DC's July 2014 in dismemberments

Good God, that's some chutzpah.

The above is a two-panel sequence from this week's Harley Quinn Invades Comic-Con International San Diego #1, a new one-shot by regular writing team of the surprise-hit Harley Quinn monthly series, Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti (the issue is drawn jam-issue style by nine different artists, although the above panels come from artist Dave Johnson's pages).

The premise of the comic, in brief, is that that Harley and her supporting cast are visiting CCI to sell merch, and she is using the opportunity to shop her portfolio of sample pages around (she's created a comic book character called Hurl Girl, which Conner draws). In punchline of the above joke is apparently that DC's direct market and superhero IP rival Marvel Entertainment doesn't pay as well as DC does (I guess...? It's one of the many inside baseball jokes that are so inside I think you actually have to work for DC to get, appreciate or care about them), and, of course, that "They," which would be Marvel, "aren't looking for anything new or original."

That hopefully good-natured slam comes in a comic book about a once-serious violent psychopathic comic book character now played for laughs invading a comic book convention (as in Keith Giffen, Alan Grant and Kevin O'Neill's 1993 Lobo Convention Special #1), a character created by in 1992 by Paul Dini and Bruce Timm, and currently being used in her second ongoing series by Conner and Palmiotti as DC's answer to Deadpool, a crazy, anarchic character who hears voices, frequently breaks the fourth wall, and is portrayed as silly and comedic in her own book, but seriously outside her own title.

Excusing the fact that DC's current editorial strategy is re-do and re-mix pre-existing characters, costumes and even stories as part of their New 52 initiative, I think it's worth noting the recent bibliograpies of the writers making fun of Marvel's unwillingness to try something "new" and "original."

Conner's most recent work for DC prior to co-writing and providing covers for Harley Quinn was working on a prequel to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' 1986 Watchmen, over the very loud and very vociferous objections of the original author, featuring Moore and Gibbons creations inspired by superhero characters from the 1960s, created by a bunch of other creators.

The much more prolific Palimiotti's recent output for DC has consisted mainly of a very long run with co-writer Justin Grey on Tony DeZuniga and John Albano's 1972 Jonah Hex character, which, as it neared its cancellation, included a Booster Gold/Hex team-up that followed the pairing of the characters by Geoff Johns and Jeff Katz in 2007 and a Hex-thrown-into-his-future storyline that followed the same premise that Michael Fleisher-written Hex series from 1985.

He and Gray also wrote a bunch of miniseries based on Grant Morrison's reimaginings of the Golden Age Freedom Fighters characters and took over the Batwing title starring a legacy version of Morrison's re-creation of a black Batman originally conceived by Frank Robbins and Dick Giordano from a 1973 issue of Batman. They are currently writing a character dubbed "G.I. Zombie," whose name echoes that of the 1962-created Robert Kanigher co-created character G.I. Robot, and who is a monster serving in the military, like the characters of J.M. DeMatteis/Pat Broderick 1980-created Creature Commandos.

It's also a fucking zombie comic. Launched in 2014.

I'd like to think that Conner and Palmiotti were being ironic in their Marvel diss, that they were lampooning DC and themselves rather than taking a crack at their main competitors, as a quick survey of the output of the two publishers features a very, very, very wide gulf in terms of quality, originality, relevance, vitality and, of course, variety. DC mostly publishes New 52 comics which, with few exceptions, all look alike and share a very similar tone, whereas Marvel's output includes incredibly quirky books like a Mike Allred-drawn Silver Surfer, that All-New Ghost Rider, a superhero-humor-comic-that-is-actually-funny She-Hulk, sad-sack super-crime comedy The Superior Foes of Spider-Man, and books like Hawkeye, Daredevil, Moon Knight and Ms. Marvel.

I don't want to get into a Marvel vs. DC thing here, but Conner and Palmiotti apparently do, and for anyone at DC to be trying to troll Marvel in 2014 for being adverse to anything new and original is, well, crazy-sounding.

Like I said, I would like to think they weren't serious, but those panels immediately follow this weird-ass one, in which Palmiotti and Conner have Dan DiDio making fun of the frequent (constant?) complaints from fans and ex-DC creators that DC is just way too involved in dictating stories and interfering in the creative process in a way that is weird, random, unwelcome and unproductive and, obviously, usually results in pretty shitty comics:

I think the DiDio in the comic is meant to be making fun of the idea of letting creators go crazy and do what they want on their books, but that actually sounds kind of awesome, doesn't it?

The reason DC doesn't do that, DiDio's avatar seems to say, is that they won't sell more than a thousand units, which seems pretty contrary to much of the available evidence of auteur-style/creator-driven comics in the direct market that outsell a great deal of DC's output (Walking Dead, Saga, anything written by Mark Millar no matter how terrible it is), the general success of Marvel's current editorial model in relation to that of DC's (which almost always has a greater share of the market than DC's comics, and produces many more positive reviews) and even in-[DC's]house evidence, with DC's consistently best-selling comic being the one where Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo do whatever they want with Batman, and other outliers like Geoff Johns' Green Lantern franchise or Grant Morrison's Batman Inc being exempted from "New 52" continuity, save for a costume-tweaking here or there.

They're pretty damn weird jokes to be sharing a page, with creators Conner and Palmiotti arguing in favor of strict editorial control of books and that sales are the best metric of success in one panel, and then arguing in the next to panels that Marvel isn't willing to try new and original ideas like DC is.

I hope to discuss the book further and at greater length in the near future, when I get some time to review-review it, but, in the meantime, I wanted to at least stop and point at the unbelievable chutzpah of the Conner/Palmiotti writing team. This doesn't seem to be a case of the pot calling the kettle black so much as the pot calling the good china black.

Review: All-Star Western Vol. 1: Guns and Gotham

DC's relatively long-running Western comic starring Jonah Hex by the writing team of Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray was changed somewhat slightly by the publisher's "New 52" refurbishing, its name being changed from Jonah Hex to All-Star Western (it was also expanded by about ten pages, with Palmiotti and Gray written back-up features starring various other super-cowboy types).

Although "All-Star Western" is the name of an old DC comic book, the title was less precise than Jonah Hex was and, given the change of setting from the Old West to late 19th Century Gotham City, not entirely accurate—the lead stories were only "Westerns" in the sense that they had a cowboy in them, otherwise they were technically Easterns. Given the general quality and perception of the 2010 film Jonah Hex, perhaps its understandable that DC would want to distance themselves as far from that particular title as possible.

So despite the new title, the tweaking of format and price tag and the new setting, Palmiotti and Gray were joined by a new artist in the form of Moritat, and Hex was joined by an unlikely partner, buddy cop style, in the form of Amadeus Arkham (who would eventually found the asylum that Batman's enemies are kept in when his writers and artists aren't using them).

It is sometime in the 1880s, and Hex has come to Gotham City in pursuit of a vicious, Jack The Ripper-like serial killer who is also of interest to young alienist Arkham, and the two form an unlikely and uneasy alliance to get to the bottom of a great deal of bizarre criminality in young Gotham: In addition to the ritualistic killings, there's a secret society, mass kidnappings and forced labor.

Like the inferior Demon Knights, this is an example of the historical superhero comic, and while the mode is that of the Western (again, defined as "containing at least one cowboy"), Palmiotti and Gray make great use of DC continuity and shared setting in order to form unexpected and unlikely connections to other DC Comics.

In addition to Arkham, a character Grant Morrison more or less created in 1989's Arkham Asylum graphic novel, other references to Morrison's work include the Crime Bible and the religion devoted to it, as written about in 52 and elsewhere by 52 writers Morrison and Greg Rucka, and the inclusion of The Miagani, an indigenous tribe of bat-worshiping Native Americans that live in caves beneath Gotham City, and a monstrous giant bat, which played small roles in Morrison's Batman run (Particularly in Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne). Nods are also made in the direction of Scott Snyder and company's Batman: Gates of Gotham series, and the prominent families of early Gotham, which Snyder would devote more time to in his Batman run (and Palmiotti and Gray would base more stories around in the future).

This book contains the first six issues of the series, accounting for about two adventures of Hex and Akrham in Gotham. Moritat's art helps place this among the strongest of the 2011 relaunched line. His storytelling is impeccable, and he fills establishing shots and long shots with rich detail.

The writing is, as it was in the 70-issue Jonah Hex series, decent genre fare; rarely if ever transcending the expectations of a dark, scarred killer cowboy hunting and fighting human monsters for money and/or justice, but the change of setting and verbal sparring partner/point-of-view character certainly give it a new coat of paint, which has a relatively restorative effect on Palmiotti and Gray's Hex.

Like all comics though, this one lives or dies by the art, and, thanks to Moritat, it's quite vital. As with Action Comics Vol. 1, the back-ups are collected and included at the back of the book. The serial format of these seems to be about eight pages of story per issue, starting with All-Star #2.

There's two full stories here. The first stars the original El Diablo, the character Lazarus Lane created in 1970 by Robert Kanigher and Gray Morrow (Modern versions of the character were attempted by Gerard Jones and Mike Parobeck in 1989 and by Jai Nitz, Phil Hester and Ande Parks in 2008). This one features Lane as the whip-wielding spirit of vengeance, pitted against a zombie horde raised by native magic. It's drawn (impeccably) by Jonah Hex vet Jordi Bernet.

The second stars The Barabary Ghost, an apparently new creation by Palmiotti, Gray and artist Phil Wil Winslade (oddly, she's the only character to get "created by" credits; not even star Jonah Hex gets a "Created by Tony DeZuniga and John Albano" credit). She's a Chinese immigrant whose large family was whittled down in a violent war of attrition with a crime boss from the old country; to avenge them she dresses like the 19th, Chinese-American version of Dark Horse's Ghost and pretends and uses fireworks as weapons. More-or-less straight genre fare, although I suppose there's always something to be said for striving for diversity in big publisher genre characters, and Winslade's art is pretty great, but his style is not as much to my liking as that of Moritat or Bernet (Make no mistake, Winslade is an excellent artist, but I have greater personal affection for the styles of the other two artists involved in this book).

Of the handful of "New 52" relaunches I've sampled in trade paperback form, this is one that made me happy I read it. It's head and shoulders above most of the others I've read, and if the writing isn't as inspired, ambitious or fun as that in Action Comics, it makes up for that deficiency by boasting better and more consistent artwork.

So what's the absolute last thing you can imagine Wonder Woman ever calling a woman?

Because in Ame-Comi Girls #5, the writing team of Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray have Wonder Woman call Supergirl the second-to-last thing you could imagine Wonder Woman ever calling a woman.

Review: Wolverine & The Black Cat: Claws

What do you know about Joe Linsner?

If you’re like me circa a week ago, the name might not mean anything at all to you, although once you find out that’s the name of the person who does those Dawn comics, then you’ll probably have a flood of mental images of a painted-looking, red-haired lady.

Now, not being familiar with the work of Joe Linsner meant the fact that he was doing a Marvel miniseries with the semi-reliable writing team of Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray did nothing to excite me, nor did the characters being featured, nor did the title—Wolverine & The Black Cat: Claws.

The series was serialized back in 2006 , and it sure seemed like a random couple of characters to throw together for a team-up, two characters who, as far as I knew, had nothing in common other than what is alluded to in the title.

As it turns out, that’s probably a large part of the reason why the characters were chosen (the other, made clear in the back matter, was simply that Linsner liked ‘em). The fact that Linsner and company managed to find another Marvel character, particularly a female one, that didn’t have history with Wolverine, the most often teamed-up with character in the Marvel Universe, is actually kind of remarkable.

The book gets off to a rather slow start, with a kinda crass flirt-and-fight involving Black Cat and Spider-Man that only served to confuse me (Spidey woulda have still been married at the point this was published if it was in-continuity, and everything else seems to point toward it being in continuity), although I really liked this part:At the point I read that scene, I was thinking I’d rather read a story about Spider-Man accidentally webbing a bird and trying to deal with de-webbing it without hurting it then about Black Cat and Wolverine teaming up.

Once Wolvie is introduced, in a two-page scene revolving around the difficulty of flying commercial with a metal skeleton, I really started to warm-up to the book, which just got better and better from that point on.

The plot is one more riff on the “Most Dangerous Game,” people-hunting-people premise, with someone claiming to be Kraven the Hunter capturing the two stars and setting them loose on a trap-laden island with a volcano rigged to go off in a certain amount of time, while various killers and hunters try to track them down.

The most immediate problem with the premise—how it’s any fun at all, given Wolverine’s relative immortality and regeneration powers—is overcome by the screwball romance sort of relationship between the two leads, the villain behind “Kraven” (I don’t want to spoil it, but I think he’s one of Marvel’s best villains in the way he shows endless potential for creating scenarios, is completely ridiculous in that any of his plans will sound completely impractical to anyone who thinks about them for more than three seconds, and the way in which his modus operandi reflects that of comics creators) and, of course, Lisner’s wonder, wonderful artwork. Linsner is a superb “actor” and an even better character designer. His handle on facial expressions puts him up there with Kevin Maguire and Amanda Conner (and his Wolverine in particular reminded me of Darick Robinson's), although each and every character he draws is so distinct from each other one that it makes many modern superhero comics look like amateur work.

That is, you can tell his Wolverine from other characters not only by his claws and weird hair, but by the shape of his nose, the way he rolls his eyes or grits his teeth, his unruly eyebrows, or the shape of his chin.

Lisner can design, he can draw, he can cartoon. This is pretty much perfect superhero comic book art, and I feel kinda like a sap for missing it the first time around.

One other thing Lnisner did here which I wouldn’t have noticed until reading it, not being a religious Spider-Man reader, was rather completely redesign Black Cat’s costume, make it much more cat-like and more realistic and practical at the same time, since, as he explains in the back matter,“if you look at her present outfit, as she’s pictured most often, you could call her the White Weasel and not have to change anything.”

As much as I enjoy process stuff about comics, I generally don’t get too excited about sketch pages and the like at the end of trades, since it usually amounts to little more than filler. This hardcover collection had a pretty massive 30-page section by Lisner, but it had enough original work and, most importantly, commentary from the artist that it was actually a pleasure to read.

In it, he reveals that he based his depiction of Kraven as a cross between Frank Zappa and Jesse Ventura, for example. That is relevant information of great interest to me!It actually bummed me out all the more that Linsner didn't get to do more scenes with the character.

There’s only two things I didn’t like about the book. One was our heroes’ apparent willingness to sacrifice a goat while revenging themselves on our villains (luckily, the goat survives), and two was this scene right here:
Come on, Wolverine can’t possibly be that strong, can he?

Otherwise, this was a fairly wonderful little genre story, featuring some of the best art you could possibly ask for.

Three from Radical Comics

Hotwire: Deep Cut #1: Steve Pugh’s near-future sci-fi ghost-police procedural comic gets a second three-issue miniseries, following Hotwire: Requiem For the Dead.

Despite being a sequel, this first issue is an extremely easy to jump onto jumping-on point, in part because of the familiarity of the basic skeleton of the plot—troubled cop seemingly checks out on the job and the real world in general, but gets pulled back into the life when a case so big it demands her attention comes up—and in part because of the rather immediate focus on the past and personal life of the protagonist.

That protagonist is, of course, the irritatingly intelligent, body modification-into, twenty-something, Metro Police Detective Exorcist Alice Hotwire, whose Warren Ellis-ishness is easily explained by the fact that she was co-created by Warren Ellis (Ellis still earns a cover credit and creator credit, but once again Steve Pugh provides both the writing and art).

After the events of the previous series, Alice is holed-up in her apartment playing videogames, drinking with the ghost/“blue light” of her ex-boyfriend and ignoring the phone messages left by her partner Mobey. When the overzealous SWAT-type accidentally cause a major highway accident while pursing a brand-new type of ghost—which looks to be some sort of blue light/robot hybrid—she reluctantly goes back in action.

If you read Requiem for the Dead and dug it, you’ll be happy to know that this is more of the same, with Pugh working in the same art style, although the plotting and script seem a little tighter and a lot faster-paced, perhaps on account of a lot of the world-building regarding Alice’s future world having been gotten out of the way in the last go-round.

If you haven’t, this offers an excellent checking out point, as it seems quite representative of the previous series without being completely dependent on it. I’ve read at least the first issue of every miniseries Radical has put out so far—they’re pretty great about getting review copies into the hands of critics—and Hotwire is probably the best book they’ve published so far. Both the writing and art are quite accomplished, and, in terms of the latter, Pugh is working in the general area of what seems to be the publisher’s default housee-style (realistic design, computer-y photorealism and/or painted-looking art…a general style I generally don’t care for), but Pugh’s is always brighter, easier to read and all-around better-looking than the bulk of it.

[Obligatory Caleb Complaining About Cost Section: This comic book contains 24 full-color, all-original story pages—plus two illustrated pages recapping the previous series—and only three pages of ads, all at the very end of the book. It costs $3.50. How is it that Radical can publish $3.50, ad-free, 24-page comics, but Marvel and, increasingly, DC can get away with charging customers 22-pages of ad-filled comics for $3.99? Shouldn’t a newer, smaller company be more likely to have to charge a higher price than the long-time industry leaders, instead of the other way around?]


Mata Hari #0: I’m not entirely sure if it’s a good idea to review this comic, which is more of sample of a graphic novel than an actual comic book (The above is the title according to the fine print; Diamond’s shipping list referred to it as Radical Premiere-Mata Hari). Priced at the how-can-I-not-buy-it? price of $1.00 for 15 pages of comics and six pages of prose, it’s less a prequel to a comic to follow than the beginning of a graphic novel. The 130-page original graphic novel Mata Hari is due out next January; Radical did something similar with a $1 Premiere issue associated with the Legends: The Enchanted graphic novel.

But what the hell. Radical sent me a review copy, and they sold it as a distinct, standalone unit, so review it I will.

Perhaps the last 115 pages are so great that they prove transformative of the first 15, but if these first 15 are indicative of what follows, Mata Hari is a pretty lousy comic.

The most interesting piece of this publication is, by far, the prose piece at the end. Entitled “Mata Hari: A Proposition,” writer Rich Wilkes discusses the real Mata Hari, to the extent at which it’s possible to discuss the real Mata Hari, given the decades of mystery and deliberate, official obfuscation related to the at least half legendary woman.

Wilkes’ proposition? That his subject may have been one of the most important figures of the twentieth century, if not the most important, given how a different ending to her story might have lead to a very different World War II.

It’s more interesting reading than the actual comic that precedes it—and certainly more straightforward. It opens in 1953, and is narrated in first person by a woman named Onya, who tells us about a little girl she met, who tells her a story about Mata Hari, which includes a story within a story taken from a journal.

So in just 15 pages we get two narrators and three points of view, revealing some hints and snippets about Mata Hari and some weird goings-on and…that’s it. Reading the comic, I didn’t really get any idea about what the story would be or where it go, and didn’t find a hook to make me curious about the graphic novel.

I did get a pretty good sense of what it was going to look like, and that I didn’t like at all. Roy Allan Martinez gets an “illustrated by” credit, while Draenka Kimpel gets a “painted by” credit. The lay-outs include a lot of weird angles, the character designs are unappealing and all of the pages are dark and murky looking.

There’s some smart logic to some of those layouts, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. Take, for example, this panel: Mata Hari seducing a general type, while they're symbolically framed by an army of young men rushing into a meat-grinder is a nice, era-appropriate political cartoon sort of imagery, but the composition lacks symmetry, and the gore that comes out of the meat-grinder looks crudely rendered. I suppose making gore look gross makes a sort of sense—gore is gross, but given the context and image, why not make a nice drawing of it, you know? Ugly subjects can be conveyed beautiful in a way that doesn't necessarily endorse or celebrate them.

Another downside of that prose piece at the end is that it includes plenty of photos of Mata Hari, and their presence so close to Martinez and Kimpel’s version of the same woman (or at least a fictional version of that woman) only underscores the weakness of the art.
See?

And here are some details of the title character's face in the comic, below some photos of her face from that prose section:



That piece at the end, the words and photos, suggest there’s a really great graphic novel about Mata Hari to be created. Based on this preview though, this isn’t going to be it.


Time Bomb #1: Know how I said that Pugh’s Hotwire is probably the best book Radical’s published so far? Well, this is probably Hotwire’s biggest competition.

It’s also a somewhat standard genre comic, a very sci-fi, action adventure-y sort of thing with sexy characters doing exciting things with exciting, cutting-edge technology. Also like Hotwire, it’s illustrated by an extremely talented and experienced comics artist, someone who has been drawing comics since computer-coloring came along and started to dominate the look of comic book art.

In this case, that someone is Paul Gulacy, and he’s working with the writing team of Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray.

I’m sort of lukewarm on that writing team, as they sometimes write comics I kinda like, but more often than not write ones that somehow disappoint me—I’ve rarely read anything from them that I found out-and-out terrible, but if I were a teacher handing out grades and they were in my class, I think they’d probably have a B average, sometimes earning B+’s or the occasional A-, sometimes pulling C’s or C+’s.

This one’s pretty good though, and that may have a little to do with the fact that they’re not wrestling with DC and Marvel continuity and characterization, as they usually are when I read something with their names on it.

So here’s the premise. In the very near future—like, two years from now—a world-ruling government-type agency with the extremely unimaginative name of “New World Order” (they even operate out of a skyscraper marked “NWO”!) are alarmed when some agents find a hidden Nazi city under Germany.

While exploring it further, those agents accidentally set off a rocket marked with Darkseid’s favorite letter of the Greek alphabet, which promptly explodes and unleashes a humanity-killing-off virus on the world. In a matter of days, any humans not living in fancy bunkers will be dead.

The only hope of stopping it is to have never launched it in the first place, something that might be possible, thanks to a super-secret time-travel device with fairly limited abilities. The plan is to send four highly-trained, heavily-armed, attractive-looking agents back in time with a massive contact list with this little mission impossible: Find the world leaders in the past, convince them that they are agents sent from the future, and then stop them from discovering that hidden Nazi city and/or launching that weapon.

The team doesn’t actually make it back in time until page 46 of 51, which means there’s an awful lot of stage-setting, some of which I spoiled (Although the cover contains a lot of that stuff anyway, right? Rocket, Nazi menace, sexy-super agents?). Much of that build-up is pretty interesting though. The NWO stuff may have elicited some eye-rolling, but the technobabble revolving around the time-travel stuff was a lot of fun—it was infinitely more realistic and specific in scope than a lot of what you get in sci-fi comics or movies. There was something rather Michael Crichton about it all, in that it was fantastic, but was at least plausible to someone like me, whose main experience with quantum physics is superhero comics.

After the team lands in the past, they find themselves a bit further back then expected, and immediately faced with a version of the killing Hitler dilemma, one in which there seems even less risk than usual, since for all intents and purposes their world could hardly get any worse if they altered the flow of 20th century history.

I know Gulacy is something of an acquired taste among many super-comics readers, but I’ve always dug his stuff, and it seems particularly smooth, clean and polished here (Charles Yoakum inked what Gulacy himself didn’t, and Rain Beredo handled colors…its aggressive coloring, but not so aggressive as to mess with the Gulacy’s line or the staging of the panels).

It’s a really great looking book, and among the most comic book-y looking comic books that Radical’s published.

And at 51-pages (and a “prestige format” style spine) for just $5, it’s a damn good value too. Like Hotwire: Deep Cut, Time Bomb is a three-issue miniseries, and the second issue is due in shops September 15.

Review: Daughters of the Dragon: Samurai Bullets

Daughters of The Dragon: Samurai Bullets (Marvel Comics) collects an early 2006, six-issue miniseries starring the Misty Knight and Colleen Wing characters, who are here working as bail bonds-babes who collect minor supervillains.

Writers Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray premised the series as a sort of exploitation work, in keeping with the leads’ roots in the Marvel creators of the 1970s attempts to exploit the then-current popularity of kung fu and blaxploitation movies. It’s a self-aware, never-completely-serious action book which splits its attention between ogling its protagonists and declaring how bad-ass they are, over and over again.

That could grow awfully tiresome (and I imagine reading this story as it was serially published, 22-pages a month for six months, would have been awfully tiresome), but artist Khari Evans’s execution of all the ogling, action and all-around design work is so strong it carries the book even through the weak parts.

Evans gives each of the ladies distinct looks, with different faces, different bodies, different hair and different sets of expressions and yes, I know that’s not something that should be singled out for praise per se, but go look at a current issue of, say, Birds of Prey, DC’s book about sexy crime-fighting women, and then look at Evans work here, and the latter’s going to seem all the more special.

He dresses them in authentic-looking clothes, which, again, shouldn’t be a big deal, but is usually so poorly done in super-comics it’s refreshing to see characters who can dress themselves when not wearing their superhero costumes. The superhero costumes they wear are pretty cool too; check out the cover.

Well, okay, Misty’s doesn’t look all that great really, but I like the bionic arm sheathe, and I like the zippers and buttons and such-like—it looks like real clothes, again, something you could imagine someone actually taking off or putting on, rather than the costume-in-a-can spray paint endemic to superhero comics.

I like Colleen’s even more, particularly the tennis shoe-footie things she wears. If there were actual superhero-ing in the actual real world, I imagine a costume like that would be a pretty close approximation to what one would look like, provided you were so good you didn’t feel you needed armor plating, and could get away with wearing white.

Oh, and Evans draws nipples, making Colleen and Misty perhaps the only anatomically correct superheroes in the Marvel and DC Universes. Not bare nipples of course, since comics like this aren’t for adults, but for teenagers, but the nipples do protrude through the clothing. And if you’re wearing a super-tight, white costume without a bra, your nipples are going to show through.

I hope this doesn’t sound too prurient on my part, but I was really happy to see Colleen’s nipples showing through her costume here. It made Daughters of the Dragon one of the very rare superhero comic books that didn’t seem to be half-assed in its construction.

I know I’ve complained about this before, but the Big Two companies especially engage in this sort of half-assery, where they publish comics that aren’t safe for kids on account of all the ultra-violence, contextual profanity, exploitive sexual imagery and all-around squicky content, but still cling to a veneer of propriety, so that Brian Michael Bendis characters will say “@#$% you, mother @#$%er” and Ed Benes will draw women with huge nipple-less breasts exploding out of body paint costumes.

I’m not calling for more explicit comics from DC and Marvel here; I’m calling for them to decide just how exploitive and/or mature they want there books to be, which audiences they want which books to appeal to, and then go for it, rather than trying to appear dangerous and play it safe at the same time.

Colleen Wing’s nipples haven’t changed the comics industry since they appeared—this series is four years old, after all—but I was pretty glad to see them in this comic book. High five Khari Evans! And everyone at Marvel who didn’t pulp this book!

Okay, so the art’s great. How’s the writing? That I’m of two minds about.

There were a lot of things I didn’t like, some having to do with suspension of disbelief (How come when Rhino hits a car with his head, he destroys it, but when a car hits him on the head he gets knocked out?), some having to do with Marvel continuity minutia (Like someone named American Samurai or something appearing for a short scene that served no purpose other than giving Colleen an excuse to unzip her top), some having to do with the ways characters are portrayed (The Punisher bit, for example, was very funny, but made our protagonists seem like psychopaths for not trying to bust him then and there; also, I was disappointed Misty won her big fight at the end simply because she had a bionic arm and her opponent didn’t) but most of it having to do with too many jokes about a white, nerdy character talking in hip-hop slang, a variation of the old white guy talking like a young black guy minstrel show humor that has been played out since…well, since I’ve been alive, at least.

That might seem like a long list, but the drawbacks are more pot holes than plot holes (or anything as serious as such). The overall plot is pretty well structured, Palmiotti and Gray wring some humor out of the same white-character-who-talks-black earlier on by revealing his superpower, the pacing is strong and regularly punctuated by well done action scenes, and there’s a lot of use made of many of Marvel’s wackier super-villains, many of whom I have something of a soft spot for.

A gang of four such losers attempt to rob a very powerful renaissance woman and accidentally steal a super-maguffin she was planning on selling to the highest evil bidder. When she starts picking them off in an attempt to recover her property, Colleen and Misty get pulled into the plot, since the villains are their clients. Orka, The Porcupine, Doctor Bong, The Trapster, Mandrill, Mole Man and Iron Fist all put in appearances, in addition to those already mentioned.

This miniseries seems to have lead almost directly into a Misty and Colleen lead version of Heroes For Hire written by Palmiotti and Gray, but instead of Evans, the artwork was handled by Billy Tucci and Francis Portela. Palmiotti and Gray didn’t stick around too long either, and the book only lasted 15 issues, its main claim to fame being the fact that it was the first major American superhero publisher’s comic to put a hentai-style tentacle rape fantasy on the cover.

Oh, and I suppose it’s worth mentioning that after having read this book, I still have no idea why it’s called Daughters of The Dragon: Samurai Bullets.

If 2007's Uncle Sam and The Freedom Fighters isn't the worst comic I've ever read, it's only because it was so bad I couldn't read it.

As discussed at (far too great) length in yesterday’s interminable post on the subject, DC’s 2006 eight-issue miniseries Uncle Sam and The Freedom Fighters was followed in 2007 by another eight-issues miniseries with the exact same title and logo. (I feel sorry for anyone trying to collect those series from back issue bins in the future!).

The collection of the 2007 series at least got a sub-title to help differentiate it from the previous series: Uncle Sam and The Freedom Fighters: Brave New World (DC Comics).

Despite not really liking the trade collection of the first series, I had somewhat higher hopes for this second one, because a) it had a different artist, with Renato Arlem taking over for Daniel Acuna and b) the characters were all introduced and/or reintroduced and their status quo and mission statement re-established, which would theoretically eliminate the existential crisis I felt emanating from the pages of the first series.

Oh, and c) the cover is awesome. It’s by Dave Johnson, who drew Uncle Sam cradling a tattered U.S. flag in the same pose and making the same expression as Superman holding the dead body of his cousin Supergirl.I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be hilarious or not, but I was incredibly amused by the implication that Uncle Sam loves every single random American flag as if it was a close relative of his, and makes an anguished Crying Superman face whenever he sees one damaged.

As it turned out, I should have lowered my expectations rather than raised them. Because you see not only is this second series actually worse than the first, it is the worst comic book series ever published.

Okay, maybe that’s not fair. Admittedly, I can be a bit hyperbolic about superhero comics here (although, in my defense, the superhero genre was founded, sustained and sold on the basis of hyperbole) and, yes, I know I’ve said other comics were the worst comics ever before, perhaps most notably Ultimates 3, which I devoted a week of blogging to covering.

But here’s the thing—as terrible a comic book series as Ultimates 3 was, I was able to at least read it. I could make it through every single panel of the thing, look at all the images and make sense of them, read every single word.

I just could not do that with this book. It wasn’t simply a lack of desire. I tried about a half-dozen times, and made it maybe 40 pages in. I would pick it up and read a panel or three at a time later. As I said before, I liked the characters, I had no specific objections to writers Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray, and the plot did seem sort of awesome—a mind-controlled and newly empowered Red Bee II is the main antagonist, there’s an empire of giant super space-bugs invading earth, Neon The Unknown’s in it…but, man, I could not make myself do it.

I know I had the ability to read the book, but it required a lot of willpower, a lot of effort and it was just incredibly unpleasant. See, artist Renato Arlem—who apparently did all of the art, as no one else gets an artist credit, not even a colorist—didn’t draw the comic so much as assemble it.

The background and props—every single one of them—looks like a photo ran through a filter to make it look slightly less photo-y. True, the characters look drawn, and are cut-and-pasted over the backgrounds, but Arlem doesn’t draw them very often, and uses the exact same drawings of the exact same characters over and over again.

I’ll get to some examples, but this series looks more like a work of photo collage than drawing. True, Arlem likely created the raw material for a great deal of that collage work, but I found it just this side of unreadable.

Let me show you what I mean.

Here’s the first panel of page 10 of the first issue:Happy Terrill, the Golden Age Ray, and Uncle Sam are talking in Arlington Cemetery. Since this panel contains the characters in the background, it seemed like a good example of how Arlem handles the settings in the book.

They all look like that.

Aside from the fact that this is the diametrically opposed to what I like to see in a comic book, it’s worth noting that it’s also not very good storytelling.

Note The Ray II in the right hand corner—he’s kind of hard to see as he’s wearing black and he’s posed over a black background—long-jumping in from off-panel. See also all the little white, abstracted bird shapes frozen in mid-flight. The image represents one single moment in time—the time between the flaps of a bird’s wings—and yet three different people speak a sentence of dialogue in it.

In short, the script and the image just don’t match up. This is a little like one of those long-winded speeches that Captain America would give while jumping up in the air and kicking two Hydra agents in the face simultaneously—only we’re 45 years on, comics aren’t just for kids any more (Biff! Bam! Pow!) and everybody presumably knows better.

It’s on page 12 where Arlem’s habit of recycling art on the same page and even in consecutive panels became apparent, and, once I noticed it, I couldn’t stop noticing it. Check out The Human Bomb in panels two and four. Dr. Mid-Nite in three and four. Blond guy in three, four and six.

Arlem does this throughout, and it’s crazy annoying.

In issue two, a guy who looks like Tony Stark meets with Stormy “Phantom Lady III” Knight, who is in this series portrayed as a Lindsay Lohan-like celebrity in downard spiral.Tony Stark appears on the page four times, but is only drawn twice. Stormy appears four times as well, and is likewise drawn twice—and one of those drawings slightly altered to give her a third pose. The first four panels aren’t drawn so much as cropped.

Two pages later, Tony Stark meets with the president on a five-panel page which opens with a Gary Trudeau-like shot of the White House with a dialogue bubble pointing to it (although here it’s a photo of the White House, not a drawing of it), and three of the four panels consist of differently cropped versions of the same image.

And one page after that, we get this, in which Stormy appears in five consecutive panels, but is only drawn twice.Notice the PR lady—who may actually be Miss America; Arlem doesn’t do so hot at distinguishing characters either—in the first few panels.

Her image was simply flip-flopped but, in addition to that, she apparently ran across the roof and re-folded her arms between the panels. That’s…kind of unnatural behavior for a conversation, right?

I could go on and on, as Arlem does this throughout the book, but I’ll stop with examples from the second issue of the series, as that’s as far as I could stand to read.

Near the climax of the issue, a quartet of super-people calling themselves The Futurist Militia is found posing in front of a photo of “CIA headquarters, Washington, D.C.” (Weird; Hollywood told me they were headquartered in Langley, Virginia).Again, the story telling is wonky. Between the first and second panel, the three characters not named Thunderer apparently run away real fast, Thunderer takes several steps back to be closer to the C.I.A. seal, all thos soldiers run in, and then he does the action we see in that second panel, before returning to the same pose he was in in the first panel (although now the building is a different building).

Also, TV news cameras are shooting bullets out of their lenses at him. Pwee! Pwee!

The reason I chose this page of the many other awful pages in the book is that it contains that lady in the weird bikini and veil combo, striking a rather odd, rather particular pose.

As we’ll soon learn, her name is Seducer and her superpower is a “seductive glare” which “none can escape.”

She only appears in this one seven page scene in which The Futurist Militia appears demanding to fight the Freedom Fighters, a fight that lasts until a drunk Phantom Lady shows up and cuts one of them in half.

Aside from her one-panel appearance on the page above, here is every single image of Seducer:

That's it. She was apparently drawn exactly once, and then ever so slightly modified from panel to panel—flip-flopped, one of her limbs moved a tiny bit.

It was at this point that I realized Arlem was basically ding something akin to what the old Space Ghost Coast to Coast show on Cartoon Network did, recycling the same three or four poses of a few different characters and occasionally slightly altering them.

That was done for comedic effect though, and the producers drew attention to it and played it up, packing in lots of awkward silences.

The comics equivalent is probably Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics or David Rees’ Get Your War On and other clip art-derived comic strips.

Although, again, both of those use the obviously repeating, completely static images for comic effect; Arlem and DC seem to by trying to tell a serious (well, superhero serious) action adventure story using a similar application of the technique.

I found myself half-expecting Utahraptor to appear in a panel, or the Freedom Fighters to start swearing about the Iraq War and Bush Administration in red font.

If Palmiotti and Gray were filling Phantom Lady and Guy Who Looks Like Tony Stark’s mouths with North or Rees level jokers, then I suppose this way of building a comic book might actually work. Because those strips, and others that take similar approaches to their art work, have lasted because the writing is so good that it makes up for the fact that there’s very little to the art and the fact that it is quite clearly being lazily re-used on purpose.

But I don’t think Palmiotti and Gray told any jokes in this series…certainly not in the two issues I read all the way through. The plot seemed to involve the aforementioned alien bug army invasion, with spaced devoted to the FF wrestling with issues of superhero registration similar to those in Marvel’s Civil War and some exploration of the superhero-as-celebrity ideas explored in Marvel’s X-Force/X-Statix.

It looks like some potentially awesome stuff happens later in the book, but none of it actually looks awesome. It looks like Arlem moving his clip-art around photos, while the writing does all the story-telling.

And any comic book—but especially a superhero comic book full of primary colored, Golden Aged superheroes with fantastic powers—that leaves it to the dialogue to tell the story is pretty much a failure as a comic book.

Looking for a positive angle on the fact that DC apparently solicited, paid for, published and was proud enough to re-publish this as a trade paperback collection, the best I can do is think it was meant as an experiment, and DC, Arlem and all involved are proud of the fact that they tried a new and different way to tell a comic book story.

If that’s the case, well, the experiment was a complete and total failure. So there’s no need to ever try it again.


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

Oh wait, I do have something positive to say about the book: Johnson’s covers are all fairly top-notch. Here’s his cover for the first issue—
—and you can see the rest here.

Waaaaaaay too many words about 2006 comic book series Uncle Sam and The Freedom Fighters

I really like the Freedom Fighters characters from afar—code names, costumes, powers, potential, they all seem like very sturdy, very promising superheroes of the sort many Golden Age also-rans were.

Sure, Uncle Sam and The Ray were never going to be Superman and Batman, but if circumstances were different, maybe they would have been Green Lantern or The Flash, you know?

A great deal of my affection for the characters, of course, no doubt has to do with the fact that, with few exceptions, I’ve only seen them from afar. I can count the number of Doll Man stories I’ve actually read on one hand, but the covers and illustrations I’ve seen suggest countless cool, beautifully-illustrated stories. (Like the Golden Age Daredevil and, I don’t know, Green Giant, the Freedom Fighter characters always fascinated me because they dwell, for the most part, in my imagination, and I just didn’t have enough access to their original adventures for reality to spoil them for me).

Of course, the characters have been part of the architecture for the DC Universe for a while, and so I have encountered them over and over over the years—a back issue of their seventies title here, flashbacks there—so they don’t belong wholly to my imagination like some Golden Age superheroes do, but they nevertheless have an aspect to them.

I started reading superhero comics in the early nineties, and thus met the former Quality comics heroes through covers in Overstreet price guides and comic book histories borrowed from libraries and through legacy versions.

In 1992, DC introduced a new, teenage Ray in a six-issue miniseries by Jack Harris and up-and-coming artist Joe Quesada (I wonder whatever happened to that kid?), followed by an underrated ongoing series written by Christopher Priest and originally drawn by Howard Porter.

That same year Brian Augustyn and Rags Morales launched a short-lived monthly with a new, more rugged version of The Black Condor.

In 1996 John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake reintroduced Uncle Sam in an arc of their also underrated series The Spectre, giving the character a make-over that wouldn’t quite take, but paving the way for later appearances anyway. And in 1997, writer Steve Darnell and Alex Ross created a two-part Vertigo series entitled U.S. starring the character; it was and remains Ross’ most serious and literate work (i.e. it’s about something other than straight superhero nostalgia).

These were all pretty good comics, and I’d recommend all of them to anyone looking for decent superhero comics from that decade (The Ray’s art wasn’t always top-notch, but Priest’s scripting always carried the book; and if Black Condor wasn’t the greatest comic in the world, hey, Rags Morales).

Writer Geoff Johns had the bright idea of gathering up the Freedom Fighters—surviving members and legacy version—and using them as a unit. In 2001 special JSA: Our Worlds at War, Johns had the JSA lead a strike force consisting of every surviving or legacy member of the DCU’s Golden Age on a daring space mission, and the FF characters were one of the teams that split up from the main one.

Later in his JSA, Johns made them an official team, with Uncle Sam looking like and answering to the name Uncle Sam again (He was going by “Patriot” for a bit), working for the U.S. government.

And when they next appeared, it was in 2006’s Infinite Crisis #1, wherein Johns had the villain collective The Society kill (Phantom Lady, Black Condor, Human Bomb), disfigure (Damage) or simply severely beat (Uncle Sam, The Ray) them.

The Freedom Fighters would next appear in a six-issue miniseries entitled Infinite Crisis Aftermath: The Battle For Bludhaven, which apparently dealt with a plot point from IC, although just looking at the covers, the first time a Freedom Fighter who is recognizable shows up on a cover is on the sixth one, where a Phantom Lady is one of the 11 superheroes pictured on the cover.

That series was written by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti and, as would eventually become apparent, would bridge certain plot points from Johns’ Infinite Crisis to Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis, while including aspects of Morrison’s Seven Soldiers and a wide variety of characters including new versions of The Freedom Fighter characters and The Atomic Knights.

Based on the title, it seemed to be about an event and setting more than a character, group of characters or story. Based on the covers, it was a Teen Titans/Hal Jordan/Nightwing team-up against bad guys from Ostrander’s old eighties Suicide Squad series.

It was apparently the launch of the new Freedom Fighters though, so perhaps it would have benefited from being called Freedom Fighters: The Battle for Bludhaven or Infinite Crisis Aftermath: The Freedom Fighters or something…? (I still haven’t read this; I didn’t know I would need to until I was about half way through a trade collection of Uncle Sam and The Freedom Fighters and realized I was missing a lot of information).

An eight-issue miniseries featuring the characters entitled Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters got it’s unofficial start 2006’s DCU: Brave New World special, a $1, 80-page special that served as a preview of a bunch of post-Infinite Crisis projects that would all come to naught (“New look” Martian Manhunter, the Steve Niles-written Creeper reboot, Judd Winick’s troubled recreation of the Marvel Family, an OMAC series and the Gail Simone-written All-New Atom featuring the recently killed-off Ryan Choi).

Having a great deal of affection for the characters and having no strong objections to the creators (writers Palmiotti and Gray, a reliable team that’s never really reached must-read status in my esteem, but likewise had never been so consistently bad that I would ever avoid them, and Daniel Acuna, whose art I didn’t care for but didn’t completely hate yet), I tried reading the miniseries in monthly installments.

I remember the precise scene at which I gave up on the comic, although not the exact issue (#2 or #3, I think); it was a scene where the disgraced Freedom Fighters are on the run from Father Time’s Super Human Advanced Defense Executive (SHADE), and they meet a bunch of bad guys whose names were apparently just words with negative connotations randomly picked out of the opinion page of a daily newspaper—super-speedster Spin Doctor, fore field-generator Embargo, psychic Propaganda, and so on.

That was the “ugh” moment for me where I realized that not only was I not really enjoying the book, but it seemed to be getting awfully stupid, and why was I reading 22 pages of something I didn’t care for for $3 a month when I could just read the whole thing for free in a few months from a library?

Of course, the Columbus Metropolitan Library never acquired it for their collection, so I went a few years without reading it after all. I never felt like I missed anything.

And that, my patient, patient readers, is my history with Uncle Sam and Freedom Fighters up until earlier this summer, when I managed to track down collections of both of the Palmiotti and Gray written miniseries in trade paperback from Ohio libraries.

After a few attempts, I finally made it all the way through the first trade intending to review it for Every Day Is Like Wednesday, but it was an extremely weird experience. I didn’t much care for the book, but I didn’t much care for it in an unusual way. I didn’t like it, but I also felt like maybe I didn’t get it either, or like it was a book I was so clearly not part of the intended audience of that it wasn’t even possible for me to read and evaluate it (I’ve felt that way about some ‘90s X-Men trades borrowed from libraries in the past).

I stewed over what to do about it for a while, re-reading sections and going over the art repeatedly for a few weeks. Should I review it? Should I just write about how I didn’t even want to review it, and let that stated lack of desire stand in as a review? Should I just ignore it, since it’s not like I’m not obligated to talk about every single comic book I read on my blog? Should I have “The Red Bee" review it for me?

As you can see, I apparently decided to just start typing some long-ass introduction about my personal relationship with the characters who make up the Freedom Fighters.

No, actually, I was planning on simply acknowledging the weirdness of my reaction to the book, the fact that I found it very off-putting and hard to read, but was also having difficulty articulating why in a cogent fashion (or at least as cogent as I normally get here when complaining about comics I don’t like, I guess), and then maybe just list some of the things about the book I didn’t like in terms of broad categories.

So let’s do that…


SOME BROAD, MOSTLY NEGATIVE OBSERVATIONS ABOUT UNLE SAM AND THE FREEDOM FIGHTERS


1.) I don’t like Daniel Acuna’s artwork. I actually had this out from the library so long wondering what to do about it that it was terribly overdue and I had to return it before I started typing this long, rambling post so, sorry, I don’t have the ability to offer man (any?) images to illustrate anything I saw about Acuna’s art.

But I don’t really like it.

I’m more familiar with Acuna’s work from covers than from interiors—other than the Uncle Sam stuff, I think the Star Sapphire lead stories from Green Lantern #18-#20 are the only interiors of his I’ve seen—but random covers can give you a pretty good idea of his style.

It looks…un-comicbook-y, as if it were painted, but not with a computer or an airbrush wand rather than with a paintbrush. I may just be old and cranky, but I have a really hard time reading comics that don’t at least look like paper, ink and a pen or brush were involved at some point.

I’m well aware that it’s a personal aesthetic bias of mine, and that something drawn with pen and paper the way Jack Kirby used to do it isn’t automatically, inherently better—or of greater value, I suppose—than something created on a computer the way Freddie Williams does it. But I like it the one way, and not the other.

I think doing it with computers or however Acuna does what he does exactly more often than not leads to unappealing work though, and allows artists to be lazy enough that the laziness shows through, and can distract the reader. “Acting” is also much more difficult when work is too closely referenced.

Not that Acuna was necessarily lazy or overly reliant on photo reference in the creation of this book; I’m just speaking in general terms here. My main objection to Acuna’s work here is simply that I don’t like the style; the photorealistic, painted-looking coloring effects on fairly two-dimensional-looking figures gives the world he creates a sickly, waxy look. It seems wrong and unnatural to me, and my impulse is to look away, not look at the next panel.

Acuna’s not a great character actor, which lead to too many emotional exchanges seeming overly broad, the difference between soap opera actors and accomplished theater actors.

There are some other problems with the visuals as well. I don’t think the coloring was very good, and a lot of scenes in which good guys in dark costumes confronted bad guys in dark costumes in dark places looked murky and hard to read.

And then there were the designs, but I don’t know that we can heap all of that on Acuna—this incarnation of the Freedom Fighters was based on Grant Morrison’s notes for an FF revival, and chances are he also provided some sketches. Additionally, the simple fact that the characters were changing—in some cases radically—necessitated particular sorts of character designs.

For example, if the new Doll Man was going to be more of a G.I. Joe-like action figure, then naturally he’d have to wear a more G.I. Joe-like action figure costume than this——and that meant clothing him in a generic version of some military gear. But let’s give character design its own number bolded header thingee.


2.) Many of the character designs are not very good. And, given the fact that about 90% of a superheroes personality are defined by the clothes they are wearing, that is pretty bad news.

There seemed to be a conscious effort to make the costumes both more up to date and more “realistic.” Which, in superhero comics, usually means to make them look more like something Bryan Hitch might have designed for the characters had they appeared in The Ultimates.

Whoever designed the costumes did mostly forgo ribbing, so hooray for that, but, um, I don’t like a lot of these. There’s just way too much black and, since the generic SHADE red shirts are dressed all in black—as are the antagonists Father Time and The Robot Pretending To Be President Knight—it helps everybody just sort of blend together.

We already mentioned Doll Man, but let’s take ‘em one at a time. Some of these aren’t so bad, some are even good, but, on the whole, I think the sense of design of the team and the book was one of the strikes against it. (I don’t have scans of Spin Doctor and all of those other, more terrible heroes that just look like one another, so we’ll skip those guys…and Bigfoot, who just looks like Blockbuster for some reason).

First, there’s Uncle Sam. He gets a new coat, and occasionally puts his hair in a pony tail, and while it seems a bit silly to try and make Uncle Sam look cooler or more realistic, the changes are subtle enough that it’s nothing to get too bent out of shape over.

Here’s Phantom Lady, whose costume is basically a mildly Ultimized version of that of her predecessors.



If anyone was going to give up primary colors for black, I would have guessed it would have been the person who wears canary yellow but calls herself a Phantom, but I was wrong.

There are two Rays in the series; newcomer Stan “Ray III” Silver and Ray “Ray II” Terrill.

Here’s the Golden Age Ray—
And here’s Ray II prior to the start of this series—
Ray III looks like this— And Ray II, in this series, gets a redesign, and now looks like this—
Their costumes are so close to their originals that they’re more or less neutral changes, but, for whatever reason, Acuna abandoned the visual signature of Ray’s flight mode, where he becomes something akin to a photo negative version of himself, and flies around in a rectangular light ray.

Acuna darkens Silver’s face when he lights up, but I think The Ray is a character that suffers from an overly realistic rendering, losing something unique to himself. The Ray’s flying appearance as drawn by Quesada and Porter and others was sort of like Firestorm’s head fire or Starfire’s hair becoming a sort of comet tail when she flies—it looks neat, it looks unique to that character, but it doesn’t look quite right when depicted more realistically.

Okay, here are two that benefit from updates.

First, The Human Bomb went from this—to this—
I think the main problem with the new Bomb’s look is only that he’s too often in the dark fighting guys dressed too much like him in this storyline. Otherwise, it’s a pretty decent look, and works in making him look like a sort of human stealth bomber (The radiation suit of the original Human Bomb is rather dated).

And while there was nothing wrong with the previous Black Condor costumes...
...I do like the new Black Condor’s look—He’s got a condor-like ruff around his neck—only it’s black instead of white—and the mohawk’s a nice compromise between being condor-bald and having hair. The red eyes on black eye-mask is pretty cool-looking too.

And then there’s Firebrand, who starts off as our point-of-view character before successive issues assign successive narrators.

It’s not hard to see why someone might think Firebrand could use a new costume. Here’s the Golden Age version:But what about this exactly says “fire”?


It’s not even red. Firebrand looks like a vaguely Captain American-y type (as do several of the bad guys who appear throughout the story), a star icon on him. Isn’t that a little like Superman having the letter “T” on his chest-shield…?

I was going to say that it could have been a worse redesign——but I’m not so sure. The ‘90s Firebrand, while an eyesore, does at least have some fire going on there. Sure, it’s green fire, but when you hear his name you at least realize why he’s called Firebrand.

Plenty of other characters show up throughout the series, but those are the main members of the team. Although before moving on, I guess I should mention the Red Bee design, if only because it will help me in my ongoing quest to make Every Day Is Like Wednesday the number one Google result for the search term “Red Bee" (I'll catch you one day, craft and hobby supply store The Red Bee!)

Once again, here’s Richard Raleigh, the original Red Bee—Fucking awesome. Why change a thing? You can’t perfect perfection on account of it already being perfect.

And here’s the new Red Bee—It’s essentially just a slightly less imaginative version of Blue Beetle III’s gear, only red, but since they changed the Bee’s gender, the costume being radically different doesn’t matter so much.

The new Bee, the entomologist/robotocist grand-niece of the original Red Bee whom DC seems to be suggesting is dead despite the fact that he did not show up as a zombie in Blackest Night and therefore must still be alive, being awesome off-panel somewhere, goes through a bunch of changes in the next miniseries, getting a whole new look and power-set, but let’s not worry about her at the moment, since she might be dead (the second series, which I’ll discuss tomorrow, is completely unreadable).


3.) I didn’t care for the overly-safe politics of the book. DC Comics is a big company catering to an often quite surprisingly Republican, Libertarian and right-leaning conservative audience (at least judging from the comments I see at Blog@Newsarama!)…despite the fact that every single one of their characters would almost certainly be liberal Democrats save Hawkman and Hal Jordan. They are owned by an even bigger company, and that means they need to strive not to offend anyone’s religious or political beliefs (oddly, they can be quite daring with depictions of violence and suggestions of sexual violence and all manner of sexual kinks, though).

So I understand why their DCU publishing line must generally steer pretty clear of making broad statements like the Republicans put a killer android in the White House who wants to control America’s populace through RFID chips. What I don’t understand is the company’s half-assedness when writing about politics.

It seems like their stories would be better served by either a) ignoring politics or b) taking them seriously and writing about them realistically, but on more than one occasion they take a strange middle road in which they invent fictional political characters, never mention parties or affiliations and assign bland positions to everyone.

When your title character is a political cartoon, this seems an untenable approach.

The plot of the book is that Gonzo The Mechanical Bastard, an android semi-created by SHADE leader Father Time, has murdered President Knight (formerly Senator Knight, father of Phantom Lady Stormy Knight) and taken his place, and has branded Uncle Sam a terrorist (!!!) and is seeking to exploit the populace’s fear to make an insane power grab. Between the introductions and dismissals of super-characters and their fights, it’s the security vs. liberty debate of the Bush years played out in a super-comic.

Essentially it’s a The Bush Administration Is Full of Evil Douchebags Who Exploited 9/11 story, which, okay, I’m fine with that, but names are never named—they don’t even say “Republican” or “conservative” or something like “ultra-rightist,” which perhaps someone on the far right could read as being even farther to the right from them.

I know they couldn’t exactly kill President Bush and replace him with a robot (in part because there never was a Bush administration in the DCU; Lex Luthor won in 2000, and thus their presidential history has varied form ours since the Clinton administration), but I feel talked down to when the writers play it this safe while simultaneously articulating a clear point of view.

I’m probably not communicating this very well, but the political views expressed in this book remind me of the way Brian Michael Bendis writes swear words in his Avengers comics.

Luke Cage will say something like “I $#!% you not” or “I’m going to kick your @$$,” so that everyone who’s ever heard a swear word before will recognize what the swear word is and simultaneously recognized that the writer and publisher want to swear but are afraid to swear, and thus came up with a half-assed compromise, wherein Luke Cage could have just said “I kid you not” or “I’m going to kick your butt” and everything would have been fine.

Does that make sense? No?

Well, that’s why I didn’t want to review this graphic novel. I can’t quite get my head around some of the things that repel me from it, or express them right.


4.) There’s a meaninglessness to the book that makes it seem like a pitch for a series rather than an actual comic book series. Well, I suppose the argument could be made that any comic book is meaningless, or that they are only meant to entertain and, if a reader doesn’t like and/or isn’t entertained by the comic, then they might call it meaningless.

But where were the Freedom Fighters before this book? Uncle Sam, The Human Bomb and legacy versions of The Ray, Phantom Lady and Black Condor (plus Damage) were a team of superheroes operating under the auspices of the U.S. government.

Where are they at the end of this book? (Spoiler!) Uncle Sam and legacy versions of The Ray, The Human Bomb, Phantom Lady and Black Condor (Plus Firebrand and a few others) are a team of superheroes operating under the auspices of the U.S. government.

The entire series is thus little more than an effort to get the team back to the same place they were at before Infinite Crisis #1, which makes killing them off there at all seem like a strange decision.

The book introduces a bunch of new characters, including replacements for the legacy characters so recently killed off, dispatches some almost immediately (don’t get too attached to The Invisible Hood!) and ends where it began.

The book felt wholly unnecessary to me, a pitch for an Freedom Fighters series rather than a Freedom Fighters miniseries. Details that could have been revealed on the fly in another story are lingered over at length.

If Grant Morrison were writing a new Freedom Fighters miniseries, I’m sure it would have began at some point set after the eighth and final issue of this series; the character new and old would start doing things and we’d learn about them as we went along, left to imagine bits of their origins and earlier adventures for ourselves.

While Morrison suggests stories he doesn’t put on paper quite often in his superhero work, it’s worth noting that even Geoff Johns did the same thing when he assembled a modern Freedom Fighters team. The first we saw of them in the JSA, the characters were already a functioning team with a full roster, headquarters and mission statement.

This series seemed to be suffering from an existential crisis, and, as a reader, I found myself suffering alongside it.

I think I would have rather just read Morrison’s pitch for these characters, and/or Palmiotti and Gray’s fleshed-out versions of them. Who’s Who-style entries summarizing the stuff in this book would have been more interesting to me than the book itself.

I suppose that says something about me as a reader—as noted, some of the above complaints are simply personal biases and matters of taste—but sure it says something about the quality of the work as well.

All that said, the second eight-issue Uncle Sam and The Freedom Fighters miniseries, published in 2007 and collected as Uncle Sam and The Freedom Fighters: Brave New World, makes this trade read like Watchmen.

I think it may have actually been the very worst comic book I’ve ever read. Well, “read” is a strong word, as it was so bizarrely constructed that I didn’t “read” very much of it. Maybe “experienced” is a better word.

We’ll talk about that series tomorrow night though.