Secret Originals

The Filth (Deluxe Edition): written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Chris Weston and Gary Erskine (2002-2003; this edition 2015): Those hoping for a completely uncensored reprint of Grant Morrison, Chris Weston, and Gary Erskine's racy, cloachal mind-bender of  science-fiction/conspiracy series will be only partially satisfied by some of the material included in the Extras section. People are still afraid of penises, or at least the erect depiction thereof.

But this slightly over-sized Deluxe Edition is still a good buy, even if only for the slightly over-sized pages and the Extras section. A Morrison blurb reprinted from the time of the first issue's release back in 2002 notes that The Filth is a "Gerry Anderson series on LSD." And it sort of is, at least in terms of Anderson's UFO, which even had its anti-alien defenders wearing wigs and odd costumes, especially on the Moon-base.

'The Filth' refers to several things in the series. It's a British slang term for the police, it's a slang term for pornography, and it's a term for, well, actual filth -- you know, dirt, shit, that sort of thing. 

The science-fictional level of The Filth shows us an increasingly odd secret organization named The Hand devoted to maintaining Status Q[uo] by almost any means necessary, with the help of high-tech, bio-tech, and some good old-fashioned violence. The last is often committed by an extremely angry and foul-mouthed talking chimpanzee who was originally created by the Soviets. He's one hell of a sniper!

The cloachal world of The Hand's secret base, its bio-tech, and the crises it seeks to prevent or truncate bleeds into the normative world of Greg Feely, a porn-loving office drone who loves his aging cat. But he's not really Greg Feely. He's actually Ned Slade, Hand super-negotiator. He's just taking a vacation away from the weirdness and doesn't know it. Or does he? Or is this all the fantasy of Greg Feely's increasingly deranged mind?

And who is Max Thunderstone? Who is Spartacus Hughes? What is iLife? Just exactly where is the Hand's secret base located, given the odd monsters that roam around it and the giant hand holding a pen that loom over them all? Has God died? Are superhero comics actually a good source of tech development? Will Tony the cat, pushing 18, survive? What's buried in Greg Feely's backyard? Will that goddam chimp ever shut up? What is the greater significance of the comic-book superhero named Secret Original? What disaster looms on a cruise ship built to hold over 100,000 people? Will Beverly Hills survive an attack by thousands of giant, flying spermatozoa? 

Well, read The Filth. It's good and it's good for you. You need to be distracted while they operate in the shadows to maintain Status Q. Just hope you aren't judged to be an Anti-Person. Or recruited by The Hand. Highly recommended.

Challengers of the Unknown: Stolen Moments, Borrowed Time: written and illustrated by Howard Chaykin (2004/ collected 2006): The stylish and provocative writer-artist Howard Chaykin gives us a re-imagining of DC's venerable Challengers of the Unknown team that plays with many of the same concepts as Grant Morrison et al.'s earlier The Filth. A world-wide conspiracy secretly turns people into super-agents. The super-agents don't know they're super-agents until they're activated. But something goes wrong, and several agents gain full self-awareness and begin to fight against the conspiracy -- here imagined as a Whites-Only group formed after World War One. It's stylish and enjoyable in the mighty Chaykin matter. The satire of Fox News and similar right-wing outlets and mouthpieces (including Ann Coulter) is savage. No series resulted from this miniseries, so it stands on its own with only partial resolution to the story-line at the end. Lightly recommended.

DMZ Volume 1: On the Ground: written by Brian Wood; illustrated by Riccardo Burchielli and Brian Wood (2005-2006; collected 2006): Enjoyable start to the relatively long-running Vertigo/DC title (well, 72 issues) drops news intern Matty Roth into war-torn Manhattan. Yes, Manhattan. The second United States Civil War has been going on for years, and Manhattan is a point of friction between the United States and the rebel Free States, one of which is New Jersey. Riccardo Burchelli's art is realistic and occasionally startling, while Wood does a good job of beginning to flesh out the realities of life in fractured, fractious Manhattan. Recommended.

Unknown

Challengers of the Unknown Archives Volume 2: written by Jack Kirby, Ed Herron, and others; illustrated by Jack Kirby, Wally Wood, Roz Kirby, and others (1958-59; collected 2004): Jack Kirby's early run on DC's first Silver-Age superhero team concludes here, as a falling-out with series editor Jack Schiff sent Kirby to (not-yet) Marvel, where he'd soon help create the Marvel Age of Comics.

The Challengers, non-powered adventurers, take on a wide variety of supernatural and super-scientific menaces here. They're abducted by aliens, develop powers of their own, and have to deal with various supernatural menaces unearthed and unleashed upon the world. It's a lot of fun, and a template Kirby's Fantastic Four would soon be following over at Marvel. Heroes vs. giant monsters = awesome.

Legendary comics artist Wally Wood supplies some of the inks over Kirby's pencils, and the results are spectacular -- Wood is one of the two or three best inkers Kirby ever had, and it's a shame they didn't get to work together more often. It's beautiful stuff. Recommended.

Possums of the Unknown

Mark of the Vampire: written by Guy Endore, Bernard Schubert, John L. Balderson, Tod Browning, H.S. Kraft, and Samuel Ornitz; directed by Tod Browning; starring Lionel Barrymore (Professor), Elizabeth Allan (Irena), Bela Lugosi (Count Mora), Lionel Atwill (Inspector Neumann), Jean Hersholt (Baron Otto), and Henry Wadsworth (Fedor) (1935): Enjoyable, concise (61 minutes!) remake of Browning's mostly lost silent film, London After Midnight.

Lionel Barrymore clearly has a hoot playing a vampire-fighting professor called in by the police somewhere in Early Hollywood Europe, where none of the accents match, to solve the murder of one man and the harassment by vampires of his daughter and her fiance. Lionel Atwill is his usual sturdy self as the inspector in charge of the case, and Jean Hersholt does some version of a European accent that could be German, could be Russian, could be almost anything. As everyone else in the movie has either American or British accents, it's a bit anomalous.

Bela Lugosi appears in several scenes, but doesn't speak until the last one of the movie. There are some nice special effects for the time, and an enjoyable atmosphere of menace and decay. The ending is a humdinger. Also, dig that possum incongruously wandering around a European castle! Maybe he's looking for the armadillo Browning put in Dracula's castle in his version of Dracula (1931)! Recommended.

The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy 1931-1951: written and drawn by Chester Gould (Collected 1970): The nostalgia boom of the late 1960's and early 1970's led to a lot of comic strips from the 1930's and 1940's being collected in hardcover. This is one of those collections.

Dick Tracy's Golden Age, which this collection covers, was one of the finest and most popular in the history of dramatic American comic strips, with a readership that may have been up to 70% of the American reading public at its peak.

By the late 1930's, writer-artist Chester Gould had reached his stylized peak of artistic form. And it's quite a peak for the dramatic comic strip, one matched perhaps only by Milton Caniff and Harold Gray.

Tracy now fought increasingly grotesque villains with increasingly descriptive names and increasingly horrifying actions. The graphics are amazingly, well, graphic, and this in a collection that actually censors the more violent endings of some villains, including one in which a Nazi spy ends his life impaled on a flag pole waving the American flag. Tracy's Rogue's Gallery is a clear influence on Batman's similarly twisted foes, while Tracy's use of forensic methods also foreshadows the Batman's expertise in that area.

The reproduction of these strips is mostly competent, especially later in the run. The large Sunday panels are missing, which means certain key events are referred to but not shown. A serious reader would want to track down some of the excellent contemporary reprint volumes of Dick Tracy, but this is certainly worth picking up used as a sampling of the great detective. The stories are clever, suspenseful, and very entertaining. 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.