story at all. It could have been anyone in the green trench coat trying to slot the merman gang boss (Although, may I say—Merman gang boss? Not bad, O’Neil).



Finally, there was Sovereign Seven #26, part of the short-lived and now mostly forgotten Chris Claremont DC series of the late ‘90s. I actually just reread it, since I had trouble remembering anything about it, and it’s about as painful to read as any Claremont DC book, particularly the parts where Claremont tries to capture the voice of an Ennis character.

Tommy only has a few pages, as he’s spying on the S7, and when he catches a few of their names, Rampart and Crusier**, he thinks, “Love the names.” Which would be funnier if it weren’t the same guy who came up with the dumb ass names in the first place writing the line.

The only things I liked about the issue were that his coat was mistakenly colored black instead of green (which is obviously a much cooler color), and there’s a pretty cool panel in which Tommy shoots a dude in the back of the head, the bullet exits through the dude’s eye, hits Power Girl in the eye, and bounces off.

And just to be super-anal, Hitman also had a panel or two in Bloodbath #2, a book I rather enjoyed at the time but is completely negligible for it's Hitman content, and one of those Secret Files & Origins specials dedicated to the leftovers of the DCU, cramming all of the less-popular characters (Tommy, J'onn J'onnz, Wild Cat, etc.) all into one story featuring Chase.

But I’d hate to close on that note, so let’s take one last look at That Stupid Bastich!:


Yes, who did weld a dog to Lobo's butt?

Garth Ennis, John McCrea, and a handful of great artists, that's who. Just as they've welded Hitman to our hearts.








*This wrapping-up went a long way toward making Hitman one of the best big-company comics of the decade, as few super-comics get the opportunity to tell a complete story. It's just the nature of the beast, to squeeze every available dollar out of every property. When you think about DC's best ongoings, however, it's likely no coincidence that several of them had proper endings, happy or otherwise (Hitman, Starman, The Sandman).



**Cruiser?! Seriously? Man, if you’re not a giant alien robot that turns into a car, or an out and proud gay superhero with a sense of humor, you really have no business using that name. However, it does kind of fit in with the rest of the team, all of whom sound like X-Men rejects: Indigo, Reflex, Finale and Cascade. Does anyone know if the Sovereign Seven every appeared again after their series ended? This is the only issue I read, and it sucked pretty bad, but it did have Claremont and Ron Lim, plus Power Girl. I always liked the logo, anyway.