"The Great Super-Star Game!" from 1976's DC Super Stars #10

When I was working on that post about Plastic Man team-ups a few months ago, I plugged "Plastic Man" into the Grand Comics Database and scanned his various appearances to see if I was missing anything. Among the Plastic Man appearances that turned up was 1976's DC Super-Stars #10, in which he was one of nine superheroes playing baseball against a team of supervillains. (The story was reprinted a few years later in 1981's DC Special Blue Ribbon Digest #13, which has a far better cover, upon which Plas and most of the other characters appear.)

The story didn't really seem to fit the criteria for a Plastic Man team-up that I had established for that post—that is, rather than featuring Plastic Man teaming up with one or two other characters, he was part of an ensemble cast—so I didn't pursue it too urgently, but I remained curious about it. Partially because it seemed like a weird place for Plastic Man to show up and partially because a superhero vs. supervillain baseball game was obviously intriguing. 

Well, it took a while, but I finally found a copy.

The story is the work of writer Bob Rozakis, pencil artist Dick Dillin and inker Frank McLaughlin, and it's an odd one, right from the get-go. It opens with a scene of...domestic violence....?

After an opening splash page detailing the two teams' line-ups and positions (above), not unlike an issue of a Justice League comic might start with a roll call, we get a panel of the exterior of a house, from which argumentative dialogue bubbles seem to be coming. A caption reads, "One of the sounds of the suburbs--or the city, for that matter--a husband-and-wife shouting match!"

The next panel reveals who the husband and wife are, Golden Age villains Sportsmaster and The Huntress, both of whom are in full costume for some reason (Probably because it's 1976, and superhero comics were still just for kids?). They seem to be doing more than just shouting, though. The Huntress (the villainess in the animal print bathing suit, not one of the later purple-clad heroines to use that name) is holding up a chair like a lion tamer might to fend off a big cat, while Sportsmaster is swinging a tennis racket at her ("I just want to knock some sense into your head!" he shouts).

And what are they fighting about? Well, The Huntress is arguing that superheroes always win and supervillains always lose (Fact check: True), and thus she wants to switch sides and become a good guy, to which Sportsmaster objects ("Over my dead body!"). 

To prove that bad guys can sometimes win, he proposes a hero vs. villain baseball game. She picks a team of heroes, he picks a team of villains; if her side wins, she can become a crime-fighter, while if his team wins, she sticks with him.

The next eight pages shows the couple doing their recruiting. Using some sort of never explained equipment, they spy on various heroes and villains and then teleport them to the baseball stadium where the game is to be played. Conveniently, the heroes and villains are all grouped together, and each at some sort of sporting event. 

So, for example, Bruce Wayne, Oliver Queen and Dinah Lance are all at a Gotham City bowling tournament when The Joker and Matter Master show up to steal the prize money. 

Plastic Man is quite literally hanging out with Wonder Woman at a United Nations soccer championship, where upon her first appearance you might notice something off about her (See the first panel below). Though her lasso is glowing with a yellow aura, it seems miscolored, red instead of yellow. This is not a mistake, though.

When Weather Wizard and Chronos appear to steal the championship's platinum trophy, Wondy goes for her lasso and discovers that it's actually Plastic Man! 

They're mid-fight when Sportsmaster and Huntress "Pop" them.

And is it just me, or does Plas' tornado maneuver here make no sense...? Like, I can see that he uses his arms to form the shape of a tornado, but I don't get how that would actually suck up the gas or blow it away. He could have transformed into a big fan or something to dispel the gas, but how exactly does this work...? (Or, wait, on third thought, did Weather Wizard make Plas start spinning with his spell two panels previous, and so his arms aren't merely in the shape of a tornado, but are actually still spinning like a tornado in that panel...? I guess that could make some sort of sense...)

Let us here pause to note how unusual the superhero team is. While some of DC's most popular superheroes are present, it's clear Rozakis didn't choose, say, the nine most popular heroes. Nor do these nine necessarily have anything in common. Sure, most of them are Justice Leaguers, but there are also a pair of Teen Titans and a pair of Golden Age heroes from Quality Comics that weren't known to hang out with the Justice Leaguers all that often at that point.

So, we've got Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Arrow, Black Canary, Robin, Kid Flash, Plastic Man and Uncle Sam, the last of whom will serve as an umpire given that he is, as Wonder Woman says, "the most honest, trustworthy man alive!"

(Note the editorial box at the bottom of the panel; perhaps that's why Uncle Sam is here; DC could have been using the appearance to help promote the short-lived, 15-issue Freedom Fighters book).

In the next panel, Luthor chooses the bad guys' umpire: "I can't vouch for Amazo's honesty--but since he's an android, he'll have to call them as he sees them!" 

As to why everyone agrees to play in the first place, well, the villains seem taken by Sportsmaster's argument that, if his team wins, it will prove that bad guys really can win, and, as for the heroes, Huntress has (somehow) filled the stands with hypnotized victims who, we're told, will remain there forever if the heroes refuse to play.

To make the game completely uninteresting, no one is allowed to use their powers. 

Rozakis seems to have tumbled on the fact that such a baseball game won't therefore be any more interesting to read a comic book story about than any actual baseball game would, and so a single page montage takes us through the first eight innings ("Readers interested in knowing the complete play-by-play of the game can find it on our text page, elsewhere in this issue!" an editorial note from "Julie" says; indeed, as editor Julius Schwartz promises, there's an all-text breakdown of the game in the back, which I suppose was fun to imagine and write. Maybe to read too, if one were the least bit interested in baseball but, well, this one isn't.)

So, in the ninth inning, the losing villains finally resort to using their powers and gadgets, and some of the heroes similarly use theirs. There are only five pages devoted to this inning, but at least they are a bit more interesting than they might have been sans powers.

Here's Plastic Man, using his powers to first trick and then tag out Sportsmaster:

And so, the heroes win 11 to 10, and then everyone POPs back to where Sportsmaster and Huntress found them, to finish up their battles, which the heroes also handily win (Wonder Woman lassoing Chronos and Weather Wizard with Plas). We see the climax or end of each of these in another montage.

And does The Huntress go straight and become a superhero? Do she and Sportsmaster get a divorce? Unclear. 

I suppose the fact that the creators spend as much time gathering the heroes and villains as they do detailing their game reveals that this was more of a fun idea for a story than it is a fun story, but it's certainly an interesting curio, and I remain fascinated by the choices of heroes included, like using Plastic Man and Uncle Sam instead of, say, Hawkman and Aquaman, or in choosing Kid Flash over The Flash...

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

You know, after reading this, I kind of want to tackle my longboxes and see if I can dig up 1994's Showcase '94 #3 and #4, in which Alan Grant and Tim Sale tell a two-part story of a softball game between the Arkham Asylum inmates and the prisoners of Blackgate Penitentiary. 

Unlike "The Great Super-Star Game!", it's actually as fun as it sounds, if I recall correctly. And check out Kyle Baker's cover for #4:

Super-Endorsements 2012:

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.