Shazam! (2019)

Shazam! (2019): Shazam (aka Captain Marvel) created by Bill Parker and C.C. Beck; written by Henry Gayden and Darren Lemke; directed by David F. Sandberg; starring Zachary Levi (Shazam), Mark Strong (Sivana), Asher Angel (Billy Batson), Jack Dylan Grazer (Freddy Freeman), and Djimon Honsou (Wizard): 

Shockingly enjoyable movie about the original Fawcett Comics Captain Marvel (ie. THE Captain Marvel), moved to the present day and made somewhat goofier than the great 1940's version whose adventures were no worse than second-best in terms of superheroes in the 1940's (Jack Cole's Plastic Man was first; Will Eisner's Spirit didn't have super-powers).

Shazam is an acronym for Solomon (Wisdom), Hercules (Strength), Atlas (Stamina), Zeus (Power), Achilles (Invulnerability), and Mercury (Speed). Well, when it comes to Captain Marvel (now Shazam), anyway -- Mary Marvel and Black Adam, to name two, have the same acronym but different names from mythology.

The whole thing is a 'low-budget' by superhero standards ($90 million) movie aimed solidly at mid-teens. Billy Batson is invested by the wizard Shazam with the powers of, well, Shazam because DC gave up on using 'Captain Marvel' because they didn't trademark it back in the 1950's or 1960's. Shazam is now Earth's defense against magical menaces, sort of a jollier Dr. Strange. 

Billy Batson, a sort-of orphan, has to learn to accept his supportive new foster family led by Freddy Freeman, once a disabled newsboy in the 1940's and now, not working, just as Billy no longer works as a radio host. Child labour laws, am I right, guys?

Zachary Levi is the result of Billy saying 'Shazam.' In the comics, he was generally written as a sort of adult version of Billy with super-powers -- they didn't share a consciousness. Taking a cue from Big, Shazam now possesses Billy's 13-year-old consciousness in a super-powered adult body. Hijinks ensue as Billy and Freddy test out the beer-buying powers of Shazam, among other things.

Much revisionism is heaped on the villain of this piece, Sivana, originally a diminutive mad scientist and now a large, imposing Mark Strong wielding magical powers derived from long-time Shazam foes The Seven Deadly Sins. And I don't mean the Traveling Wilburys song! But Strong always makes an, um, strong villain. 

I'm not a huge fan of all the revisionism heaped on Captain Mar... er, Shazam... in the recent Shazam miniseries by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank. And all of those revisions seem to get info-dumped into this movie, especially over the last 45 minutes. Oh, well. Things play a lot jollier here than in that miniseries, and Billy is much more likable.

The whole thing is nonetheless light and entertaining and often quite visually inventive. It's clearly marked throughout as part of the DC Movie Universe, and the end credits foreground this. Superman does cameo in the live-action stuff, but not Henry Cavill either because he refused or because DC is pivoting away from the dark days of David Goyer and Zack Snyder's DC movies to something more earnest and light. 

Hopefully being freed of the demands of an origin story will allow a second Shazam movie to soar and not crash. There's also a brief (unnamed) reference to the 'first,' fallen Shazam champion, Egypt's Black Adam. Dwayne Johnson has been attached to a Black Adam movie for years; the box-office success of Shazam! seems to have jump-started that movie, or at least a Black Adam role in the next Shazam! film. Recommended.

Aquaman (2018)

Aquaman (2018): Aquaman created by Mort Weisinger and Paul Norris; written by David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, Will Beall, Geoff Johns, and James Wan; directed by James Wan; starring Jason Momoa (Arthur Curry/ Aquaman), Amber Heard (Mera), Willem Dafoe (Vulko), Nicole Kidman (Atlanna), Temuera Morrison (Tom Curry), Patrick Wilson (Orm), Dolph Lundgren (Nereus), Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Black Manta), and Julie Andrews (Voice of Karathen):

Maybe nothing epitomizes better the odd, endearing, Frankensteinian assemblage that is Aquaman then the use of Julie Andrews to voice a giant sea monster and Dolph Lundgren to play a slightly pink-haired Atlantean King. The people behind Aquaman seemed to decide to throw in a wide variety of genres and tones in an effort to please everyone. As Aquaman approaches $1 billion in world-wide box office, the approach seems to have worked.

It's a weirdly likable movie with sudden shifts in genre and tone that recall DC Comics blockbusters of earlier times, especially Superman: The Movie (1978) and Batman (1989). In one bewildering 15-minute sequence, Aquaman riffs on Raiders of the Lost Ark,  The Da Vinci Code, the Jason Bourne movies, and the Roger Moore James Bond movies before doing a quick 'head in a toilet' gag and then jumping to Lovecraftian monsters before emerging in, well, Jurassic Park.

It works because while Jason Momoa is an, ahem, limited actor, he's a likable screen presence whom the movie allows to be likable (contrast this with Henry Cavill's dour Superman in Man of Steel). It also works because director James Wan, known primarily for horror movies that include Saw and The Conjuring, seems comfortable with a superhero movie that is visually more Lord of the Rings meets Avatar than Iron Man or The Dark Knight.

Vast undersea armies, weird creatures, and one really big creature (voiced by Julie Andrews!) don't need to look entirely 'real' for the CGI to work. Instead, they're colourful and strange and drawn in many cases from the comic art of people like Esteban Marato in the 1980 DC miniseries The Atlantis Chronicles. It's overlong and overstuffed and many of the 'comic' bits fall pretty flat, especially when they rely on Momoa's ability to deliver a line. 

Aquaman also has prestige actors in supporting roles, recalling Superman (1978) and those Irwin Allen disaster movies of the 1970's. One can imagine a movie poster with little boxes with actor's faces running along the bottom -- Nicole Kidman as "Atlanna", Willem DaFoe as "Vulko", and Julie Andrews as "Karathen." So much CGI work is done to de-age Kidman and DaFoe for flashback sequences that they almost qualify as visual effects.

Nonetheless, it's actually fun and weird and worth looking at -- easily the most 'comic-booky' of all of these attempts to create a DC Cinematic Universe to rival Marvel's, and all the more welcome for that sense of weird superhero mayhem and earnestness. Recommended.

Wonder Woman: War of the Gods

Wonder Woman: War of the Gods (1991/ Collected 2017): written by George Perez; illustrated by George Perez, Jill Thompson, Cynthia Martin, Russell Braun, Romeo Tanghal, and others: War of the Gods was DC Comics' company-wide crossover for 1991 and one of its best from the first decade of company-wide crossovers that kicked off with 1985's Crisis on Infinite Earths. And as with Crisis, writer-artist George Perez is a major component.

As 1991 was the 50th anniversary of the first appearance of Wonder Woman, War of the Gods also served as a de facto anniversary celebration, centered as it was upon Wonder Woman, the Amazons, WW-foe Circe, and the Amazon island of Themyscira (aka Paradise Island). 

George Perez had been writing and/or illustrating Wonder Woman ever since her series rebooted post-Crisis in 1986. War of the Gods would also serve as a farewell to Perez -- his problems with DC's low-key anniversary acknowledgement of WW's 50th helped cause him to leave Wonder Woman with the issue that served as an epilogue to War of the Gods.

A lot of people help out on the artwork here, including two pioneering female artists when it came to mainstream superhero comics -- Cynthia Martin and Jill Thompson. They're very good. They also follow Perez's lead in giving Wonder Woman a realistic physique. Which is to say, she's not top-heavy. In mainstream superhero comics, that's something of a Mission Statement then and now. You can sort of chart sexism in superhero comics by the size of Wonder Woman's bust.

War of the Gods sees the witch Circe incite a war among various pantheons of gods. Initially, this involves the Greek and Roman gods. Initially, the similarity of the Greek and Roman gods also creates confusion as to who is who and why and what and what-have-you. Then other gods from the Hindu and Egyptian and Babylonian and assorted other pantheons start wreaking havoc on Earth. It's a good thing Earth has superheroes! If you've ever wanted to see Aquaman defeat the Babylonian demon Tiamat, this is the comic for you.

Wonder Woman leads the battle against Circe, with Earth's other heroes taking their cues from her. Perez and the other artists do a solid and often inspired job of depicting all these mythological battles and weird dimensionnal realms, including another take on Perez's M.C. Escher-influenced Olympus, the war-god Ares' realm of Areopagus, and the cosmic burial ground of of the dead Titan Cronus.

Still, this is a company-wide crossover, so many other heroes are involved. And even with the 'company-wide' part trimmed to just the miniseries and issues of Wonder Woman, things get pretty crowded. Omitting all the other issues that tied into the War of the Gods sometimes means 'not crowded enough,' though. Some events that clearly occupied entire issues of Superman or Justice League get only passing mention in this volume. 

I suppose there may some day be a War of the Gods Omnibus edition that compiles all the stories. For now, we're left wondering why, to cite one example, Firestorm is given such a major introduction in this volume before going on to do, um, nothing. I assume he had a pivotal role in one of the tie-ins. Or maybe not. Thanks for coming out, Firestorm!

There's some fairly typical Continuity Wankiness here, especially when it comes to Shazam. Why do the names that make up the acronym Shazam come from Greek, Roman, and Biblical figures? Well, now you will know! 

And the answer isn't 'Because they start with the right letters?' No explanation is given for Mary Marvel's different set of gods and legends, but I'm not sure Mary Marvel was in DC continuity in 1991. Hoo ha! 

Three characters from Crisis on Infinite Earths -- Harbinger, Pariah, and Lady Quark -- also make appearances here so as to tie in the universe-shaking events to the multiverse-shaking events of that series. Hey, it's always nice to see Lady Quark and her weird costume.

In all this is an enjoyable, sometimes choppy volume, that choppiness coming from the missing tie-in issues. I suppose if you're not going to reprint all the issues for the sake of brevity, you could always insert text pages explaining, 'Meanwhile, in Superman this happened, and in JLA that...'. But it's nice to see Wonder Woman figure so prominently in a crossover. Recommended.

Dark Nights: Metal (2017-2018)

Dark Nights: Metal (2017-2018): written by Scott Snyder with James Tynion IV; illustrated by Greg Capullo, Mikel Janin, Alvaro Martinez, Jonathan Glapion, Raul Fernandez, and others: Metal writer Scott Snyder notes in his foreword that he wanted this Event Series to be a big event like the ones he remembered enjoying in his youth. And Snyder does manage lots of cosmic melodrama, dire moments, and seemingly doomed heroic final stands.

Metal may have the oddest set-up for a cosmic event comic ever. In the months prior to Metal, Batman had been investigating the origins of the weird metals of the DC Universe. That would include the resurrectional Electrum of his enemy The Court of Owls, the strange Nth metal of Hawkman's mace and wings, and even the protean shapeshifting of Plastic Man himself.

Against all advice, Batman -- who has probably been the cause of and solution to all of the Justice League's problems more than any other hero -- pursues his quest to the point of fulfilling an ancient prophecy that he thought he was working to forestall. Hoo ha!

To not give anything away, Batman's successful failure allows a whole lot of bad things to invade the DC Universe. It will be up to Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and all Earth's other heroes to rescue the multiverse from Batman's mistake. 

Snyder proves to have a strain of cosmic goofiness in him that I was not aware of. Metal evokes the original craziness of DC's 1950's and 1960's Silver Age while also playing at the edges of metafictionality as do the cosmic DC Comics of Grant Morrison. This is a story that is very explicitly about Story. Bringing Daniel, the 'new' Lord of Dreams (well, new since the conclusion of Neil Gaiman's Sandman back in 1995) into the fray serves to make the whole Story emphasis very, very emphatic.

It's not much of a stretch to note that essentially the DC Multiverse comes under fire from a whole lot of misguided pro revisionism and creepy fan fiction. I kid you not. 

It all works, somehow. Greg Capullo, who partnered with Snyder on a lengthy Batman run, channels his days drawing cosmic melodrama on Todd Macfarlane's Spawn to good effect. Things get a bit crowded with characters, not really a problem because that too is a nod to George Perez's meticulous, overcrowded work on the Nexus of all DC Comics Event Series, Crisis On Infinite Earths. Capullo does a nice job with all the punching and the kicking, the weird character designs for the invading villains, and the endless leagues of heroes and villains he must draw. 

Metal certainly isn't perfect. Like most Event Series, a number of story points briefly touched upon in the main narrative require the purchase of other comics in which those points are fleshed out more fully. Things get a little rushed at the end, to the extent that some confusion sets in as to who is doing what where, and what the heck is happening in some of the action sequences. This is not a problem peculiar to Metal. But in all, this is an enjoyable superhero comic that could probably be read by someone who's not fluent in the 80 year history of DC superheroes. Recommended.

The Dark Knight III: The Master Race

SUPER BEST FRIENDS AGAIN !!!

The Dark Knight III: The Master Race (2016-2017/ Collected 2017): written by Brian Azzarello and Frank Miller; illustrated by Andy Kubert, Klaus Janson, Frank Miller, Eduardo Risso, John Romita Jr., Brad Anderson, and Alex Sinclair: Rumours are that Frank Miller had very little to do with the writing of this follow-up to The Dark Knight Returns (1986-87) and The Dark Knight Strikes Again (2001-2002). His art duties involve the inking of a few covers and drawing inter-chapter 'mini-comics' that contextualize portions of the main story. 

The main story is credited as 'Story by Frank Miller and Brian Azzarello.' Penciller Andy Kubert and inker Klaus Janson (inker of The Dark Knight Returns) do a fair job of maintaining their own styles while also paying homage to Miller's art style circa 1986. Miller's art in the mini-comics is sort of awful at points, reaching a nadir when he hinges the Atom's legs backwards, having apparently forgotten how knees work.

Taking up three years after The Dark Knight Strikes Again and six years after The Dark Knight Returns, DKIII again features aging versions of DC's major superheroes in a near-dystopic future. Events conspire to team up Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and many others to oppose a new global threat. One of the signs that Miller may not be writing much of the book is that Superman comes across pretty well for once, even saving Batman's life at one point. It's a shocker. 

Azzarello, if he scripted most of this, supplies lots of tough-guy and tough-girl introspection alongside all the fist fights and explodey-ness. Kubert and Janson give us suitably over-sized heroes and villains, innocents and grotesques and all that jazz. The whole thing goes down smoothly and way, way faster than the original The Dark Knight Returns and its intermittently densely packed pages of dialogue and exposition set off by full-page spreads. There's still satire here, particularly of both Obama and Trump, but it's pretty boilerplate stuff. 

Azzarello, not really known for writing superhero punch-ups, has written a giant superhero punch-up. It's enjoyable, certainly far more enjoyable than the clumsy and misanthropic Dark Knight Strikes Again, though no touch on the original. Miller's far-right politics seems to manifest in the idea of Kryptonian cultists who look and act a lot like stereotypical Muslim fundamentalists, but the comparison is never pushed too far (and these fundamentalists appear to believe in gender equality). In all, lightly recommended.

Doom Patrol

Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol Volume 2 (1990-1991/ Collected 2016): written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Richard Case, Vince Giarrano, Malcolm Jones III, Mike Dringenberg, Doug Hazlewood, Steve Yeowell, and others: Grant Morrison's early foray into American superhero comics after about a decade writing for UK publications remains its brazen, pomo self all these years later. C-List early 1960's DC superhero team The Doom Patrol offered Morrison the chance to play fast-and-loose with superhero conventions for both comic and dramatic effect. 

Original Doom Patrol member Cliff "Robot-man" Steele remains mostly unchanged, except for his professed level of angst about being a brain in a robot body. And team leader The Chief is still here, wheelchair-bound and pre-emptory as ever. Tempest remains from the brief late-1970's revival of Doom Patrol, but he mostly confines himself to being team medic. Negative Man is now a hermaphroditic hybrid of man, woman, and negative-energy being that calls itself Rebis. Little Dorothy struggles to control her ability to make her dreams becomes true, or at least solid. And Crazy Jane juggles 64 personalities, all of them with different superpowers. But she's integrating them!

This volume introduces Charles Atlas-comic-strip-based superhero Flex Mentallo ("The Man of Muscle Mystery!"), a creation of satiric wonder invested with a poignance based on the ephemeral nature of childhood dreams and visions. A loose plot thread from Paul Kupperberg's previous run on the title is tied up in weird, space-opera fashion. 

The Sex Men, the Men from NOWHERE, the Shadowy Mr. Evans, and the Brotherhood of Dada threaten our heroes. The Chief goes solo against The Beard-Killer in Morrison's hilarious parody of macho comic-book heroes like Wolverine and the Punisher and the sadistic macho monologues of pretty much any hero written by Frank Miller. The volume ends on a bit of a cliffhanger -- the Brotherhood of Dada shows up, but the battle awaits in the first couple of issues collected in Volume 3. Onwards, Absurdist Soldiers. Highly recommended.

Mullet Time

Superman Vs. Aliens (1996): written and pencilled by Dan Jurgens; inked by Kevin Nowlan: 20 years ago, DC and Dark Horse put out this fairly nifty battle between Superman (still in his mullet phase) and the Alien film franchise. It was a time when the Kryptonian Supergirl was still gone from DC continuity. That fact explains much of the storyline, in which Superman responds to a distress signal from a domed city in space that appears to have once been part of Krypton. It comes complete with a spunky blonde girl named Kara who's pretty much the image, in appearance and name, of the pre-1987 Supergirl.

The story is a bit heavy on the then-continuity of the Superman comics, from the mullet to the absence of Lex Luthor from the storyline. Superman can't travel unaided through space for long at this point in his career, necessitating some technology help from LexCorp. Or LuthorCorp. Whatever. 

It's solid, unspectacular, and relatively unbloody fun. There's a bit too much harping on Superman's decision not to kill anything, including hordes of acid-blooded aliens. Is this a workable moral stance for the Man of Steel under the circumstances? Well, yes, but as written it relies an awful lot on other people killing aliens, which makes the moral stance seem awfully dubious, if not completely daft. A sin of omission rather than commission is still a sin.

Inker Kevin Nowlan makes the normally straightforward pencils of writer-penciller Dan Jurgens broody, moody, and intermittently menacing. It's a great job of inking in terms of establishing a tone a penciller isn't known for -- Nowlan did something similar with his inks on the sunny Jose Luis Garcia Lopez's Dr. Strangefate during the Marvel/DC crossover around the same time. Lightly recommended.

JLA: Justice League of America: Power and Glory (2015-2016): written by Bryan Hitch with Tony Bedard; illustrated by Bryan Hitch with Tom Derenick, Scott Hanna, Daniel Henriques, Wade von Grawbadger, Alex Sinclair, and others: Maybe getting the perennially late Bryan Hitch to both write and draw a new Justice League comic book way back in 2015 wasn't such a great idea because, well, perennially late. 

It took so long for the nine issues of his initial story arc to appear that DC had already rebooted Hitch's Justice League title (now known as Justice League and not JLA: Justice League of America) when the last issue of this title came out. And by rebooted, I mean, there were as many issues of the subsequent title on the stands as there were of this title when that last issue appeared. Whew!

Hitch writes the reboot, but the art has been left to others. That's too bad because of Hitch's strengths as an artist, strengths that outweigh his strengths as a relatively new writer. Hitch's art, a career-long riff on Neal Adams and Alan Davis, made him a superstar nearly 20 years ago in the pages of ultra-violent superhero book The Authority. And he does good work here -- 'widescreen,' as they say, cosmic though sometimes crowded.

His writing seems a bit padded at times. Nine issues seems like about two issues too much here, with about 40 pages too many of running back and forth without resolving anything plot-wise. Hitch's new Justice League has shorter story arcs so far, suggesting that something may have been learned.

Power and Glory pits Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, and the usual gang of super-powered idiots against the Kryptonian Sun-god Rao, who arrives in near-Earth space with a whole lot of super-powered followers and an offer to bring peace, health, and long life to all the citizens of Earth -- and indeed, someday, everyone in the universe. He's initially greeted as a saviour. And of course there's a catch.

Hitch throws a lot of super-science and bombastic, epic battles around the nine issues. And time travel, strange visitors with hidden agendas, and weird standing stones waiting to fulfill some plot point or another. It's good, overlong fun. One caveat: in order to finally put a capper on this story (and this JLA title), DC elected to have other people write and draw the final issue, with only the plot by Hitch. Given how long readers had waited by this time, a few more months could probably have been survived if the end result was an all-Hitch writing-and-drawing issue. Oh, well. Recommended.

Task Force X!

Suicide Squad (2016): written and directed by David Ayer; based on DC Comics characters and situations created by John Ostrander, Luke McDonnell, Gerry Conway, Paul Dini, Bob Haney, Howard Purcell, and many others; starring Will Smith (Deadshot), Margot Robbie (Harley Quinn), Viola Davis (Amanda Waller), Jared Leto (The Joker), Joel Kinnaman (Colonel Rick Flag), Cara Delevingne (June Moone/ Enchantress), Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Killer Croc), Jay Hernandez (Diablo), Jai Courtney (Captain Boomerang), Adam Beach (Slipknot), Alaine Chanoine (Businessman/ Incubus), Ben Affleck (Bruce Wayne/ Batman), and Ezra Miller (The Flash):

I'd love to see the David Ayer director's cut of Suicide Squad. Did it include as many music-video sequences? More importantly, did its first 45 minutes seem like the film adaptation of Who's Who in the DC Universe I've been waiting 32 years to see? 

Ayer is a solid, gritty director of manly men doing violent, manly things in movies that include Fury and End of Watch. And Ayer has definitely seen The Dirty Dozen, which did this sort of Rogue's Team-up with flair -- an early death in Suicide Squad bounces right off the first death in The Dirty Dozen in visual terms. Lee Marvin would really help this movie, or even someone Lee-Marvin-esque rather than Joel Kinnaman's somewhat bland portrayal of team leader Colonel Rick Flag. Was Stephen Lang available? Stephen Lang would be a killer Rick Flag.

Dismantled and reassembled by a team of panicked Warner Brothers executives after the widespread vitriol that attended Batman V. Superman back in March, Suicide Squad is a strangely enjoyable mess that seems to be missing vital connective tissue at several points in its narrative. The changes in mood -- from zippy to grim to sentimental to music video to Ghostbusters -- are striking and sometimes off-putting.

But like a lot of DC Comics movie offerings (and very few Marvel movie offerings, regardless of their box-office success), Suicide Squad is stylistically interesting and, at times, visually bold. The plot may sag or jump, but visually David Ayer manages a number of striking moments, along with some awfully good live-action visual adaptations of comic-book costumes. Say what you will about these DC movies, but they've yet to foist upon the viewing public as crappy a superhero costume as Marvel's lame-ass visualization of the Vision.

But people like plot. Plot, plot, plot. And I wish this one was more coherent. Hell, I wish they'd included a scene that actually named one of the two supernatural Big Bads (Incubus) rather than leaving that job to the closing credits. Hmm. Incubus. And another super-villain is named Slipknot. That's some weird musical stuff.

Everyone's already talked about Margot Robbie (pretty good as Harley Quinn, not so good as psychiatrist Dr. Harleen Quinzel) and Jared Leto (underwhelming and underused as the Joker, who really should be stuck trying to save the world at the climax because that really would be funny). I liked Jay Hernandez and his character Diablo, which visually is a crazy gang-banging stereotype but as written and performed is instead the movie's most noble and nuanced character. Viola Davis is pretty much on-point as Amanda Waller, who will do anything to save the world. Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje  gets buried under a ton of make-up and a mumble-mouthed Cajun accent as Killer Croc, but he's still pretty good.

And Will Smith does that twinkly Will Smith thing as principled assassin Deadshot while wearing a mostly faithful recreation of Marshall Rogers' striking re-design for the character from the 1970's Batman comics. Why Warner wasted Smith here and didn't get him on-board the Justice League movie as Green Lantern John Stewart baffles me. It seems like a major missed opportunity. Oh, well. 

The last hour is pretty much that Ghostbusters reboot you didn't expect to see in a comic-book movie. And I liked a lot of the visual work on all the monstrous tentacles and crawly, misshapen, monstrous hell-soldiers running around a supernaturally invaded Midway City, (Midway City being the name for Toronto on Earth-DC, at least judging by all the recognizable Toronto locations that make cameos in Suicide Squad). The Enchantress looks creepy in her earlier appearances, though her later belly-dancer get-up underwhelms. Techno-organic hell-god Incubus also has some visual moments, along with an underwhelming death. 

That the movie should end with Harley Quinn killing the Joker seems like a real lost opportunity to freak out the Internet. But it would totally be a great idea. And clear the way to someone better than Leto playing the Joker because that guy never stays dead anyway! Suicide Squad straddles a line between lightly recommended and recommended. Your experience may vary. 

The China Mieville Superhero Explosion

Dial H: Deluxe Edition (2012-2013/Collected 2015): written by China Mieville; illustrated by Mateus Santolouco, David Lapham, Alberto Ponticelli, Dan Green, and Others: That China Mieville wrote a jolly, funny, humane superhero comic book set off in a weird corner of the DC Universe seems as improbable as the events and characters in that comic book. But it happened! And while Dial H was cancelled after 16 issues, Mieville managed to bring things to a satisfactory enough conclusion that this volume is well worth picking up. 

The eponymous dial first showed up in a series of 1960's comic stories fondly remembered by Mieville in his essay in the collected edition. Dial 'H-E-R-O' on the dial and one becomes a superhero for a brief time. A completely random, often weird superhero. The dials don't repeat heroes, so far as we were ever shown in the original series.

Mieville takes this initial concept and builds up an architecture of myth, legend, conspiracy, and science-fantasy weirdness around it. Overweight, 30ish Nelson Jent accidentally dials one of the dials. He becomes a superhero just in time to save his own life from some thugs who are after a criminal friend of his. This first hero is Boy Chimney, strange wielder of smoke and soot. There will be many others, from Captain Lachyrmose to Open-Window Man. There will even be a Native-American stereotype of a hero so ridiculous that Jent will hide for the duration of the change.

Others are searching for the dials. One of these searchers is a dial auto-didact who has her own dial. She's really the co-protagonist of Dial H. She's also a woman in her 60's who calls herself Manteau. So the protagonists of the comic are an overweight guy and a woman in late middle age. And the ultimate villain of the second half of the volume is a Canadian superhero turned super-villain. Several issues take place in Ottawa, Canada. Mieville has pretty much up-ended all the norms of a superhero comic book.

There's a width and breadth of invention here that will be familiar to those who've read Mieville's fiction. Things are a bit lighter and more hopeful here than in, say, Mieville's New Crobuzon or his London of King Rat-- the weird heroes of Dial H really are heroic, despite their frequent misgivings. There are apocalyptic stakes and strange monsters. There's world-hopping and dimension-hopping. There's even an issue that tips a hat to Simon and the Land of Chalk Drawings.

The art by Mateus Santolouco, David Lapham, and Alberto Ponticelli doesn't always serve the story.  Mateus Santolouco, who illustrated the first few issues, is a fine and detailed renderer of weirdness, but his panel-to-panel progressions and in-panel storytelling can sometimes get confusing. Lapham cleaned things up when he took over for a spot. 

Alberto Ponticelli, working with inker Dan Green, took a couple of issues to hit his stride. When he did, though, the book managed the combination of weirdness and easily followed graphic storytelling that it needed, peaking with that Simon and the Land of Chalk Drawings homage, an issue in which Open-Window Man spends most of his time talking to a sentient chalk drawing on a wall.

As satiric, ironic, and critical as Dial H can be of certain superhero maxims and stereotypes, it nonetheless concerns itself with the basics of superheroing more completely than an awful lot of non-weird superhero books and movies. Nelson Jent and 'Manteau' diligently protect innocent bystanders at every turn, no matter how awful the enemy they face. They don't destroy cities to apprehend one person. 

And they're primarily motivated by curiosity about the dials and a desire to do good. Jent initially has a personal motivation, but that's resolved fairly early in the series. After that, it's all about the joys and responsibilities of superheroing, even when the superhero you're going to be for the next few hours is a sentient colony of plankton or a giant rooster with wheels for legs. People need you. Dial H. Highly recommended.

Blackhawk Up

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Funny Books

Plastic Man: On the Lam!: written and illustrated by Kyle Baker (2004/ Collected 2004): Kyle Baker's brilliant, hilarious run on Plastic Man begins here. He won the comics industry Eisner Award for best new series back in 2004 for his take on the Golden Age's stretchable FBI agent. That didn't keep the book from being cancelled after 20 issues despite it getting a rave review from Entertainment Weekly as well. 

But you should buy this. Really, you should buy anything by Baker. He's a swell writer-artist, never sweller than when he's writing his own stuff. He can draw pretty much any way he wants to, though the fallback on Plastic Man is anarchic cartooning that pays homage to Plastic Man creator Jack Cole's zany work even as it also nods to a host of other influences, including Warner Brothers cartoons. 

One of the ten or 15 greatest things DC Comics has published in the 21st century, it even manages to make its metacriticism of superhero tropes and stereotypes and oddities specific without being an in-joke inaccessible to non-expert comic-book readers. The Baker Plastic Man deserves an Absolute hardcover edition, stat! Highly recommended.

Airboy: written by James Robinson; illustrated by Greg Hinkle (2015): James Robinson's comic-book writing career has been distinguished by many superhero series, most notably the Cold War Justice Society miniseries The Golden Age and his terrific, lengthy run on his legacy version of the Golden-Age DC hero Starman, the reluctantly heroic son of that now-retired hero.

Here, Robinson takes the almost-forgotten Golden-Age comic-book aviator Airboy into the realm of metafictional, quasi-autobiographical, scatological satire. 

And it's terrific. To describe too much would spoil things. But suffice to say that versions of Robinson and artist Greg Hinkle are characters along with Airboy and friends. But 'Robinson' is drug-and-alcohol-addled, self-destructive, and despondent over what he feels is his failed career as a writer. Poor old Hinkle and his gigantic, often-displayed penis come along for a story session that turns into a Bacchanal that turns into a trip into the realms of comic-book-land. 

It's very funny, completely NSFW, and politically incorrect -- a scandal erupted over Robinson's use of trans characters early in the series, though the last issue recontextualizes that use in such a way that the complaints seem to be fully addressed. That didn't stop Robinson from having to issue an apology/justification before the last issue ever came out. So it goes. This is terrific stuff in terms of both Robinson's writing and Hinkle's funny, cartoony, and often grotesque cartooning. Highly recommended.

Red Skies at Night

Convergence: written by Jeff King, Scott Lobdell, and Dan Jurgens; illustrated by Ethan Van Sciver, Jason Paz, Carlo Pagulayan, Stephen Segovia, Eduardo Pansica, Aaron Lopresti, Ed Benes, Andy Kubert, and many others (2015): As a standalone miniseries, the weekly, 9-issue Convergence is something of a disaster. It did tie into a seemingly endless group of two-issue miniseries focused on various DC heroes from a wide range of 'abandoned' universes, and some of these two-parters were very good (especially Shazam!). The 9000-page Convergence Omnibus edition should be half-killer, half-filler.

However, Convergence is important for company-wide reasons at DC as it establishes a new/old status quo in its final issue. Unfortunately, while we see the build-up to the important, universe-shattering battle in that final issue, and while we see the aftermath, we do not actually see the battle itself. Either that or my copy of Issue 8 (the series begins with Issue Zero, btw) is missing several dozen pages.

In a way, this makes Convergence the perfect capstone to 30 years of universe-shattering, forest-consuming, million-issue crossover events at DC and Marvel. It's a story so big they couldn't fit the story in. Wait for next year's Convergence: Crisis War Blues Explosion mini-maxi-series, I guess.

And while there are moments of interest interspersed throughout the miniseries (most of them in issue zero, illustrated with snap and verve by Ethan Van Sciver) , a lot of space involves fighting, more fighting, and pointlessly and brutally killing off characters from a Warlord comic-book series that most readers probably weren't born to read when last it breathed life on the comic-book racks. I mean seriously: we spend what seems like half the miniseries in the world of Warlord. And we're mainly there to kill off all the characters in terrible, futile situations. Did Warlord creator and writer-artist Mike Grell poop in somebody's punch bowl over at DC recently?

So while the outcome of Convergence is mostly fine by me, the execution of this miniseries is surprisingly dreadful for long stretches. Pick up the beautifully illustrated Issue Zero and Issue 8 and forget the rest of the minieries. Oh, and track down Convergence: Shazam 1-2.  Not recommended in its entirety.

Crisis Times Two!

Crisis on Multiple Earths Volume 6: written by Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas; illustrated by George Perez, Don Heck, Adrian Gonzales, Jerry Ordway, Romeo Tanghal, and others (1981-82; collected 2013): When DC had multiple Earths the first time around, an annual team-up between the Justice League of Earth-1 and the Justice Society of Earth-2 started in the early 1960's. Earth-1 was home to the heroes regularly published by DC; Earth-2 was home to their counterparts who first appeared in the late 1930's and 1940's, along with a few 'legacy' heroes like Power Girl (Earth-2's Supergirl) and the Huntress (daughter of the Earth-2 Batman and Catwoman).

This volume reprints two of the longest team-ups -- eight issues in all between the two. The second team-up also brings in the All-Star Squadron, writer Roy Thomas's ret-conned Justice Society of World War Two, when the Society was disbanded in favour of a larger assemblage of Axis-fighting superheroes.

In all, this is a lot of time and space-bending fun from the late Bronze Age at DC, which ended in 1985 with the Crisis on Infinite Earths. 'Crisis' is the keyword here, used in the titles of the very first JLA/JSA team-up and then forever after in the titles of subsequent team-ups. When someone says 'Crisis!' in the DC Universe, something big and bad is going down.

The great George Perez pencils the first story arc, one which pits the League and the Society against the Secret Society of Super-villains and the Crime Syndicate of Earth-3. Much punching and inter-dimensional travel ensues. Perez demonstrates his almost uncanny ability to make super-heroes seem distinct and different and razor-sharp in their delineation. Conway's script is full of cosmic absurdity and 'cosmic balance,' as the scripts of these team-ups should be.

The second story arc crosses over between Justice League of America and All-Star Squadron. The long-penciling Don Heck does yeoman's duty on the JLA sections, especially when he inks his own pencils in the last JLA issue. Over on All-Star Squadron, a young Jerry Ordway inks Adrian Gonzales in crisp, pleasing fashion. This arc jumps between worlds and times as Golden-Age Justice Society villain Per Degaton (love that name!) enlists the help of a variety of super-villains so as to rule Earth-2. Thomas and Conway's time-travel plot is a twisty one, and at one point takes us to Earth-Prime -- which is to say, to 'our' Earth, where superheroes appear only in comic books, TV, movies, and on Underoos.

In all, this is a fine collection of melodramatic, high-stakes superhero action. One of the funnier bits involves the heroes being shocked at the idea of a world without superheroes. A running bit in which the JLA's nuclear superhero, Firestorm, keeps trying to hit on Power Girl is a bit lame, though. Stop macking on Superman's cousin! Recommended.

'Old' Books

The Dark Man and Other Stories by Robert E. Howard, edited by August Derleth (1963): Eclectic collection of non-Conan stories from Robert E. Howard, originally published in hardcover by Arkham House. Magazines of the 1920's and 1930's originally published everything included here, including the wonderfully named Oriental Tales. Boy, those were the days. Was Edward Said the editor?

Basically, one gets some contemporary horror stories, of which "Pigeons from Hell" is the marvelously titled best, and at worst Howard's second-best pure horror story. Howard's ancient Pict leader Bran Mak Morn shows up a few times, even after he's dead. Some Lovecraftian horrors show up, as do a few ghosts and demons and one malevolent magic snake.

Roaming freebooters of the Middle Ages, Turlogh O'Brien and Athelstane, have a couple of adventures involving lost civilizations and massive bloodshed. And a couple of (then) modern-day Americans suddenly flash back to past lives of adventure, as happens a lot in Howard's stories. Viva reincarnation! Recommended.

Cinder and Ashe: written by Gerry Conway; illustrated by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Joe Orlando (1988): Solidly written thriller from Gerry Conway, Cinder and Ashe follows private detectives Jacob Ashe and Cinder DuBois as an enemy from their shared past in Viet Nam long thought dead suddenly turns up in a case they're working in 1988.

This miniseries, from that long-lost era when DC Comics regularly released non-superhero work under the main DC banner (as opposed to under the Vertigo banner) has never been collected into book form so far as I know, so you'll have to check out the back-issue bins.

Conway's writing does the job -- you can see how he would seamlessly transition from writing for comics to working for the Law and Order franchise in the years to come .

And the art, by longtime DC mainstay Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, is fantastic -- beautifully detailed and fluid. Because Garcia-Lopez works here on normal people and not super-heroes, his artistic similarity to the great Milton Caniff and other comic-strip giants really shines through. Not only does the art alone make a case for permanent collection, it makes a case for oversized permanent collection so that the often exquisite linework becomes fully visible. Recommended.

Dial Hard

Dial H (Issues 0-15, JL 23.3): written by China Mieville; illustrated by Alberto Ponticelli, Mateus Santolouco, and others (2012-2013): China Mieville's Dial H series for DC Comics would probably have lasted longer in the 1990's, when there was a certain commitment by DC to odd superhero books. In the second decade of the 21st century, it never really had a chance. But it was fun while it lasted, warts and all, as Mieville learned how to write comic books and the readers got to watch.

How odd was this series? Well, the two heroes are a 30-ish overweight man and a woman in her late 50's or early 60's. The villain is a Canadian. The Hero Dial, a concept from DC's Silver Age, works pretty much as it always did. You dial H-E-R-O and you become a different hero for a limited time every time you dial.

From this basic set-up, Mieville took off running with an exploration of how the dials work and where they come from. And even though cancellation came without much warning, the powers that be gave Mieville enough time to supply a mostly satisfying, though somewhat open-ended, wrap-up to what I would have marketed as the War of the Dials. Because by the end of the series, there were a lot of different dials (this a commentary on DC's recent obsession with there being a power ring for ever colour of the spectrum and more in the Green Lantern books). Dial to be a Sidekick. Dial for world-shattering Doom. And so on. And it's an analog Dial in a digital age. Why?

Mieville's characterization of his oddball (for superhero comic books, that is) protagonists was sympathetic and engaging, as was the depiction of the supporting characters who appeared throughout the series. If there were problems, they lay partially in Mieville's inexperience at writing comic books: the first few issues are a bit too murky in their proceedings, the engaging weirdness obscured by, well, just plain narrative weirdness and a bit too much off-putting narration from some deeply weird H-E-R-O characters.

Another problem lay in the choice of the first artist for the series, Mateus Santolouco. He's a lovely draftsman, but his storytelling sense wasn't all that strong (or Mieville was giving him odd instructions that he couldn't overcome). Alberto Ponticelli cleaned things up a lot when he came on-board, but the series might have benefitted from a bit more traditional, Silver-Agey grid-structure art. One of the things that made Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol (the DC book most like Dial H) so enjoyable in the early 1990's was that penciller Richard Case was a fairly straightforward storyteller. In some cases, the weirdness needs to be delivered 'straight,' especially weirdness in the post-modern Silver-Age school of metafictionally recursive superhero comics.

By the last few issues, Mieville and Ponticelli were really pretty much all there. Issue 13, in which one of the characters interacts with an alternate universe composed entirely of chalk drawings on walls, was the best single issue of the series, and a classic of post-modern superhero comics in any decade. I'd say it's the best single issue of any superhero comic book published in DC's mainstream New 52 line since that line started in autumn of 2011. It's a hell of a high point. No wonder the book got cancelled. Recommended.

Fantastic Four: Beta Version

The Challengers of the Unknown Archives Volume 1: written by Jack Kirby, Ed Herron, and Dave Wood; illustrated by Jack Kirby, Roz Kirby, and others (1956-58; collected 2003): Jack Kirby's foray into a four-person, jump-suited team of heroes who fight weird menaces predates the Fantastic Four by 5 years -- and almost directly led to Kirby going to Marvel where he'd co-create the FF, as a conflict with series editor Jack Schiff caused Kirby to leave DC for a decade.

 
The four Challengers are Ace Morgan, Prof Haley, Rocky Davis and Red Ryan; blonde June Robbins becomes the distaff honorary member a few issues into the team's existence. The four men, who are already adventurers or various types, survive a plane crash they believe they should have died in and decide afterwards to become a team of heroes because they're "living on borrowed time."

　
Technically, the Challengers are the first new superhero team of the Silver Age of Comics. While they usually lack (super)powers, they fight a wide variety of monsters, aliens, and supernatural menaces. They'd be one of the early success stories of that Silver Age, with the first run of their adventures lasting until the late 1960's, with sporadic revivals ever since.

　
Kirby and company seem to be having fun here, what with all the scary monsters and superfreaks threatening the world. The Challs (as they get called, even now) take awhile to become truly differentiated in character, but it does eventually happen -- script-writers Dave Wood and Ed Herron are competent comic-book writers, nothing more, at least here. Kirby's visuals and visual inventiveness do the heavy lifting here, and it's some pretty good lifting. A Kraken is especially awesome-looking. Recommended.

Fast Company

Showcase Presents The Flash Volume 3: written by John Broome, Gardner Fox, and Robert Kanigher; illustrated by Carmine Infantino, Joe Giella, and Murphy Anderson (1963-66; collected 2011): The Flash was always the jauntiest of DC's Silver-Age reimaginings of Golden-Age characters, sleekly drawn by Carmine Infantino and written with a flair for the oddball, mostly by John Broome. As with other DC titles of the 1950's and 1960's, psychology is mostly absent and rapid-fire superheroics are the norm. Also, there are a lot of aliens.

There is some Marvel-Age influence here as the volume moves to the mid-1960's. A cover with the Flash abandoning his uniform and his superheroing seems pretty clearly inspired by a classic Spider-man cover of the same time period. Some personal angst slips into a couple of the stories -- being the Flash does occasionally play havoc with the Flash's relationship with reporter Iris West -- but the overall tone is usually light. One story has the Flash participating in bizarre, tearful conversations with his costume. The mental stability of superheroes often seems pretty precarious.

And then there's the Flash's host of supervillains. Captain Cold, the Trickster, Captain Boomerang, Heatwave, the Top, Abracadabra, the Reverse-Flash, and numerous others may be occasionally homicidal, but for the most part they're either trying to steal things or seemingly obsessed with playing tag with the Flash. And there are a lot of aliens from both space and other dimensions trying to destroy the Earth, or conquer it, or whatever.

The Flash's superspeed, so advanced as to give him complete control over every atom in his body, comes in handy. Occasional 'Flash Facts' explain why our hero can do certain things (like run straight through a brick wall) that one might think would kill him. Thankfully for Earth, relativity doesn't seem to apply to the Flash, as his jogs at the speed of light don't make him so massive as to destroy the Earth. Seminal Flash artist Carmine Infantino draws everything with an angular, lunging quality that highlights the speed of the Flash and the occasional slowness of everything around him. Phew! Recommended.

Nail Fail

JLA: The Nail: written and pencilled by Alan Davis; inked by Mark Farmer (1998; collected 1999): In this Elseworlds miniseries (or 'What If?' were it from Marvel), the DC Universe suffers from the apparent non-existence of Superman because of a nail in Ma and Pa Kent's truck tire on the day of baby Kal-El's arrival from Krypton.

Alan Davis has always been a very clean, exciting superhero artist, firmly in the tradition of Neal Adams and John Byrne in the world of the hyper-real. He's also turned out to be a solid writer. The Nail feels like a throwback to the early 1980's or even earlier. It may be aimed at some sort of adult, but it nonetheless zips along in a breezy and entertaining fashion, without too much psychobabble despite some of the heavy-duty shenanigans that go on.

Without Superman, the present-day Justice League of America finds itself in a world where many normal citizens hate and fear super-heroes. Without Superman, DC-Earth has become Marvel-Earth. Or maybe just a foreshadowing of the New 52. In any case, someone or something is causing super-heroes and super-villains alike to vanish while simultaneously fanning the flames of xenophobia. This looks like a job for...oh, right.

A new edition collecting both The Nail and its excellent sequel, Another Nail, would be nice -- they really form one narrative. The biggest laugh here comes from the identity of the supervillain behind the woes of the JLA. It's at once weirdly funny and, given the thematic relevance of the whole 'Nail' concept -- of greater and greater consequences resulting from one small changed moment -- completely apt. Recommended.

Tarot of Terror

Lucifer Volume 4: The Divine Comedy: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross and Dean Ormiston (2002; collected 2003): Lucifer, based on the version of Lucifer in Neil Gaiman's earlier Sandman series, has succeeded in creating his own universe. Humans and supernatural beings have flocked there from God's universe through any one of thousands of portals, there to live by only two commandments: Thou shalt not worship any gods, and thou shalt not attempt to be worshipped as gods.

And things seem to proceed swimmingly.

But Lucifer has enemies and rivals. He also has allies, though he doesn't have any friends -- he's a self-involved jerk, which means readerly sympathy has to be built upon the supporting characters and, negatively, by showing that Lucifer's enemies are much, much worse than he is.

Carey, Gross, and Ormiston succeed in this task -- Carey's writing zips along, combining inventiveness with a quirky oddness of original creation; Gross and Ormiston are deft cartoonists, cleanly rendering a world of wonders and terrors both supernatural and natural. And the fallen Cherubim Gaudium really is cute in a gargoyley way as he complains his way across two creations.

Lucifer's chief opponent here is the Basanos, a sentient Tarot Card deck created as a malign twin of the Book of Destiny. The Basanos can see all possible realities and force the outcome they desire; Lucifer is powerful enough to shrug off almost any and all attacks imaginable. But we're dealing with a deck of cards here -- They/It have something up Their/Its sleeve(s). Highly recommended.

A Stretch of the Imagination

Plastic Man Archives Volume 7: written and illustrated by Jack Cole (1946-47; collected 2006): Another jolly, anarchic, cleanly rendered volume of Golden Age Plastic Man adventures, written and illustrated by the stretchable hero's creator Jack Cole and members of Cole's studio. Plastic Man is one of the few Golden Age comic books that holds up today, not just as a historic curiosity, but as an exemplar of the form and of the superhero genre.

Plastic Man's adventures are funny and fun without being weightless (the death count is surprisingly high). Cole's imagination found wings with a hero who could look like pretty much anything, battling crooks who were comic grotesques. While Plas works for the FBI (the first superhero to work for a government agency, so far as I recall), he remains a curiously liminal figure -- a bringer of chaos and anarchy in the cause of law and order.

While Cole would 'cut loose' on the splash pages of Plastic Man's adventures (taking a cue from the Will Eisner studio's Spirit, upon which Cole worked briefly), he primarily worked his narrative magic within a fairly conventional panel layout. It's inside the panels that everything cuts loose, and within which little jokes and sub-stories play out in the background in a manner which anyone who's read the later Mad magazine would recognize, though I think Cole was taking his inspiration from great comic strips that include Bringing Up Father (aka Maggie and Jiggs), Krazy Kat and E.C. Segar's Thimble Theatre (aka Popeye) when it came to the dense shenanigans occurring around and behind the main action of a strip.

The product of a true visionary and artist, Plastic Man is one of those rare Golden-Age comic-book creations who has never been improved upon by writers and artists other than his creator. Lovely, lovely stuff. Highly recommended.