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!

Supergods: Not quite an industry tell-all, but closer than usual

One thing American politics has over American comics is that the former publishes many more and much more interesting books and memoirs. The political book market is a curious one, as it seems to exist primarily for participants to cash in on their experiences by telling their side of the story (which, in some cases, turns out to be a story of historical significance), revealing just enough new, gossipy, insider details to justify the political media paying attention for a week, which in turn justifies the book's existence, and then everyone forgets about the particular books forever, because they are all terrible and full of lies anyway.

Comics doesn't generate these sorts of books. Not simply because so many fewer people care about comics than they do about politics, not simply because there's so much less money involved, not simply because the comics media is a tiny fraction of the political media, and thus relatively few books about comics exist at all, but instead because no one ever really leaves comics, and it is thus, even if there was enough interest in comics memoirs from creators and industry leaders to regularly generate them, it would be all but impossible to get anyone to offer up any bridge-burning gossip or name-calling.
A prominent writer, artist or editor leaving one company (say, Marvel), would just end up across the street at the other (say, DC Comics) and probably, a few years later, they would end up back at the former company. If, hypothetically, former Marvel Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter used to subsist on a diet of live puppies and kittens and bather every night in a tub filled with the tears of Marvel freelancers, most of the editorial staff whose job it was to procure live animals and gather those tears wouldn't share that information widely, for fear that they would have a reputation for talking out of turn and become unhireable.

When someone leaves a job in comics, they generally take another job in comics, unlike politics, where leaving, say, a presidential administration generally leads to sitting on a few boards somewhere and maybe lobbying. It's not like you're ever going to have to work with Colin Powell or Condoleeza Rice again, so go ahead and write about what a bunch of babies they were.

I don't really read many of those sorts of political memoirs, but I always enjoyed the way they receive coverage, particularly from places like online magazine Slate, which would pore through them looking for the newsworthy/salacious bits to air in articles with headlines like "We Read Slimy John Edwards' Stupid, Self-Serving Book (So You Don't Have To)" (Note: I said with headlines like; that is not an actual headline).

As you may have heard, superstar comics writer Grant Morrison recently wrote a book, and I recently read it.

There are several strands to the book, and they sometimes intersect a bit awkwardly, but one of those strands is Morrison's career in comics, and thus many familiar names appear in the book, either as subjects or as characters, and Morrison reveals his thoughts and opinions on many of them. Mark Waid is nice...and smart! Glenn Fabry once drunkenly bit Karen Berger on the ass! Peter Milligan used to drink a whole lot with Morrison! Jill Thompson is striking looking! Warren Ellis was thin, eager and brainy as a teenager! Alan Moore is hairy!

Relatively little of it is along the lines of "Colin and Condi are sissies and I would have bombed Iraq two years earlier if it weren't for them," but it is rare, even refreshing to hear even this much talk of comics behind the scenes, and to hear even mildly unflattering opinions shared.

I thought I'd try to put together one of those Slate style "We Read Supergods (So You Don't Have To)" articles for fun, but you should read Supergods—it's much more engaging, educational and fun to read than, say, Donald Rumsfeld or Presidents Bush or Clinton's books.

I should note at the outset that the two creators who receive the most discussion in the book are Alan Moore and Mark Millar. Morrison rarely goes into any great detail, but he clearly has very complicated relationships with both men, and both are so important to comics today that Morrison couldn't have written this book without discussing them.

Morrison writes at considerable length about Marvelman/Miracleman and Watchmen, offering a fairly brilliant review of the latter before launching into its weaknesses. Both seemed to have dramatic impact on Morrison, as they showed the end of one particular road of superheroes, and necessitated him trying different directions for superheroes. Moore shows up as a writer glimpsed from afar though, not a character.

Millar's work is similarly dissected, particularly Wanted, The Ultimates and Civil War, with some discussion also given to The Authority and Kick-Ass. Millar appears as a character though, and is in many anecdotes, as Morrison and he were apparently besties and collaborators for years before...something happened, which isn't really explained at any length.

I whole book could probably be written about Morrison, Millar and Moore, and the way their work and relationships have effected mainstream comics and the mainstream's acceptance of comics in the last few decades (and influenced one another's work). Morrison talks about both men so often (Millar appears on 26 pages, Moore on 30, according to the index). I didn't really bother looking for good, juicy quotes to share; read Supergods to read his thoughts on them...and their impact on his work.

As for Morrison on some other topics of note to you, dear reader, please, read on...


On Bill Jemas:

—"By this time, I was coming into regular conflict with Marvel’s new fire-brand publisher Bill Jemas over the direction and execution of my stories. He’d been brought in to modernize along with Joe Quesada as EIC, and we’d all started out on the same page. But slowly I began to feel that misunderstood the fasion aspect of mainstream hero books and their need to constantly change with the times.

"The old war between groovy Marvel and stuffy Brand Echh intensified into playground name calling. Jemas expertly manipulated the Internet crowd, stirring up controversy to draw attention to his books. He referred publicly and disparagingly to “AOLComics” and called his DC rival Paul Levitz “Lol Pevitz” over and over in interviews and inflammatory press statements, as if repetition could eventually make it funny…Levitz, who had elected, in old-DC style, to play the role of gray-templed gentleman, resolutely ignored the ruffians hurling their excreta at his drawing room window, but quietly placed his tormenters on a DC blacklist. "


On Dan DiDio:

—"Dan was the same age as I, but bearlike and gregarious, with a Brooklyn tenor I loved to imitate when he wasn’t around. I liked Dan immediately and appreciated the respect he was showing my work, after Bill Jemas’ growing disinterest. "


On Joe Quesada:

—"I liked Joe a lot…"


On Brian Michael Bendis:

—“[Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s origin of Spider-Man] was perfectly composed in just eleven pages. (When writer Brian Michael Bendis was called on to update and retell the Spider-Man origin for a new generation of readers in 2000, it took six twenty-two-page issues to tell the same story in the “decompressed” screenplay style of twenty-first-century comics)”

—“A recent Marvel Comics event series entitled Secret Invasion was a direct sequel to The Kree-Skrull War but without any of the dazzling narrative tricks that made the original so remarkable.”

—“Bendis came from the independent comics scene and, influenced by playwright David Mamet rather than Stan Lee, he made alarmingly convincing dialogue the focus of his style and broke the rules of comic-book storytelling by having characters exchange multiple balloons in a single panel. His dialogue had a call-and-response rhythm that captured each voice perfectly, like the strains in a chorus, and soon he was Marvel Comics’s premier writer, dominating the sales charts for the next ten years with no sign yet of slowing down. When Bendis committed to a title, it was like swans mating, with ten-year-runs on his pet books”

—“Marvel parried with its own events. Civil War, as I’ve already discussed, was the best of them. But Brian Bendis also contributed the lukewarm House of M, and Secret Invasion—his sequel to the Kree-Skrull war in which the aliens won, Earth was conquered, and some slightly hamfisted attempt to compare Skrulls to radical Islamists were made, borrowed wholesale from TV’s Battlestar Galactica"


On Allen Heinberg:

—"Screenwriters, tried-and-tested storytellers from a more glamorous medium, were the only strangers admitted into the comics field during this time of withdrawal and consolidation…Unsurprisingly they didn’t write comics quite as well or with the same freewheeling abandon as the pople who did it for a living, and few lingered beyond their first unimpressive checks…Allan Heinberg’s short but effervescent burst on 2006’s nineteen-millionths Wonder Woman revamp was another rare exception, but the writer, who’d worked on the youth drama The O.C., couldn’t stand the poisonous atmosphere of comics fandom and made a swift, quite exit after a promising start, leaving the field once more to the diehards.”

[Ah, so it wasn’t Allen Heinberg that quit comics, it was us readers that drove him out of the field. What could have made comics fandom seem poisonous to a writer who was widely and greatly celebrated for his rather uninspired “I’ll take The Avengers, and make teenagers out of those IPs!” and supported to ludicrous, money-leaving-on-the-table-lengths by Marvel? Surely his inability to meet a deadline might have had something to do with it...?]


On Alan Moore and Frank Miller’s influence on the post-Watchmen/Dark Knight Returns supercomic:

—“Take out Moore’s passion, his excellece as a wordsmith, and his formal obsessions, and save only his cynicism, his gleeful cruelty, and his need to expose the potentially wounded sexuality of carton characters, and you had the germ of a strain of superhero-porn comics. Unlike Watchmen, which was written for a wide mainstream audience, the new superhero comics were pitched at fans in the direct market, who were tired of all the old tricks and craved shock-thereapy versions of their old favorites."

—“Elmintae Millers’ talent as a cartoonist and satirist, his skill as an action storyteller, and leave only his reactionary 'bastard' heroes—all those psychologically damaged sociopaths in trench coats, jackboots, and stubble—and you had the new model superhero in the late-eighties American style."


On his old enemy, the Internet:

—"Soon film studios were afraid to move without the approval of the raging Internet masses. They represented only the most minuscule fraction of a percentage of the popular audience that gave a shit, but they were very remarkably, superhumanly angry, like the great head of Oz, and so very persistent that they could easily appear in the imagination as an all-conquering army of mean-spirited, judgmental fogies.

"…Too many businesspeople who should have known better began to take seriously the ravings of misinformed, often barely literate malcontents who took revenge on the curel world by dismissing everything that came their way with the same jaded, geriatric 'Meh.'"

—"It is, of course, telling that I’ve never met any reader at a comic convention who behaved the way many do online, suggesting that the Internet monster is a defensive configuration, like the fan of spikes a tiny fish erects when it feels threatened."


On Mark Millar’s radical, pioneering exploration of why nobody’s ever done a “real” superhero before his Kick-Ass:

—"Back in 1940, Ma Hunkel, the Red Tornado, was the first attempt to dpecit a 'real-life' superhero in comics. Not a spaceman from Krypton, not a billionaire playboy with a grudge, Ma had no powers except for her formidable washerwoman build. She wore a homemade costume to dish out local justice in the stairwells and alleyways of the Lower East Side in some aborginal memory of the early DC universe…

"...Seventy years after Ma Hunkel, sixteen-year-old Dave Lizewski, the hero of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s Kick-Ass, asked the question 'WHY DOES EVERYONE WANT TO BE PARIS HILTON BUT NOBODY WANTS TO BE A SUPERHERO?' Leaving aside the cynical response that nobody in their right minds wanted to be Paris Hilton, Dave’s question had already been answered by a handful of brave souls, real people in the real world who dress up in capes and masks to patrol the streets and keep people safe. You can read all about them online if you type 'real world superheroes' into a search engine."


On The Red Bee:

—“The race to create superheroes with fresh gimmicks crashed headlong into one spectacular dead end with the Red Bee…[Richard] Raleigh was clever enough to have invented his own 'sting gun,' which shot effective knockout darts. He could have simply loaded up his sting gun, stopped right there, and still made a perfectly serviceable Golden Age mystery man called the Red Bee. But for Rick Raleigh, only one thing guaranteed his crucial edge over the violent underbelly of society: the hive of trained crime-fighting bees he kept confined in the buckle of his belt…until crime reared its snout. Ever eager to be set free in the cause of justice, the lead bee and chief offensive weapon in Raleigh’s apian arsenal was somewhat endearingly named Michael.”

—“If it seems ridiculous, it’s because it is. But there was something else goin on here: a radical eenchantment of the mundane. As the creators of the superheroes pitched their nets ever wider in search of fresh and original gimmicks, they touched more and more of the everyday world with childlike wonder dust. Bees could be special…Boring gym equipment could become the lethal arsenal of the criminal knon as Sportsmaster….In the world of the superheroes, everything had value, potential, mystery. Any person, thing or object could be drafted into service in the struggle against darkness and evil—remade as a weapon or a warrior or a superhero. Even a little bee named Michael—after God’s own avenging angel—could pitch in to win the battle against wickeness.”

A guest review:

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.

Click to better scrutinize my poor penmanship and limited understanding of Photoshop's eye drop and paint tools

(Cross-posted here and at Blog@Newsarama)