Review: Fantastic Four Vol. 1: The Fall of The Fantastic Four

I was a mildly surprised last month when Marvel announced the cancellation of Fantastic Four, but not shocked or distraught or anything. While the comic book and the team of characters that star in it have long since faded from the center of the Marvel Universe (and line of comics), the characters remain foundational elements in much of what Marvel publishes.

For example, meetings or teleconferences with, or at least namedrops of, Reed Richards are all but mandatory in any Marvel comic plot involving super-science, and you can't have a big, line-wide crossover story without featuring him and his family fairly prominently. Given that Marvel is now always running a big, line-wide crossover story, well, you see a lot of Reed Richards and the gang.

In other words, The Fantastic Four have been present in Marvel Comics constantly, no matter what's going on in their book, and I can't imagine that will change just because their book isn't going to be published monthly for a while, even though the book's primary (even if only symbolic or totemic) importance to the publisher is such that I just kind of assumed it was one Marvel would always publish no matter what, in the same what that DC will never cancel Action Comics.

The reason I wasn't shocked or distraught was because this didn't seem to be all that sudden a decision by Marvel, and it's not like they haven't given the book plenty of chances to become a huge hit over the last few years, granting a seemingly "Do Whatever You Want" level of creative leeway to superstar teams like Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch, or Jonathan Hickman, Dale Eaglesham and other artists, or Matt Fraction, Mark Bagley and Mike Allred. They let Hickman give the team new costumes, found a school for little super-geniuses and launch a sister book (Future Foundation); they let Fraction have two books too (With FF replacing Future Foundation, and featuring a different team). They killed off Johnny Storm and added Spider-Man to the line-up.

The late, great Dwayne McDuffie got to write a short, mildly gimick-y (but ultimately awesome) run in which The Black Panther and ex-X-Man Storm replaced Mr. and Mrs. Richards temporarily. Brian Michael Bendis made The Invisible Woman one of the major players in his Age of Ultron.

And then there was this run, the post-Fraction one that relaunched the title as part of Marvel's "Marvel Now!" rebranding campaign. In addition to the new #1, the book also got a new creative team consisting of the recently-imported-from-DC writer James Robinson and pencil artist Leonard Kirk and the team got snazzy new red costumes for no immediately apparent reason other than the fact that they looked kind of cool (I liked Bully's theory, though).

The new costumes as Arthur Adams drew them on a variant cover for the second issue.

I didn't read Fantastic Four #1 when it was recently released, despite my default setting being one of Interested In The Fantastic Four, my appreciation for Kirk's artwork and the fact that I was curious about and attracted to those red costumes (Oh, and the fact then when I flipped through it in the store, I saw it included a fight with Fin Fang motherfucking Foom!). It was one of Marvel's $3.99/20-page books, which aren't really worth purchasing serially. I figured I'd wait for the trade but, by the time I got my hands on the trade, Marvel had already announced the book's cancellation.

And, as I said, I was mildly surprised, but not shocked or distraught by that news. Now that I've actually read the first five issues of the book, I have a new emotional reaction to the news of the cancellation—disappointment. Robinson and Kirk's Fantastic Four is actually pretty good.

Granted, the tonal shift from the last Fantastic Four comics I read is pretty drastic. If I'm remembering correctly, the last issue of FF ended with everyone literally having a big party, and the first image in this issue is of The Invisible Woman sitting at a little desk in a pitch black room, writing a letter to her children (With pen and paper? Invisible Woman is 400 years old), in which she talks about how terrible everything has become while tears stream out of her eyes. After previewing the dark events of the near-future—Reed is "a broken man," Ben is in a laser jail for murder, Johnny "a lost soul" drinking himself stupid in a bar—the narrative then jumps backwards to the point where everything started to go wrong.

Which is the point where everything looks awesome: The Fantastic Four Vs. Fin Fang Foom!

(Incidentally, the first page of the first issue is a full-page splash; the second and third pages each have two panels on them, so that the two-page spread they form consists of four panels, each featuring a member of the FF; the fourth and fifth pages are a two-page splash. So there are only six panels in the first five pages of Fantastic Four #1; that's one-quarter of the length of that first issue. That's one of the four dollars you would have spent on this comic. They are very nice drawings and all, the pacing reads nicely in a trade, but good God, is it really a surprise the book shed readers so fast? This first issue—which contains two more two-panel pages and one more splash page—took less than four minutes read).

After Sue's letter presages doom, we follow the FF into a pretty typical FF adventure, in which their characters, powers, personalities and generally positive relationship with the rest of society is illustrated. It's a nice reminder/primer on the FF, a necessary start for a story about their "fall."

Later that night, a secured portal to a dangerous pocket dimension Reed keeps in the Baxter Building for study opens up, and a horde of strange alien space bug monster creatures pour out and start wreaking havoc all over the city. A generous helping of guest-stars cameo in the battle, and Reed eventually figures out a way to stop them all, but it comes at a very high price: Johnny loses his Human Torch powers in the process.

Over the course of the first four issues, the characters each get a conflict arc, with Reed and Sue worried about daughter Valeria (who has moved to Latveria to try and bring out the good in Dr. Doom) and Johnny struggling with the loss of his powers while trying to put on a brave face (I liked the scene where Reed promises to try and figure out how to restore his powers, to which Johnny replies "I won't hold my breath...Look at Ben. How long have you been working on a cure fore him to no avail...and you're the smartest man alive."). And as for Ben, he tries to rekindle his relationship with Alicia, and it seems to be going well, although her one concern is that every time things go well for them, something big and terrible happens.

And, of course, there's some superheroing, as The Wizard's latest Frightful Four, which consists of himself and three of The Wrecking Crew, attack the city, the Wizard letting slip that all of these recent events may be connected to a single, mysterious puppetmaster (Shocking, I know). The substitute FF from FF—She-Hulk, Ms. Thing and Ant-Man show up to help in this battle, in their snazzy uniforms; I really like those costumes, and that group of characters (Medusa, the fourth of their foursome, is probably off doing whatever The Inhumans are up to post-Infinity).

Kirk's cover for FF #4

And then, in the fifth issue, it's the trial of the Fantastic Four, as they're summoned to court to answer for every bad thing they've ever done. They have She-Hulk as their attorney, defending them.

Robinson writes the opposing attorney pretty well, well enough to at least sell the blatantly ridiculous nature of the proceedings: That anyone on Earth could really be all that mad at The Fantastic Four about anything. Each of the events mentioned basically boil down to a story in which the FF save the city and/or the entire world and/or universe, but the attorney objects to the way they save it.

I suppose that too will prove to be part of the mystery villain's plan, but, in the meantime, it allowed for a string of amazing guest-artists to line up and draw the flashback scenes, each to a fairly well-remembered or momentous event in FF history: Chris Samnee, Dean Haspiel, Paul Rivoche, Phil Jiminez, Mike Allred*, Jim Starlin, Jerry Ordway, Derlis Santacruz and June Brigman. About a half-dozen of those are artists whose names alone are usually enough to get me to pick up a book.

The result is that the kids of the Future Foundation are taken away from Reed and Sue, and placed in SHIELD custody at Camp Hammond, where The Avengers Initiative was based. Camp Hammond has a new commander, however, Jim Hammond himself, and the original, Golden Age Human Torch will apparently be playing a role in Fantastic Four going forward (I guess this explains what Robinson had in mind when he had Captain America asking Hammond to join SHIELD at the end of the first story arc in Robinson's All-New Invaders book).

I get the sense that many of these sub-plots are ones we've seen repeatedly, even in relation to these characters, but this particular franchise is old, old-fashioned and rickety enough that even the most cliche super-comics elements feel comfortable here in a way they wouldn't in other comics or with other comics characters. Is this simple, old-school, soap opera-style superhero comics, but with a modern, more sophisticated model of storytelling? Yes. But what's wrong with that, exactly?

I really love those new uniforms, too. I don't know that red is necessarily, inherently better than blue, black or white, but it's new, and that alone is pretty interesting, giving this particular batch of Fantastic Four comics a radically different look than the hundreds of other ones that preceded them (If DC really wanted to shake-up the visuals of their star characters when they launched The New 52? Instead of taking away Superman's shorts and giving him seams and a high collar, they should have turned his costume red. And dressed Batman in brown).

I like too that they are all slightly different. Reed and Sue's costumes are the same basic design and in the same colors, but the red and black parts are swapped on each. I like Ben's "4" symbol on the hip of his shorts, and the way the black is attached to the "belt buckle" element of them. Johnny's looks just like Reed's, as if there's a boy version and a girl version of the costume (although Johnny's out of his costume and in civilian clothes before too long).

Franklin's costume is red, but the rest of the Future Foundation kids keep their white "school uniforms."

In addition to the slick new costumes**, Kirk also designs a pretty awesome new Fantasticar that splits into four segments, one for each member of the team.

Man, I would have loved to play with a toy of that when I was in third grade.

I also really, really like the new logo.

One final note, as I stop reviewing and just start listing observations at random (Note to self: Don't forget to polish up this review before posting; it's not very good, even by your usually lax standards, Caleb, and just sorta deteriorates at the end). While the main attraction of the court room jaunt through Fantastic Four history was getting to see things like Mike Allred draw Galactus or Chris Samnee re-drawing panels of Jack Kirby's from the first Fantastic Four #1, it was also neat to see some of the more obscure bits of their history mentioned.

Many of these events I never actually read in their original comic book form, but have seen referenced repeatedly in other comics (Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross' Marvels version of the fight with Galactus, for example) and/or multiple cartoon series and/or the live action films: I think the Silver Surfer/Galactus story has been adapted into every multimedia version of the FF I've seen (save the Roger Corman live-action omvie), for example, and I've seen multiple cartoon versions of the Thing/Hulk brawl.

One story I have never seen adapted elsewhere*** or referred to in another comic, however, is the one where Sue was possessed by the Hate-Monger and became Malice, which, because she was a woman who became evil, meant she had to dress like this:

Ordway

Oh, wait, a second, she also had a spiked leather gimp mask to go over it too...?

I know superhero comic books are weird and pervy now, but it's sometimes easy to forget that they were always weird and pervy.



*The ideal Fantastic Four artist in our post-Kirby world. Behold:

**As for why they are red now, there's no in-story explanation, but editor Mark Paniccia explains the decision in a little editorial feature on the back page. The original thought, Paniccia explains, was to return to blue uniforms after wearing the white for so long:

...but since this was a bold new direction, we thought now was the perfect opportunity to do something completely unexpected. Leonard did about nine versions. Since this arc is about the fall of the Fantastic Four, we decided red would help message that our characters were in danger.

***Actually, the Internet tells me she was turned into Malice in an episode of the 1994 FF cartoon, which I watched a complete DVD collection of around the time the first live-action movie came out, but I have no memory of it. I'm pretty sure they toned toned the dominatrix aspects a bit...if only because I feel reasonably certain I would remember a cartoon show in which Sue Storm was wearing a spike-covered leather gimp mask.

Review: Tales of The TMNT #7

The cover for the seventh issue of Tales of The TMNT is a pretty perfect one in that it tells you exactly what you can expect to find underneath it: Teenage Muntant Ninja Turtle Raphael and teenage girl Shadow fighting werewolves.

The story begins on the rather lovely Michael Dooney-drawn frontspiece, featuring Shadow—the adopted daughter of Casey Jones and April O'Neil, born to Casey's girlfriend Gabrielle in "City At War"—reading a diary she wrote five years ago, when she was a younger, apparently angrier and jerkier teenager (according to her own narration).

The story, "Darkness Weaves," is the story of Shadow's last night as a New Yorker, and it's the work of Steve Murphy, Jim Lawson and Eric Talbot. Murphy writes the script and Lawson handles the pencil art, while Talbot contributes to both, co-plotting the story with Murphy and inking Lawson's pencils. (As I've mentioned before, one thing I really like about the old Mirage comics is the way they are so often created by a group of creators who function a little like a rock band, everyone contributing to everything, just in different capacities or degrees of involvement. Even after Kevin Eastman left, and even on this sister book to the Peter Laird-written TMNT Vol. 4, you see the same small stable of Mirage studio mates working on many of the issues together as a group).

So it's a good five years or so ago, and Casey and April have gone on vacation, leaving Shadow in the care of her grandfather and uncles, Splinter and the Turtles. She's watching videos of her favorite singer Lilith—whose lyrics consists of bad, "dark" poetry in a font I hate—until midnight, at which point she attempts to sneak out of the sewer lair she's staying in. Raphael busts her however, and after some fun banter—I really like the idea of the now older, wiser Raph trying to parent his best friend's almost-grown daughter—she gets sent back to bed.

She eventually manages to ditch Raphael and meet her friend Sloane in the city, where Lilith happens to be playing. Raph trails her to the show, where no one seems all that surprised that the entire audience is female. Hell, even the two security guards are female. After another lame song, Lilith uses some ceremonial-looking knives to cut herself and fill a fancy chalice with her own blood.

It gets passed around for her fans to drink, while a skylight overhead opens, letting the moonlight in and, well, you've seen the cover already, so you can probably guess what happens to the girls who drink her blood.

Luckily for Shadow, she notices everyone turning into werewolves around her before drinking.

That dialogue in the second panel is the best.

Together she and Raph fight some werewolves and, before they can become completely overwhelmed, Shadow's other three uncles arrive.

In the ensuing fight, Shadow accidentally stabs Sloane with a sai, seemingly killing her (although, it wasn't silver...would that work...?), recognizing her mistake only when she hears Sloane say "frig," her favorite swear word, and apparently the only one that appears in the Turtles comics without being represented by a grawlix.

Lilith, herself a werewolf recognizable from the others only by her ankh necklace, swears vengeance against Shadow, and so Shadow is exiled to the Norhthampton farmhouse for her own safety, Splinter relocating there in order to raise her (And that's where we find the pair of them at the opening of TMNT volume four).

The very last panel includes a question mark after the words "The End," and the answer is, of course, no: 2007 miniseries Raphael: Bad Moon Rising by Bill Moulage, Jim Lawson and Eric Talbot would pick up where this issue left off, not unlike Leonardo: Blind Sight spun out of Tales #5 (Bad Moon Rising, by the way, features cover art by TMNT fan and EDILW favorite Ross Campbell; I know IDW is using their own rebooted continuity for their TMNT comics, but man, how great would a series set in the Mirage continuity and featuring the adventures of teenage ninja Shadow and her mutant turtle uncles by Ross Campbell be...?).

As straightforward as the plot and script for Tales #7 may be, it has some witty moments.

And the art is great. Lawson's work may be an acquired taste for some, but I've long ago acquired it and, as I've been working my way through Tales issue by issue, I've noticed that, perhaps because Lawson was drawing the TMNT series at the time (and/or that he's drawn the bulk of all the TMNT comics published), his contributions to the series seem some how more real or official than some of those by other artists.

This issue has little in the way of shading or toning, making for a particularly stark black and white type of black-and-white, more appropriate than usual given the faux goth nature of Lilith as performer, and the supernatural goings-on. While I would have loved to see what this issue might have looked like had it been penciled by Talbot as well (or by Eastman, whose Splinter always looked like more of a scary werewolf than a rat to me), I liked all the thick black he brings to the table drawing board.

There are several scenes in which Raphael appears more as white lines on a black shadow than vice versa...

...which looks particularly compelling when applied to Lawsons rough-hewn, semi-simplistic design for the ninja turtles.

Review: Earth 2 Vol. 4: The Dark Age

Probably without even intending to do so, DC Comics pulled something of a bait and switch with their Earth 2 title. It originally launched, under its original writer James Robinson, as a sort of rebooted version of the original Earth 2 concept. This Earth would apparently be where all the Golden Age heroes lived, but rather than their stories starting in the 1940s, they would begin in the present. After an issue spent killing off Earth 2's Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman, the focus for much of Robinson's run was on new versions of other Golden Agers with no analogues on Earth-New 52: Green Lantern Alan Scott, Flash Jay Garrick, The Atom Al Pratt, Hawkgirl, Dr. Fate and so on.

Near the end of Robinson's run, which comprised the first three collections, and with the start of new writer Tom Taylor's run, collected herein, there doesn't seem to be any real logical, organizing principle anymore.

A Red Tornado is introduced, and while she's a she as the original Golden Age Red Tornado was, she's also an android, like the Earth-1 Red Tornado*...and she has Lois Lane's consciousness in her. Jimmy Olsen is introduced, and he's a metahuman on this Earth. Red Arrow Roy Harper (a character from Earth-1/New Earth) is introduced, as is an Aquawoman. Finally—in this issue at least—the dead Earth-2 Superman returns, now a slave of Apokolips (shades of John Francis Moore and Kieron Dwyer's 1998 Superman: The Dark Side), Earth-2 Batman gets a rather unlikely successor (unless you've previously read Flashpoint) and Superman's successor appears but isn't yet properly introduced.

It's basically an Elseworlds series that crisscrosses in and out of New 52 continuity—Power Girl, Huntress and Mr. Terrific have all traveled between the two Earths—but one with no unifying theme...which sort of defeats the purpose of Elseworlds-like stories.

This fourth volume collects four issues of the monthly and the second annual, which accounts for two stories, both by Taylor. The monthly issues chronicle the Evil Superman and his army of Parademons' attack on Earth, with Superman just wrecking the heroes and the forces of the World Army. Meanwhile, in the bowels of of a World Army facility, a mysterious—and mysteriously powerful—new Batman is gathering allies for a showdown with Superman, including the new characters (well, new versions of old characters that are new to this series) mentioned above.

As for the story of the annual, that's the secret origin of Earth 2's Batman II**, presented as a story he's telling his new allies during a momentary lull in the battle against the Apokolyptian Superman.

The artwork is something of a mess, reflecting the disintegrating focus of the series. The original art team of Nicola Scott and Trevor Scott handle the first two issues by themselves. With the third, a second art team joins them. With the fourth, a third art team joins the second art team, and the Scotts are no-shows. The annual is penciled by by Robson Rocha, who was half of the just-mentioned second art team. None of the artists are particularly bad, but they don't mesh together too well, as in it's quite obvious when an art team changes, and it gives the book a rushed, confused visual look. I suppose it doesn't help that the book consists mainly of very unpleasant, alternate versions of the already fairly unpleasant New 52 characters doing extremely unpleasant things to one another.


*I know, I know. But it's so complicated, I'm just going to stick with the fact that in post-Crisis continuity, the android Red Tornado is a native of DC's only Earth, which was Earth 1 with some grafts from a handful of other Earths. Red Tornado spent most of his time on Earth 1, back when there was an Earth 1, anyway. For more on stupid Red Tornado and his dumb origin and stupid continuity, I'll refer you to Wikipedia.


**Of possible interest to some is the fact that, when the annual was originally printed, Batman II tells his new allies that he gets his enhanced strength from a drug called Miralco that lasts about an hour, which he stole from Rex Mason. Rex Mason is the secret identity of Metamorpho, not the Golden Age Hourman, who is Rex Tyler. In the collection, the mistake has been fixed, so that now Batman II says he stole the drug from Rex Tyler. It was apparently a typo all along then, and not an intentional decision to change the inventor of the Miralco drug on New 52 Earth 2.

Paging Mr. O'Brien...

There were a couple of pieces of very good news for Marvel's still rather new Ms. Marvel series, the first trade paperback collection of which was just released last month. First, the book is apparently Marvel's #1 seller digitally (and, remember, Marvel's the company that publishes all those Avengers, X-Men and Spider-Man comics), and, second, its first trade was apparently the best-selling one in the Direct Market last month, which is really quite an achievement, considering both the number of popular and exceedingly high-quality books available in the DM in October.

That's really good news for a lot of reasons, and will likely bring a lot of good cheer to a lot of folks, and not just those like writer G. Willow Wilson and artist Adrian Alphona, who probably get some sweet royalty checks. If the book sells well and continues to sell well, then it makes a compelling argument using the only rhetoric that really matters on a couple of fronts of great importance to many people. It argues the value of a female writer; it argues the value of a female protagonist; it argues the value of an ethnically, culturally diverse protagonist (the title character is a 16-year-old, Pakistani-American, muslim girl); it argues the value of allowing an artist to essentially color way outside the lines of any sort of top-down, editorially-enforced "house" style (Alphona's work on the series doesn't look much like anything else Marvel is publishing or has published before...not even previous Alphona comics); it continues to argue the value of letting particular creative teams try out highly idiosyncratic and personalized takes on solo character monthlies (i.e. "The Hawkeye Effect); and it argues the value of fun, funny comics (while Ms. Marvel is a superhero comic, it's a superhero comedy).

Good job, Kamala!

I myself just read the series for the first time this weekend, having waited for the trade...mostly because I thought the book would be priced at Marvel's now-standard $3.99 price point, which I won't pay for 20-22-page comics, although it was actually priced at $2.99 (There were other reasons too, most of which seem silly in retrospect after having actually read the book, including some hesitation regarding Wilson—I've loved some of her comics, and not liked some of her other comics—never being at all interested in Marvel's Captain Marvel characters, particularly Ms. Marvel, who appeared as non-entity in years worth of Bendis-written Avengers comics I read, and even that first cover gave me pause...it is a pretty terrible cover, isn't it? Most of the covers that followed it have been produced by great artists and have been really great, but even those sweet Jamie McKelvie covers have been pretty off, not really capturing the look, spirit or feel of the interiors at all).

I was pretty surprised by the book itself—pleasantly so, in terms of the quality of the book. Among those surprises were the fact that Ms. Marvel is apparently going to end up being closely tied to The Inhumans (which I guess I should suspected when they started soliciting all those awesome Lockjaw covers), and that the new Ms. Marvel's power-set has absolutely nothing at all to do with the powers of previous Ms. Marvel...she just liked Ms. Marvel, so she took her name.

I guess knew that from conversations with a friend—I know a few ladies who read Ms. Marvel, and little to nothing else that Marvel publishes—but not from reading it. Rather than having Carol Danvers' vague, generic superpowers (Superman plus energy beams, I think...?), Kamala can can stretch, grow, shrink, and take on pretty much any shape in order to disguise herself as other people or even objects.

In other words, Ms. Marvel has Plastic Man's super-powers.

This being the Marvel Universe, perhaps it would be more acceptable to say that she has Mr. Fantastic's powers, but she seems to use them in ways Mr. Fantastic rarely if ever uses them (I'm not the biggest Fantastic Four fan, but I've read a fair amount of FF comics, and I can't recall any scenes of Reed Richards shrinking, growing giant or disguising himself), and in ways that Plastic Man generally does (I think it was the many panels of her growing her hands into giant fists in particular that made me think of Plas, as an old DC Direct action figure came with giant hands attached to it*), the main difference being that Ms. Marvel can also change her coloration, whereas no matter what Plas turns into, he's limited to the palette of red, yellow, black and the four color peach of his skin (While less useful than Kamala's powers, and perhaps slightly unrealistic in the way characters often fail to notice say, a vase with the yellow and black striped belt of Plas around its middle, I prefer the comic book-iness of Plas' color limitation).

Now this is obviously not the most important thing about Marvel's Ms. Marvel; in fact, it may be the single least important think about it, but it's a thought that occurred to me while reading the comic and this is my blog, so I'm going to go ahead and take the necessary time out of my life to type it out and post it on the Internet, godammit: How about the fact that there's this really great, really successful comic book that is a superhero comedy starring a character with Plastic Man's powers in the year 2014? It's kind of too bad that there isn't a really great, really successful comic book that is a superhero comedy starring Plastic Man right now, isn't it...?

I've always loved the hell out of that character, owing in large part to just how amazing those Golden Age Jack Cole comics really are, and the fact that Plas, like Captain Marvel (the original, not one of the Marvel Cpatain Marvels), ended up surviving, but never flourishing since his 1940s hey-day; Plas, like Cap, has become something of an also-ran, and thus, even when DC is actively trying to use them, what you end up with are these compelling, interesting glimpses that serves as gateways, and then when you walk through those gateways and see what the Golden Age iterations of the characters were like, your mind gets a little blown. How on Earth did that boring-ass Captain America guy get popular in the 1960s again and stay popular, while these guys collect dust? Like that.

Plas is therefore a character you can feel a sort of ownership over. Yeah, I was into superheroes, before they went all pop culture in the Silver Age. I was into their old stuff, like Plastic Man and Captain Marvel and The Human Torch. Also, there's just something kind of fascinating about knowing there's this character out there, that there's all this untapped potential you can see, but never see really being tapped. It's kind of the way I feel about Wonder Woman, too—Golden Age Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, Plas, they all seem like lit sticks of dynamite to me, and the spark on the fuse is never actually moving down the wick, but, oh man, if it ever actually does...!

It's probably not even accurate to call Plastic Man an also ran. It's not like he's, I don't know, The Red Bee of Firebrand. He's had his own comics now and then, at least one of which was really rather great, although it didn't last all that long (That would be the Kyle Baker one; I can't recall if it was canceled due to low sales, or because DC didn't think it fit in with the direction they wanted their line to go in at the time, or some combination of the two). Writer Grant Morrison resurrected him as a prominent member of his late-90s JLA run, and writers Mark Waid and Joe Kelly continued to play with Plas as part of the Justice League ensemble. Paul Dini and Alex Ross used him in their various Justice League related projects. And, of course, Plastic Man had his own cartoon in the 1980s, and he was one of the more frequent guest-stars on Batman: The Brave and The Bold. Not too shabby, really.

And hey, DC has recently shown a willingness to experiment with different tones and different art styles in a few of their mainline superhero comics—Batgirl, Gotham Academy, Arkham Manor, Catwoman—so maybe they'll decide to do a Plastic Man comic soon. Plas obviously can't star in a DC version of Ms. Marvel, as he's a middle-aged white guy and establishment hero, not really the sort of character who could pull off Ms. Marvel's conflicts regarding being an outsider, having trouble growing up or fitting in, or learning to be a super-powered person, but if there's an appetite in the market for people with powers like Kamala Khan's starring in fun comic books that are organically humorous, well, maybe now's the time to try another Plastic Man ongoing.

Now, where did they last leave the character in the New 52...?

Oh yeah, that's right.

Well, nevermind then. I guess I'll just keep my fingers crossed that DC decides to publish a Plastic Man Chronicles series of trade paperbacks to get all the original Cole material out in print in an affordable format some day...

(Actual review of Ms. Marvel Vol. 1: No Normal to appear sometime later this week).


*This one, which may be the only DC Direct action figure I ever bought:

Not counting the DC Direct Pocket Heroes. I bought like a billion of those.

Comic Shop Comics: November 5

Batman Eternal #31 (DC Comics) Bane might have been he man who broke the bat, but he's no match for Alfred Pennyworth. That's what I found most exciting in this particular issue, which is focused almost entirely on the aftermath of The Spectre blowing up Arkham Asylum in order to send Deacon Blackfire's ghost back to hell or whatever he did, exactly (I like that artists Fernando Pasarin and Matt Ryan depict the post-Spectre Arkham as one of those big sinkholes that occasionally open up which will, if need be, provide a real-world, non-occult reason for what happened to Arkham in future stories).

While Batman busies himself beating up escaping inmates who survived both Blackfire's killing of 'em and the collapse—I suppose it's safe to assume that only inmates without supervillain codenames died—Bane un-buries a still half-crazed Alfred, and together they seek to escape. Once in the sewers, they're attacked by some creature-things that I guess The Spectre missed, and then Alfred lays Bane out flat.

There's also a weird scene where Stephanie "The Spoiler" Brown is apparently a stunt motorcycle driver...

...and then she gets clotheslined off her bike by Hush, who is about to kill her.

Is this the end of The Spoiler? While part of me would find it amusing if DC brought the character back into The New 52-iverse just to kill her off a few months later, I'm fairly certain she'll make it out of that alley alive.

Gotham Academy #2 (DC) With this issue even more so than the first, which had a brief Bruce Wayne cameo to sort of Batman-itize it, I got the impression that this was exactly the sort of comic book DC should have been publishing in, oh, 2003 or so, and collecting them in digest-sized trades for the manga audience. The only way this comic could have read more like a manga story would have been if it were in black and white. And I, of course, mean that as a compliment.

New 52: Futures End #27 (DC) This issue has a really great cover. And...well, that's all there is to say about it. It has a nice cover. Nothing else of any real note occurs within. We touch base with several of the book's ongoing plotlines, but none of them seem to have moved forward much at all, unless you count Lois Lane flying over Cadmus Island for the second time, and this time jumping out of the plane.

Oh, and Batman Bruce Wayne appears to confront Batman Terry McGinnis, but that will mostly play out in the next issue.

The only part of the interior I really took any pleasure from were the scenes featuring Green Arrow, because in every panel you can see in the middle of his beard a jagged a line that looks like it could have been a drawing of his beard, before it was re-drawn bigger.

I really like the idea of artists Aaron Lopresti and Art Thibert handing in the art for this issue, and the editor saying, "No, no! Green Arrow's beard should be twice as long as this! Redraw those beards!"

Your mileage, however, may vary.

Scooby-Doo Team-Up #7 (DC) This issue raises so many questions. Scooby and the gang team-up with the characters of their fellow Hanna-Barbera franchise The Flintstones in this issue, in which Professor Albert Einstone uses his newly invented time machine to summon Mystery Inc back 10,000 years in the past.

Now, I haven't thought much about The Flintstones since I was, oh, I don't know, eight-years-old or so, but I guess I never gave any thought to when the show was set. Here we get a number, which sets the events of The Flinstones at around 8,000 BC. That seems a lot more recent than I would have imagined, given their coexistence with dinosaurs, but I suppose I shouldn't think about it too much.

"It's strange, Fred," Velma says as she and Fred Jones investigate Fred Flintstone's dinosaur lawnmower, "I thought cavemen didn't live at the same time as dinosaurs..."

Fred responds, "I thought They didn't have lawnmowers."

In the same panel, when Barney asks Daphne what the future is like, she answers him, "Surprisingly like this, actually."

Writer Sholly Fisch once more does a really rather astounding job of blending two disparate cartoon franchises into a single story, with this issue probably being the most amazing script he's pulled off, as The Flinstones and Scooby-Doo are so incredibly far apart (despite coming from the same animation studio). The comic really reads like a fairly typical Flinstones episode, save with Scooby and the gang appearing.

Einstone's time machine only works one way, so while he tries to figure out how to send Mystery Inc back to the future, he introduces them to The Flintstones and The Rubbles. Betty and Wilma are insisting that the guys take them to the opera, but they would rather go bowling. To try and get out of it, Fred cooks up a story about The Phantom of the Operrock, which, naturally, only intrigues their visitors, and so they all go. This being a Scooby-Doo comic, there really is a Phantom of the Operrock, although it turns out he's really just a guy in a costume trying to scare people away from the opera.

When Wilma says she's never heard of anyone trying such "a clever scheme before," Daphne chimes in, "Wow, we're witnessing a real historical moment! He's the world's first crooked real estate developer!"

Fisch packs in The Gruesomes, The Great Gazoo, Bam-Bam, a reference to Pebbles cereal commercials and just about every Flinstones joke you could hope to expect. Oh, and did he slip a pot joke in as well...?

The artwork this time around comes courtesy of Scott Jeralds rather than Dario Brizuela, and Jeralds does a dead-on job on the character designs and setting. Part of me would have liked to see what a "compromise" version of Bedrock might have looked like, given how far apart the design aesthetic of the two shows are—The Flintstone characters don't even look like the same species as the Scooby-Doo characters, really, but this is probably how a crossover involving the two cartoon shows should look.

I know I only read a handful of new comic book-comics this week, so it's probably not saying much, but this was by far the best that I read. Just from a pure craft stand-point, it's a pretty amazing piece of work.

Tiny Titans: Return to the Treehouse #6 (DC) You know what they say about all good things.

Cyborg, who has "some sweet Justice League connections," uses a Boom Tube to get a group of Tiny Titans out of class and onto the Justice League satellite, where Batman is a big jerk to them, but, after a page or two of jerkiness, Batman and Superman manage to get the Titans' treehouse back from The Brainiacs. As each of the previous issues involved the Titans getting a new, less-than-ideal Treehouse HQ, they now have a half-dozen treehouses...almost a little forest of treehouses.

And then they get detention for skipping school.

The end.

This is my favorite page:

Man, I wish B'dg filled in for Hal Jordan in the pages of Justice League; it seems downright weird that there are currently three human, Earth-born Green Lanterns (Hal, John Stewart and Simon Baz; Guy Gardner's currently a Red Lantern and Kyle Rayner's currently The White Lantern), and yet the League is Lantern-less. Unless you count the new Power Ring, which I don't.

Meanwhile, at Robot 6...

I have reviews of each of the above, if you'd like to go read them.

Review: Tales of The TMNT #6

As previously mentioned when discussing the Peter Laird-led fourth volume of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turltes, the characters' co-creator decided to jump some 15 years worth of story time between the end of the second volume of the series and the launch of the fourth volume, having allowed the characters to age in more-or-less real time, and, incidentally, creating a decade and a half worth of "lost years" in which stories could eventually be filled in via flashback.

When the second volume of Tales was launched, filling in the blanks of those lost years became one of the title's main functions. This particular issue does just that, providing the back story of the enmity between Leonardo and Foot Clan ninja Cha Ocho, who appeared early in—and then off and on throughout—the pages of Laird and Lawson's TMNT. At that point, the Foot had honored their post-"City At War" vow to end their feud with the Turtles and had gone more-or-less straight. The Utroms had hired Karai's New York Foot Clan to provide security for them, which brought the Foot and the Turtles into close orbit once again.

For the most part they were cool, save this Cha Ocho person with the diagonal scar across his face; he was still pretty pissed at Leonardo. And this issue of Tales is the story of who he is, and how he came to be so pissed at Leonardo.

Based on editor Steve Murphy's introduction to this issue, the big news of Tales of The TMNT #6 wasn't which characters were featured and what story was being told, but rather who was telling it: Writer Dean Clarrain and artist Chris Allan, the pair responsible for the later, better issues of the Mirage Studios-produced, Archie Comics-published Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures series, which started out as an adaptation of the cartoon show before going off into weird, wild directions all its own.

Murphy wrote that he was always hearing fans asking for the pair to return, almost as often as he was hearing fans asking for their return on the Archie Comics version of the title and/or characters, and that this issue marked a compromise that should please a lot of fans: The pair returned, but to the Mirage version of the Turtles, rather than the Archie version.

(An aside: A few weeks ago, Joe McCulloch discussed the apparently imminent return of Puma Blues in the course of his weekly column at TCJ.com, and, in the course of the piece, mentioned that writer Steve Murphy "subsequently wrote a huge number of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics...under the pseudonym 'Dean Clarrain.'" That struck me as tremendously odd, as it was just a few days before I read that particular column of McCulloch's that I read this issue of Tales, in which Murphy wrote about Clarrain. Five to ten minutes of Internet research assured me that McCulloch was right, and that Clarrain and Murphy were one and the same. I've never really understood the use of pseudonyms or pen names myself, probably because I'm so vain—despite the fact that I now kinda sorta wish a great deal of what I wrote in my twenties could now be hidden under a fake byline—but I find it particularly baffling here. Not only does Murphy write about Clarrain as if he were an entirely different person in his introduction, but the credits for this issue credit Murphy with the plot and Clarrain with the script; did Steve Murphy collaborate with himself on this comic...?)

The move to the Mirage Universe allows the creators best-known for their Archie comics to work in a more adult venue. There's a scene where Ocho, as a young boy, and his mother are being mugged in an alley. One of the gang of muggers pulls her purse strap away from her body with his knife, Allan drawing her breasts prominently in the image. "Hmm, nice..." the thug says, "Hey, kid, you're mom's pretty hot."

Later, a man has first his hand and then his head cut off on the altar of a church, blood spray landing on the face of Jesus on the crucifix hanging near by.

And, later, when Leondardo does battle with Cha Ocho, he defeats him with a pocket knife, and then carves a scar into his face, "a mark of shame."

Not exactly the sort of thing you'd expect to see in an Archie comic, or an early '90s TMNT cartoon show, you know?

This issue is basically the life's story of Cha Ocho, beginning with Dan Berger's fronstpiece image, of Cha Ocho peeling an apple with a knife in a grave yard, and then flashing back to his childhood.

As a kid, he and his mom are attacked by the aforementioned muggers after she picks him up from karate practice. Before they can come to any harm, a shadowy figure appears and renders all three armed, would-be muggers unconscious in less than five seconds, without even having to draw one of the two swords he's wearing on his back. This is, of course, Leonardo.

Ocho does not become a ninja turtle when he grows up, but he does become a cop. And, later, when his wife is killed and he's eventually kicked off the cold case for being too emotionally involved, he quits and joins The Foot Clan, during their post-Shredder, Karai-led existence.

It's as a Foot ninja—wearing the later, lamer version of their uniform—that he next encounters Leonardo, who finds him breaking into a police station to retrieve a file. After he explains himself, Leonardo takes Ocho back to the Turtles' sewer lair, and together they begin an investigation to find the murderer of Ocho's wife.

They do, and despite warnings from Splinter and Leonardo, Ocho cuts the more-or-less helpless and remorseful man down, chopping him into a couple of pieces. Leonardo is none too happy about this, and lectures Ocho on the difference between justice and vengeance, and the importance of honor and of the code of bushido.

Ocho calls bullshit on Leo. He doesn't point out that Leo's a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and not a Teenage Mutant Samurai Turtle, but he does bring up that Leo and his brothers spent most of their lives training to kill Oroku Saki in order to avenge a murder (as we discussed a bit last time).

Leonardo argues that he's learned since then that "vengeance sows the seeds of future sorrow," which sounds about right given the cycle of revenge killings that have caused the Turtles and friends so much grief over the years, and, when Ocho accuses him of acting like he's "God," Leonardo counters that he's "never given much thought to God," which is interesting to me, if only because I wonder about things like the religious beliefs of various comic book heroes I read about (Although, on the previous page, Leo says to Ocho, "I can't believe you killed him, and in a church, no less").

To teach Ocho a lesson, Leo picks up the pocket knife the one-time, accidental murderer of Ocho's wife was using to futilely defend himself, and uses it in a fight against Ocho and his katana. After he defeats Ocho, he marks him with the scar and then disappears, in the same dramatic way he did when Ocho first saw him as a child.

Now I agree with Leonardo that cutting a dude's head off isn't the best way to go about punishing people, even those you hold responsible for something as heinous as killing the love of your life, but hell, I've never been in Ocho's situation, so what do I know? I like that Murphy and/or "Clarrain" make the conflict a good one, with more gray than the black-and-white art its rendered in—Ocho's argument about Leo's hypocrisy is a good one, and jeez, where does Leonardo get off fucking mutilating him just because? (There are additionally a few interesting digs taken at Leonardo regarding his inability to understand how Ocho feels—presumably because as an essentially gender-less member of a tiny, evolutionary dead-end mutant "species," Leonardo will never have a wife to lose).

Allan's art is a particular treat, and it's a kick to see his familiar style from the Archie comic applied to more sophisticated storytelling, complete with better Ninja Turtle character designs (although, much more than in the previous five issues, these Turtles look more like the cartoon/Archie Turtles...with pupils and everything!) and freedom from bad coloring and cheap paper stock.

The black-and-white of this issue is of the purest form, with little shading, no toning and no real grays, all the better to appreciate Allen's linework.

This issue also contains a 10-page back-up by Murphy and artist Jim Lawson called (sigh) "The Raisin," a sequel of sorts to their previous back-up story in #4, "The Grape."

The Utrom who died in a police raid in that story is briefly resurrected by a weird, alien monster that feeds on dead Utroms called a "Morto Mullocos." It is in the process of resurrecting the dead Utrom in order to feed on it, when the same police from the drug raid storm the morgue to capture the beast. And then a group of vigilante Utroms appear on what look like hovering Roombas with laser guns mounted on them to also capture the beast.

During the course of the fight, the female police sergeant gets the front of her shirt completely blasted off...

...which might make for a sorta sexy scene, did it not lead directly to this weird revelation...

I suppose it was only a matter of time before the Utroms made female body suits to walk around in, huh? A squishy, tentacled brain-alien in the abdominal cavity of a lady body, her breasts framing it like curtains, is one weird image, so kudos for that.

Finally, rounding out this pretty full 35 story-page issue, is a pin-up by Chris Herndon and Berger, of the Turtles fighting classic Foot Clan ninja on a speeding garbage truck:

All that, a prose introduction and a two-page letter column for just $2.95. Man, they just don't make Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics like they used to, do they...?

Briefly on IDW's Tales of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Vol. 3

As I've been reading and reviewing my way through volume 2 of Mirage's Tales of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, I figured it was time to check in with IDW's reprint program of the same comics. They have been collecting both volumes of Mirage's old Tales comics—the seven-issue, 1987-1989 volume one and the 70-issue, 2004-2010 volume two—in a single series of colorized trade paperbacks. Their first two collections covered the entire first volume of Tales, while this third collection features the first four issues of the second volume.

As with the previous Tales collections, this one features a new cover by artist Jim Lawson, who drew two of the five stories within (the "Seeds of Destruction" story from #2 and the six-page "The Grape" back-up from #4), and the cover scheme is basically the same as all previous Tales collections, with the various heroes (here, just the Turtles and Splinter) fighting the various bad-guys (one of the worm guys from #1, the Foot mystic from #2, the worm/shark/octopus/Oroku Saki monster from #3 and #4) in a single scene.

There are two changes of note from the original comics being collected.

First, the logo on the cover of this collection is that of the original Tales series, complete with the "Eastman and Laird's" being prominently featured as part of the logo, whereas the issues in this collection all bore the Tales of The TMNT logo, eschewing including the names of the creators and using the "TMNT" acronym, which was more prominently featured in the Turtles title this volume of Tales was tied into (I like the original logo much better, just from a simple design point-of-view).

Also, as with almost all of IDW's TMNT reprints, this collection is colorized...and no one gets a byline for doing the coloring. A Ronda Pattison gets a "cover colors by" credit, but that's it.

In the past, I've noted some strange, usually bad choices made in the colorizing process, but this volume didn't seem to have anything too egregious. The worm men in the first issue are all a fleshy, peach color, similar to that of earthworms, whereas I likely would have went with something closer to white, to reflect their centuries of living in a sunless underground cavern. And the hybrid ex-Shredder monster in "The Worms of Madness" is colored a golden brown, rather than the shark-gray I imagined him to be while reading the black-and-white original story. But these aren't mistakes, just matters of personal preference, I suppose.

This was the only panel that really jumped out at me during a flip-through as being too terribly off:

That's a panel from #3, the first half of "The Worms of Madness" by Steve Murphy, Rick Remender and John Beatty. It's a "cover" panel of one from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #21, the final issue of the three-part "Return to New York" storyline in which the Turtles finally defeat the back-from-the-dead Shredder, whose helmet is always colored either gray or silver. Here, it's red and gold with a silver face plate, for some reason.

Oh, and there's a weird mistake in this Eric Talbot fronstpiece from the same issue. Check out the point of the sai in Raphael's left hand:

Not sure what that is, but I imagine it was supposed to be taken out before this went to press.

Artist Ryan Browne's Popcorn Swamp Thing from Swamp Thing Annual #3 is the best Swamp Thing.

Sure, Popcorn Swamp Thing—or should it just be Popcorn Thing?—only appears on two pages of the 38-page comic, and Brown is only one of the five artists who contribute work to the book, but man, those are two really great pages (So too are the two pages Dave Bullock draws, depicting the origin of The Demon Etrigan).

DC's October 2014 in dismemberments