Batman #668 (DC Comics) It’s more of the same from Grant Morrison and J. H. Williams III. And given how great last issue’s first chapter of this three-parter was, that is indeed good news. Interesting page lay-outs, truly remarkable design work filled with winking allusions to other artists, panels shaped like the names of the main hero and the main villain, characters as colorful and interesting as their codenames and costumes—it’s all on display for a second time.
One of the things I like most about Morrison’s writing in the DCU, on his Batman as on his JLA, is the way he weaves in a sort of implied continuity, peppering conversations with names, places and adventures that might have happened before and might not have; and if they haven’t, then they happen in the background of your imagination as you read, or after you set the book down. In the case of “Now We Are Dead,” it’s the references to the Club members’ past villains and exploits, some of which have occurred in other comics and others of which only in Morrison’s mind.
He and Williams are doing a hell of a job here, because aside from Knight and Squire, all of these characters (at least in these iterations) are new to me, and I honestly find myself quite worried about them all getting killed. Take Ranger if you must, Black Glove, but for God’s sake, leave me Knight, Squire, Man of Bats and Raven Red…I sincerely would like to read more stories about them (And DC, if you want to go ahead and spin a Club of Heroes miniseries out of this story arc, go for it).
Birds of Prey #109 (DC) I have conflicted feelings about this issue, mostly because it is very good and jawdroppingly bad at the same time. I know that increasingly few of the people that work at DC—editors, writers, even artists—seem to actually read other DC comics, or to even be fairly familiar with the history of the characters they work on, but I still get surprised by the size of some of the mistakes that get through.
This issue is written by Tony Bedard, who just completed the Black Canary miniseries which chiefly existed to make sure everyone had all their canaries in a row, seeing as how the stories featuring Black Canary in Gail Simone’s Birds of Prey, Brad Meltzer’s Justice League of America and Judd Winick’s Green Arrow didn’t all seem to go together, and certainly didn’t all seem to be pointing towards Canary and on-again, off-again lover Oliver Queen tying the knot in a few short months. In fact, this issue also seems intended to do a little creative bridge-building, touching on Barbara Gordon’s reaction to Ollie’s proposal, explaining why Canary’s in the League after quitting the Birds, and taking care of some Countdown business (Another refugee from the Fourth World gets slotted; don’t worry, it’s not Barda…yet).
So it seems especially out-of-place to see a big, huge, stupid continuity error right in the middle of a story that mainly exists to deal with continuity. Barbara “Oracle” Gordon, who’s whole deal is that wields information like a superpower and has a photographic memory, is recounting all of Ollie’s acts of questionable faithfulness to Canary, mentioning someone named Marianne that I’ve never heard of (before my time) and Joanna Pierce from a 2003 Green Arrow story. On the same page, Bedard has Barbara say, “He fathered Connor with that ninja woman,” and Canary responds, “Shado shot him and drugged him.”
Ollie didn’t father Connor with Shado. He fathered Connor with Sandra Moonday Hawke. (He did father a child with Shado, but the boy was named Robert). Now, I can see why these mistakes crop up—Connor’s part-Asian, he’s an illegitimate child of Ollie’s, Ollie fathered a child with Asian woman Shado—but I’d expect that a DC writer and/or one of the two editors to have their name on the book to be able to catch such a mistake.
And one need not have read every Green Arrow story ever to know all of this information, of course. It’s handily summarized in the entries on Green Arrow and Shado in The DC Comics Encyclopedia, which I assume would be an invaluable resource for DC freelancers and editors, due to how user-friendly and relatively complete it is (It covers the post-Crisis On Infinite Earths)/pre-Infinite Crisis continuity, so obviously a lot of the details have changed from the Superboy punching and new multiverse making). Mr. Bedard, if you don’t have your own copy and ever need me to look something up in it ahead of time for you, feel free to hit me up at the email address in the upper right-hand corner.
Now, out of curiosity, Mr. Bedard, Birds of Prey editor Mike Carlin and assistant editor Elisabeth V. Gehrlein, if you honestly believe Shado to be Connor’s mother, then what’d you make of this cover, which, even if you didn’t read your comp copy of, I’m sure you at least saw the cover of on your website?
I suppose I should also mention that I don’t think Scarface and the Ventriloquist were active as far back as when Barbara Gordon was Batgirl and before Ollie had moved to Seattle and changed costumes, but that’s pretty small potatoes compared to who gave birth to Connor, really.
The rest of the issue is hardly problem-free, although that was indeed the major one.
But let’s leave poor Mr. Bedard alone for a moment and focus on the art first. And where better to start than the cover, which is really quite a mess.
I usually really dislike DC’s tendency to include magazine feature-story like half-pun cover blurbs, but in this case it’s perfectly descriptive: “Marry Green Arrow?! Are You Serious?!!” Unfortunately, the way that text is positioned, on either side of Green Arrow, who has a quizzical expression and is half shrugging, it would appear that Green Arrow himself is saying it, and not, you know, Barbara. Immediately in front of him are Batgirl and Black Canary, and while Canary’s costume is off (that’s not the one she wore when Babs was Batgirl), what’s most distracting about their positioning is that they seem to be rubbing their taints on top of the heads of their modern day selves. In the foreground we see Barbara clutching her belly, slamming her hand on the tabletop and seemingly having a good laugh at the prospect of Canary marriyng Ollie. This part of the cover is a great image, and would certainly have made a fine cover all by itself. The artist, Stephane Roux, really captures thewomen’s friendship here, the situation, and even their divergent personalities (note the drinks). I have no idea why it’s lit like that though, so that their hair, the table top and Babs’ shirt all seem to be emitting light, but I suppose that’s not any weirder than the warp effect in the background, or why it shows through the flashbacks of the characters, or why Barbara’s doing that weird Bruce Lee thing with her face, or why Ollie’s leg-less torso is floating behind them and asking “Marry me? What are you nuts?”
Anyway, that’s the cover. A good composition made part of a terrible composition, which looks worse and worse the longer you look at it.
The interior art, by Nicola Scott and Doug Hazlewood, is pretty great. Scott does her usual fine job with expressions, particularly druing the couple of conversations that comprise most of the issue. If I had to find weaknesses in it, I guess I’d point out that the handcuff arrow is off model (really, how would it even work if it had a floppy chain like that?), and that she couldn’t find a less blood-soaked way to draw Knockout’s gory corpse (although the colorists seem to have had more to do with the amount of blood on that particular splash page than Scott or Hazlewood).
As for Bedard’s script, other than the big blunder regarding Connor’s parentage (which next to something like last week’s J’onn-talking-to-Aquaman II-as-if-he-were-actually-the-currently-dead-Aquaman I-and Aquaman II-responding-as-if-he-himself-thought-he-was-the-other-Aquaman bit in Justice League of America #12 isn’t even that big of a deal), Bedard does a pretty great job.
This is a downtime issue, featuring a heart-to-heart between Babs and Dinah over whether or not she should actually marry that cad Ollie. It’s a strong scene, and had I not read the credits, I wouldn’t have even known the series’ former writer Gail Simone hadn’t written (Canary’s line about jumping off rooftops even made me choke up a bit). Bedard similarly acquits himself well to the comedy relief bits featuring Sin and Barda talking Pokemon, and the killing off of Knockout by whoever’s killing New Gods all over the place. The scene seems a little out of place here (Someone’s killing New Gods. Got it. The first three times), as does the opening scene featuring a five-page sequence of young Batgirl meeting Green Arrow, but as filler goes, it’s not exactly bad filler.
It’s all around good stuff, which makes the things like continuity errors more frustrating, because they’re exactly what keeps a pretty decent read from being as good a book as it’s clear Bedard, Scott and Hazlewood are capable of producing.
Black Summer #2 (Avatar Press) Three issues in, and I think this remains a better idea for a comic book than an actual comic book series. I really dig Juan Jose Ryp’s Darrow-esque, hyper-detailed art though, and might have gotten more out of the book if I could look at Kathyrn Artemis without thinking about these guys:
Blue Beetle #18 (DC) I tried Blue Beetle #1, and I didn’t really like it. It was fine, nothing special; just one more superhero comic more or less like all others. I checked in on the series again with #7, prompted by all the guest-stars, and I didn’t really like that one much either. I didn’t try another for almost a year, although within the last few months I noticed more and more blogosphere taste-makers really talking the title up, saying so many good things that my curiosity was quite piqued. So I figured maybe I’d try it in trade some day. But then I saw this cover, chockfull of Titans, and in was such a slow week that I figured, what the hell, why not give the book a third chance. I’m glad I did, because all those nice things you hear people like Chris Sims, Kevin Church and Ami Angelwings have been saying about John Rogers and Rafael Albuquerque’s Blue Beetle? All true.This was a nice, fun, funny, accessible done-in-one story introducing Jamie to the Teen Titans. The story is pretty simple, as high schools from around the country converge at a Texas-based spaceport for field trips, including Jamie and his friends (whom I know very little about) and some undercover Teen Titans, whom I’ve actually come to miss quite a bit since I dropped the title (one issue of Adam Beechen’s Titans was way more than enough for me, thanks). I’m a real sucker for stories of sidekicks going undercover. It was so much fun seeing the teens interact, in their secret IDs and in costume, that when Lobo finally showed up, I had completely forgotten he was even supposed to be in the title. If you’re like and have been curious about Blue Beetle (or just miss well-written Titans), I’d definitely check this issue out.
Green Arrow: Year One #4 (DC) I’m no doctor (no, seriously, I’m not), but I find it awfully suspicious how well Ollie’s arm healed considering the severity of the fracture (dude’s bone was totally sticking through the skin, all white and pointy and shit!). While Andy Diggle and Jock’s story continues to work on it’s own as a sort of paper action movie, I don’t think I much care for how it retroactively alters other DCU stories. Having Ollie freak out on Roy Harper for being addicted to heroin after himself being briefly addicted to heroine, for example, takes some of the drama out of that story, and makes Ollie maybe seem like an even bigger jerk. I mean, if he’s been there himself, who is he to get all pompous and self-righteous with Roy?
Outsiders: Five of a Kind—Metamorpho/Aquaman #1(DC) This is probably the most interesting book released this week, more so because of who created than for anything that happens within it, although the fact that the person creating it is even involved with such a minor, meaningless DCU story is also pretty interesting, I guess. This is one of several one shots with ponderously long titles that don’t quite match up between the fine print on the inside back cover and the what’s on the cover, supposedly pitting contenders for a place on Batman’s new Outsiders line-up against one another. I lost count of where we are exactly—this is either the third or fourth special—but none of it really seems to matter anyway, as DC house ads and future cover solicits seem to suggest who makes the team anyway, and as far as I can tell the one-shots have little to do with the team-building and more to do with introducing characters to readers (each apparently ends with a short few page coda by upcoming Batman and the Outsiders writer Tony Bedard actually dealing with the who’s in and who’s out business). My interest in this issue has less to do with Outsiders business (I gave up on the franchise about the time Judd Winick had Roy Harper’s toddler daughter Lian captured by a child sex slavery ring, revealed Grace’s origin involved the same child sex slavery ring and wrote a few pages of her brutally, mechanically, dispassionately beating a man), and more to do with a confluence of the characters involved (My love for Aquamen is illogical, but overwhelming, and if you can read Showcase Presents: Metamorpho and not fall in love with the Element Man, you’re not human) and creators.
These are artist Joshua Middleton, whose every panel looks like a beautiful water color painting, and writer G. Willow Wilson, a female Muslim journalist breaking into comics with a Vertigo graphic novel (Cairo) and, for some reason, one-fifth of this wheel-spinning Outsiders event.
The art is, predictably, beautiful—there was a lot of great art in a lot of different style in my relatively small haul this week, and this book still stands out as the best looking. Middleton’s painterly imagery is perfect for Metamorpho, who can change into gasses and the like (although he actually only shoots some acid and does some stuff with his hands here), and the desert landscapes. Wilson gives him some neat things to draw, too, particularly a monster made out of whirling sand and another out of water.
As for Wilson’s scripting, it is quite strong, and this is a perfectly complete story all by itself. Rex and Arthur both seem perfectly in character throughout, a new character is introduced and shows potential for return appearances, and there’s a nice balance of action adventure superheroics and character work.
I’m less sure of Bedard’s overreaching plan for the book—mostly because this is my first taste of this Five of a Kind business—but that has nothing to do with these creators or this effort. Batman certainly seemed against the idea of team like this back when his Justice League colleagues were teaming up with some good bad guys to form Justice League Elite, and neither media darling and former Justice Leaguer Rex Mason or kid version of Aquaman necessarily seem like people you’d want on a black ops-esque, I want the world to see us as villains kind of team. But then, that plot is only touched on in the last two pages.
One final note: I love the logo for this issue.
The Spirit #9 (DC) Darwyn Cooke abandons the done-in-one formula for a the first part of what will end up being at least a two-parter. He switches narrators throughout to tell the tale of El Morte, who seemingly died along with Denny Colt at the beginning of The Spirit’s career and similarly came back to life, only he really actually truly died, and he has the rotting flesh and resistance to shotgun shells to prove it. While the format might be slightly different than that of Cooke’s previous issues, the quality level hasn’t changed a bit—it’s still pretty much perfect.
Superman #666 (DC) Kurt Busiek, I don’t know if I say this enough, but I just want you to know that I love you, man. Seriously, before you came along and started writing both Superman books pretty much monthly, I just never realized how totally awesome Superman could be week in and week out. And just when I thought I couldn’t like your Super-work anymore than I already did, you go and write an extra-length, number-of-the-beast special issue, and pack it full of guest-stars and demons and giant space explosions because if you’re fortunate enough to get Walt freaking Simonson to illustrate an issue of Superman, you might as well give him demons and space explosions and as much of the DCU as can possibly fit into a single issue. Busiek and Simonson on a Satanic issue of Superman what could make this better? Nothing…except the lettering of John Workman. And guess who letters this issue?
Without spoiling the plot too much, it involves a demon from Kryptonian hell, Superman cutting loose and acting like a jackass Superman III style and some of the most inventive uses of his superpowers to kill friends and foes alike. In addition to Superman, his supporting cast and most of his villains, Simonson gets to draw the evil versions of the heroes you see on the cover, plus Hawkman, Animal Man, Aquaman II, Phantom Stranger, Zatanna, Etrigan, Superman becoming the Anti-Christ and Superman’s totally sweet orbital easy chair.
Continuity question time! Okay, I missed most of John Byrne’s post-Crisis (On Infinite Earths) origin stuff on account of being too young at the time and too uninterested later, but Superman did execute some Phantom Zone criminals, right? He did kill before? Because this issue addresses this question, and he and Lois seem sure that he has never killed, but there’s a bit of inner doubt that Superman experiences. Were those executions retconned out, and Superman is half-remembering something from between DC’s two big continuity rejiggerings?
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