Weekly Haul: November 11th

Batman and Robin #6 (DC Comics) Grant Morrison continues to do that thing Grant Morrison tends to do on low-pressure superhero comic books like this. Mainly, turning out perfectly serviceable genre stories that cover all of the expected bases, while also being exceedingly clever, addressing the audience both as readers of comics and people who like to know and think about comics in a general sense.

In this issue, the climax of the three-part “Revenge of the The Red Hood,” the late Bruce Wayne’s two protégés battle, but find their rivalry interrupted by a villain who renders their disagreements on crime-figthing philosophy moot, while simultaneously proving an example on which to test their philosophies.

It’s also the best Jason Todd story I’ve read since DC made the silly decision to bring him back to life. I don’t know that it justifies that decision, or makes all of those terrible Jason Todd stories between his fake-out return in “Hush” and this very issue worth while, but I’ll be damned if Morrison didn’t find ways to turn the character’s significant baggage into something appealing. (For example, Dick Grayson sums up Todd’s post resurrection Countdown career thusly: “…Jason’s fought aliens and been to parallel worlds. He’s died and been brought back to life. Don’t ever underestimate him.” It’s just the set-up for Damian to act arrogant and dismiss Todd while escaping from his bonds: “Well, he’s useless at tying knots.”

Also cool? Someone finally wrote a story about the grown-ups in Gotham City treating Jason Todd like the murderous villain he’s been written as, rather than as an annoyance on the peripheray of Batman and company’s radar.

Like the previous two issues, Philip Tan handles the art, and it is a credit to Morrison’s abilities that the art doesn’t destroy the book, given the gulf in quality.

Tan’s art is a bit different here, although stronger than it was. There’s still no real sense of setting or place, and some action scenes are handled poorly—the death blow administered to the bad guy, for example, or a character being shot five times being revealed in dialogue a few pages later, not when it was supposed to be occurring right before the readers eyes.

Jonathan Glapion is creidte as inker and Alex Sinclair as colorist, but I’m not sure what is going on with the art, really.

The Batman and Robin scenes seem to be color effects applied directly to pencils with no inks, whereas the the Red Hood and Scarlet scenes look penciled, inked and colored in the same way previous issues were.
When all of the characters start interacting, everything takes on the gauzy, soft, ink-less look of the Batman scenes.

It’s better, but it’s still bad work, and of a confoundingly amateur quality, given this is one of the American comic industry’s biggest publisher’s biggest books.

It’s not all Tan’s fault, of course. Someone hired the guy, approved his work, and put this issue together so that it looks half like a late ‘90s Wildstorm Universe book and half like a couple photo-referenced characters jumping around fields of color effects.

Batman says it himself in this panel…
…but note the writing in the “background.” What’s that say? “*colors flames in left bg”…? I don’t know. I tlooks like Tan penciled Batman and left instructions for the colorist to finish it up…?

And then there’s the very last page of the book:
I think it’s supposed to be a big, climactic splash panel, revealing original Batman Bruce Wayne’s body, which Dick Grayson has hidden away. But in addition to the lack of visual context leading up to the reveal, the way the page is laid out, it simply looks like it may be a piece of the next issue ad, which is just as big as the splash panel.

(And to get all nerdy for a second, if Dick Grayson has Batman’s body, whose buried in Batman’s grave (and whose skull is The Black Hand toting around in Blackest Night? The mystery of the multiple Batman bodies deepens!)


Booster Gold #26 (DC) One of the things that buggd me about all the wanton character death in the DCU starting around the time of Identity Crisis and Countdown to Infinite Crisis was how realatively little was actually being done with the deaths.

Like, if DC was going to start killing off characters, why not explore the dramatic possibilities of those deaths? Why not have some character development result or, at the very least, some special funeral issues? Instead, the deaths tended to be events leading to particular actions, but never any real stories or consequences. It felt like the editors and writers were swatting flies, not killing characters.

Well, writer/artist Dan Jurgens finally gives us the funeral of Ted “Blue Beetle II” Kord, so this issue of Booster Gold has that going for it. The time-travelling Booster was apparently so upset and so angry with everyone at his best friend’s superhero funeral that he couldn’t give a eulogy, and he goes back in time to try again.

It ain’t exactly great literature or anything, but it’s at least character-focused. It makes an effort, dammit, and I appreciate someone making an effort every now and then.

This is the Blackest Night tie-in issue of Booster Gold, which should come with a plastic ring of some sort (I got an orange). It will therefore probably be the best-selling issue of Booster Gold…perhaps of its entire run.

I’m not sure how great a job it does of showing off the specific virtues of the title in a way that might keep ring-hunting, Blakest Night completist readers, but it struck me as fairly reader-friendly.

The Blue Beetle back-up is done away with for the issue, with the character and page-count being absorbed by the lead feature, as Jaime Reyes joins Skeets, Booster and Supernova against Black Lantern Blue Beetle (Regular Beetle back-up artist Mike Norton provides some of the art).

Like last week’s Doom Patrol, the issue opens with a info dump of exposition narrated by Ted Kord, excused as the character’s memories being downloaded into the Black Lantern form of his corpse.

From there, Rip Hunter and Skeets search for the missing Booster, who is attending/re-attending Beetle’s funeral. Perhaps fighting a zombie douchebag version of his friend in the present will help give him closure?

I dug it.

(Hey, did you guys read the five-page preview of JSA All-Stars #1, the new series featuring all of the unpopular JSA characters in their own book, that was included in the back? What’d you think? It sure made me not want to read that series at all. I was pretty surprised by the artwork too. I liked it well enough, but it didn’t really look like the previous Freddie Williams III art I’ve seen at all).


Comic Book Comics #4 (Evil Twin Comics) Another excellent issue of Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey’s brilliant idea of presenting the history of comic books as a comic book.

This issue is chockfull of short pieces, including one on crime comics, another on Marvel Comics’ golden era, another on the career of R. Crumb and finally a piece on European comics.

The history of comics, like all history, can be boiled down to a series of conflicts, and this issue has plenty behind its cover of Crumb, Ditko, Kirby and Tintin and Snowy versus a gigantic Stan Lee monster. Mr. Crime vs. Mr. Coffee Nerves! Stan Lee vs. the State of New York! Ayn Rand vs. The Marvel Method! Galactus vs. God! Spider-Man vs. The Comics Code Authority seal! Crumb vs. himself!

This issue has pretty much everything you’d want, including things you never knew you wanted, like seeing the dozen different ways Dunlavey can add Stan Lee’s moustache, smile and glasses on to different types of people to make them completely disturbing, and the Le Soir Vole headline “Hitler = Awesome” (next to picture of Der Fuherer surfing).

This is one of those books where I could probably have spent the entire night just scanning random panels and typing, “Ha ha, look at this it’s so great!”

I limited myself to two.

First, here’s a friendly reminder that while comics may be more accepted and cool then they’ve ever been before in America, no one really reads the damn things anymore:
Yes, the very best-selling comics in North America today would have been abysmal, embarrassing failures and canceled immediately, back when comics were a real business.

And here’s Van Lente and Dunlavey boiling the entirety of Denny O’Neil, Neal Adams and company’s classic Green Lantern/Green Arrow comics down into just a portion of a single panel:
That entire run was exactly like that, for two whole trade paperbacks.

Anyway, if you like comics, you’ll love Comic Book Comics.
today's creators



....


...Wait, one more nerdy detail thing and I'll shut up about this week's comics. What color of the emotional spectrum is racism? Because the Racist Lanterns would destroy the Green Lantern Corps handily.

Another weird thing about that Hulk Vol. 2 trade?

It's rated "A," which Marvel indicates is material, "Appropriate for ages 9 and up."






I think their ratings system is sort of silly in general, but I was sort of surprised to see that "A" on the back of the back cover, instead of a "T+" ("Appropriate for most readers 13 and up, parents are advised that they may want to read before or with younger children") or "Parental Advisory" ("15+ years old similar to T+ but featuring more mature themes and/or more graphic imagery. Recommended for teen and adult readers").

I can't imagine Loeb and Cho were thinking about nine-year-old readers when doing that locker room scene at the top of this post, for example. (And man, what the fuck is up with Spider-Woman's gesture in that last panel? Is she stifling a laugh, or eating an invisible banana, or...?)

Hulk Vol. 2: Red and Green is a very strange collection.

I didn’t exactly have high hopes for Hulk Vol. 2: Red and Green. Jeph Loeb wrote it, and his entire bibliography tends to range from fair on the high end to The Worst Comics Ever Written on the low end. I had read the previous volume, and it wasn’t very good (Though not terrible either; I was actually sort of pleasantly surprised that it seemed to be Loeb writing in his Superman/Batman cameo-and-splash pages mode, instead of Mark Millar-but-even-dumber Ultimates mode).

So I didn’t expect Red and Green to be a good comic, but I was completely unprepared for how strange a comics work it is.

It make very little sense, and not merely in the usual this doesn’t obey the rules of good fiction or narrative structure or “Holy shit, they are paying this guy real actual American money for this?” sorts of ways, but even at the most basic, structural level, I was confused by the book.

The fine print on the title page says the trade collection I borrowed from the library “contains material originally published in magazine form as Hulk #7-9 and King-Size Hulk #1.” I only went back and checked that because the book seemed composed entirely of 8 to 11-page mini-stories, each set apart by a new cover image and brief introduction or title and ending with a cliffhanger or climactic event.

I thought that perhaps the chapters only seemed short given Loeb’s tendency to put as few panels as possible in his scripts, but when I went back and counted the pages of the segments, they did indeed turn out to be the length of back-ups, rather than 22-page feature stories.

I’m not sure how this book was put together exactly, or what its source material—those comics “originally published in magazine form”—actually looked like, and that ended up being just one more thing for me to puzzle over why wading through Red and Green’s 120 ponderous pages.

The volume opens with Loeb’s usual Chris Claremont-style first-person narration, from a character telling us, “My name is Bruce Banner. I am THE HULK.” He spends a few panels telling us all about the extraordinary security measures SHIELD has taken to keep him calm and unable to turn into the Hulk and/or escape his cell. He will narrate the first mini-story of the book, despite not being present during it (which he at least notes; his narration is his attempt to reconstruct the events).

I was shaking my head by the second page, during the course of which Loeb has Banner say: “THIS Hulk does things I never did. Like using a GUN. Which I’ve done.”

How can those three sentences be strung together like that by a grown-up? How can an editor or six read it, and a letter put it on the page? My mind was boggled and I was sputtering to myself on page two. I still had 118 to go.

In this story, the Red Hulk makes camp somewhere in the frozen north (despite a bunch of place name-dropping, Banner never tells us where “there” actually is), and is attacked by The Wendigo, a Marvel monster probably most famous for being in the issue of The Incredible Hulk in which Wolverine was first introduced.

Actually, Banner notes, this is a Wendigo, not The Wendigo. (This will be important later on). Where do they come from? Dr. Banner explains that they are: “Mystical creatures born out of humans who feast on…human flesh. CANNIBALISM.” (Yes, he actually, redundantly adds the all-caps “CANNIBALISM” there. The narration, by the way, is being written on a yellow legal pad by Banner, and appears in little narration boxes that look like squares of yellow legal pad paper with handwriting on them. That means Banner occasionally writes words in all-caps like that. And that he actually wrote out “…” before writing the words “human flesh” in the above sentence. This is only page three, and Red and Green has already become awesomely terrible. That is the secret of Loeb’s success, I guess).

The Red Hulk butchers the Wendigo with his Hulk-sized hunting knife and jumps away, leaving the pieces of his foe’s body to be devoured by a pack of Wendigos. In the last panel, the unidentified General Ross—who won’t appear again in this volume—sits at his desk looking grim, and the word “Soon…” appears before him. That is the end of the story.

And you know what’s weird? It’s drawn by Arthur fucking Adams, so it looks great. Adams is a nee plus ultra of monster drawing, and his Wendigos are incredibly detailed, scary and fluid. It’s kind of shocking that Marvel would hire Adams to draw one of their books, and then give him a script that everyone involved should be embarrassed to have their names attached to, and that he’d accept it. And then he’d proceed to draw the hell out of it.

The next story opens with Bruce Banner in Las Vegas suddenly, his escape or release from the prison in the last story not only unexplained but unmentioned, on the trail of the Red Hulk. He hears screams, and heads into a mythology-themed casino, and Adams draws this splash page:
Jesus, look at that. Look at the detail there…the differing expressions on the faces of the Cyclops statues, the care with which Adam lined up the slot machines, the little details like the arms of the dead hanging over the edges of the fountain, the number of panicked extras, the way the Wendigo on the far right casually tosses a slot machine with his right claw while reaching toward a terrified victim with his left.

This is a really nice splash page, made even nice still by the fact that too few artists even bother to draw enough to fill-up splash pages anymore. Later in the book, Frank Cho will squander double-page spreads on nothing more than a half-dozen characters posing in front of a blank background.

The entire Wendigos going ape-shit in Vegas storyline looks this great, by the way. The story isn’t just an insult to its readers, it’s a punch in their faces, but hell, Adams just about redeems it with his work.

How did this pack of Wendigos get to Vegas, which is, after all, quite a ways away from the frozen wastes of Canada? That goes unexplained too. Somehow they are in a Vegas casino, apparently passing Wendigo-ism on to their victims, and Bruce Banner, who is also somehow there, must stop them…which he attempts to do by randomly turning into the gray “Joe Fixit” version of the Hulk for some reason.

Then New York-based superhero Moon Knight randomly appears and starts fighting The Hulk. Then The Sentry and Ms. Marvel appear. Then the gray Hulk turns into the green hulk. Then he turns into this: It’s all completely random and aggressively, insultingly stupid, right up until the one and a half page appearance by Brother Voodoo, who simply magics everything back to normal, ending the storyline.

I did snicker at that Wendihulk splash, and, as I read it, I could kind of see what some people must find appealing about Loeb, beyond the fact that the brand of stupidity he writes is often so very funny. There’s certainly an appealing craziness to the Hulk just randomly becoming a Wendigo for a few pages, and calling himself the Wendihulk.

But were all these other pages really worth that one, single-image burst of zaniness? The rest of the story didn’t really have anything to offer aside from Adams’ always appealing line work.

More representative are pages like this—
—in which Loeb writes Moon Knight, Marvel’s off-brand Batman, and The Sentry, Marvel’s off-brand Superman, as if they were Batman and Superman, and even titled the story “World’s Finest,” just in case the gag weren’t obvious enough.

That’s the end of that storyline, and Arthur Adams’ involvement with the book. He’s replaced by another exceedingly talented artist, Frank Cho, and Loeb seems to have written a storyline specifically for Cho—it consists of nothing more than random Marvel superheroines fighting the Red Hulk, giving Cho the opportunity to draw just pages and pages of asses.

There’s an eight-page segment that recounts the Red Hulk vs. She-Hulk scene from the previous volume, this time from Shulkie’s point-of-view. It ends with the words “The Beginning…”

The next chapter finds She-Hulk calling superheroines from a list and trying to recruit them for an all-girl assault on the Red Hulk. Why is she only calling women? Well, because Cho likes drawing women. There’s no in-story reason given, because it’s not really a story…it’s just Cho drawing women, with Loeb writing terrible dialogue over the pictures.

The only two she can successfully recruit are Valkyrie and Thundra, shown here with SHIELD Deputy Director Maria Hill, who, it turns out, is actually a hobbit: After She-Hulk declares “Let’s go spank some red ass…” on a full-page splash, the trio track down the Red Hulk and engage in a violent battle full of gross dialogue. Then, just as the Hulk has them on the ropes, all the random heroines that all turned She-Hulk down earlier all appear.

Spider-Woman! Invisible Woman! She-Hulk! Tigra! Even Hellcat and Black Widow, who can’t possibly add anything! Why did Invisible Woman leave the rest of her rather powerful teammates to come alone? Because they’re boys, duh!

Here is some more actual dialogue that Jeph Loeb was paid to write:

"A waffle house of witches. Which one of you puts on the waitress uniform-- --and serves me? GOOD THING I BROUGHT MY APPETITE!"

They defeat the Hulk, and proceed to spend the night waiting for him to revert back to whoever he is when he’s not the Red Hulk. He never does, and eventually wakes up, grabs Thundra, jumps away with her, recruits her for something, and then the story ends.

It’s followed by one more, much shorter piece, “The Death and Life of The Abomination,” which is a recap of the Abomination’s fictional history, presented as a report from an unseen General Ross and illustrated by the great Herb Trimpe.

So the creative roster for this book? Jeph Loeb. Arthur Adams. Frank Cho. Herb Trimpe. One of those guys doesn’t seem to belong on that list, and the reason why isn’t simply that he’s not an artist.



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RELATED: Here’s a typical “look at all those asses” panel from Cho’s story:
I like the fact that Storm says she lost her phone. No wonder! Where would she put a cell phone? Did she try putting it in her pocket, forgetting that she wasn’t even wearing pants, and thus it just fell to the ground before she flew away?

Oh yeah, in this week's issue of Batman: Unseen, Batman totally

grabs a naked, greased dude's penis.

No, of course I'm not making that up. Okay, so the villain in Unseen is a new mad scientist type character who has developed a serum that makes him invisible.

The chemical doesn't affect clothing, however, so obviously he needs to be naked in order to sneak up on victims, right?

And he needs to be greased because...well, he probably doesn't need to be greased. He may just be worried about chafing. But being greasy sure comes in handy when someone tries to grab him.

In the climax of Unseen #3, Batman stops the invisible killer while he's attempting to claim another victim, and the two fight. At one point, Batman takes a flying tackle at him, and the pair tumble down the stairs:
And Batman notices that he's naked. How does Batman, master detective that he is, know that the invisible man is naked? Batman's wearing gloves and is covered ear point to cape tip in his own clothing (save for a bit around the mouth). So, clearly, Batman must have inadvertently touched his enemy in a way that made it clear that the invisible man was indeed naked.

Therefore, Batman totally grabbed a naked, greased dude's penis.

I can't decide—

Is Namor's X-Men costume completely awesome, or is it actually just awesomely terrible?

I think he always looks good in black and/or blue, and the fish-scale looking material is nice, although I'm having some trouble with the fact that the pans make it look as if he's wearing leather chaps.

The crux of my inability to figure out if I actually love or hate the new costume are the little X-shapes at the ankles of his chaps—on the one hand, it seems like crass over-marketing, but on the other hand, it's totally sweet how the bottom of the X forms a little space from which his little ankle wings can protrude from.

I hope you guys like linkblogging because that's all you get tonight:

I have a short review of Drunk, an anthology of stories about drinking and bars by Las Vegas creators. You can read it here (And if you're in Vegas, you can check out a bunch of the art from the book here).

The above is from "A Vulgar Display of Power" written by Alex Getchell and drawn by Laurenn McCubbin, in which a young man gets in a fight with "this big townie asshole." The above is my favorite sequence; he's trying to do a martial arts maneuver in which he grabs the big townie asshole by the shirt and throws him over his hip to the floor, but, instead, something rather awkward occurs.

This is the very next panel on the next page:
I really like the way McCubbin mixes photo-referenced art with more traditional cartoon vocabulary, like the ear steam.


—I really enjoyed Andrew Weiss' "Nobody's Favorite" entry on Crucifer, a vampire character from John Byrne and Chris Claremont's "Tenth Circle" arc of JLA. I think I bowed out of that storyline before they even got around to introducing Crucifer that story was so bad, but I kind of regret it—I don't get to enjoy making-fun-of-Crucifer jokes as much I might have if I had read the whole "Tenth Circle" all the way through.

That storyline still strikes me as sort of significant though, as it was the first time I realized that my then-favorite DC super-title could, in fact, be so bad I wouldn't even want to read it anymore, and that this John Byre and this Chris Claremont character may not in fact be the comic book super-geniuses their reputations within comics fandom might lead one to believe (I hadn't read any of their classic Marvel work at that point, and knew their reputations better than their work).

Anyway, Crucifer! Go read that post! And tell me, how is it that there hasn't been a band named Crucifer before Byrne used that name for a vampire with a funny haircut?


—You know how much I like Kelley Jones, right? Well I enjoyed reading Ken Parille's write-up of the many virtues of Jones' Batman: Unseen. I think he explains Jones' awesomeness quite well, with lots of examples, and he makes special note of the coloring, something I think I've appreciated without even really noticing (if that makes any sense). Parille later had another post on the subject of Unseen, this one focusing on #3's cover.


—Check out this gorgeously illustrated version of an old traditional murder ballad, "On the Banks of the Ohio." It's not often I see the name of my home state used in relation to murder ballads. (Via Tom Spurgeon).

(Later-than-usual) Weekly Haul: November 4th

Assault on New Olympus #1 (Marvel Comics) Hey, it’s an issue of Incredible Hercules, but instead of just calling it Incredible Hercules, Marvel gave it its own weird, hard to read title, with “Assault On New” across the top in small font, and “OLYMPUS” running top to bottom all gigantic-like down the right side of the page.

There’s a 32-page story by the regular Inc Herc writing team, continuing plot threads from their title, as Hera prepares to unleash an extinction event foreshadowed previously, and Hercules finds kinda-sorta-but-not-really-married Peter Parker dating his wife Hebe, leading to Hercules and Spider-Man fighting for about 20 pages (which is pretty awesome, by the way).

There’s also a six-page Agents of Atlas back-up story by Jeff Parker and Gabriel Hardman that flows directly out of the two-part X-Men Vs. Agents of Atlas miniseries so, um, good luck keeping track of the Agents, I guess.

It all seems needlessly complex to me, like whatever sales boost comes form putting a “#1” on the cover of a comic book isn’t really worth making the story so hard to follow around the comics rack. Presumably it will be a little easier to keep track of in trade form.

Oh, by the way, Hardman’s version of Greek octopus god Phorcys? Awesome.


Batman: Unseen #3 (DC Comics) You know, if Batman just used the heat-vision lenses in his cowl, fighting an invisible man really wouldn’t give him much trouble. Of course, then we would have been denied artist Kelley Jones’ depiction of Batman getting kicked around by an unseen foe for about eight pages. You know what to expect by the half-way point of this miniseries, right? A good-old fashioned Batman story with plenty of opportunities for Jones to demonstrate his skills, including a bravura page during which a pair of black leather gloves breaks into a couple’s house and murders a woman.


Deadpool Team-Up #899 (Marvel) The Merc with the Mouth and the Herc who also has a mouth are shown hoisting mugs of beer while lounging atop their fallen rivals Wolverine and Thor on Humberto Ramos’ cover, but their actual adversaries within are Arcade, the assassin with the most overhead in the Marvel Universe, and Nightmare, who has just got done reading one of those Starman omnibi and though The Shade dressed super-cool.

It’s written by Fred Van Lente, who co-writes The Incredible Hercules (and had a short story in Deadpool #900, and it’s therefore pretty good stuff—Van Lente can do superhero action comedy with the best of ‘em at this point, and he proves it writing a Herc book month-in and month-out.

It’s about a standard a formula for a done-in-one Marvel superhero team-up as you could imagine, with the pair meeting up, fighting, realizing they’re the pawns of their two foes, and then defeating them by working together.

Deadpool’s antics and pool of gags have gotten a tad tiring for me personally—on account of having spent so much time with Deadpool comics recently—but Van Lente has some pretty inventive riffs on them, particularly the two dueling voices in ‘pool’s head.

Artist Dalibor Talajic draws a huge, beefy, fuzzy Hercules with a very classic, very Greek looking face—most of the panels with the big guy in them just sing. Talajic’s art is actually all around very nice. The characters have a lot of detail and lean toward realism, but retain a hand-drawn look and move through comic book environments, and thus avoid the slick, sickly “house” look of too many Marvel comics. (You can see five unlettered pages of the book here for a better idea of what Talajic’s art looks like than my poor description of same).


Doom Patrol #4 (DC) The latest attempt at a Doom Patrol revival lasted a whole three issues before needing a fill-in artist and crossing over into a company-wide event (To be fair to the regular at team, however, the two may be related).

Is this a bad thing? Well, I’m pretty sure it won’t be from where DC’s sitting, once they tally up the sales. The copy I bought was the last one on the rack at my local shop (although they did have more by the register and a stack to refill the rack with), and my purchase of it got me a big, fat yellow plastic ring—just like the one Sinestro wears!—which oughta help drive sales (Mine will be something my grand-nieces and nephews get left to them in my will, and be very disappointed in the rest of their lives—“Why did Uncle Caleb have all this weird plastic jewelry? And why did he think it would be valuable?”)

I can’t imagine it will still be a good thing in a couple more issues though, as you’re going to either have to be a reader of a certain age (or a certain attraction to your shop’s back-issue bins) to find the contents all that interesting. The plot here isn’t exactly something that seems likely to appeal to new readers, which is presumably the sort of reader issue #4 of a brand-new series wants.

If you’ve read any of the “Blackest Night” branded books, then you know the drill here. Dead characters return to life as zombies in Black Lantern uniforms and start making fun of the heroes in an attempt to stir their emotions. Here the dead characters are from a previous incarnation of the Doom Patrol (the second, I think), all of whom were killed off around the time of DC’s 1988-1989 Invasion! line-wide cross-over story.

Writer Keith Giffen kicks off the issue with a three-page illustrated Wikipedia entry on the Doom Patrol of the eighties to prep readers for the next 18 or so pages, but if the point of the exercise is to work up the emotions of the readers, the story might have benefited from a different approach (Me, I just read a long thinking, “Oh Niles Caulder’s had a wife I never heard of who was also a superhero, and I guess she has some powers? Hey, there was another guy named Tempest before Aqualad used that codename, apparently.”)

The pencil art Justiniano, and it’s pretty decent, although less detailed and inventively arranged on the page than most of his early work. The art seemed to have a little more life than it’s had in previous issues, but I think this is probably where I get off. I’ll just hope they collect the (still) excellent Giffen/DeMatteis/Maguire Metal Men back-ups in trade eventually.


Secret Six #15 (DC) I like this title because I like pencil artist Nicola Scott, I like writer Gail Simone and I like a couple of the half-dozen characters ensemble cast. This fifteenth issue of the series has a different artist, a different writer and only features a single member of the cast.

As an issue Secret Six therefore, it’s fairly awful, and fails to meet some of the basic requirements of being an issue of Secret Six. As a Deadshot one-shot, however, it’s not bad at all.

That’s due mostly to the presence of John Ostrander, the long-time DC who probably knows the character better than anyone, on account of having written him for so long on Suicide Squad. If you want a Deadshot character piece, which folds his origin into his current status quo, then you’re going to want Ostrander writing it.

The art is by Jim Calafiore, whose work I can’t appreciate it. He knows how to design a comics page and move a reader’s eyes, so I realize that alone puts him a step or two ahead of some of DC’s worst artists, but I just don’t like looking at his work at all. I don’t like his character design (particularly the weird things he does with limbs), and I generally try to avoid his work. (Which isn’t to say he’s a bad artist, just that he’s an artist I don’t like).

I tried pondering what others see in his work that I might be missing, given that how much work DC gives him (including at least a couple issues of an upcoming Secret Six storyline), and the best I can come up with is that he must work very fast (which explains why editors call on him so often) and that there’s a weirdness to his art that perhaps reflects the intended tone of comics like this (in which a killer struggles with his urges to shoot everyone he sees to death).

To end on a positive note, I think this is the best of Dan LuVisi’s covers so far. It’s his sixth, and too often he seems to simply pick a single character to spotlight, and then render in a really odd way. Here, the one-character spotlight is appropriate, since the comic is all about this one character to the exclusion of the rest of the cast, and his Deadshot is rendered perfectly well. I’m not a fan of this sort of digital work, but it’s nice enough looking, and I could certainly see kids thinking it looks totally badass.


X-Men Vs. Agents of Atlas #2 (Marvel) Wow, what a completely lousy cover this book has. Adi Granov has drawn six fairly random characters engaged in some form of combat with one another. If you read AoA already, you can probably figure out the guy in the background is supposed to be Jimmy Woo (by process of elimination anyway), and you can probably figure out the rest of the characters, although I’m not sure why you’d even be tempted to pick up and flip through a book with such a boring, prosaic cover—Namora looks bored while fighting the X-Men, and if actually fighting the X-Men is so goddam boring, what’s reading about fighting the X-Men going to be like? Will you actually fall asleep, as Colossus has here?

The weakness of Granov’s reader-repelling cover was made all the more apparent when I got to pages two and three, which are a double-page spread in which—let’s see—about a dozen X-Men, including the ones from the movies and cartoons, rush into battle against a killer robot, a gorilla with a jetpack, a bunch of warrior monks, and a lady who looks like Namor with big tits.

It’s a very exciting image, one with enough information in it that I stopped reading just to look more closely at all the X-Men rushing into it from the left and pick them out. Why on earth is Marvel trying to sell this book with some lazy pin-up art on the cover instead of hinting at how exciting the interiors are?

It used to be that the covers were always more exciting than the contents of the comics, that publisher’s went out of their way to hype up the comics by giving them bold, mind-blowing cover images that demanded you stop and look at them, if not pick them up and buy them.

I wouldn’t have even seen this comic on the rack; luckily I have a pull-list at my shop, so someone physically handed it to me. (The X-Men also fight a dragon in this issue. Doesn’t “The X-Men fighting a fucking dragon!” sound like the sort of thing that might move a couple extra comics? (If it sounds like I’m being too hard on Granov, I should note Humberto Ramos’ variant cover is just as bad, if not worse. His characters look a little more enthusiastic to be on the cover, but he doesn’t even bother to put Wolverine on it, which is, like, step #1 on an X-Men cover, isn’t it?)

The interiors are pretty predictable, as writer Jeff Parker continues with the fight and then make-up portions of the Marvel team-up formula, but there are some fun moments in the specifics of the fighting (I particularly liked Gorilla Man’s assessment of Wolverine’s strength, for example).

After all the X-Men fighting, there’s an eight-page prologue to the story that continues in the back-up of Assault On New Olympus #1, and artist Gabriel Hardman does a hell of a job on it. I loved his giant statue of Aphrodite as an avatar of the real thing.

Another Ghotsbusters comics project

I recently took a look at Tokyopop’s efforts to bring The Ghostbusters to comics, via the so-so 2008 anthology Ghost Busted, so I thought I’d see if other publishers had fared any better.

IDW Publishing took their turn with Ghostbusters: The Other Side, a four-issue miniseries that launch late last year and was collected into a trade paperback back in May.

It’s a more organized, accessible and straightforward effort than Tokyopop’s—rather than a multi-team anthology, it’s a single story by a single creative team. It’s story and art are far weaker than the strongest stories in Ghost Busted, but they’re also far stronger than the weakest story in Ghost Busted. So if Tokyopop’s effort was a mixed bag, IDW’s is at least consistently mediocre.

Artist Tom Nguyen, who is somewhat unevenly assisted on inks by Drew Geraci and John Alderink, does a pretty fine job on the character design of the principals though. Here are the four main characters:
As with the various Tokyopop artists, Nguyen seems to be avoiding using either the likenesses of Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and the other actors from the movies or the character designs form the cartoon series.

The designs seem to be of the movie characters, but not the actors, if that makes sense.

The above panel may not be the best example of each, but it was the best one of all four (and I didn’t wanna waste too much time scanning). Ray, Peter and Egon are all easy to distinguish from one another, despite their similarities.

Ray has big ears, slightly puffy cheeks, mussed, fikle hair and a goofy, boyish look, reflecting his often over-eager attitude.

Peter’s hair is longer and pushed back, he’s either starting to bald or has a dramatic widow’s peak, and he often has the half-sleepy expression of Bill Murray, if not Bill Murray’s actual facial features.

Egon’s got glasses to distinguish him, but beyond that Nguyen gives him spiky hair and thing, pointed facial features.

His art may lack some of the personality of Maximo V. Lorenzo or Chrissy Delk in general, but his main character designs have personality to spare.

The rest of the characters that appear in the book are infinitely more blandly designed, but none are really given any personalities by the story anyway—they’re merely props for the Ghostbusters to interact with.

Writer Keith Champagne draws on the well-established characters from the films to power his narrative—Peter’s sarcastic, Ray’s enthusiastic, Egon’s smart, Winston is personality-free—and the story seems positioned as a third movie, although the specifics of the plot seem more like one of the one-off little adventures the team was always having on the cartoon show.

Apparently a life of crime can lead to an afterlife of crime, and some of America’s most notorious gangsters have continued to devote themselves to organized crime now that they’re ghosts.

Their new racket is smuggling souls from Purgatory back to the land of the living, and when the Ghostbusters try to bust them, they all end up dead and on the, um, other side (hence the title). Teamed up with some equally famous crime-fighters, they have to bust ghosts while themselves little more than ghosts.

It’s not bad work at all, and definitely has its moments, but it’s certainly not great comics, and seems sub-par compared to the films it’s based on…and even many of the cartoons that were based on those films.

Part of the problem may simply be that it’s going to take either an extremely skilled cartoonist or creative team to be able to replicate the particular charms of the half-dozen or so actors who originally brought the characters to life in addition to continuing the premise and extending it into a horror/comedy/adventure of equal size and shape. But spending so much attention on various dead historical figures instead of the protagonists certainly didn’t help any, nor did IDW’s presentation.

The Other Side is thoroughly decent, cheap, time-wasting entertainment, but the painted, off-model covers on $4, 22-page books or, in this particular case, on an $18 trade with a fancy raised logo tries telegraphs a better, more important work. It’s probably not fair to single The Other Side and IDW out for this here, as it’s a problem among a lot of comics and publishers these days—presenting mediocre entertainment as respectable art often ill-serves the material, making it seem all the more disappointing.

In other words, a $12, pulpy, paper-paper stock trade is probably what The Other Side deserves; the glossy paper and “art gallery” of shitty covers and black and white versions of certain unimpressive pages just makes the trade collection seem arrogant. That would be fine…provided it had a reason to be arrogant. It doesn’t.


…


Yes, I know I am projecting human emotions into an inanimate trade paperback collection. Shut up.

Ivan Reis' Scarecrow

Last Wednesday's Blackest Night #4 featured a five-panel appearance by one of my favorite comic book characters, The Scarecrow:
Geoff Johns must be rather fond of the character too, as he gave him a similar cameo in his last big ring-related cross-over story, "The Sinestro Corps War" as well. I discussed my affection for the Scarecrow at probably way-too great length at the beginning of 2007's Scarecrow Week, but if you weren't reading back then, I'll simply restate that one of the things I like so much about the character is how visually versatile he is.

Like Batman himself, The Scarecrow can look completely different from artist to artist, and yet still look "right." Because his costume is simply a homemade scarecrow costume, there's virtually no wrong way to draw him, and artists therefore have a pretty free hand when it comes to putting this classic Batman villain down on paper.

Anyway, that's Reis' version above.

What do you guys think? I'm not terribly fond of it, myself. It looks a little too much like a realistic version of the the later Batman: The Animated Series costume...and are those tennis shoes on his feet? That's the least scary type of footwear of all!

I do like seeing Black Lantern Azrael trying to scare him by saying "Rraarrrr!" like a little kid making a dinosaur roar, though. And the "Aiiieee" scream in the last panel. Does anyone ever scream "Aiiieee" outside of a comic book...?

One more Deadpool story arc...

While I was putting together that really long post about Deadpool a couple weeks ago, the one in which I was trying read my way towards an explanation as to why the character was so incredibly popular all of a sudden, I looked to see what Deadpool trades were available at the library.

None, it turned out.

Oh, they had three trades featuring Deadpool in some capacity, but no collections of the series, which seemed rather odd. A quick search on Amazon reveals plenty of trades to choose from, with more coming up in the next few months. Maybe Columbus just doesn’t have many Deadpool fans around? At least not any that bug their local libraries to order trades for them?

Of the three they had, there was Ultimate Spider-Man Vol. 16: Deadpool, in which Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley introduced the Ultimate Deadpool in a not-very-interesting story pitting him against Spider-Man and the X-Men, Wolverine/Deadpool: Weapon X, Frank Tieri and Sean Chen’s comics featuring the pair, and, finally, Wolverine Origins: Deadpool.

That’s the one I remember Tucker Stone speaking fairly highly of at the time it was being released in serial comic book format, so I took it out to give it a looksee.

It’s actually two story arcs. The first, “The Deep End,” is by Daniel Way and Steve Dillon, and it is fantastic. It’s followed by a two-issue story arc entitled “Son of an X” by Way and artist Stephen Segovia and tells the origin of Daken, Wolverine’s son with bad hair and worse tattoos.

The second story is no damn good, and its presence kind of ruins the whole book. But that first story? The first issue/chapter begins with Wolverine finding a bomb stuffed into a roast duck in the Chinese restaurant he’s eating at, and ends with someone dropping a piano on the ol’ Canucklehead’s head.

Deadpool’s attempts to kill Wolverine seesaw between typical for such comics high-tech, sci fi weaponry and things he saw in a Warner Brothers cartoon. Way’s not the first writer to play Deadpool as some sort of Loony Tunes character—Buddy Scalera put him in the position of Wile E. Coyote in Deadpool #56—but Way certainly does a good job of it.

Both Deadpool and Wolverine have healing factors that make them impervious to any mortal harm, so, not unlike cartoon characters, they heal after each explosion they’re caught in, and come back for more punishment.

Way also frequently lets us inside Deadpool’s head, and it’s clear he sees the conflict as something out of a cartoon, with Wolverine appearing in his mind’s eyes as a skinny guy in a baggy costume with sporks for claws and, later, as a rabbit in a Wolverine costume.

Then there’s the simple fact that the story is, like a Roadrunner or Tom and Jerry cartoon, almost completely devoted to traps and combat. What little story there is doesn’t intrude into the narrative until about halfway through the fourth issue of a five-issue story arc.

The rest of the story? It’s just Deadpool subjecting Wolverine to one deadly trap after another, forcing him to run a gauntlet of meticulously orchestrated violence until he finally “kills” him and takes the already-healing body to a place that will keep him dead (I’m a little lost on the science of killing Wolverine at this point, but Deadpool’s plan is to keep him chained underwater indefinitely—if you left Wolverine underwater like that for ten years, would he come back to life once he could breathe again?)

That probably doesn’t sound all that appealing, and I would have been horribly frustrated with the story if I was reading it in 22-page installments over the course of five months, but it’s enormous fun in one big, chunk like this—a perfectly accessible, super-straightforward action comic that plays to both of its leads’ strengths with just enough eleventh hour plot revelation to justify all the slapstick violence that precedes it as a necessary part of the story.

That story? Well, it’s more of whatever the hell’s going on in Wolverine: Origins, a title that at least in theory sounds interesting, but seems to deal with Wolverine chasing around his three-clawed, mohawk-ed son and an always off-panel wolf man. Characters that hadn’t appeared in the first eighty-some pages of the story simply walk onto the scene at the climax of “Deep End,” and I’m not sure how one even makes sense of them without having read previous collected volumes (I read enough Marvel promotional material that I have a general sense of what’s going on in the title and who’s who, but if I didn’t I imagine I’d be pretty frustrated with the way it plays out).

The reason the story works as well as it does comes down to the simple fact that Steve Dillon draws it. Dillon draws absolutely perfect comics, and you could take almost all the words out of this thing and still be able to follow the action perfectly well. In fact, most of the good parts come from the drawings, from the perfect clarity with which Dillon renders a character’s expression or stages a transition between two panels.

How good is Steve Dillon? Let’s put it this way. He makes Daken look cool. That is no easy task, since Daken looks like this:

Once “The Deep End” ends, this is the next thing that confronts a reader:
It’s a terrible Greg Land image, in which Wolverine doesn’t look like the Wolverine in the preceding 100 pages, Daken doesn’t look anything like the Daken of the preceding 100 pages and he seems to be missing his third claw.

That’s the awful cover of the first issue of a two-part story drawn by Stephen Segovia, whose art looks so much like Leinil Yu’s I had to check and make certain it wasn’t.

“Son of an X” follows Wolverine as he carries his now-in-a-coma son Daken to a secret military compound only he knows exists, and there he finds some monsters created by mad medical science who want revenge on him. The story flashes back to both Wolverine being a total cock during WWII, when he guarded the compound and made sure none of the interred Japanese human guinea pigs escaped, and to Daken’s secret origin. Apparently, he was born with his haircut, as he had it even as a baby.

As I mentioned, it’s not very good, and it is particularly jarring following “The Deep End.” The shift in art style is so drastic that the characters don’t even look like the same people, making it harder still to care about what these two monstrously unlikable guys with claws were up to in their flashbacks. I was sort of rooting for the monsters, but our hero Wolverine kills them all, out of mercy.

If you’re curious about what so many people seem to see in this Deadpool character, this Wolverine: Origins trade isn’t a bad way to go. At $20, it’s probably a pretty expensive curiosity satiate-er—Deadpool #900 is a more economical choice—but it’s definitely worth a borrow from your local library.

Like, Friday night. Or maybe Saturday? Definitely Sunday.

Weekly Haul: October 28th

Batman: The Brave and the Bold #10 (DC Comics) In this issue, Batman grows into a gigantic green, fire-breathing kaiju and tries to smash a prison full of convicted criminals. It’s up to The Atom to get really big and punch him in the face until Green Arrow can find the antidote. That is a very good plot for a comic book right there.


Blackest Night #4 (DC) When I first noticed Geoff Johns’ tendency to lionize the character of Hal Jordan, it was kind of eye-rolling (No way he punches Batman out like he did in Rebirth!) Then it got pretty annoying. Then it got kind of hilarious. Now I think it may be moving beyond hilarious and into embarrassing.

“The only one of us who didn’t worry about fitting in was Hal,” The Flash Barry Allen says to Mera and Ray “The Atom” Palmer at one point in this issue, trying to explain that the Justice League was made of outsiders. “He let the rest of the world fit in around him.”

Yeesh. The Flash then goes on to explain that the only hope the heroes of earth have is to ask themselves what Hal Jordan would do: “So right now, God help me for saying it, and if you ever tell him I’ll deny it, we need to act a little more like Hal. We need to run in, take charge and kick ass like we were born to.” (That’s all I’m going to quote because the next two lines are far too mortifying to type, even for the purposes of mocking).

This latest instance of characterizing Hal Jordan by everyone talking about how awesome he is aside, this fourth chapter was the one where the miniseries really started to feel like a big DC crossover, as it’s just packed with superheroes, supervillains and the undead, Black Lantern versions of both attacking.

There are some pretty clunky lines, there’s some senseless gore (Ray Palmer destroys the first Atom by growing inside him and ripping him apart), and there’s some downright silly character juggling here and there (particularly getting the Golden Age Atom and all three of his legacy versions in the same place at the same time), but if you like DC superheroes as much as I do, there’s no denying it’s also an absolute blast.

Unfortunately, it’s only 25 pages for $3.99. What’s up with that, DC? Why are you guys trying to pull a Marvel here?


Green Lantern #47 (DC) Hal Jordan wasn’t in this week’s issue of Blackest Night, because he was off in outer space, trying to assemble a new Corps featuring a member of each color. So far, he’s got a yellow lantern (Sinestro), a pink one (Carol Ferris) and an indigo one (Indigo-1). They fight a couple of Black Lanterns. Meanwhile, the red lantern Atrocitus goes after orange lantern Larfleeze.

It’s really nicely drawn by Dough Mahnke and Christian Alamy, although it consists of little more than variously colored versions of Green Lanterns fighting—sometimes just bickering, other times tearing one another apart.


Incredible Hercules #137 (Marvel Comics) I’m not 100% certain, but I do believe Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente ended this issue with a full-page splash page that simultaneously serves as an homage to John Romita and makes fun of Chris Claremont. This is the conclusion of the Amadeus Cho storyline that’s been alternating with the Thorcules storyline, and it’s naturally not quite as hilarious as the previous issue, but it does feature some pay-off of various plot stands that have been running through the book since it’s existences, some of which have been running through the book so subtly I didn’t always realize they were even there all along.


King City #1 (Image Comics) As you may have noticed over if you’ve been reading for very long, I’m a real cheapskate when it comes to buying comics, so I was a little surprised that I finally broke down and spent $2.99 on this. I’ve already read and own the contents of this comic, in the original manga-sized digest format that Tokyopop published it in, but when I saw how cool the cover for the second issue was, I decided maybe I should invest in rereading King City, especially given the bigger, squarer magazine-like format. I really dug King City the first time around, and I like it even better like this, I think.


Wolverine Art Appreciation (Marvel) Speaking of comics I really didn’t need to buy, here’s a $3.99 collection of all seventeen (17) “Wolverine Art Appreciation Month” variant covers form March of this year. What can I say? A lot of those covers were extremely cool—Paolo Rivera’s Wolverines-playing-poker remains a favorite—and this seemed the best way to get ‘em all at once.

I appreciate Marvel’s attempt to add value to the project through the format, although it’s not the collection of these I would have wanted if I was allowed to design my own version.

Most of the covers appear as full-page splashes on the right-hand side of the book, while the facing page contains a little art lesson about the artist or style being paid homage to, some quotes from the artists about working on the various pieces and a little biographical information about each.

It’s definitely interesting reading, but it’s hardly worth $4, and, unfortunately, some of the covers are presented as much smaller than the full-page presentation that most of them have. I would have preferred a lot more pages for this much money, and it might have been a neat idea to fill it out with other, past Wolverine covers and artwork.

Oh, and if you see this in your shop, you should at least pick it up and feel it. The covers seem to have been printed on wallpaper. I certainly like the way the book feels; I’ve been absently petting it off and on all afternoon.

Note: I am still kinda liking Incarnate

Radical Comics’ Incarnate #2 was released earlier in the month, on October 6, but I just wanted to take a minute to point out I’m continuing to enjoy it a lot more than I expected to prior to actually trying it.

The involvement of a kinda sorta celebrity, the weird tangle of credits, the multiple covers (many of which don’t reflect the contents at all)…on paper, Incarnate seemed to suggest one of the many ambitious Virgin Comics miniseries, the bulk of which ended up being pretty terrible.

But, um, also on paper…like, the paper it was actually published on? Incarnate is really not bad at all.

I like the $4.99-for-56-pages format and the fact that it has a spine like DC’s old prestige format books (the end result being you can stand it on a bookshelf with trade paperbacks if you want, making it a more versatile format to live with once you’re done reading it and have to find a home in your home for it). I like all the ads being house ads, and appearing only in the back, after the comic itself is done (Aside: How is it that Radical can afford to publish so much comic for so cheaply, and to not sell any advertising, whereas DC and Marvel can’t? Or is it just that the two biggest publishers in the direct market don’t want to, more than can’t?)

I also really like the colors, something I tended to not even notice until the last few years, when computer coloring effects got so completely out of control that I can barely stand to read many books, and the default mode for whole lines of comics tends to be dark, muddy and tightly photo-referenced.

The art in this book, which seems to be provided manga studio style given the strange credits (a penciller, an inker, a colorist and three credited “art assistants”), is nice and flat, and the design is simplified and cartoony, and the coloring works with that.

Despite the Jo Chen cover, this insides of this are a comic book that looks like a comic book. Random panels wouldn’t, couldn’t be mistaken for stills from videogames or album cover art.

The story is moving extremely quickly, and parts of this issue seemed to be setting up a sort of ongoing premise, so I’m somewhat confused by the fact that it’s actually two-thirds over…unless writer/artist Nick Simmons and Radical are planning on the series of mini-series model.

The character Mot, a “revenant” (which here is a sort of immortal, vampiric creature) and his friend have been captured and fitted with special obedience collars fashioned from the bones of other revenants (since only revenants can hurt and kill other revenants). They are both under the control of a rich young spoiled blond teenager, who forces Mot to attend her school with her and act as her bodyguard.

Also, she might have a crush on him. And also, he might be attracted to her, despite denying it.

See? Not a bad premise for, say, a manga series.

In this issue, the revenants are much further differentiated from vampires than they seemed to be last time around. There’s a goth-punk female one who sprouts six big black bird wings from her black, another which has all kinds of insect-like body-parts hidden beneath his clothes and skin, and one named Anubis who transforms into something like this:

It’s a pretty neat design, one that looks like what one would expect a character named Anubis to look like, but it simultaneously looks unlike any version I’ve seen before. (Note the ditch he digs with Mot’s face as drags it around the ground above).

Even Mot himself seems to conceal a more alien, monster form:

And it's two-thirds over, so it only has to stay good for about another fifty-some pages!

The ineffable Abraham Lincoln/Uncle Sam brawl

This is the cover of The Second Part of the Secret History of The Ineffables, a self-published comic book from Craig Bogart, a local comics creator and member of the Panel collective:
Who are The Ineffables? Well, you can find out pretty much everything you need to know here on Bogart’s website, under “Who are the Ineffables?” They’re a sort of Fantastic Four/Challengers of the Unknown science and exploration superhero team, and they defend the mysterious city of Mystery City.

Among there members are Mason, some sort of stone…alien…man…thing that looks like one of those things on Easter Island heads climbed out of the ground to reveal a whole body, and then proceeded to go on adventures.

Another member is Abraham Lincoln who, as Bogart’s site explains, “faked his death to investigate a Confederate plot involving the Fountain of Youth, he has rejoined The Ineffables as the world's toughest patriotic comic character!”

Does that sound awesome? If so, you and I concur on what makes for awesome comics, so please read on. If not, you may want to skip this post, as I’m just going to go on pointing at things in this comic and saying, “Isn’t this awesome?”

As the title indicates, this comic is the second part of a story about the team’s “secret history,” and while I’ve read some earlier issues of the series a few years back, I did not read the first part of the secret history story.

And, believe it or not, it doesn’t really matter all that much. This was a completely accessible and enjoyable single issue of a superhero comic that seems to have been created—consciously or unconsciously—with the idea that it may be someone’s first exposure to the Bogart’s comics world.

Accessible, new-reader friendly superhero comics that stand on their own as complete works, whether they are part of a larger, ongoing narrative or not—a radical concept, I know.

It opens with a Justice League-like superhero team team known as The League of Protagonist battling Professor Iniquity on his satellite base, and even the mighty Mister Protein and Emasculatra can’t seem to fight their way through his secret weapon.

Which means Lincoln has to take off his shirt:

He was booted off the team shortly after that, having proved he was maybe a little too hardcore, a story he explains to a bartender while throwing back drinks.

He tells the attentive bartender how his new team The Ineffables have died. Without spoiling one of the neater, big crazy ideas in this comic, the border between the worlds of the living and the dead were broken down, and the city was being overrun with the undead.

This allowed Mason to recruit new teammates who have gone on to their final reward to help them save the day:
And you better believe that infiltrating the headquarters of the billionaire industrialist bad guy, defeating him and saving the day will require the ability to drive things very fast, several skills learned in scouting and extremely cool jazz music.

Unfortunately, the battle to restore the border between the living and the dead results in Lincoln’s Ineffable teammates ending up in the land of the dead, hence his drinking in a bar telling sad stories about his past.

At this point, his bartender can take it no longer:
Holy shit, is this the Abraham Lincoln vs. Uncle Sam battle you’ve wanted to see your entire life, perhaps without even knowing it? It is! But I won’t scan that page; I’ve probably spoiled enough of the issue as it is.

Suffice it to say that Uncle Sam punches Lincoln so hard that he pierces the veil and ends up in the dimension of the dead with his teammates, who must find a way out of the afterlife and back to their home…but not before they learn something shocking about the nature of the universe.

It’s great stuff.

I’m generally pretty leery of self-published work, for the obvious reasons (including the fact that I’m working on self-published stuff and, rest assured, it is not very good), but Bogart’s book continued to surprise me with fun stuff. It’s plotted like a less-serious Fantastic Four and full of goofy gags given completely deadpan delivery, and while Bogart is no Jack Kirby (this isn’t a book I’d likely buy for the quality of the artwork alone), it’s clear, easy to read and gets the job of transmitting what’s in Bogart’s mind to a reader’s mind through the eyes, which is what comics art is supposed to do.

In other words, the art works, and the writing works great, making The Ineffables…well, at the risk of closing on an overly-obvious joke here, there’s something ineffable about it.