Comic Shop Comi--Eh, it's just Scooby-Doo Team-Up #33

Scooby-Doo Team-Up #33 (DC Comics) So when I first started this blog, every Wednesday night the post would be a feature I called "Weekly Haul," wherein I reviewed all the comics I brought back from the shop that afternoon. At the time, the stack of comics was sizable enough that the word "haul" wasn't too much of an exaggeration. Then, in 2010, I moved to a city without it's own comic shop, so I changed the name of the feature to "Comic Shop Comics," because I was no longer getting comics on a weekly basis. Even though I moved back to a city with a comic shop some years ago, I kept the "Comic Shop Comics" title, because the number of comics has been dwindling to the point where "haul" doesn't seem to describe it. Some weeks, like this week, I wonder if I'll even continue the feature at all, under any name, because it's honestly not hard to imagine a Wednesday night in the near future where I go to the shop and then return empty-handed.

This week, for example, I came home with just a singe comic book. Comic books--at least the kind one can find in a comic shop on a Wednesday evening--seem to be drifting apart, and I'm not sure if it's me, or if it's Comics.

Anyway, I'm glad I found at least one comic today. Better still, it was a good one.

As you can see from the cover, this month's issue of Scooby-Doo Team-Up, DC's best gateway comic to the DC Universe's superheroes, features The Legion of Super-Heroes. It occurred to me that I've read exactly three comic books featuring the Legion this year, and all of them were out-of-continuity team-ups with characters seen on television (the others being Legion of Super-Heroes/Bugs Bunny Special #1 and Batman '66/Legion of Super-Heroes).

The three founders travel back in time to pick up Mystery, Inc and take them to their own time, as the legendary ghost hunting detectives are needed to help the LOSH solve the mystery of The Ghost of Ferro Lad. Before it's over, The Fatal Five will attack, and we get to see battles I think it's safe to say no one had ever imagined before writer Sholly Fisch typed them up, like Fred Jones vs. Mano, or Daphne Blake vs. The Persuader.

Fisch is joined by his usual partner on the series, Dario Brizuela, who does a pretty fine job of drawing all those Legionnaires into the superhero style he's established for the series.

While Fisch gets a lot of jokes out of the team-up, I can't help but feel there were a lot left on the table...perhaps the result of there being so many goddam Legionnaires--about nine of them get panel-time, many others simply have cameos. A Scooby-Doo/LOSH miniseries would be needed to take full advantage of all the opportunities presented by the teenagers from the late 1960s traveling a millennium into the future to hang out with the teenage superhero army.

Review: Tales of The TMNT #12

It's the further adventures of the Raphael and teenage Shadow team, last seen fighting werewolves together in Tales #7, as they encounter the supernatural.

This issue is written by Steve Murphy and features art by Dario Brizuela over breakdowns by Jim Lawson. There's a big, rather irritating mistake in the transition from the frontspiece opening that all of these issues oepn with and the story itself.

The frontspiece, a rather gorgeous illustration by D'Israeli featuring the four turtles in a Paris sewer, the Eiffel Tower reflected in the rain-slick street, has Raphael narrating, saying "Did I ever tell you abut my first time in Paris? No? Well, then..." before getting to the required "...Let me tell ya a story."

But when the story begins, we have an entirely new narrator, Shadow, who is on an Honors French class trip to Paris, and writing in her journal about how psyched she is to finally be free of Splinter, Casey, April and her uncles.

Not that she actually is, of course. Raphael has stowed away on the plane, buried among packages and luggage, and sent to keep an eye on Shadow.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in Paris, by the way, is a great idea for a Turtles story, given how big, old and exotic the world beneath Paris is; as far as sewers and subterranean environments below major cities go, it's pretty hard to beat that of Paris. Murphy and company, unfortunately, barely scratch the surface of this premise, as Raphael follows Shadow's class as it hits all the major tourist attractions by walking their itinerary beneath them, in the well-marked Paris underground.

It's in one such underground tunnel that Shadow meets someone named Jean-Louise, who has long-ish hair and is wearing a peasant's blouse. He warns her that her uncle should not have come to the city, which is the first she's heard of Raph's presence. Meanwhile, Raphael encounters first a blade-wielding killer known as "The Beast," who cuts him, and then the local version of the cops, who assume the masked giant turtle man is The Beast, and proceed to shoot him.

All parties—Shadow, Raph, The Beast, Jean-Louise the police—reunite in the catacombs for the climax, in which we see The Beast revealed for what it is for the firs time: A guy with huge blades, standing atop the shoulders of another guy (The placement of the logos on the front cover obscure Brizuela's depiction of these blades a bit, but we're essentially seeing a Beast's-eye-view of Shadow and Raph on the cover).

The real Beast catches all the bullets in this encounter, while Jean-Louise disappears after saving Raph and Shadow.

Who was that The Vampire Lestat-looking guy?

Would you believe, a ghost?

It's not the Brizuela's best work on the series (that would be Tales #1), nor is it Murphy's, but this particular issue does play around with some fun ideas. It doesn't make the most out of any of them, certainly, but it is by no means a bad comic, either.

Review: Tales of The TMNT #1

About 14 issues and 28 months into Mirage Publishing's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Vol. 4 (discussed at some length earlier this week), the publisher launched a sister title, Tales of the TMNT.

Peter Laird, who would serve as the book's editorial consultant, provided a short introductory essay on the inside front cover of the first issue. He explained how he was faced with three paths to take when relaunching TMNT—picking up where they left off with Vol. 2, starting over from scratch, or the path he ultimately took, picking up the characters' story while factoring in the time that had passed between the end of Vol. 2 in 1995 and the launch of Vol. 4 in 2001, which he worked out to be about 15 years of story-time.

His plan, he wrote, was to address all those missing years in the flashback sequences of TMNT, but never seemed to be getting around to it, and thus decided to revive Tales, Jim Lawson and Ryan Murphy's short-lived, seven-issue, 1987-1989 series. The new version would focus on filling in the stories from those missing years, or be set further back in time, but they would all take place somewhere along the line of the "official" TMNT timeline. As Laird hadn't worked out every event that might have happened between the end of Vol. 2 and the start of Vol. 4, he said he gave the reigns to Steve Murphy, and said he would work with the creators in determining what felt right for his TMNT continuity and what didn't.

For this very first issue, Murphy and a great deal of the usual Mirage gang contributed. Michael Dooney provided the painted cover of the Turtles in the sewer, Eric Talbot lettered the story and gets a production and design credit. Meanwhile, Jim Lawson drew the frontspiece, a splash page with narration ending with the words "Let me tell you a story..." that kicked off every issue of the old Tales. Oh, and Lawson also provided the lay-outs for the 28-page story.

The heavy-lifting on this issue was done by Murphy, who wrote the story, and artist Dario Brizuela, a familiar name to readers of DC's kids books. He's an incredibly talented artist with an uncanny ability to mimic the styles of others—which he's made great use of on Scooby-Doo Team-Up—and it was both a surprise and a pleasure to find his name and his work here. In fact, this may be the first time I've seen Brizuela drawing in his own style, rather than cleverly aping the character designs of others.

The story is set back before the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were even teenagers, as they are only 12-years-old at the time (Although they are not wearing the bigger masks and wielding the weapons the did in 1986's TMNT #9, in which Michelangelo was using a manriki-gusari and Raphael tonfa, the story whose title page referred to them as "Eastman and Laird's Pre-Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.")

At that point, they are still living in their New York City sewer lair with Master Splinter, and, at story's opening, Donatello is reading aloud to the rest of his family from a book about the original explorers of the chunk of the new world that eventually became their New York City.

When a very old-looking map falls from the old book, the boys ask if they can go exploring to find the hidden spring it refers to. With some cajoling, they finally prevail upon Splinter—this is, apparently, their first trip without him.

They explore the underworld of the city—which is, in and of itself, interesting enough—eventually discovering fossilized dinosaur foot prints, a lost temple and, most dangerously of all, a society of half-worm humanoids (they look like giant worms from the waist down, and fish-like humans from the waist up).

Fighting naturally ensues, although Donatello ends it with a brief experiment and what he hopes will be a solution to the worm people's problems.

Brizuela's artwork is, as I said, a treat. He gets a great variety of things to draw, as the story opens with the art illustrating the passages that Donatello is reading aloud.

His Turtles don't show their young age at all; they look to be about the same age as they are always drawn. Brizuela's Turtles are short and squat, with smooth, round faces with no real hint of a nose. They look a lot like smoother, cleaner, more cartoony versions of A.C. Farley's, really.

There's no toning used, and little in the way of shading, so his line work really pops, and it's pretty great line work.

As much as I liked his art, this is the scene that really impressed the hell out of me:

That is, of course, a worm guy looking up at one of the Turtles through the water, and Brizuela affects the wavy look of peering through water simply by the way he draws the wiggly lines.

That is, in short, fantastic.

It makes for the start of a very promising series that would prove to be one of the longest-lived TMNT comics, lasting 70 issues (TMNT Vol. 1 lasted 62 issues, Archie Comics' Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures lasted 72 issues).