The Disparate Four

Deadline (2002): written by Bill Roseman; illustrated by Guy Davis: Slight, interesting take on Marvel's New York as seen by an up-and-coming reporter. Major heroes like the Human Torch and Spider-man cameo, though the journalist's interactions are primarily with low-level heroes and villains. Roseman does a nice job of keeping things human-scale here, and Guy Davis is always a pleasure as an artist. Lightly recommended.

Terra Obscura (2003-2005/ Collected 2006): written by Peter Hogan and Alan Moore; illustrated by Yanick Paquette and Karl Story: Spinning off from Alan Moore's Tom Strong series, Terra Obscura revisits the alternate Earth inhabited by Tom Strange and a group of super-heroes. Moore co-plotted the series with writer Peter Hogan. It's a fun, slightly revisionist take on super-heroes who tend to resemble their DC Comics brethren moreso than those from Marvel. Strange, like Strong, is a sort of amalgam of Doc Savage and Superman. Yanick Paquette and Karl Story supply some lovely visuals throughout. This isn't revisionism in the mode of Watchmen, but more Alan Moore's version of Astro City. Recommended.

Wonder Woman: Earth-One Volume 1 (2016): written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Yanick Paquette: If nothing else, Grant Morrison and Yanick Paquette give us the gayest, bustiest Wonder Woman of all time. Allowed to give the Wonder Woman of DC's Earth-One universe her own distinctive origin, Morrison turns to the mythology and weird 1930's super-science that made the original Wonder Woman so strange, along with all that bondage and submission invested in Wonder Woman's world by original creator William Moulton Marston (and possibly his wife and their live-in, female lover). It's fun and weird and curiously thin. Recommended.

Speak of the Devil (2008): written and illustrated by Gilbert Hernandez: Blistering noir about a star gym student turned serial Peeping Tom. And she's a girl. And I really didn't expect any of the plot twists that come with this graphic (very graphic) novel. Gilbert Hernandez (Palomar) is in fine form as both writer and artist. He's got one of a handful of the cleanest, most expressive cartooning lines of his generation. Highly recommended.

Through Time and Space with Warren Ellis

Stormwatch: Force of Nature (1996/ Collected 1999): written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by Tom Raney, Randy Elliot, Pete Woods, and Michael Ryan: This volume reprints the first six issues of Warren Ellis' writing stint on Wildstorm's Stormwatch. Prior to Ellis, Stormwatch was an undistinguished superhero comic with an interesting premise -- its superheroes worked for a United Nations strike force. Ellis made the series more political and much weirder pretty much from the get-go, setting up a later transition from Stormwatch to The Authority. The art from main penciller Tom Raney is solid, but it's Ellis' cynical yet hopeful take on superheroes that is the main attraction here. Recommended.

Stormwatch: Lightning Strikes (1996-97/ Collected 2000): written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by Tom Raney, Jim Lee, Randy Elliot, and Richard Bennett: The second volume of Warren Ellis' Stormwatch focuses on the new heroes Ellis has brought to the team, most notably Jenny Sparks and Jack Hawksmoor. Jenny Sparks is the "Spirit of the Century," one of a number of Ellis' Wildstorm characters born at the beginning of the 20th century to act as super-powered anti-viral agents for the Earth. Jack Hawksmoor has been remade by mysterious aliens to be the protector of cities. 

Ellis gives Sparks a clever career retrospective that homages a variety of different comics styles from the appropriate eras -- Jenny's 1930's adventures mimic the art style of Superman co-creator Joe Shuster, her 1980's adventures the look of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen. Tom Raney does especially fine work here on the Sparks issue. Fan fave artist and Wildstorm publisher Jim Lee shows up to draw an issue linked to Wildstorm's WildC.A.T.S. superhero team. Recommended.

Stormwatch: Final Orbit (1998/ Collected 2001): written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by Bryan Hitch, Chris Sprouse, Michael Ryan, Paul Neary, Kevin Nowlan, and Luke Rizzo: The end for Stormwatch (and the birth of The Authority) comes partially in the last issues of their book, partially in the pages of the WildC.A.T.S./Aliens crossover. As those are the aliens from Alien and Aliens, you can probably guess at least some of the reasons Stormwatch ceases to exist. More of a tidying up than anything else, though the Aliens issue is compelling from writer Warren Ellis and artists Chris Sprouse and Kevin Nowlan. Recommended.

Supergod (2011): written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by Garrie Gastonny: Warren Ellis takes superheroes to one logical endpoint in this 2011 miniseries, using them as both metaphorical stand-ins for nuclear weapons and as quasi-realistically imagined horrors in and of themselves. It's bold, bleakly funny, and depressing as Hell. In a world where nations that include Great Britain, the U.S.A., India, Iran, the Soviet Union, and Iraq (hilariously in the latter case with funds diverted from post-Gulf-War-2 U.S. aid) race to develop superhumans, who will win? Well, not humanity. Recommended.

Astro City!

100 Issues of Astro City!  (1995-2017): written by Kurt Busiek; illustrated by Brent Anderson, Alex Ross, and others: 100 issues of Astro City over 22 years and at least three publishers. That's quite a milestone in today's rapid cancellation comics marketplace. 

Writer Kurt Busiek helped implement a sort of 'soft' revisionism in superhero comic books with Astro City. The series has always paid fond homage to the super-heroes and pulp heroes of a hundred years (and more!) of publishing. But it's done so with character-driven stories and a meticulously worked-out history.

The basic set-up for Astro City was that the eponymous city, near the slopes of Mount Kirby, held within it super-heroes who paid homage to the super-heroes of American comic-book history without simply being slavish pastiches of those super-heroes. Samaritan, for example, is Astro City's nod to Superman -- but as established early in Astro City's run, he's his own man, with his own origins and his own dreams, day-time and otherwise. Nonetheless, he fights evil just like Superman: there's nothing cynical or calculated about Samaritan.

Other characters who hew close to their sources include the Silver Agent (Captain America) and Winged Victory (Wonder Woman). But both get to have finely observed, multi-issue stories about them over the course of Astro City's run. Indeed, the Silver Agent's fate is the thread that unites the entire year-long The Dark Age storyline. 

Astro City give us heroes with problems, but it also shines a sometimes amusing, sometimes poignant light on a world in which not everyone with super-powers or super-technology wants to be a super-hero (or super-villain). It travels to small towns to check out the hero life there. It tracks super-hero families over the course of generations. It examines how life in the different boroughs of Astro City works -- things differ, especially in the borough that's home to supernatural beings and watched over by the mysterious hero dubbed The Hanged Man. One of its most poignant characters is Steeljack, a small-time super-villain who basically fell into super-villainry and then spends a couple of storylines (and 20 years or so) trying to claw his way out of it.

It's been a great ride, one I hope continues. Busiek and primary Astro City artists Brent Anderson (interiors) and Alex Ross (covers) have created something that now looms, like Mount Kirby, as a testament to what good writing and artwork can do with super-heroes. One never feels cheated by Astro City on the writing or artistic fronts. Anderson, who started his career very much in the vein of Neal Adams, has become an artist now more in the role of long-time Superman artist Curt Swan, an artist who can comfortably depict both the mundane and the cosmic, sometimes within the same panel. 

And Busiek gives full textual value: unlike the vast majority of modern super-hero comics, an issue of Astro City takes more than three minutes to read. That isn't to say that Astro City is text-heavy -- instead, its text/art balance is more in keeping in line with mainstream superhero comics prior to the oughts, when 'decompression' became first the superhero buzz-word and then the stranglehold.

The richness of Astro City also lies in the way it comments on super-hero stories while presenting super-hero stories that work on a prima facie level. The Samaritan's arrival in 1986 corresponds to the year DC Comics hired writer-artist John Byrne to reboot Superman. The lengthy Dark Age storyline comments on the periodic veers of mainstream super-hero comics into grim and gritty territory. Various place names, including that looming Mount Kirby, celebrate comics creators. Nonetheless, Busiek's characters are their own people even as they also evoke famous super-heroes and super-villains.

Perhaps the greatest subversiveness of Astro City is that it presents hope (or perhaps Hope) and goodness as being valid concepts, no matter how bad things may seem. It's the finest long-form super-hero comic ever presented. Long may it run! Highly recommended.

Three Strikes

X-Men: Apocalypse (2016): based on characters and stories by Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Len Wein, Dave Cockrum, Chris Claremont, John Byrne, Walt Simonson, Louise Simonson, and many others; written by Simon Kinberg, Bryan Singer, Michael Dougherty, and Dan Harris; directed by Bryan Singer; starring James McAvoy (Professor Charles Xavier), Michael Fassbender (Magneto), Jennifer Lawrence (Raven/ Mystique), and Oscar Isaac (Apocalypse): Once you've got more than five X-Men in a movie, maybe you should make a miniseries instead. The bloat of X-Men: Apocalypse didn't affect me because I watched it over three nights on TV, thus making it into a CW superhero four-parter with a really high production budget. But it is bloated. And while Oscar Isaac's decision to underplay Apocalypse makes for an interesting arch-villain, it doesn't make for a very exciting arch-villain.

The acting from everyone who didn't date Aaron Rodgers is fine, and some of the visual effects are really lovely and sublime, though there are so many of them by the end that all effect is lost. Certainly not the 'bomb' that some critics suggested it was, however. Lightly recommended.

Light's Out (2016): adapted by Eric Heisserer from a short film by David F. Sanberg; directed by David F. Sandberg; starring Teresa Palmer (Rebecca), Gabriel Bateman (Martin), Alexander DiPersia (Bret), Billy Burke (Paul), and Maria Bello (Sophie): Short, taut, and to-the-point supernatural thriller pits a family against a ghost-thing that only comes out at night. Or at at least when the lights are out. I'd have liked a scene in which the main characters hit a hardware store to buy every portable light source imaginable from flashlights to glow sticks. They do have enough sense to pick up a crank-flashlight, given that the ghost-thing can affect utilities and batteries, so Kudos! Recommended.

Patrick Dennehy

Disgraced (2017): directed by Pat Kondelis: Marvelously assembled Showtime documentary on the 2003 Baylor University basketball scandal that started with the murder of Patrick Dennehy, the team's best player, and then became a horrifying story of American university athletics spun entirely out of control, aided and abetted by a local legal system stacked with Baylor grads. Then-Baylor coach Dave Bliss, secure in some false sense of untouchability, is actually stupid enough to be interviewed by the film-makers in the present day. It's gratifying to learn that once the documentary aired, he was fired from his then-current job as coach at another 'Christian' university. Highly recommended.

So Much Cthulhu

Black Wings of Cthulhu Volume 3 (2014) edited by S.T. Joshi

The Madness of Cthulhu Volume 1 (2014) edited by S.T. Joshi

A Mountain Walked: Great Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (2014) edited by S.T. Joshi

The Sorrows of Young Warlock

Jim Starlin's Warlock: The Complete Collection (1975-77/ Collected here 2014): written by Jim Starlin; illustrated by Jim Starlin, Steve Leialoha, Josef Rubinstein, Alan Weiss, and Al Milgrom: The 1970's were a quirky age of growth for mainstream American comic books, with much of that growth occurring at the margins in a way we just don't see any more. Some of the greatest writers and artists mainstream comics have ever produced worked away on series that were mostly far from the big hitters like Spider-man and Superman. 

Names to conjure with included Bernie Wrightson, Howard Chaykin, Walt Simonson, Don McGregor, Steve Gerber and many others. And the great series of mainstream comics at DC and Marvel were either limited-run back-up strips (Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson's brilliant, beautiful Manhunter at DC) or strange, genre-bending series located safely away from the normal mainstream universe (Don McGregor, P. Craig Russell and company's sprawling, poetic Killraven). 

And then there's Jim Starlin, a writer-artist who staked out his own peculiar corner of cosmic adventure. The only thing all that similar to Starlin's early 1970's Marvel work on Captain Marvel and Warlock was writer-artist Jack Kirby's gigantic, unfinished Fourth World saga over at DC. But where Kirby was ultimately obsessed with life (really, LIFE), Starlin was obsessed with death (DEATH). 

Having cut his cosmic teeth on Marvel's Captain Marvel in the early 1970's, Starlin would return to fringe heroes and outer-space sturm-und-drang in 1975 when he revived the Adam Warlock character. Warlock made his debut as a naive, genetically engineered superman known only as 'Him' in the pages of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's Fantastic Four in 1967. Over the next few years, he'd gain the name Adam Warlock, have adventures on Counter-Earth, and fulfill his superheroic Jesus Christ arc by getting himself crucified and resurrected.

HIM! In his cocoon.

Returned to Marvel publication after a few years off (hey, everyone has to take time to recover from a crucifixion!), Warlock was now being written and penciled by Starlin, who never met a case of cosmic angst he didn't like. And Warlock would soon be the angstiest cosmic hero of all, easily surpassing the Silver Surfer for the number and rate of existential crises suffered during barrages of energy bolts and exploding stars. 

But it's fun. And very heavy metal (though not really Heavy Metal) in its adolescent mixture of self-loathing and super-powered punching. Starlin would bring the cosmically villainous Thanos over from his run on Captain Marvel, first as an unlikely ally for Warlock and then as a more likely antagonist. Nay, nemesis! For while Captain Marvel was a problem for Thanos, Warlock is his full-blown opposite: the Life Equation to Thanos' Anti-Life Equation, in terms of Jack Kirby's Fourth World comics for DC.

People talk a lot in Warlock. Boy, do they talk a lot. Starlin has learned to lighten things up a bit by giving Warlock a comic sidekick -- Pip the Troll -- and a female sounding board -- Gamora, played by Zoe Saldana in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  Starlin's fascination with the Church (and specifically the Roman Catholic Church) as an institutional Evil shows up here, to later be expanded upon in his Dreadstar series. And he gives Warlock one of the most fascinatingly twisted enemies to ever appear in an ostensibly mainstream superhero comic: The Magus, about which no more said.

But it's the battle against Thanos that dominates much of this volume, as it should. It's probably good that Warlock got cancelled when it did, thus forcing Starlin to end the Thanos saga in post-cancellation Avengers and Marvel Two-in-One annuals. Otherwise, Warlock's suffering might have gone on forever. Instead, Warlock rallies the Avengers, Spider-man, and the Thing to his crusade against Thanos. It's a smaller scale version of what would happen 15 years later in Marvel's Infinity Gauntlet miniseries: everyone versus Thanos. And Starlin throws in some lovely twists along the way. It's good, clean, angsty cosmic fun in the Mighty Starlin Manner. Highly recommended.

Against Infinity

Jim Starlin's Captain Marvel: The Complete Collection (1968-82/ Collected here 2016): written by Jim Starlin, Gary Friedrich, Steve Engelhart, and Steve Gerber; illustrated by Jim Starlin, Al Milgrom, Dan Green, and others: The 1970's were a quirky age of growth for mainstream American comic books, with much of that growth occurring at the margins in a way we just don't see any more. Some of the greatest writers and artists mainstream comics have ever produced worked away on series that were mostly far from the big hitters like Spider-man and Superman. 

Names to conjure with included Bernie Wrightson, Howard Chaykin, Walt Simonson, Don McGregor, Steve Gerber and many others. And the great series of mainstream comics at DC and Marvel were either limited-run back-up strips (Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson's brilliant, beautiful Manhunter at DC) or strange, genre-bending series located safely away from the normal mainstream universe (Don McGregor, P. Craig Russell and company's sprawling, poetic Killraven). 

And then there's Jim Starlin, a writer-artist who staked out his own peculiar corner of cosmic adventure. The only thing all that similar to Starlin's early 1970's Marvel work on Captain Marvel and Warlock was writer-artist Jack Kirby's gigantic, unfinished Fourth World saga over at DC. But where Kirby was ultimately obsessed with life (really, LIFE), Starlin was obsessed with death (DEATH). 

Starlin would cut his cosmic, thanatophiliac teeth on Marvel's version of Captain Marvel, a not-particularly-popular superhero from the alien race of the Kree. Starlin would give Cap cosmic awareness (whatever that was) and, most importantly, a new villain: Thanos, the "mad Titan," which is to say, a crazy member of the race of demi-god-like Titans living on, well, Titan, Saturn's largest moon.

Starlin initially intended Thanos to be an evil riff on Kirby's Fourth World demi-god Metron, which explains why Thanos spends so much of his early life sitting in a chair just like Metron in his Mobius Chair, a tendency that seems to have persisted into Thanos' early appearances in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But Thanos soon grew into the Marvel Universe's biggest threat. Well, a big enough threat that Captain Marvel would have to enlist Iron Man, the Avengers and others of Marvel's mainstream heroes to thwart Thanos' plans.

In the Captain Marvel volume reviewed here, Captain Marvel and friends battle a number of Thanos' stooges before taking on the big man himself. The original Drax the Destroyer appears for the first time -- he'll be much mutated by the time the world sees him played by Dave Bautista in Guardians of the Galaxy. The object of Thanos' quest this time around is a Cosmic Cube, a doohickey from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's 1960's Captain America comics that confers nigh-infinite power on its user. It's no Infinity Gauntlet, but it's helladangerous.

Besides the assorted comic space adventures and battles inside the mind that Starlin deploys to generally enjoyable effect, Captain Marvel also allows for a lot of superhero philosophizing. Starlin doesn't script a lot of these stories, so that philosophizing hasn't reached its apex yet. But Warlock is coming, and it will. Boy, will it ever. 

An omnibus of the Starlin Warlock and Captain Marvel stories would make a certain amount of chronological sense. The last piece in this volume is a reprint of Marvel's first 'graphic novel,' 1982's The Death of Captain Marvel. It's really a coda to Starlin's Captain Marvel and Warlock. Captain Marvel, retired to Titan for years, discovers that he has incurable super-cancer. Fun stuff!

The graphic novel does illustrate, literally, that with Starlin, less is more. Given more time to render the art in a more painterly style, Starlin's work ossifies into curious, stilted poses at certain points. One of his tics -- posing characters knees partially bent in an anatomically puzzling partial stoop -- becomes distracting whenever it shows up. Given more time to work on the faces, Starlin elongates everything below the eyes, another distracting oddity.

Still, The Death of Captain Marvel is a fascinating piece, especially in its early 1980's context. It's not about fist-fights, which for Marvel remains a rarity. If one has purchased both of these Starlin volumes, leave it to the last -- otherwise, you're going to have the fate of Thanos spoiled. Well, the temporary fate of Thanos. In superhero comics, death is always conditional. Highly recommended.