My favorite jokes from Sholly Fisch, Marcelo DiChiara and company's Teen Titans Go! To Camp!

Sholly Fisch and Marcelo DiChiara send the Teen Titans to Camp Apokolips in their original graphic novel, Teen Titans Go! To Camp!, which offers a good enough excuse to play with Jack Kirby's Fourth World characters, embedding them into the absurdly silly, crazy-paced milieu of the Teen Titans Go! cartoon (which the book approximates about as well as a comic book can). A particularly fun feature is the letters home from camp the Titans and various other campers write, which are each drawn by a different, excellent guest artist, few of whom seem to even attempt to ape the style of the show.

There are plenty of effective jokes in the book, but these ones are my own personal favorites...

1.) Martian Manhunter eating a cookie. When the Teen Titans flash back to their disastrous experience at the Justice League's Camp Super Friends, they are greeted by the entire League line-up. J'onn J'onnz, the manhunter from Mars, is drawn by artist Marcelo DiChiara chomping on an over-sized chocolate sandwich cookie.

This isn't a joke as much as it is a callback to previous light-hearted Justice League stories featuring J'onn, like those of Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis and company's five-year run on the Justice League franchise during the "JLI" era. That was when J'onn's love of Earth's chocolate sandwich cookies was first revealed (Originally his brand of choice was Oreo, but it was later retconned into "Chocos"). This panel basically just serves as a reminder of a bunch of past fun stories featuring the character, but that was more than enough to make it one of my favorite panels in the book.

As far as characterization goes, "likes cookies" might not be the deepest of traits, but it is certainly a relatable one.

2.) The Deep Six! There are several more minor Jack Kirby-created characters appearing in various capacities at Granny Goodness' summer camp—Devilance The Pursuer provides transportation, Mantis works in the cafeteria—but it was the appearance of The Deep Six that most delighted me. And that they serve as lifeguards, er, anti-lifeguards? Even better.

3.) "You mean Aquaman?" At the end of the third chapter, guest artist Abigail Larson draws Raven's letter home to her father, Trigon The Terrible. In it, she tells him how they spent the first night at camp sitting around the campfire, telling spooky stories. Billy Numerous attempts to tell the one about the guy with a hook for a hand, but, well, Aqualad doesn't find guys with hooks for hands to be particularly scary. This letter is one of several that is notable for how sharply the art style contrasts with DiChaiara's, which adheres to the look of the show.

4.) Green Arrow is a communist. Leila del Duca illustrates Speedy's letter home to Green Arrow, a sequence that begins with a page of Green Arrow checking his mail, which includes this gem of a panel.

5.) Where's Mr. Mind? As the story reaches its climax, DiChiara treats us to this two-page spread featuring all of the campers dealing with various Apokalyptian traps, monsters and villains as they seek to complete the obstacle course. Can you find Captain Marvel's archnemesis, one of the universe's greatest villains and the founder of The Monster Society of Evil?

The villainous worm makes no other appearance throughout the book, but he does get drawn into this spread. And really, given how little space the little guy takes up, and how awesome he is, why wouldn't you draw him into such a panel? Hell, I'm surprised Mr. Mind doesn't get drawn into every DC Comic...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile...

This week I interviewed writer Sholly Fisch about his new bi-monthly book Scooby-Doo Team-Up for Good Comics For Kids, and reviewed Chip Kidd's bookification of Gaiman's May 2012 "Make Good Art" commencement speech, Make Good Art, for Robot 6.

The least essential Blackest Night tie-in of them all

The cover of Scooby-Doo #150 features the tag line, “Darkness Falls On Scooby-Doo…As Mystery, Inc Face Their Blackest Knight Yet!” It was released in November of 2009, when the phrase “Blackest Night” would have invariably evoked the Geoff Johns-written, Green Lantern-starring event series Blackest Night, which at that point was as much as a DC Universe line-wide branding term as it was the title of a particular story.

Scooby-Doo is, of course, part of DC’s unofficial Johnny DC imprint, and as such never subject to what’s going on in the DC Universe proper, but if not a Blackest Night tie-in proper, DC was at least going for a joking allusion to the biggest DCU story at the time.

Note what Scooby-Doo is holding in his right paw on artist Vincent Deporter’s cover, after all.

The contents are split between two short stories. In the first, Scooby and the gang investigate a host of pampered black cats that inherited their eccentric late master’s fortune and now run riot all over town, seemingly plaguing it with bad luck. Hence all the cats on the cover. The green lantern on the cover references the events of the second story in the issue, “The Blackest Knight” by writer Sholly Fisch and artist Fabio Laguna (Laguna is one of the artists I mentioned in yesterday's post as being one of the better Scooby-Doo artists).

Lest one think the Geoff Johns’ Blackest Night references are a coincidence, check out the first two panels of the story, in which the gang arrives at a castle in England:
And now let’s meet Lord Geoffrey himself:I’m not familiar enough with Geoff Johns' personal appearance to know whether or not that’s supposed to be his likeness or not (I do know that he's probably rich and successful enough now that he can probably afford to live in his own castle and dress as ridiculously fancy as he wants now). The amount of detail Laguna draws into it suggests that Lord Geoffrey is modeled on a real person though, as opposed to cut from the same cartoon cloth as the Mystery Inc. characters and the other supporting ones that appear throughout the short story.

If Lord Geoffrey is Geoff Johns, then who is Sir John? The fact that he’s colored slightly darker than Lord Geoffrey and has a goatee makes me think he’s simply supposed to be an evil Geoff Johns. Er, not to ruin the mystery or anything!

(And hey, while you’re scrutinizing that panel, check out Fred’s face. What’s that expression all about? Is there something…unnatural going on with his face? He looks sort of sick or possessed or injected with Joker venom).

As introductions are made and snacks devoured by Shaggy and Scooby, the ghost suddenly appears……demanding a ring!

Like the others, Lord Geoffrey runs for his life when the ghost appears.
(Wow, did you ever think about Fred’s footwear? I mean, really think about it?)

As Lord Geoff barricades them all in the study, we get some more subtle Green Lantern allusions: Are they overdoing it at this point? No. They overdo it on the next page, after Lord Geoff explains that the Black Knight is looking for a lost emerald ring, carved in the shape of the eagle from his family crest:Get it?! Eagle? Evil? Ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Ah.

But wait, there’s more! When everyone splits up to search, Shaggy and Scooby volunteer to start with the kitchen and—wouldn’t you know it?—the ghost finds them. He chases them back to the crest in the study, and just as he’s about to stab our cowardly heroes, the crest falls from the wall, clobbering the knight and allowing Daphne to unmask him.Will power! Green Lantern has that!

Finally, Velma puts two and two together and realizes the emerald ring must be hidden in the lantern, which is what caused it to glow green all this time, and sow Lord Geoffrey gets his green ring back:
The end.

Maybe DC should have done a free plastic ring giveaway with this issue? It couldn’t have hurt.

Now let’s look at some more awesomely weird little kid art from the letters page of this issue.

Here’s a piece entitled “Scooby-Doo Scares Mummy,”and here’s one from the perspective of someone totally tripping:Aaaaaaaaaaaaaa! The strange special relations, Daphne’s tiny plum-sized head atop a long neck stalk and her horrifying, claw-tipped paws! This is much scarier than a bunch of black cats or a sword-wielding black knight ghost!