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Showing posts with label jrjr. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jrjr. Show all posts

Thursday, August 14, 2025

On 2017's Ghost Rider/Wolverine/Punisher: Hearts of Darkness (again, apparently)

(UPDATE: So funny story, and by "funny" I mean "slightly alarming." I wanted to revisit 1991's Hearts of Darkness due to some of my recent reading of Ghost Rider comics, so I looked for it in my library catalog, found the above 2017 collection, checked it out, read it and then spent a few hours writing, oh, almost 4,000 words about it. Once I was finished and was attaching tags to it, I noticed that I already had seven for "ron garney" which seemed like a lot to me, so I clicked on that to see which of the comics he drew I had already reviewed and—surprise!—I had already reviewed this very trade, back in 2017, when it first came out. What's worse, that review was much shorter, punchier and funnier than the one I had just written. So not only is my memory deteriorating to the point that I can't remember which comics I've already written about—hell, I didn't even remember having read Dark Design before, and thought I was doing so here for the first time—but my comics-writing-about skills are apparently deteriorating, as I've grown increasingly used to writing super-long posts and publishing once or twice a week, rather than writing something daily-ish. So that's...great. Just great. Anyway, since I wasted an afternoon re-reviewing this book, I might as well go ahead and post it. But do keep in mind there's a shorter 2017 review that makes pretty much the exact same points as this one, only in fewer words. Ugh...)

This trade paperback collects a pair of Howard Mackie-written team-ups featuring three of Marvel's most violent, most badass and most popular heroes of the 1990s: Ghost Rider, Wolverine and The Punisher. 

The first, sub-titled Hearts of Darkness and featuring art from John Romita JR and Kalus Janson, was released in 1991 as a $4.95 special, with a spine and sturdier cover, essentially what DC Comics used to call "prestige format." 

The second, 1994's The Dark Design, was a fairly direct sequel, gathering the same heroes, the same villains and even a supporting character, but this one was drawn by Ron Garney and Al Milgrom (And, I see, cost a buck extra, which seems like a lot of inflation for just three years). 

As I mentioned in the first of my recent posts about Marvel's Ghost Rider character, I had actually read Hearts of Darkness before, shortly after it came out, when I was around 13 or so. If I recall the circumstances correctly, my grandfather had taken my sister, brother and I to downtown Ashtabula on a Saturday afternoon, and I convinced them to let me stop into the comic shop that was then on Main Street. My grandfather offered to buy my little brother a comic too, even though he wasn't a regular reader like I was. 

I suggested he try a Marvel comic, as I figured it made no sense for both of us to read DC Comics, and if he started reading Marvels that would double my access to comics. This book, which had a neat wraparound cover, the right half of which was reused for that of the collection, is what he chose (Why my grandfather agreed to pay almost $5 for a comic book, given that he grew up buying them for a dime, I can't imagine).

At the time, I knew almost nothing about the title characters beyond what I read in that comic (and had gleaned from the covers of their books I had seen previously in the shop), and less than that about the book's villain Blackheart, and his adversary/father, Mephisto. 

I didn't remember too much about it, other than that I kinda liked the art (At that point, the only name I was familiar with on the cover was "Klaus Janson", which I knew from reading a friend's copy of The Dark Knight Returns). That and, despite the chains, claws and guns, it must not have really spoken to me, as I didn't start following the adventures of any of these characters after that. (My brother went on to read Wolverine #48-50, which I still have in a longbox somewhere....Say, that fiftieth issue with the claw marks through the outer cover didn't ever end up being worth anything, did it...? Oh, and I did pull Ghost Rider #33 off the new rack out of desperation a few years later, but otherwise it wasn't until about 2000, when Marvel started hiring favorite DC creators and launching their new reader friendly Ultimate line that I started reading any Marvel comics regularly.)

I was curious to revisit the comic now, in part because reading Wolverine: Evilution and the first couple hundred pages of the '90s Ghost Rider comic put me in something of a mood to see more of those characters from that time period, and in part because I was curious to see how much the experience of doing so at this point might differ, decades and hundreds of comics later, when I was so much more familiar with the characters, having seen them in various cartoons, movies and TV shows...in addition to the comics.

Oddly, I have to admit my regard for Hearts of Darkness hasn't changed all that much. I still think the art is pretty great (in the years since 1990, I got to know the name John Romita JR, and gained a great esteem for his work, although I think this is maybe the earliest of his comics I've read), and the story so-so, a somewhat strained plot offering little in the way of characterization, beyond a very tell-not-show summation of these darker superheroes as belonging to a newer, more modern breed of Marvel champion.

The 46-page story opens in the town of Christ's Crown, apparently so named because of a nearby hilltop ringed in thorns, like Jesus' own crown of thorns. There some people in hoods and cloaks have gathered by torchlight to sacrifice a pretty blonde woman, her modesty preserved by a blanket, in the name of a devil that sounds more like that of an X-Men character than something from the Bible: Blackheart. 

Apparently created by JRJR himself just about a year or so previous, with writer Ann Nocenti for their Daredevil run, the character is the son of Marvel's devil figure Mephisto, and has an interesting look: He's an all-black humanoid with a tail, giant red eyes, thorny skin and a huge mane of hair that looked more like porcupine quills than dreadlocks to teenage Caleb (Wes Bentley played him in the 2007 Ghost Rider movie, although he looked far more like Wes Bentley than JRJR's weird design in that movie). 

He bubbles up from the blood spilled to summon him, strips the flesh from the bones of all of his worshipers, and then seems to have a nervous breakdown of sorts, complaining to himself about his lot in life, that his father stripped him of his free will and, holding the skull of one of the victims' head aloft like Hamlet, he talks about how "There is a new breed of man...one whose fall towards the corrupt will not be so far", a breed of man that will help him kill his father. 

Cut to Dan Ketch motorcycling into what seems like a pretty typical small town, arriving at a local boarding house with a big sign reading "BOARDING HOUSE" on it, and meeting its proprietor, a woman named Flo, and her daughter, a little girl with a ponytail bouncing a ball in the driveway.

He's only the latest boarder there, and he meets the other two at dinner: A "Mr. Logan", who, thanks to his distinctive hairstyle, any reader would immediately recognize as Wolverine, and a "Mr. Frank," who looks a lot like The Punisher wearing sunglasses indoors...save for his pencil-thin mustache.

"Something about these two," Dan thinks to himself. "I feel like I've met them before."

He has, of course. According to Comics.org, Hearts of Darkness was cover dated December of 1991; Ghost Rider met Punisher in issues #5 and #6 of his own book, September and October of the previous year, and he first met Wolverine in a string of issues of Marvel Comics Presents during the winter of 1990-1991. 

Dan apparently can't see through their disguises and aliases though, and they don't recognize him without his skull on fire, I guess, although Wolvie will later tell The Punisher "something about him tickles my nose," regarding Ketch.

This happens at night, when Wolverine sticks a claw through Punisher's door with a "SNIKT" and a "Guess who?" 

"Mr. Logan?" Punisher says, opening the door. "Thought it was you. Didn't think you'd recognize me."

"The phony mustache ain't that good of a disguise," Wolvie answers. "Besides you've got the stink of death on you, Punisher-- --Just like me!" 

Here Frank peels off his mustache, which, sadly, never reappears throughout the rest of the comic.

They compare notes, and we learn what brings the three anti-heroes to the Christ's Church boarding house: All three received short, hand-written notes signed "B.H.", each promising what might seem like their heart's desire. Knowledge about the Ghost Rider, Wolverine's true origins and how he received his claws, and who really killed Castle's family.

So not really all that sophisticated a plan, for a demon, really, this anonymous mail scam. For some reason, they had to come to Christ's Crown, too? Is that where Blackheart lives? Can he not tempt long-distance?

Anyway, that night Blackheart appears to all three separately in their rooms, apparently simultaneously, tempting them further, and talking about them as a new breed of hero:

All three of you represent humanity's newest breed of hero.

A hero that isn't afraid to approach the edge when need arises.

It's an intangible thing. A gray area which resides within each of you, in a place that my father would call your soul. 

I mean, I guess...? But it seems more of an aesthetic thing, at this point. The Punisher and Wolverine seem to kill enemies without compunction, and not fret over the morality of doing so all that much (I wouldn't exactly say The Punisher works in a "gray area," for example; he just seems to murder bad guys and save good guys). 

And while I'm obviously not sure about what happens later in his career, but at this point, Dan's Ghost Rider has never killed anyone.

Anyway, Blackheart's pitch involves making them more powerful, helping them tap into the gray area of their souls and, in exchange, all he wants from them, he says, is their help in killing "the greatest evil your race has ever known, my father, Mephisto." A little later, Blackheart refers to Mephisto as "your world's devil," which seems pretty appropriate.

Still, all three don't want to work with Blackheart, and all three answers in a curt declarative: "No."

Blackheart then, realizing he will have to try a different approach, disappears from their rooms. Flo and seemingly all of the people in the town start to walk as if in a daze towards the top of the hill. As for Blackheart, he's stolen Danny's bike and abducted Lucy.

Punisher and Wolverine struggle to get through both the mass of innocent people and then, later, the thorns. Dan, meanwhile, shouldn't be able to transform into Ghost Rider without his bike, but then looks at his palms, and sees symbols on each. His hands then burst into flame, the flesh melting off of them, and then off his face, and, transformed, he jumps onto a motorcycle stolen from a sports store and speeds through the thorns.

After a bit more tempting (during which Blackheart refers to Ghost Rider as "Zarathos! If that is who you are"; it is, we will eventually learn, not who this Ghost Rider is), the heroes all follow Blackheart to hell in an attempt to free Lucy, and there they fight hordes of little green, frog-like creatures (those seen on the wraparound cover), and, eventually, take on Blackheart. 

One would think such a thing would be impossible, but Ghost Rider takes off his gloves to reveal boney, burning fists, and shouting "Feel the pain!" he lays into Blackheart, punching him so hard he pulps half his face. Another punch, and his fist breaks through Blackheart's torso, exiting the demon's back.

From there, Wolverine lops off one of Blackheart's arms, and then Punisher spends a few panels shooting him with what I think are a machine gun ("BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA") and a grenade launcher, maybe? ("POOM POOM POOM POOM"). I don't know; I've never read an issue of The Punisher Armory, so I'm not sure what guns he carries when. 

Soon, Blackheart is just a severed head sitting in a pool of black goo, but as much punishment as his physical body seems to have taken, he can't be killed like this, and his body starts to reform. Before he can do so though, the heroes are all dismissed by Blackheart's dad, Mephisto.

This Mephisto looks nothing like the red-skinned devil with the cape and fright wig that John Buscema and Stan Lee created for Silver Surfer in the late-sixties. Rather, he looks more like a behemoth red humanoid frog of sorts, with a prominent beak, a long, long tongue and prominent breasts, each with a long, ribbon-like nipple. His weird head is crowned with an explosion of thick red hairs or tentacles, and he's surrounded by gingerbread-shaped forms that I assume are meant to be human souls in long-shot.

He scoops up the puddle of Blackheart and swallows him, making a vague threat to Ghost Rider: 

Go now, Ghost Rider-- 

--But we will meet again. 

Soon. And there will be no gray areas involved.

The truth will be revealed.

And that's pretty much the entirety of the adventure, our heroes reappearing atop the hill with Lucy, who they reunite with her mother. And while the skeptical Punisher asks Wolverine if all of that was real, and what he thinks of the business about "us being close to the edge," Ghost Rider gets the last word in, saying that, "As long as the innocent are protected-- --our cause is just."

The price tag would have been fairly steep for a book that's only twice the length of a regular comic book—that month's issue of Ghost Rider was only $1.75, after all—but I have to imagine Marvel fans appreciated the opportunity to see three of their favorite heroes in a single story like that, and Mackie certainly writes them all well (even if Ghost Rider, whose book Mackie was then writing, seems to get the most attention), and he does a fine job in the tough guy, alpha male personas (Originally, I took this as 100% straight; re-reading it today, I wonder to what degree Mackie might have been parodying a certain kind of action hero with Mr. Logan and Mr. Frank's macho portrayals).

I really can't say enough good things about JRJR and Janson's renderings of the characters (colored by John Wellington). They are big, thick and bulky as one comes to expect from JRJR, but they all also look like "themselves" in ways that other artists aren't always able to pull off (And I appreciated JRJR making Wolverine so short, particularly when standing next to the big Frank Castle).

Did the story deserve a sequel? Well, probably not, but it got one anyway, in the form of Ghost Rider/Wolverine/Punisher: Dark Design.

Things have changed a lot in Christ's Crown in three years, and things have changed a lot for at least one of the heroes. At this point, Wolverine has exchanged his brown and yellow costume with the big red belt for his blue and gold one, complete with the shoulder pads I don't think make any sense.

Additionally, he seems to have lost the metal on his claws, as here he has those jagged bone claws he sported for a while.

Oh, and for some reason, his eyes are red much of the time, whether he's wearing his cowl or not. Other times, they are white. Should we blame colorist Paul Mounts for this? Maybe, but we'll come back around to the coloring in a little bit.

The plot begins in media res, with Ghost Rider on foot, carrying a now much bigger and older Lucy, while a woman wearing a tank top crop top with no bra and carrying a big shotgun urges him on. Garney's Ghost Rider has the same basic design as the one I had gotten used to, save for in his drawings of him, G.R.'s skull seems to float in a pillar of flame rather than be connected directly to his torso, and, for some reason (the nineties, I guess?), there is often strings of spittle between his skeletal jaws.

They are on the run from Blackheart's followers, who are apparently members of the town who have been corrupted by his touch. They now all have prominent black veins visible in their skin, they dress in revealing, tight-fitting black clothes that look like they might have been worn to a goth dance club or a fetish ball, and they wield weird-looking sci-fin guns that seem to shoot lasers.

They are after Lucy, who seems to have maybe developed some kind of (mutant?) power around the time she "began...coming of age". 

The town has been physically transformed into some sort of weird hellscape with scary-looking buildings more bizarre than those even the most creative artists might draw in Gotham City. And the population divided between Blackheart's corrupted, who want to capture Lucy for him, and the regular folk, who are trying to defend Lucy from them.

Our three heroes have returned to the city, compelled by psychic distress signals from Lucy who, as Garney draws her, has apparently hit puberty in the intervening years, although her breasts aren't as prominent as those of all the other women he draws in this issue, corrupt and uncorrupt. 

Meanwhile, Blackheart is hanging out in a cathedral of some sort, looking much as he did before, only now wearing a trench coat. He talks to himself, ranting about his descent into madness, while his father, in the form of a dove, seems to torment him.

Ghost Rider, the first hero we see, has his hand touched by one of the corrupt, which spread their infection to him. In order to try and stave it off, he turns back into Dan Ketch.

Wolverine, who Garney draws not with that weird wolfman hairstyle and prominent muttonchops he always sports, but with a long, lion-like mane; after his first skirmish with the corrupt, when The Punisher saves him by gunning down a wave of a half-dozen attackers from a rooftop, Wolvie suits up, and I can't imagine how all that hair fits so snugly beneath his cowl. 

Shortly after the heroes all meet up at a camp, the corrupted attack and make off with Lucy who, back at Blackheart's cathedral, is dressed in a white wedding dress (complete with veil), where she is apparently to become his child bride, and the key to his victory over his father.

Our heroes attack, are briefly strung up on strands of ink black something-or-other and subjected to mental images to torment them. A naked Wolverine, his hair seemingly having gotten even longer, has no patience for this when he seems to find himself in the snow Canadian wilderness: 

GRRR! The north country...Canada! 

Pretty original takin' me back to my roots.

It's been tried too many times.

Don't even know what's real myself anymore.

Don't really care! Get out of my mind, Blackheart!

He's able to get through to Ghost Rider and Punisher, and once again the three triple-team the demon, Ghost Rider beating him with flaming fists, Wolverine slicing him with his claws, Punisher pumping rounds into him.

What's different this time? Well, this time Lucy runs from the heroes back to the fallen Blackheart, seemingly offering him forgiveness, at least according to Mackie's narration. But when Mephisto again arrives to collect his son, Blackheart pulls a knife, the tip of which is dripping with blood.

"I do not need the child," he says. "Only this! The blood of a child. INNOCENT BLOOD!"

So I guess Lucy either slipped him a knife with her blood on it, or, when she went back to forgive him, allowed him a bit of her blood...? That, or he cut her just deeply enough to get a few drops of her blood on his blade a few pages earlier, when the heroes first stormed his base and he briefly held a knife to Lucy's throat.

At any rate, that's apparently all one needs to kill Marvel's devil (temporarily, I assume), as Blackheart stabs his dad to death, and the last panels shows Blackheart standing triumphant, having doffed his trench coat and raised his arms in victory: "Mephisto, King of Hell, is DEAD... Long live the new king!"

I imagine that was a significant event in the Marvel Universe and was probably reflected in a few comics for a while, but I also imagine it was relatively short-lived. Certainly, I've seen Mephisto alive and well since (notably in Jason Aaron's Avengers run, which I read the first two-thirds of or so. And now that I think of it, I can't remember the last time I saw Blackheart in a comic...).

For Mackie's part, I think the script for Dark Design suffers from the classic affliction of so many sequels, that of repeating something because it was popular and there was demand for more of the same, and not because there was anything new to say. The story thus suffers from diminishing returns.

Also, because it is essentially just a few action scenes strung together, only interrupted by Blackheart ranting at his father, it doesn't have anything as fun as seeing the characters in their secret identities...or The Punisher's clumsy attempts at a disguise that we saw in Hearts of Darkness. 

And then, of course, there's no real need for Mackie to meditate on the dark nature of these heroes, because, well, he already did that three years previous, and, in that time, they all just kept on doing what they've been doing with, I imagine, little change (In this story, for example, Ghost Rider refuses to kill human beings, even those corrupted by Blackheart, while Wolverine and The Punisher mow them down without a second thought). 

I did not care for the art at all, which came as a bit of a surprise to me, given that I genuinely like Garney's art on JLA about a decade or so later (He drew the "Pain of The Gods" and "Syndicate Rules" arcs toward the end of the series). I suppose we can blame much of that on the times, as even a quick flip-through will reveal this to be a very nineties looking book.

Aside from his specific design choices, the colors, the letters and their various fonts and special effects, the layouts, the inset panels...the story reminded me a lot of the look of the earlier issues of Spawn I had read, and seemed a significant departure from the first year or so of Mackie and company's Ghost Rider, or Hearts of Darkness. 

Indeed, because it's just a page-turn away from Hearts of Darkness, I think Dark Design suffers in comparison, although I wonder how much of this is really a matter of, say, the JRJR/Janson team being better at telling a comics story than the Garney/Milgrom one, and how much of it is due to the first being published in 1991, and the second in 1994. 

Certainly, the advances in comics coloring technology and lettering style (and/or technology?) seems to have informed the latter book, which seems to take full advantage of all the new choices a colorist had to work with in the mid-nineties, whether it necessarily ended up benefiting the book in the long run or not. 

Reading both stories back to back today, Dark Design looks much darker, muddier and harder to read than Hearts of Darkness. (Also, one can't tell from this particular collection, but Dark Design was apparently published on glossy paper, which might have accounted for its higher cost, whereas I don't think Hearts of Darkness was. I'm now a little curious what similarly glossy paged books from the time might now look like in trade collections, but I'm not even sure where I could look to see...). 

Anyway, I disliked Dark Design as much as I liked Hearts of Darkness, and I would hesitate to recommend this particular collection to any reader...unless, of course, said reader was simply curious about Marvel Comics in the first half of the nineties, in which case I guess this book is a decent encapsulation, both good and bad.

Oh, and as I mentioned on Bluesky, after reading this particular trade paperback, I now find myself, for the first time in my life, as a person with opinions about Wolverine. Those being that the brown and yellow costume > than the blue and gold one, and that metal claws > bone claws. 

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Wednesday, January 15, 2025

DC Versus Marvel Omnibus Pt. 7: Punisher/Batman: Deadly Knights #1

A mere two months after Batman/Punisher: Lake of Fire, a second DC/Marvel crossover featuring the two characters hit the stands, this one featuring the actual Batman, Bruce Wayne, rather than his temporary fill-in, Jean-Paul Valley. 

I thought it was the better of the two comics, and not simply because of the fact that it was what a reader might expect from a crossover of the two characters. The creative team also seemed better suited to the task, with the art especially being of a magnitude greater than that of the previous comic, at least according to my own personal tastes.

That creative team was writer Chuck Dixon, pencil artist John Romita Jr. and inker Klaus Janson.

By 1994, Dixon was both a prolific Punisher writer and a prolific Batman writer, and thus an ideal choice for a book in which the pair cross paths with one another. While I've never read his Punisher output, I have read a lot of Dixon's Batman comics (and those featuring other members of the Bat-Family, particularly from his long run on the first Robin ongoing). 

While not my favorite Batman writer (that would have been, at the time, probably Alan Grant), and never one for particularly inspired, imaginative, wild stories, Dixon was still an incredibly solid comics writer, a stalwart whose name on a book guaranteed a certain level of competency and quality. 

I always thought he excelled at coming up with plots for his heroes to challenge and foil, often with interesting crimes that seemed perfect for action movies (And yes, as a fan of his work, it saddens me that his personal politics seem to have alienated him from much of the mainstream industry, and lead to him working on truly bizarre comics like 2016's Clinton Cash: The Graphic Novel, a comics adaptation of Peter Schweizer's election cycle hit book). 

JRJR was an extremely familiar presence at Marvel Comics and had drawn Punisher War Journal, but this comic was his very first time drawing a DC Comics character officially. That was, in and of itself, rather exciting at the time.

And as for Klaus Janson, not only was he a frequent JRJR collaborator, but his work with Frank Miller on 1986's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns meant his was a name every Batman fan would know. 

So the art, which was colored by Christie Scheele, was obviously great, and the intense, dynamic cover of the two characters wrestling the pouring rain you see above is but a small taste.

Romita's drawing of the lead characters' figures are big, blocky and imposing...muscular, but with a sense of animated grace about them. His many mobster characters that populate the panels of the book are similarly big and bulky, with jagged edges to their suits and faces.

Under Janson's heavy inks, there's a tactile sense of grit to the art, and lots of blackness, from busy crosshatching to the rings around the stalactites in the Batcave to the wrinkles and shadows on the suits to the driving black rain of the climactic encounter.

Dixon's script gives a few great opportunities to really show off the Romita and Janson art, too, and they do not waste it.

Both characters are introduced in interesting splash spreads that require the reader to turn the open book from the standard horizontal orientation to a vertical one (no easy feat with a 1,000-page hardcover omnibus!) and read them that way, not unlike a pin-up in an old girly magazine.

The Punisher is introduced first, in a low angle standing atop some crates, a series of muzzle flashes and arcs of spent bullet casings emanating from the guns he has in both hands (They look like uzis to me, although he calls them "MACs" in narration later in the story; are those different things? I am not a gun person). 

JRJR's Frank Castle is bigger and thicker than Barry Kitson's was, and his face is covered in stubble and shadow. A strip of two inset panels along the bottom of the image of Castle keep it from being a true two-page splash; these panels feature regular Batman supporting characters Harvey Dent, Renee Montoya and Commissioner Gordon. 

Batman appears a few pages later, in similar fashion, although he's on the "bottom" of the spread, with a strip of panels above him. He's shown leaping into action, seemingly falling from the sky, with his hands outstretched like claws (and his fingers looking particularly, peculiarly flat, as JRJR tends to draw hands), his face and cape all black.

Later in the book, at the climax, when the pair come to blows for the second time, there's another two-page spread requiring one to turn the book to see it right-side up, featuring The Punisher punching Batman in the face.

I'm not sure about the image, as it affords the moment of biggest impact in the entire story to that particular blow in a fight, and it's not exactly the most dramatic moment of their conflict. It also devotes all that comic page real estate to a moment in which Castle "wins" the fight with Batman, although in both of the instances in which they fight one another in this book, Dixon's script makes clear that Batman would ultimately be victorious in a hand-to-hand fight with Castle (Actually, Lake of Fire also presumed the same about a fight between Punisher and that Batman, although the Punisher won the conflict by resorting to using a gun and a bit of trickery). 

It's perhaps worth pausing to consider JRJR's Batman, as this was his first time drawing the character (He would of course get another crack at the character during his 2016-2020ish stint at DC Comics, where he drew the first arc of writer Scott Snyder's All-Star Batman).

This is, of course, Batman in his "classic" costume, blue and gray with a form-fitting utility belt and a yellow circle around his bat-emblem (Batman would debut his new, all-black, brief-less costume the following year; that's what he would be wearing in his next Marvel crossover, a 1995 team-up with Spider-Man). I say "blue" of course, but it may look black to you, given how many lines Romita and Janson use, and how heavy the inks are; it does appear to be the same color as The Punisher's costume in this crossover, so I guess one could say they are both blue-black or, perhaps, comic book black.

JRJR's Batman is as big and imposing as his Punisher, but, in the few instances where we see him with his cape unfurled and flying behind him, he's also a bit more lithe and athletic, his waist looking almost comically slim below his huge barrel chest.

On the ears front, JRJR is on the longer side of the spectrum, which was the fashion at the time. Unusually for many Batman artists, however, his bat-ears are very thick at the base, forming two big black triangles atop his head.

As for Dixon's plot, it's pretty straightforward, and somewhat perfunctory, basically maneuvering the pair into a rainy Gotham City alleyway so they can hit one another and focus on their differences in crime-fighting philosophy in as perfect a test case as possible: Unrepentant mass murderer The Joker, put a bullet in his head or beat him up and take him to Arkham?

There's no big supervillain plot like Jigsaw's plan to turn the Gotham City reservoir into a lake of fire as in Lake of Fire, nor is there any focus on the interior lives of the characters, as with Valley's struggling with his delusions, and the conflict between his religious programming and his inherited crime-fighting mission. 

There's also, perhaps surprisingly, little real connective tissue between Deadly Knights and Lake of Fire. The characters make passing references to it (The Punisher noting that Batman's fighting style seems as different as his costume, for example, or Batman noting that The Punisher was in Gotham while he was "absent"). It obviously doesn't matter now that the two comics are collected back-to-back in the omnibus, but one could easily have read Deadly Knights in 1994 without ever having read Lake of Fire. 

We open with The Punisher in a massive firefight with generic gangsters in a Gotham City paint factory, his narration telling us he's returned to the city looking for Jigsaw, who never returned to New York as he had expected. Just as Castle is about to execute the last surviving gunman, Batman lands on the back of his head and they fight for a few pages.

"Something different here," Castle narrates. "Last time I was in Gotham this guy was a reckless brawler. Now he seems more skilled. Something refined about him."

Batman, meanwhile, is somewhat dismissive of The Punisher's abilities: "Punisher's tough. Strong. At heart he's just a brawler. All rage and brute strength." 

Though The Punisher gets in a few hits, including breaking a crate over Batman's head, Batman is in the process of throwing him across the room when the burning building collapses, and The Punisher escapes.

Meanwhile, Jigsaw, now drawn with his face bandaged up like a mummy, the work of "the best plastic surgeon that extortion could buy" in the words of his new partner The Joker, is trying to consolidate power around himself, and become the new leader of Gotham's criminal underworld. 

It is perhaps here worth noting that JRJR's Jigsaw looks entirely different from Kitson's. He's a great deal smaller, his hair far longer and shaggier (and a different color, although I suppose that's between the colorists), and he's lost the weird metal neck brace he had seemed to be wearing. 

As for The Joker, I really like JRJR's version, which manages to convey a full range of emotions through the eyes and brows alone, despite the smile being fixed. 

Dixon writes The Joker more as a typical gangland figure than he's usually portrayed, even if a crazy one with something of a schtick. Here he's not as wild or theatrical as in most of his other appearances, even those that Dixon himself had written. And there's no real plan that he's executing here, either; he's simply working to help Jigsaw consolidate power because...well, because Dixon wanted both title characters' archenemies in the relatively short, 45-ish page story, one assumes. 

While the two vigilantes pursue parallel investigations—and their respective computer-savvy sidekicks Micro and Robin have a computer fight, leading to this immortal panel—they both end up in a nightclub with The Joker, Jigsaw, a local crime boss and a whole bunch of generic guys with suits and guns, leading to a big, long 12-page fight scene ("The caped choirboy is holding his own, but he's throwing fists in a firefight," The Punisher observes).

At the end, the crime-fighters end up facing one another's villains, which means The Punisher putting a gun in The Joker's face and saying, "I've got all the therapy you need right here, comedian."

Batman, of course, would appear just before Castle could pull the trigger, leading first to a brief argument, and then that splash of The Punisher decking Batman.

A short fight ensues, in which Dixon has Batman assure us he could totally kick Castle's ass, if so inclined: "I let you have that one because you probably think I deserved it," he says, and when Castle throws another punch, Batman catches his fist and tosses him into a pile of boxes. "I said one...Don't test me, Castle."

Batman threatens him that if The Punisher ever comes to Gotham City again he'll see him locked up with "the other murderers," but seems awfully complacent about The Punisher's last few nights of killing a dozen or two guys in his city, and, rather uncharacteristically, seems content to just let The Punisher go (To be fair to Dixon, he had run out of his allotted pages).  

The Punisher, meanwhile, gets the last word in, but otherwise slinks away. And, to date anyway, has obeyed Batman's command and never returned to Gotham. 

This would be the pair's final meeting...unless you count an off-panel scene in JLA/Avengers, wherein the Justice League, visiting the Marvel Universe, are apparently delayed in their mission by some 20 minutes when Batman stops to beat up The Punisher. But, again, that was off panel.

If Deadly Knights was what we might expect a DC/Marvel crossover of the mid-1990s to be—two popular, top-tier headliners with interestingly opposing philosophies running headlong into one another by a creative team perfectly suited to the occasion—the next collaboration between the two publishers was anything but. 

Which isn't to say it wasn't interesting, of course, just not predictable.



Next: 1995's Darkseid Vs. Galactus: The Hunger #1

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Saturday, February 03, 2018

On The Silencer #1


*Just like the previous of DC's "New Age of Heroes" books, Damage #1, the first issue of The Silencer features "Dark Nights Metal" in the blue tier of the corner box, the space which indicates which family of books individual titles are part of.

And just like the first issue of Damage, The Silencer doesn't have any apparent connection to the events of Dark Nights: Metal...at least, not the issues of Metal that have shipped to date, #1-#5. So if Damage and The Silencer and the other "New Age of Heroes" books are going to be Metal spin-offs, then there are either going to be a lot of set-up in that sixth and final issue of Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo's event series, or else these books are going to have to do something in future issues to retroactively tie-in to Metal. (The one exception among the announced "New Age" books seems to be The Terrifics, as 50% of that book's stars have been prominently featured in Metal, and the fifth issue of the series starts to reveal how it ties in; I suppose there's a good chance Immortal Men will be a clear tie-in too, as a group of immortals played a small role in Metal near the beginning).

*I figured this vertical gatefold cover out very quickly, after struggling a bit with the one on Damage. It's an awkward space to fill with art, really.--I'm not sure why they didn't go horizontal, which is the sort of space comics artists and readers are more familiar with--but artist and character co-creator John Romita JR did a pretty good job of filling that space; much better than Tony S. Daniel did. Romita has  the title character in the center of the image; the space below her is filled with a pile of dead ninjas, which she is standing atop, and the space above her is filled with more, live ninjas raining down on her.

Now that I've seen two, I guess I understand the image on the other side of the cover as well (part of what confused me with the Damage cover was that it looked like three un-related images by Daniel, while the back was a portion of another image). The back of each cover are portions of an image previously seen in promotional material showing many of the characters from the "New Age" line standing side by side. I guess you can collect them all, tear the covers of, put them together like a puzzle, and BAM! you have a poster.

Also, as I previously mentioned, I am dumb, which contributed to my bafflement about the covers.


*After the three-panel, in medias res opening page, there's a heavily narrated seven-page sequence, much of which appeared in previews in the back of previous DC comics, in which Honor Guest is confronted by a cyborg tough named Killbox. It's a pretty flinchily violent scene involving a fistfull of sharpened pencils--I woulda jumped in my seat if I saw it in a movie--but aside from her ass-kicking abilities, The Silencer has a kind of cool, rather unusual super-power, too; one I don't think I've ever seen before.

When she puts her fingers to her lips and goes "Shh," she's surrounded by a sizable field in which there's no sound; this lasts until she snaps her fingers.

 I wasn't sure if there was more to it too, given that it looks like she's embedding her hands fingers deep into Killbox while, um, killing him, but that was likely just the way JR JR is drawing the violence, with people's fingers and fists striking so hard they seem to smoosh or even enter the body of their victims..


*Pasta fagioli is one of my favorites. My mom, my late grandfather, my friend's mom, a local restaurant in my home town, the folks that make it for the churches in Ashtabula to sell on Fridays during Lent, they all make it completely differently, and yet they all make very good pasta fagioli. I'm sure someone somewhere makes terrible pasta fagioli, but I've yet to find it.

This may be the first time I've seen it mentioned in a comic book, but it could also simply be that I have forgotten prior mentions of it in comic books.


*I was somewhat surprised to see Talia al Ghul show up. As drawn, in business suit, she's completely unrecognizable. JRJR draws her so that she looks exactly like Honor Guest, only with white skin and brown hair instead of brown skin and blonde hair.

DC has done a good job of keeping Joker appearances rare and fairly consistent, particularly in comparison to years past, but at the same time they seem to have really lost control of other Bat-villains. Ra's al Ghul and Talia al Ghul are good examples, as they seem to show up pretty much anywhere any bat-related character appears--and that's a lot of different comic books--and there's little evidence that the editors and writers are keeping track of them in even the most cursory ways.

For example, this Talia, in both appearance and status, doesn't really seem to match the one we've seen just four or five issues of Batman ago.


*Leviathan, the organization she lead in the pages of Grant Morrison's Batman comics, which awkwardly span the Flashpoint/New 52 reboot, is mentioned.


*Killbox is followed by two more assassins with dumb names, Bloodvessel and Breacher. None of them survive the issue, so the dumbness of their names isn't really anything to be concerned with, I guess.

*Talia gives Honor some kind of disc-shaped gadget which she only reluctantly takes and I guess it is her costume...? In disc-form? We barely see it in this issue, as she only dons it at the climax, but it's pretty lame-looking (you can see it in the "New Age" house ad; she's the character in profile you can't recognize, because she's wearing a mask she lacks on the cover of The Silencer).

I'm so used to that cover image at this point, that I was surprised to learn she even has a costume. Having seen it in a couple different places so far, I think it's probably better than she not have one. I suppose it could grow on me, though.


*Hey, guess what? This comic book contains no splash pages at all! Not a one! In fact, the fewest number of panels per page in this book is three, and some pages have as many as seven panels. There are several passages with a six-panel grid lay-out. This is in sharp contrast to the first "New Age" book released, which had a gratuitous amount of page real estate wasted on multiple splash pages and double-page splashes.
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Sunday, March 12, 2017

Review: Ghost Rider/Wolverine/Punisher: Hearts of Darkness

Hey, I remember this one! It was an extra-long prestige format comic published in 1991. My grandfather and my siblings were shopping downtown, back when my hometown's downtown still had stores in it, including a comics shop, and my little brother, then considering maybe getting into comics, asked my grandfather to buy it for him. My grandfather, for whom comic books used to cost a dime, was taken aback by the $4.95 price tag (which was actually steep even for 1991), but ultimately relented.

I wonder what he would make of this new trade paperback edition, which costs $15.99; hell, having read the 1991 one-shot, I couldn't imagine how Marvel could get away with that price tag. Turns out they did so by including a sequel I didn't know existed until I started reading this new edition, the 1994 Dark Design (plus a five-page Marvel Age interview with Hearts pencil artist John Romita Jr).

The premise of Hearts of Darkness was that the three characters whose names came before the sub-title--Ghost Rider, Wolverine and Punisher--represented a new* breed of hero with levels of darkness in their hearts that pushed them so close to evil that the demon prince Blackheart thought he could tempt the three of them to assist him in assassinating his father, Mephisto who was, of course, one of Marvel's various Satan analogues.

It was probably just a happy coincidence that, in the early 1990s, these were also three of Marvel's most popular characters. Writer Howard Mackie certainly knew what he was doing in terms of proposing a comic book.
It's an extremely simple, straightforward story. Blackheart invites Danny Ketch, Frank Castle and Logan to the town of Christ's Crown--apparently named because of a hill surrounded with thick thickets of thorn bushes nearby--via letters promising them information they might want, signing the missives B.H.

All three show up on the same day at the same boarding house, run by a woman whose little girl Lucy is extremely trusting and takes to each of the dark, scowling men immediately. Her mother portentously notes her daughter strange trusting nature, and how it's almost like there isn't a bad bone in her body.

That night, Blackheart reveals himself to the three anti-heroes simultaneously, and, when they all tell him to get bent--they may occasionally kill their foes, or, in Frank's case, constantly kill their foes, but that doesn't mean they are going to sign up to work with the a devil (There's a lot of hair-splitting and semi-silly speechifying about how they all walk the razor's edge without falling over the cliff, and other such metaphor mixing).

To try to convince them, Blackheart snatches up Lucy, the only pure soul in Christ's Crown, and takes over the minds of the rest of the city, all of whom have enough sin in them that they can control them. He also steals Danny's bike.

Together, the three popular badasses are able to claw, shoot and hot-chain their way through hordes of little frog-like demons, journey to hell, turn Blackheart into gory chewing gum and save Lucy.

The chief pleasure of the book, then as now, was John Romita Jr.'s artwork, inked by a perfectly compatible Klaus Janson. I really loved his Blackheart design. He looks a bit like a giant, humanoid porcupine, with a head, shoulders and back covered in a mane of bristling spines. He has a tail, bit red eyes and no mouth; additionally, Romita and Janson give him what look like thorns all over his skin. It's a sharp, uncomfortable, jittery, anxious design. It's a hell of a devil, really (I wish that's what the version in the first Ghost Rider movie looked like; it might have gone a ways towards improving that film).

The version of Mephisto who appears here was pretty unfamiliar to me, looking like a gigantic, bloated humanoid with large breasts (and long, string-like nipples), and a vaguely avian head that looks like a primitive ceremonial mask of a bird. There's something of a primitive fertility goddess statue about him. He never gets up off his haunches, but is shown big enough to grab the mooshed-up Blackheart in his hand and throw him into his mouth.

JRJR draws the three title characters exceptionally well, of course. I particularly liked seeing how small and stocky his Wolverine looked; perhaps it was the influence of the films, or simply the slackening of Big Two style guides over the decades, but Wolverine tends to be as tall whoever is drawing him these days wants him to be, so it was kinda refreshing to see a little Wolverine standing next to a giant Frank Castle.
Dark Design is...not very good. Mackie writes it, but Ron Garney pencils and Al Milgrom inks. I like both artists, and Garney in particular has evolved in style into something I quite like now, but back in 1994 he was very much working in a 1990s Jime Lee-like style. Unlike Hearts, this sequel doesn't age well at all, and seems to be, visually at least, inextricably linked to the time in which it was published.

Blackheart has returned to Christ's Crown, and is now sort of insane. He has somehow transformed and twisted the town into a goth sci-fi big city, and enslaved portions of the population, who are called The Corrupt. They wear dumb spandex costumes, have visible black veins, and wield weird laser guns.

Lucy, now a tween or teen, is protected by a small and dwindling band of rebels. I'm not sure why Blackheart didn't just take over their minds too, but it may have something to do with her burgeoning psychic powers, with which she summons Ghost Rider, Wolvie and Punisher back to town. After killing their way through The Corrupt, they take on Blackheart again, this time interrupting his wedding to Lucy (Ew).

He gets what he needs from her, though: Her innocent blood on the tip of his knife, with which he seemingly kills his father.

As I said, Garney's style here is pretty much just default early '90s superhero art. His Blackheart lacks all the pointy parts of JRJR's, looks smaller and wears a coat; he reminded me of an extremely off-model Nightcrawler throughout. He draws the weird bird version of Mephisto, but with a few alterations, like some sort of make-up or mask on his face, and huger, blacker nipples.

Wolverine has traded his brown and yellow costume in for his blue and gold one at this point, but Ghost Rider and Punisher have barely changed (the latter traded in his white boots for black ones, but that's the most drastic wardrobe change he made during the years between these comics). The coloring, by Paul Mounts, is much more garish and nauseous in the second story, but that likely has a lot to do with the changing technology of comic book coloring of the day. There were many more new options suddenly available, and colorists went for them.

I'm not sure what the originals cost these days, should you find them in back-issue bins, but I'd be shocked if they had increased in value so much that you couldn't find them there for cheaper than the cost of this collection. On the other hand, new collections are easier to buy. If you really want to. Like I said, this is a nice showcase of JRJR's art from a previous stage in his career, and serves as a nice time capsule of a certain time in Marvel comics history, but it's not exactly literature.



*Created between 1972 and 1974, these characters weren't exactly brand-new in 1991, although they were definitely among the second generation of Marvel characters. This Ghost Rider was introduced just around the time this comic was originally published though.
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Tuesday, May 05, 2015

John Romita Jr.'s Superman #40 is the best issue of Geoff Johns' Justice League I've never read

I read Superman #40 quite by accident, as I planned to start reading the title when new writer Gene Yuen Lang took over from exiting writer Geoff Johns. I had added the book to my pull-list earlier this month, while Convergence and its tie-ins were taking the place of DC's regular New 52/DCU line of comics, but I guess this last issue shipped late, and therefore ended up in my pull-box.

I'm glad I got it though, and I'm glad I read it. It was great fun, and the fact that it was completely unexpected made it even more so. Long-time Marvel artist John Romita Jr. has been drawing Superman while Johns has been writing it, and he's staying on as the title's artist when Lang's run officially begins with issue #41. This issue, which Romita himself wrote, is therefore a sort of bridge between the two.

The plot picks up on what I imagine was a rather major plot-point in the previous few issues–Superman's new "solar flare" power, where he essentially releases all of the solar energy his cells have stored up in one big, devastating blast–a rather arcade logic application of a super-power, really–at the cost of all of his powers for a period of time afterwards, while his cells recharge.

There was certainly an element of the stunt about the new power, although in rather typical Johns fashion, it was explained and presented in a way that made logical sense, given what had come before. Sure, it was new, but it felt and feels organically in-world.

In Romita's done-in-one story "Powerless," which he pencils as well as writes, with Klaus Janson inking and Dean WHite coloring, as per usual, Superman turns to his friends in The Justice League to help him test his new power.

I actually first noticed that Romita was writing as well as drawing when I hit pages three and four. On the third page, Batman picks up a naked Superman on a remote mountain top–the solar flare disintegrates Superman's uniform–while cracking a series of jokes from the cockpit of his Batplane. On the fourth page, the pair are on the Justice League satellite, where they've been joined by New 52 League founders Wonder Woman (wearing a robe over her costume), Aquaman, The Flash and Cyborg. Superman leans casually up against a chunk of mechanical stuff, while Batman looks more casual still, sitting with his legs crossed at the ankles, his cape off, and sipping a beverage while smiling widely.
These guys seem awfully happy and comfortable, even natural, I thought to myself, then flipped back to page one to see who was writing it. That's when I saw that it wasn't Johns, who has been writing Superman, as well as almost every single appearance of the Justice League I've read since the 2011 continuity reboot.

The League decide to help put Superman through his paces, to see to what degree his powers have returned after 4 hours, and this involves a battery of tests, like Batman and Cyborg shooting laser guns at Superman ("This is a recreational sector!" Superman complains, while the smiling Batman responds, "Well, we think this is recreational!" while blasting away at his friend...I kind of love Romita's happy Bat; is he fast enough to draw Superman while writing and drawing Detective Comics? Because I want to read more of his Batman).

Eventually they take him down to the "basement" of their satellite for a "controlled" solar flare test, and he is once again naked. I think this is maybe my favorite Justice League page since the relaunch:
For the first four panels, Romita has Superman and Batman talking about super-business, but check out Aquaman playfully covering Wonder Woman's eyes so she can't see naked Superman, and her brushing his big, green gloved hand aside to check out Superman's butt.

And those last two panels, with Smiling Batman putting his hands on Superman's face like that, and telling the reporter that he has to buy everyone dinner. Bruce Wayne, you're a billionaire! You should always be treating everyone!

That is immediately followed by a sequence that is every bit as fun, with everyone but Cyborg putting on street clothes to have a few beers together at a Metropolis tavern. I can't really remember the last time I've seen the Justice League just kind of...hanging out, perhaps in large part because I came in when Grant MO\orrison was writing JLA, and he tended to portray them solely as remote, god-like figures. When the League has just hung out, it's tended to be the Leagues that have had more minor characters. For years, decades even, Batman and Aquaman haven't really been the sort to socialize with their peers, let alone put on street clothes to drink beers with them.
White does that thing I hate that I've seen in the CW superhero shows, in which the characters dress in street clothes the same color as their costumes (something I've always associated with the Power Rangers, which was, of course, targeted at little kids who needed the context clues), and I really hate Barry Allen's dumb hat (especially in yellow, but this was an all around fun scene.

When Clark starts talking too loud and running on, the others remark on the fact that he's apparently gotten drunk off just a few ounces of light beer–in addition to his super-powers, he's temporarily lost his Kryptonian constitution, of course–the night seems to end early.

He awakes next to his bed, wearing one sock, the next morning, only to find he's late for some Supermanning, and the book ends with a seven-page Superman sequence.
He sustains an injury as Superman–he went into action before his powers were fully recovered–and Lois notices that Clark Kent has a bandage right where Superman was injured, apparently putting together that they are one and the same (as seen in the Divergence Free Comic Book Day offering).

In that regard, I suppose this will prove to be an "important" book in terms of Superman's status quo in the months ahead, but what I found most important was the fact that it was a light, fun superhero story featuring a bunch of characters I like, apparently enjoying themselves and one another's company. When the beer first starts to go to his head, Clark announces "Hey, this is great! I love you guys!"

The way Romita writes and draws them, I have to agree. This is great; I love those guys.
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Wednesday, September 03, 2014

I kinda hate to be that guy...

...particularly when it comes to a comic book by writer Geoff Johns and John Romita Jr. They both seem like decent human beings and hard-working professionals, and I generally respect and like a lot of their output. In the case of JRJR, I think he's one of the best superhero artists working regularly today, and one of the all-time greats of that part of the comics industry.

So it kinda sorta pains me to point this out, but I can't help myself. Check out this page from the latest issue of the pair's generally pretty good run on Superman:
That is not the way the human eye works, as Johns, Romita, the inker, the colorist or the editor could have discovered by laying on their sides and looking at a chair, with or without someone sitting in it.

On the other hand, Superman is Krpyptonian, so maybe his eye works differently than ours do, but I get the feeling this was the creative team shooting for something sort of cinematic, and ending up fucking up something fairly basic.
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Sunday, June 29, 2014

The Week in Geoff Johns Comics, Part 2: Superman #32

As stated in the previous part, the big news about this particular issue isn't its writer, but its artist: John Romita Jr, whose name is so synonymous with Marvel, it's difficult to think of a more surprising creator to show up for work on a DC book in 2014 (Brian Michael Bendis, maybe?). I'm not too terribly surprised that DC finally convinced JRJR to draw for them, as I have to imagine that no matter how much loyalty a professional superhero artist might have for the publisher Marvel, that artist would still want to spend at least part of their career drawing Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash and Green Lantern, and since there don't seem to be any DC/Marvel crossovers on the horizon, JRJR had to draw something for DC eventually, right?

I am a little surprised to see him come on to the massively troubled Superman title (although DC probably wanted him and Johns there to stabilize it), as I would have expected Detective Comics would have been a more appealing place to start (Batman being the most visually interesting of DC's stable, and having such a big, weird cast and setting for an artist to play with; that almost-as-troubled book just got a new creative team a few issues ago), or perhaps a Justice League comic, as that would allow Romita to start drawing as many DC icons as possible right out of the gate. (When previous long-time Marvel-artist-drawing-for-DC Mark Bagley came aboard, DC gave him first a weekly series that spanned much of the DC Universe in Trinity, and then gave him Justice League of America. Before that, the Kuberts were pretty big Marvel guy "gets," and DC gave Andy Batman and Adam Action, but their inability to keep a schedule render the presence of both artists at the publisher all but meaningless...I guess Andy's become a semi-regular cover artist).

When I say troubled, I'm referring to the behind-the-scenes and on-the-page creative chaos. Superman was rebooted with a new number one and new, retconned continuity in September of 2011, and is one of the inaugural group of New 52 titles that has yet to be canceled. At it's launch, its creative team consisted of George Perez (writing, providing breakdowns and drawing the covers) and Jesus Merino (finishing the interior art). They were in a pretty rough spot, actually, as Superman was the secondary Superman title, and was set in the present, while Grant Morrison, Rags Morales and company were establishing Superman's new origin and history in the pages of Action Comics at the very same time Perez and company were supposed to be telling stories set five years after the Action Comics stuff they hadn't seen yet (And, complicating matters further, Geoff Johns and Jim Lee were also telling a pivotal Superman story set in the characters new past in the pages of Justice League).

Perez wasn't happy, but let's not rehash all that. Suffice it to say that in it's just-shy-of-three-year-existence, Superman has had five different writers or writing teams (Perez for six issues, Keith Giffen and Dan Jurgens for four issues, just Jurgens for two issues, Scott Lobdell for 17 issues and Mike Johnson for 2 issues...plus three different writers on the decimal-pointed issues from Villains Month, but let's ignore those) and about a dozen or so artists in various configurations, not counting fill-in inkers and Villains Month artists (Perez and Merino; just Merino; Perez and Nicola Scott and Trevor Scott; Nicola Scott and Trevor Scott; Giffen, Scott, Jurgens and Merino; Jurgens and Merino; Kenneth Rocafort; Rocafort, Tyler Kirkham and Robson Rocha; Aaron Kuder; Eddy Barrows; Ken Lashley; Ed Benes; Brett Booth).

Of them all, Lobdell writing and Rocafort drawing has been the longest collaboration, but this is one of those book's that never really settled down into anything resembling consistency, and even once DC got Lobdell and Rocafort together, their storylines were being interrupted by Superman line crossovers and stunts like the zero issue and those decimal point issues.

One might think that a creative team comprised of such talented, high-profile creators as Geoff Johns and JRJR (who, both, perhaps most importantly for a book like this, have reputations for meeting deadlines and staying on books for a while) is the sort of creative team you would launch a book like Superman with, not have come in on issue #32. If nothing else, one might expect DC to relaunch Superman with a new #1, but no dice.
So the new creative team—which also consists of frequent JRJR inker Klaus Janson, colorist Laura Martin and letterer Sal Cipriano—comes on board with the randomly numbered issue, Johns' return to a Superman monthly and JRJR's arrival at DC heralded by a wraparound cover featuring Clark Kent turning into Superman (I thought it interesting that they chose that particular cover, as it features Superman's New 52 transformation sequence, in which he doesn't wear a Superman costume under his clothes, exactly, but, like, summons it somehow and it builds itself on his body nanotechnologically or some such; if this was your first Superman comic, and you missed the introduction to the new suit, the sequence looks pretty weird, like Superman ran through a couple of water balloons while turning from Clark Kent to Superman).

This first issue reminded me rather a lot of the beginning of Superman Unchained, the last Superman book to feature a super-high-profile creative team (Scott Snyder and Jim Lee, if you forgot), which was sold and launched as an ongoing monthly but became a miniseries because, you know, Jim Lee. Like Superman Unchained, this issue introduces a Superman mirror character, in the form of Ulysses.

It opens 25 years ago at the Ulysses Research Center, three miles below Omaha, Nebraska. There is a terrible accident, in which the "strange matter from dimension two" the scientists there were apparently studying begins eating/destroying the locked-down lab. Two scientists, who look so similar they could be brother and sister, fear for their baby son, who is in the lab with them, it apparently being Bring Your Baby To Work Day, and while they can't save themselves, they can save him (sound familiar?) by launching him through a portal to "Dimension Four."
A turn of the page reveals a two-page splash of Superman KO-ing a giant, robot gorilla. I have to assume this splash page was a factor in Chris Sims' positive review of the book at Comics Alliance (which I haven't read yet as I type this, but will have by the time you read it). It is indeed an awesome image, and one that earns the space it occupies in the book. It's a genuinely good use of a two-page splash, something Johns actually rather rarely does, as enamored of splashes as he is.

This giant robot gorilla is, by the way, revealed to (a?) New 52 Titano, now apparently a robot gorilla rather than a mutated giant chimpanzee with Kryptonite laser eyes.
The original Titano, as drawn by Curt Swan
The gorilla's head emanates a sickly green light, so I assume Kryptonite is involved in there somewhere, but they never really discuss that. This is basically just an action scene of Superman being super before we get to the plot.
Next, we jump to the Daily Planet newsroom, where Jimmy Olsen tries selling a terrible photo of Superman fighting Titano to Perry White, who has first an earnest conversation with Jimmy Olsen about some weird back-story I'm hearing here for the first time (his parents left him tens of millions of dollars in a business clerical error, before disappearing, and Jimmy expects them to return some day once they're cleared of allegations against them. Yeah, I don't know), and then has an earnest conversation with Clark, Bendis-ing at him about how he needs to find friends and people to talk to, and also that he'd like to hire him back to work at the Planet, because that blog stuff was stupid.

The scene includes an image of Superman's "death," which bugs the hell out of me.
Supposedly "The Death of Superman" occurred in the newer, shorter New 52 continuity, somewhere in the first five years of Superman's career, but it must have happened completely differently; imagine that story with a Lois Lane who doesn't know or love Superman and Clark Kent, without the Justice League that is in it, without Supergirl, Steel, Superboy or The Cyborg Superman. I'll just never understand DC's decision to have a new "secret" continuity that contains a few of the events from the stories in their huge back catalog of trades and collections, but completely differently, so that a reader need not, like, buy or read those books.

There's also a panel or two that really drives home how similar the post-Forever Evil status quo of (some parts of) the DC Universe is to the post-Secret Invasion, "Dark Reign" status quo of the Marvel Universe from a few years ago.

"'Lex Luthor Saves The World!'," Perry reads one of his own headlines aloud, "Bad guys are good. Good guys are bad. Thins have been turned upside down."

After the Daily Planet scene, something happens that I'm actually surprised it hasn't happened yet, as it so perfectly visually represents the entire middle-aged white guys awkwardly pandering to an imaginary young, hip, new demographic they imagine exists, that it just a few quick drawings conveys the spirit of Jim Lee grafting the WildStorm Universe to the DC Universe, redesigning all of the most iconic superhero costumes and hiring Bob Harrass, Scott Lobdell and Rob Liefeld.

I am, of course, talking about Superman's backwards baseball cap:
He wears it during a sequence demonstrating the loneliness that Perry White was just talking to him about, as Superman grocery shops, makes dinner, eats alone, and then sits around in his living room, looking at a photo-album of his dead adoptive parents.
Luckily, someone's screaming for help somewhere! I love what Romita, Janson and Martin do with that last panel there.

So there's a weird-looking alien in a weird-looking ship, destroying things. There's a fight. There's a mysterious stranger with an apparent connection to Superman's past. Just when it looks like the alien has Superman on the ropes, a character strongly resembling the scientist in the first scene appears out of a glowing blue portal, beats on the guy beating on Superman, and, together, the two supermen punch the attacker so hard his face and torso cave in and he emits a giant dome of blue light, before collapsing.

The new guy introduces himself as Ulysses, and says he thought he was from Earth, and that Earth was destroyed, but apparently not. And so Superman, who was just being all lonely, finds himself confronted with another superpowered young man whose birth parents rocketed him away to save him from destruction! Will they be friends now?

I'm going to guess that yes, yes they are. For a few issues. And then they will fight, when Superman realizes all is not what it seems with Ulysses, who may not necessarily be evil, but will be revealed to have been manipulated and somewhat emotionally unstable because of it. And then Superman will return to the Daily Planet, taking Perry's advice to spend more time with people and re-befriend Lois and Jimmy, who seemed awfully tight with in Superman Unchained and Action Comics, but he seems rather distant from them in this comic.

Just guessing, of course.

For a shorter, more on-point and more-knowledgeable review, might I suggest Tom Bondurant's at Robot 6...? (That Sims review is well-written, as well, if you didn't click on the link to it already.)
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Monday, January 07, 2013

Review: Fear Itself: Avengers

This Fear Itself tie-in collection features five issues of The Avengers and three issues of The New Avengers—since Brian Michael Bendis was writing both books, the collection manages to have a consistent voice and point-of-view, even if the art is a bit on the chaotic side.

Chris Bachalo pencils two issues of Avengers, which are inked by a whopping six different inkers, and these more-or-less altrnate with issues drawn by John Romita Jr. and inked by Klaus Janson. The three issues of New Avengers that close out the collection are all created by Mike Deodato using…whatever method he uses now.

Bendis has never seemed as interested in telling stories (something he has managed to avoid doing for much of his 10+ years at Marvel) or writing characters as much as he is interested in writing dialogue and creating scenes (at least in his mainstream Marvel Universe work), so he’s a writer who’s actually quite well-suited to these sorts of event tie-in comics, especially when he’s not the guy writing them (That’s pretty infrequent really, as he’s written or co-written all but three of Marvel’s event series since House of M).

Tie-ins like these are, by their very nature, inessential bits of the actual story, which is being told in the main title (here, Matt Fraction’s and Stuart Immonen’s actually rather good Fear Itself); they're scenes between the important scenes, side-stories and filler providing texture, expansion or merely curiosity-satiating content explaining what Squirrel Girl or Daredevil were up to when those Nazi mechas in the second issue were attacking New York City or whatever.

Bendis event tie-ins can be extremely irritating if read serially, as Bendis, more than any other Marvel writer, treats the title or logo on the covers of his comics as more-or-less suggestions, and he often just writes about whoever or whatever he feels like, but collected like this, they’re not so bad.

This is, in essence, a bunch of vignettes starring characters from the writer’s two main Avengers titles that scan a bit like deleted scenes from Fraction and company’s Fear Itself series.

Unfortunately, Bendis, being Bendis, decided upon a framing device that allowed him to take even the most rollicking superhero premise—big, bruiser-type supervillains and a few heroes are given evil Thor hammers that power them up and force them to destroy everything in their path—into something that can be told mainly through talking heads.

The framing device here is that someone—who is never explained between these covers—is making a book of some sort about Avengers history, and, as part of that, they have regularly been meeting with Avengers throughout Avengers history and interviewing them on camera.

The result is panel-packed pages featuring Avengers—from different eras—talking about themselves, each other and various events, while looking right at the camera/reader in a series of headshots.
It’s…not the most exciting way to tell a superhero comic, really. It certainly adds a lot of texture, and slows down stories that would otherwise be over within a few minutes, but is just this side of deadly dull, and seems like the sort of thing someone writing a Bendis parody would come up with to spoof Bendis (There’s an off-putting reality show element to this form of storytelling, as it seems like little more than edited scenes of participants talking directly to the camera about the events the producers are depicting between such scenes).

Bachalo does the most interesting work with these scenes, using extreme close-ups and varying angles to keep the panels from getting repetitive, and while his attempts make 12-panel grids of superheroes talking more fun to read, it also breaks with the premise, as it suggests an artsy filmmaker behind the camera, rather than a static camera on a tripod set up to record material for a books.

Deodato’s talking heads keep up that illusion, and Romita’s fall somewhere in-between: All three end up recycling the same images over and over, and aren’t terribly subtle about the shortcut-taking.

The artwork, particularly on the first eight issues, is all top-notch, but none of it really goes together. Bachalo’s highly cartoony art helps hide all the ink-slingers involved (it looks pretty consistent, considering), and his slightly-abstracted, super-expressive designs make for some particularly lovely superhero work.

Romita is Romita, a perhaps slightly more acquired taste: Personally, I love his work, and when I think of Marvel Comics, when I think of Marvel heroes, his is the artwork that first comes to mind (Like, if you walked up to me and said “Spider-Man,” an image of JRJR’s Spider-Man would appear in my head). He gets to draw the most action-packed scenes, including Red Hulk and Thorred-Up Thing brawling in Manhattan, and a Captain America vs. Lame Old Captain American Villains battle. Lots of rubble.

I like Deodato’s work the least, and his style clashes most with those of the other two (who have a fairly substantial stylistic gulf between ‘em anyway). He’s adept at dynamic, action-packed layouts, and I kind of like his muscular, twisted human figures, but his artwork is so heavily photo-referenced and/or computer-aided that I have a hard time seeing past the “cheats” enough to take it at face value, and there’s an unsettling chimeric quality to the awkward melding of hand-drawn and photo-referenced material.

Let’s look at the stories, one by one, just to make this post even more too-long than it probably already is:

Avengers #13

I sort of wish I hadn’t returned the Fear Itself collection to the library already, so I could refer back to it and know for sure which specific issue of it these various issues of the Avengers comics are set during. This one seems to be set during the first issue.

After three pages (and 36-panels!) of talking heads sort of meandering around to provide a narrowing-focus on the Fear Itself events in the broad context of Avengers history, Bachalo draws a huge, two-page splash of a half-dozen of those Nazi mechs blowing the fuck out of a corner in NYC, while some army guys run around on the ground.

This is, oddly enough, the only time I laughed-out-loud during the read. See, in the 12th panel of the pervious page, there’s a tight-close up on Ms Marvel’s very serious looking right eyeball, and she says “They’re calling it The American Blitzkrieg.”
Then you turn the page to see the two-page splash, which would normally be a pretty effective transition of scale and importance (although the events aren’t really that big of a deal in the context of Avengers comics). The caption in the upper left corner reads “Blitzkrieg U.S.A.”, making a liar out of Ms. Marvel.
There’s also a scene of The Red Hulk eating raw eggs, shells and all. That’s pretty fun.
The rest of the issue is mostly talking heads, with a few short breaks involving this Avengers team hanging out in the kitchen on morning, another in which they hang out with the Asgardians and Spider-Woman and Ms. Marvel talk about boys before the former flirts with Hawkeye, and then there’s are two-pages set at Iron Man’s “I’m going to rebuilt Asgard because whatever” press conference.

And that’s it. The Alan Davis cover showing Thor standing above a bunch of knocked-out Avengers that he either konked with his hammer or is trying to defend from whoever’s outside the borders of the image who did konk them out, has nothing to do with the contents.

Avengers #14

This one’s a Romita and Janson issue. It’s divided between talking head panels and an almost completely silent fight between The Hammer-ed Thing and The Red Hulk, which results in Avengers Tower being knocked down and The Red Hulk being hit out of a NYC like a baseball going over the centerfield wall in during a homerun.

It’s a 22-page comic; two full-pages are nothing but the talking-heads, 12 pages are mostly dialogue-free fighting over three-to-four-panel pages, and the remaining eight pages feature one or two big panels of fighting, with strips of talking heads running along the sides of bottom of the spreads.
It should come as no surprise that the World War Hulk artist does a pretty great job of two Hulk-like monsters beating the stuffing out of one another and tearing up a few city blocks in the process.

Avengers #15

Back to Bachalo. This issue is structured the same as the previous one, although the superhero fight is a bit more interesting and involves a lot more talking, as the heroes involved have more interesting and diverse power-sets.

The talking heads are all talking about Spider-Woman Jessica Drew, what she brings to The Avengers, how she gets a big moment in this outing.

It zeroes in on the part in Fear Itself where the Hulk (like, the regular, green one) gets his hammer and immediately pursues his girlfriend Red She-Hulk through Brazil.

An Avengers team consisting of The Protector (the Bendis-mangled remains of the Grant Morrison/J.G. Jones version of Marvel Boy from their acclaimed Marvel Knight series), Ms. Marvel, Hawkeye and, of course, Spider-Woman, fight the Hammer-ed Hulk and temporarily slow him down a little bit, which is a big victory.

Avengers #16

Romita and Janson again. This story focuses on how Steve Rogers, the former Captain America who was now running SHIELD as Commander Rogers, reacts to the news that his protégée Bucky Barnes, who was currently going by Captain America, had just been killed in action fighting the new hammer-wielding Red Skull. (Bucky gets better, of course, just as he did the first time he died).

When Rogers gets a lead on the Red Skull’s whereabouts, he picks up his shield and goes looking for a little payback, SHIELD agents Maria Hill, Sharon Carter, and the lady with the red-streak in her hair in tow.

Turns out it’s a trap, and they run into a bunch of old Cap villains, including one with a sweet beard and mustache and another who apparently fights with a bed sheet tied in knots.
There’s a lot of shooting, fighting and explosions, all drawn by Romita. There is nothing at all wrong with that.

Avengers #17

The last of the Avengers issues in this collection, this one is another Romita-and-Janson drawing a bunch of action and destruction one.

Hammer-ed Red Skull and her Nazi Mechs are Blitzkrieg-ing the ruins of Avengers tower, and Hawkeye, Spider-Woman, Ms. Marvel and the The Protector are fighting her. Then The New Avengers show up to help fight her.

And, um, that’s the issue, really. This part was the only one as funny as the scene where Ms. Marvel and the captions disagree about what “they’re calling” Red Skull’s attack on the U.S.:
Um, are there any other letters that make the “Buh” sound that the word “Barnes” begins with, Cap?

Grief makes men say stupid, stupid things, I guess.

New Avengers #14
Twenty panels of Mockingbird talking to the camera! Then a scene of The New Avengers arguing over breakfast at Avengers Mansion! Ten more panels of Mockingbird talking to the camera! Nine pages of The New Avengers fighting Nazi mechs! One-page of Mockingbird collapsing with grief as she sees Avengers Tower crumble! Ten more panels of Mockingbird talking!

This issue, like the rest of those in this collection, are all drawn (and, in some cases, “drawn” by Deodato).

New Avengers #15
In this issue, all the talking-to-the-camera panels feature Squirrel Girl, the nanny of Luke Cage and Jessica Jones’ baby. It’s about her fighting her way through the Blitzkrieg from college campus to Avengers Mansion, where she’s supposed to start baby-sitting so the Cage family can join the other New Avengers in fighting.

New Avengers #16

There’s more variety to this issue’s talking heads, which includes all of the New Avengers. And Daredevil. They spend the duration of the issue talking about Daredevil. The “action” portions follow Ol’ Hornhead as he fights the Blitzkrieg, and then heads to Avengers Mansion to help Squirrel Girl protect Baby Cage. He’s rewarded by Daddy Cage with induction into the New Avengers.

And that’s the contents of this collection. It’s hit-or-miss, but there are certainly pleasures to be had within its covers and, unlike a few of the other Fear Itself collections, every story in it does tie-in to Fear Itself.

As for those others, there were four more that interested me, and I’m going to be reviewing one a day for the rest of the week. So come back tomorrow for Fear Itself: Deadpool/Fearsome Four.
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