The Old and the New-Old

Batman (Detective Comics) Archives Volume 2 (1941-42/Collected 1991): written by Bill Finger and Don Cameron; illustrated by Jerry Robinson, George Roussos, Bob Kane, Fred Ray, and others: The Batman Mythos begins to mature with great rapidity in this second archive of stories from Detective Comics (where Batman premiered in 1939). Robin is part of the team, the Joker and the Riddler are recurring villains, and the origin of Two-Face appears here.

As Batman co-creator Bob Kane (with writer Bill Finger, finally being credited by DC in 2016, more than 40 years too late for the long-deceased Finger) doing less and less artwork, Batman's art gets progressively better because frankly, Bob Kane sort of sucked when he wasn't swiping other people's art. Jerry Robinson is on-board for the Joker, a character he co-created, while also supplying a much more pleasingly cartooned, detailed, and often funny Batman and Robin. George Roussos supplies his usually capable inks, complete with his ever-present giant moons.

The stories, most written by Finger, are at their best when they pit Batman against his growing rogue's gallery. Batman vs. mobsters is sort of boring. Batman vs. a mind-reading scientist, the Joker, or the Penguin is pretty great. One of the things to note about the early Batman is how text-heavy and panel-heavy it is. Kids were much faster readers in 1941! One wishes at times that the art was allowed to breath at times with fewer panels per page, but it would be years before this was true in the superhero comic book except in rare exceptions drawn by the Eisner or Simon&Kirby Studios. Recommended.

The Boy Commandos Volume 1 (1941-42/Collected 2010): written and illustrated by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby: Terrible, muddy colour reproduction caused by somebody who doesn't know how to use a colour scanner makes for some tough pages in this collection. Still, it's rewarding to read one of the first 'kid gang' comics. And what a gang! Co-writer-artists Joe Simon and Jack Kirby basically serve up Our Gang with Heavy Weaponry in the Boy Commandos, as a bunch of prepubescent boys run around Europe and Asia machine-gunning the crap out of the Axis powers. 

And they're sanctioned by the Allied military! 

The Boy Commandos are a multi-national group nominally led by adult Captain Rip Carter. Their adventures are wild and woolly, and a lot more fun than those of most adult WWII comic-book characters. One can see how the 'kid gang' comic became a popular one in the 1940's before fading out around the end of WWII. Recommended. Boy, this needs to be colour-adjusted, though.

Essential Fantastic Four Volume 2 (1963-1965/Collected 1995): written and illustrated by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby; inked by Chic Stone, George Roussos, Vince Coletta, and Frank Giacoia: The Stan Lee/Jack Kirby Fantastic Four (the stretchable Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Girl, Human Torch, and super-strong Thing) starts to become a more recognizable, traditional superhero comic in this second collection of the FF's 1960's stories, in glorious B&W because this is an Essential B&W collection. They fight fewer monsters and more traditional super-villains. They also fight the Infant Terrible in a story that whoever wrote the Trelayne episode of  the original Star Trek may have prior to penning "The Squire of Gothos." 

The FF's goofiest, funniest enemies from their first volume of adventures -- the Red Ghost and his Super-Apes (!!!) -- do appear here in all their ridiculous glory. The Watcher, the Blue Area of the Moon, Doctor Doom, Prince Namor, the Super-Skrull, and the Mole Man return; Dragon Man, the Hate Monger, Mr. Gideon, the Frightful Four (including yet-to-be-revealed-as-Inhuman Medusa), and Franklin Storm debut. 

Team-ups with Doctor Strange, the Avengers, the X-Men, and a brief Peter Parker cameo sell the interconnectedness of the growing Marvel Universe to the reader. There are many stand-out stories here. Probably my favourite pits the mighty, wise-cracking Thing against a maddened, more-mighty Hulk for page after page of terrific superhero combat. The Thing's later pummeling of Dr. Doom is also a personal favourite, drawn with succinct power by Jack Kirby.

Stan Lee is typically bombastic and melodramatic throughout, with the slapstick antics of the eternally bickering Thing and Human Torch to add humour. The inking of Kirby's pencils starts off rough with George Roussos, who's a terrible fit with Kirby. It picks up with Chic Stone. Joe Sinnott's masterful inks of Kirby on the FF are still a year or so away by the end of this volume. Highly recommended.

Thor: Godstorm (2001-2002; collected 2011): written by Kurt Busiek; illustrated by Steve Rude and Mike Royer: Fun homage by Busiek, Rude, and late-career Jack Kirby inker Mike Royer to the sort of story normally found in Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's run on The Mighty Thor in the 1960's. Thor's battle with the sentient thunderstorm Godstorm occurs in three different eras as depicted in the story. 

Busiek does that thing he does in which his writing is both homage (to Stan Lee) without being overly imitative of Lee's melodramatic verbiage. Steve Rude gives us his own action-packed, sometimes cartoony pencils, made to look just a bit more Kirbyesque than usual by Rude and inker Royer. My only complaint here would be that I'd like more of Busiek, Rude, and Royer's Thor. It's swell. Highly recommended.

Superman/Batman 1942

Batman: The Dark Knight Archives Volume 4 (Collecting Batman Issues 13-16, 1942-43/Collected 2003): written by Bill Finger, Don Cameron, Jack Schiff, and Ruth Lyons Kaufman; illustrated by Bob Kane, Jerry Robinson, Jack Burnley, Ray Burnley, and George Roussos:

Batman's co-creator Bob Kane leaves most of the art chores to other people in this volume of Batman stories from 1942-1943. And the prolific Don Cameron writes the majority of the stories, with an assist from Batman co-creator Bill Finger, who was otherwise writing most of the Batman stories in Detective Comics while Cameron handled Batman in Batman.

One of the pleasant surprises here, other than Cameron, is the art of Jack Burnley. He's not as good at the comic grotesques of those stories with artist Jerry Robinson on them, but he supplies a very straightforward, cleanly rendered adventure version of Batman. 

The Batman Mythos was rapidly coming together by this point, barely three years after the Caped Crusader's first appearance. Robin is fully entrenched as Batman's sidekick, and villains such as Catwoman, the Joker, and the Penguin are already making repeat appearances. 

Standouts in this volume include the following stories:

"Here Comes Alfred" by Don Cameron, Bob Kane, and Jerry Robinson introduces the (initially fat) butler to the Batman saga.

"The Grade 'A' Crimes by Ruth Lyons Kaufman and Jack Burnley features a rare Golden Age story written by a woman. 

"The Boy Who Wanted To Be Robin" by Cameron and Burnley introduces the idea of a criminal training himself to be a sort of 'anti-Batman.'

"The Two Futures" by Finger and Burnley offers a grim vision of an Axis victory in WWII.

"Swastika Over the White House" by Cameron and Burnley is a rare WWII story in which Batman actually battles Nazi saboteurs.

"The Adventure of the Branded Tree" by Cameron and Burnley may be the first example of a strange sub-genre of DC superhero stories, those that are narrated by an inanimate object, in this case a roll of paper. It's also part of a fairly widespread tradition of showing superheroes reading about their own exploits in the comic book that they're appearing in. You'd be amazed how often this sort of meta-fiction shows up in comics of the 1940's.

In all, an enjoyable and surprisingly dense read. The comics of the 1940's often had crude art, but they generally offered a surprisingly generous amount of prose along with that art. They certainly weren't for the illiterate as they were so often accused of being. Recommended.

The Superman Chronicles Volume 9: (Collecting Action Comics 47-52, World's Finest 6-7, and Superman 16-17, 1942/Collected 2011): written by Jerry Siegel; illustrated by Joe Shuster, John Sikela, Fred Ray, Leo Nowak, and Ed Dobrotka:

The chronological reprinting of Superman stories from the beginning, regardless of what title the stories appeared in, continues here with an offering from several months of 1942. America has just gone to war, and while the covers reflect this -- Superman doles out punishment to Hitler on one cover, for instance -- the stories have not yet caught up to reality. 

We do get some great battles with super-villains, however, and a not-yet-omnipotent Superman.  The Man of Steel's powers are still developing four years after his first appearance. He still seems to be vulnerable to poison gas, for instance, and he still needs to push off from something to fly. 

The gems of the volume are two linked stories pitting Superman against Lex Luthor, previously a red-headed evil scientist who has now mysteriously gone bald like another early Superman foe, the Ultra-Humanite.  "Powerstone" and "When Titans Clash" see Luthor gain powers greater than Superman's from the mysterious, titular Powerstone. For once, Superman's wits and knowledge of Luthor's psychology must save the world, not his strength.

One bizarre story all but recreates the story of The Natural, as Lois Lane and Clark Kent discover a baseball prodigy while on a train ride to MLB spring training. Did Bernard Malamud read Superman comics? Annoying unpowered foes The Prankster and The Puzzler also make their first appearances. They really seem like rejects from Batman's Rogues' Gallery. 

The volume also offers a battle against a mind-controlling tyrant self-dubbed The Emperor of America and a battle against the first iteration of long-time Superman foe Metal[l]o, here a guy who's taken "super-serum" and dressed in a suit of impregnable metal, but later to become the Man with the Kryptonite Heart.

Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel keeps the ideas cracking. This Superman is a bit more Establishment than Siegel's original version, though still much less authoritative and pompous than he would become in the 1950's. And he still seems to operate in a world where he's at least partially an Urban Legend -- many criminals don't know who he is, thus leading to much fruitless gun-play and fisticuffs. 

Superman's artistic father Joe Shuster only illustrates one story here, "Man or Superman?," and parts of it seem to be traced from his previous work. Even this early in the game, Shuster was being undone by his declining eyesight. John Sikela and Leo Nowak do solid work as Shuster's ghosts. Sikela is perhaps the closest to Shuster's style of all the ghosts, though he's more polished and less pleasingly raw than Shuster. Nowak gets more of Shuster's cartooniness in his art, but even less of that raw power and dynamism. In all, recommended.

Supes in the 90's and Bat's in the 40's.

Krisis of the Krimson Kryptonite!: written by Roger Stern, Jerry Ordway, and Dan Jurgens; illustrated by Dan Jurgens, Jerry Ordway, Curt Swan, John Byrne, Bob McLeod, Brett Breeding, Art Thibert, Dennis Janke, Dave Hoover, Kerry Gammill, and Scott Hanna (1990/ Collected 1996): An entertaining, short story arc from the various Superman titles in 1990. Why they decided to go with a title that spells out 'KKK' in acrostic is a really good question, though. 

Coming four years after John Byrne and company had rebooted Superman into a less god-like version of himself, Krisis offers us a Superman who already seems as comfortable as an old shoe. And there's nothing wrong with that. The art is also solid, workmanlike, no-fuss stuff. The three writers give us a Superman who's as noble as ever, faced with a situation in which his powers have mysteriously vanished because of Red Kryptonite.

As there is no Red Kryptonite in the rebooted world of Superman post-1986, this offers an intellectual challenge for the Man of Steel. Not only does he need to find out why he's a normal human now, he also finds himself obligated to continue fighting super-villains by whatever means necessary. My only regret is that the writers didn't figure out how to bring back the Super-mobile, a toy from the late 1970's that was forced upon the Superman creators of the time as something that just had to appear in the comic books. See also the Spider-mobile. 

The supporting cast is likeably constructed here, from the tough Lois Lane to the mostly competent Jimmy Olsen and onwards to relatively new cast addition Professor Hamilton. The main villains of the piece are Lex Luthor and Mr. Mxyzptlk. Luthor is dying of Kryptonite exposure because he's been wearing a green K ring on his hand for several years to ward off Superman. Mr. Mxyzptlk has undergone an unfortunate redesign in the post-1986 Superman universe: the skinny, almost snake-like look wouldn't survive much longer, thank Rao. 

Along the way, we do get a terrific joke that brings Superman reboot co-architect John Byrne back to the Man of Steel after a two-year absence with a funny riff on alternate universes and Byrne's work on the Fantastic Four prior to his work on the Superman comics. Recommended.

Batman: The Dark Knight Archives Volume 2: written by Bill Finger; illustrated by Bob Kane, George Roussos, Fred Ray, Jerry Robinson, and others (1941/collected 1993): Bob Kane worked out a sweet legal deal in 1939 with what would become DC Comics. It got him sole credit in perpetuity as the creator of Batman. This also screwed over writer Bill Finger, who by all accounts came up with about 90% of Batman's recognizable features. 

Kane generally got full credit on art and story for Batman stories until the 1960's. It's not entirely clear whether he actually did anything other than supervise the stories included here from 1941 issues of Batman magazine. So it goes. 

The stories collected here are interesting in a historical sense -- this is not the hyper-competent Batman who has really only existed in comic books since Frank MIller's 1985-86 miniseries The Dark Knight Returns. Instead, he's more of a costumed adventurer with an incredible propensity for getting knocked unconscious by everyone he fights. 

Seriously, post-concussion syndrome should really be the Golden Age Batman's Kryptonite. That and Robin the Boy Wonder's ability to get taken hostage at inopportune moments. They're stories for kids (as, indeed, most stories about super-heroes should be), capably illustrated by Kane (?), Jerry Robinson, George Roussos, and others. 

Bill Finger's pulpy inventiveness was already in full swing by 1941. My favourite example here involves Batman fighting a professor who's been exposed to too much radium radiation. He may be a mad, highly radioactive scientist, but his heart was in the right place: he wanted to cure disease. The Joker makes three appearances in the course of the collection (which spans one year of comic books in 1941). Yes, he was already being over-used. But while he's kooky, he's also a homicidal criminal And, as always, something of a dick. Recommended.

Guest-starring Congorilla and Dr. Phosphorus

Showcase Presents Superman Volume 3: written by Jerry Siegel, Edmond Hamilton, Bill Finger, and others; illustrated by Curt Swan, Wayne Boring, Al Plastino, and others (1961-62; collected 2007): Superman's Silver Age adventures move forward into more absurdity, cosmic happenings, and classic tragedy. 

The last is thanks to an Imaginary Story written by Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel and illustrated by the great Curt Swan, who drew Superman adventures in five decades. It's The Death of Superman, and it puts all other stories about the Man of Steel's death on the back-burner. But it's Imaginary -- it didn't really happen, dear reader!

We also get non-Imaginary stories featuring the Man of Tomorrow battling the mischievous 5th-dimensional imp Mr. Mxyzptlk, arch-enemy Lex Luthor, and various forms of Kryptonite. Ah, Kryptonite. Invented for the radio show back in the 1940's and meant to give Superman a weakness, by the early 1960's it had metastasized into a Krypton-sized headache. There seems to be more Kryptonite on Earth than actual Earth elements, and every two-bit hood has at least one chunk stashed in his pocket. Honestly, it's amazing that every issue wasn't The Death of Superman.

As a bonus, Krypto the Super-dog teams up with Titano the giant, Kryptonite-eye-beam-wielding gorilla back in dinosaur days because Why Not? Lois Lane tries to learn Superman's secret identity on a number of occasions. Superman reveals Supergirl's existence to the world after several years as his 'secret weapon.' 

The citizens of the Bottle City of Kandor, a Kryptonian city shrunk by Superman villain Brainiac and now housed in Superman's Arctic Fortress of Solitude, help out Superman on numerous occasions. And in the final story of the volume, Superman believes he's dying for real in a tale that heavily influenced Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's All-Star Superman and Alan Moore and Rick Veitch's Superman/Swamp Thing team-up, "The Jungle Line." Highly recommended.

Batman: Strange Apparitions: written by Steve Engelhart and Len Wein; illustrated by Marshall Rogers, Walt Simonson, Al Milgrom, Terry Austin, Dick Giordano, and others (1977-78; collected 1999): This Batman reprint volume spans the entire tenure of 1970's Batman greats Steve Engelhart and Marshall Rogers on Detective Comics. And it really is great. And unlike other previous and subsequent reprints from this run, it starts with Engelhart's arrival and ends with Rogers' departure, neither of which were synchronized. Thus, Walt Simonson does the penciling chores early and Len Wein writes the last two issues included.

Despite the shortness of both their tenures (the whole volume spans about a year's worth of issues), Engelhart and Rogers generally get ranked as one of the top-five Batman creative teams of all time. And I think I agree. Engelhart writes Batman as a sympathetic hero who's not completely bonkers and not an absurd control freak (as he would become in the 1980's). 

And he gives us fresh takes on Batman villains mainly old -- in some cases really old. Engelhart brought back Deadshot, unseen for nearly 30 years and redesigned by Rogers with a costume that's pretty much used verbatim now in stills from DC's upcoming Suicide Squad movie. He also resurrected Professor Hugo Strange, unseen also for decades and one of the early Batman's pulpiest mad-scientist foes.

We also get nifty takes on old foes that include the Penguin back before movies and TV and comics started portraying the Penguin as a character only slightly less insane than the Joker. And the Joker himself appears in a great two-parter about... copyright law? Rogers and Engelhart nod to various Batman tropes throughout, most notably the Giant Versions of Ordinary Household Objects beloved by the late writer (and uncredited Batman co-creator) Bill Finger.

The art of the late Marshall Rogers was almost never better than it was here. I prefer this more realistic (though eminently stylized) Rogers to his later, more cartoony stuff. Moreover, Rogers' attention to the details of Gotham City is second to none. And in a full-page panel that may have imprinted upon a young JJ Abrams, Rogers throws in... a lens flare. Oh, that Rogers! 

The work in which Engelhart and Rogers aren't paired isn't quite up to the same standard, but it's still solid stuff. Len Wein and Rogers' legacy villain Clayface (III) is one of the most horrific creations in Batman's Rogues Gallery, beautifully and occasionally grotesquely rendered by Rogers and inker Dick Giordano. Terry Austin inks the rest of Rogers' run, and he's a perfect, sharp-edged complement to Rogers' style. Highly recommended.

Everybody Loves Kryptonite

Yes, the original is in here.

Showcase Presents World's Finest featuring Superman and Batman Volume 3: written by Edmond Hamilton, Jim Shooter, Leo Dorfman, Cary Bates, and Bill Finger; illustrated by Curt Swan, George Klein, and Al Plastino (1965-67; collected 2010): An often gloriously loopy example of DC's superheroes in the late Silver Age. Superman and Batman team up, often with Robin and Jimmy Olsen along, to face a variety of menaces that range from the sinister to the ridiculous.

The great Curt Swan, for many people The Superman Artist, draws all but one of the stories collected here, giving even the craziest of events a grounding in reality. Edmond Hamilton, a science-fiction writer who started his career in the 1930's but also wrote a ton of comics for DC in the 1950's and 1960's, writes about the first half of the book. It's Silver Agey super-science and sketchy characterization throughout. And comics were for kids, so that's fine.

Superman and Batman get a little more psychologically complex once the young, Marvelesque Jim Shooter starts contributing scripts, along with long-time-to-be Superman scribe Cary Bates and Leo Dorfman. The heroes show more doubt and have more problems, sometimes to a ridiculous extent. The final story in the volume features an astonishingly underwhelming villain who nonetheless figures out the location of the Bat-cave in about two minutes...and gets inside. It also features Batman and Superman telling a Q&A group what villains they most fear and why. Really? This is not a particularly good thing to get all carey and sharey about!

The 1950's and 1960's were also a period when everyone on the planet seemed to have several pounds of Kryptonite lying around the house. It's a good thing these were stories for children -- otherwise, Superman would have died a thousand times over. One can see by the rote use of Kryptonite by every bloody criminal on the planet why the editors tried to wipe the Kryptonian menace out during the soft Superman reboot of 1970.

Or John Byrne's hard Superman reboot of 1986, for that matter, which initially reduced the amount of Kryptonite on Earth to one fist-sized chunk. Having learned nothing from 63 years of Superman history, the producers of Smallville re-introduced Kryptonite in mass quantities and upped the ante by having it give human beings super-powers as well. Because as Bizarro-Superman (who also appears here) would say, Hollywood am smart!

In order to introduce non-Kryptonite-centric drama, the creators of World's Finest resorted several times in the three years spanned by this collection to two recurring story models. One is the 'Imaginary Story', in which out-of-continuity events such as Bruce Wayne being adopted by Jonathan and Martha Kent and being raised as Clark Kent's brother could occur. These Imaginary Stories often represented the best DC stories (for adult readers, anyway) of the 1950's and 1960's, as people could actually change and even die in them.

The other old stand-by involved the magical pair of transdimensional tricksters Mr. Mxyzptlk and Bat-Mite getting up to magical shenanigans to test the character of Superman and Batman. Because the effects of their magic -- up to and including mass death -- would cease to exist once they were banished back to their magical other-dimensional worlds, their stories could also involve a lot of danger and humiliation for the World's Finest team. Cartoonist Evan Dorkin took the Bat-Mite/Mxyzptlk stories to their logical conclusion in 2001's World's Funniest, which I thought was pretty funny.

All in all, this volume is a weird delight. Is it sophisticated graphic entertainment for adults? No. But it's more fun than a barrel of Kryptonite. And barrels of Kryptonite must be fun because everyone's got one! Also, King Arthur and his knights had super-powers in the DC Universe at this point! And the Superman of the 30th century can be brought low by... sea water, all of which is now deadly radioactive! Because Kryptonite wasn't pervasive enough! Highly recommended.