All-American

Essential Captain America Volume 2 (1968-1970/ Collected 2004): written by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Jim Steranko; illustrated by Jack Kirby, Jim Steranko, Gene Colan, John Romita, Joe Sinnott, Syd Shores, and others: The great transition period of Captain America begins here, as co-writer/penciller Jack Kirby gives way to Jim Steranko gives way to John Romita gives way, finally, to Gene Colan, who would stay on the book for a few years as penciller. 

Early red-giant-phase Stan Lee writes Steve Rogers, Captain America, as such an angsty bastard that the book occasionally shudders to a halt, bloated and inert and over-stuffed with bathetic self-pity. Redemptively, the art is good throughout, and Steranko's innovative lay-outs are such a  show-stopper that they've been collected and re-collected on numerous occasions. I don't know that the Gene Colan/Joe Sinnott art team ever entirely works for me -- Sinnott's inks normalize Colan's pencils a bit too much, make them a bit too smooth. 

It's 1968 when the collection begins, and Kirby and Stan Lee are clearly producing too much material at the time -- Lee's writing is well into its state of decay. Kirby is still great, but he's decreased the number of panels per page already, as he did on all of his Marvel books in the late 1960's. It makes for more interesting visual storytelling but also a real and notable decrease in content. Cap's African-American pal The Falcon makes his debut here. Once Kirby and Steranko leave, the new villains become ridiculous, as Lee flounders to create interesting villains and mostly fails. Recommended.

Doc Savage: The Spider's Web (2016/ Collected 2016): written by Chris Roberson; illustrated by Cezar Razek: Writer Chris Roberson nails venerable pulp hero Doc Savage much more effectively in his second go-round on the Man of Bronze's adventures for Dynamite Comics. Cezar Razek is a pleasant, straightforward cartoonist. I wish Dynamite would put an artist more, well, dynamic, on the new adventures of Doc Savage. So it goes. Any time Doc has to deal with an Earthquake Machine is all right with me. Recommended.

Cancelled

Spirit World: written by Jack Kirby, Mark Evanier, and Steve Sherman; illustrated by Jack Kirby, Mike Royer, and Neal Adams (1970-71; collected 2012): An oddity caused in part by DC's inability to commit to new projects in the 1970's, Spirit World was supposed to be part of DC's foray into the world of black-and-white comics magazines. And it sort of was.

But DC hedged its bets by creating a whole other shell company to have its name on the covers, constantly downgraded what the book would contain, and ultimately dumped it on the market in such a way that the first issue may have never reached most newsstands.

Jack Kirby and friends put together this magazine, along with In the Days of the Mob, which had a similarly truncated existence. Kirby's Boswell, Mark Evanier, lays out the odd circumstances surrounding the creation of Spirit World. DC comes across as even more bumbling than usual for the time period.

The stories here are a lot of fun, both from the first issue and the never-published second issue. Along with a fumetti and a prose piece, we get some horror pieces that lean on parapsychology rather than the overt supernatural. One of the ghosts is a cousin to the composite ghost-monster of Robert Bloch's classic story "The Hungry House," and Kirby's visualization of such a thing is one of the kicks of the volume. Recommended.


Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze: written by Chris Roberson with Shannon Eric Denton; illustrated by Bilquis Evely with Roberto Castro, John Cassaday, and Alex Ross (2013-2014): Well, the covers by John Cassaday and Alex Ross for Dynamite's quickly cancelled Doc Savage title were great. The time-leaping, eight-issue storyline that began and ultimately ended Dynamite's Doc Savage comic was not such a great idea.

Character development of anyone other than Doc was almost non-existent as the storyline spanned 80 years of the adventures of Doc Savage, with everything tied together by an overarching plot that made Doc look like something of an idiot. The time-leaping also gives us almost no significant time with any of the assistants old or new. Simply doing justice to Doc's cousin Pat and his five original assistants in eight issues would have been difficult; the series adds a couple of dozen more assistants over the years.

Interior artist Bilquis Evely was something of an ill fit for the series -- the young illustrator is pretty bland at this point, something evident right from the first issue as Doc's assistants, very distinct physically in the original novels, become almost interchangeable on the page. He's not good with period detail, and he doesn't seem to know how to make the necessary talking-heads sequences visually interesting.

Philosophically, a story pointing out Doc's faults isn't necessarily a bad idea, but it may have been a bad idea to centre your first storyline on Doc's shortcomings. It makes for something of a depressing read, which isn't something one associates with the pulp adventures. And Doc's cock-ups are so spectacular in several of these issues that it's hard to understand why he isn't in jail. Everywhere on the planet.

Doc's next comic-book appearance will apparently be at Dynamite in a six-issue miniseries also starring fellow Street&Smith pulp heroes The Shadow and The Avenger. I still look forward to it. As to Doc, something more along the lines of IDW's Rocketeer Adventures, an anthology miniseries with several stories per issue by an assortment of writers and artists, seems to me the way to go with this. Making things fun would probably also be a good idea. Lightly recommended.

Weed of Crime

The Shadow Volume 3: The Light of the World: written by Chris Roberson; illustrated by Giovanni Timpano and others (2013): Dynamite's regular Shadow series, set in the 1930's and 1940's, continues to be an enjoyable pulp adventure in comic-book form, with a lot more psychology and character development than the old radio and pulp-magazine Shadow.

The major difference between the comic book and the original pulp novels lies in the focus on the Shadow himself, who was often a supporting character in a book that focussed on his various lieutenants as they investigated whatever case the Shadow was pursuing. This left the Shadow as a mystery man. Dynamite's comic books have put him front and centre, to generally good effect.

Giovanni Timpano's art on this latest arc is fairly strong, especially when he gets to do sweeping long-shots of the Shadow on rooftops and bridges and what-have-you. Chris Roberson comes up with an interesting new villain who, like this revised Shadow, appears to be working for some mysterious organization aimed at punishing criminals.

However, the Light is fine with killing people before they commit crimes: she's pretty much going with the Biblical concept that thinking something sinful is the same as doing it. Oh-oh. Enter the Shadow: he may kill a lot, but he only kills killers.

The series (like the radio program moreso than the novels) continues to be very Shadow/Margo Lane-centric, for good and ill. I wouldn't mind seeing the Shadow step back into the, ahem, shadows for an arc or two, so that we can spend more time with lieutenants such as Harry Vincent, whose recruitment by the Shadow features in the first scene of the first Shadow pulp novel. Still, a very enjoyable series. Between this and the new Doc Savage series, Roberson is having quite a pulp-tastic year writing comic books. Recommended.

Brain Candy: Not So Dandy

iZombie Volume 1: Dead to the World: written by Chris Roberson; illustrated by Mike Allred (2009-2010; collected 2010): Breezy, fun DC Vertigo series about the adventures of Gwen Dylan, reluctant zombie, and her natural and supernatural friends.

Gwen looks relatively normal most of the time, but she needs to eat human brains once a month to avoid turning into a more standard shambling, drooling zombie. As she doesn't like the taste of brains, this is something of a drag. At least her job as a gravedigger gives her easy access to the gray matter she needs but doesn't crave.

And at least she has friends, most notably Ellie, a young woman/ghost who died some time in the early 1960's, and Scott, a were-terrier. Gwen gets stuck trying to figure out who killed the owner of the brains she eats near the beginning of this collection -- the memories of the deceased transfer to her, though understanding them can be something of a chore. And there will be other supernatural problems to face as well, including mummies and vampires and monster-hunters.

Roberson keeps things light without getting glib, and Allred's art is, as always, a clean-lined pleasure. It's funny that more straightforward, 'traditional' comic-book art continues to thrive in the Vertigo line while the 'mainstream' DC line gets ever murkier and ever more over-rendered and buried in a slop of full-process colour. So it goes. Recommended.

Walk Like A Kryptonian

Superman: Grounded, written by J. Michael Straczynski, Chris Roberson and G. Willow Wilson; illustrated by Eddy Barrows, John Cassaday, J.P. Mayer, Amilcar Pinna, Jimal Igle, Leandro Oliviera, and others (2010-2011): Much fanfare accompanied J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5, Spider-man) coming to DC to take over the writing chores on Superman in 2010. That fanfare didn't last, and neither did Straczynski, who soon left the scripting chores to Chris Roberson so as to concentrate on creating original graphic novels for DC.

Feeling that he's lost touch with humanity, Superman decides to walk across America. I guess he didn't feel like riding a motorcycle alongside Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda. What precipitates this decision is a woman complaining to Superman that he wasn't there to help when her husband was dying of brain cancer.

Now, this is indeed a shocking development because neither I nor pretty much any other Superman reader was aware that Superman could be held responsible for not operating on a brain tumour with his heat vision. Seriously, WTF? Did Superman cancel his regular shift at the Metropolis cancer clinic or something? He doesn't even have a medical license !!!

So off sad, Epic Cancer Treatment Fail Superman goes to have a series of infuriating adventures in cities other than Metropolis. The low point comes when Superman dares a woman attempting suicide to jump off the building she's attempting suicide from. Seriously, WTF? This is such an awful, stupid, insensitive, ham-handedly written scene that I'm going to pretend that it was a dream sequence.

The narrative stabilizes somewhat when Chris Roberson takes over as scripter, though he's still stuck with this whole asinine 'Superman walking across America' thing. He shakes it up a bit with some flashback stories and some more typical Superman team-ups with Wonder Woman, Flash and The Batman. The Big Bad of the story, who looks weirdly like a mid-1980's Whoopi Goldberg, fizzles out at the end, as does Superman's depression, as the creators rush to finish the story before DC reboots its entire line at the beginning of September 2011.

Roberson comes up with some interesting ideas, and the art by Eddy Barrows and company is generally solid, but writers and artists are still stuck with the inherent crappiness of the story arc's underpinnings. Not recommended.