Pulp Heroes, Pulp Horrors

BPRD: Hell on Earth Volume 2: Gods and Monsters (2011-2012/ Collected 2012): written by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi; illustrated by Guy Davis and Tyler Crook: Another day in the battle between the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense and the unleashed forces of Hell. Good times! Some stuff happens. We see the effects of the ongoing invasion of Earth. A new character is introduced. An old character meets a shocking, though perhaps not final, fate. Some cool-looking monsters rampage around. It's all part of a larger story, and would work best read in sequence with that story. Lightly recommended.

Lobster Johnson 1: The Iron Prometheus (2007-2008/ Collected 2008): written by Mike Mignola; illustrated by Jason Armstrong: Set in the 1930's of writer-artist Mike Mignola's sprawling Hellboy Universe (Earth-Hellboy?), the Lobster Johnson series is an homage to the American pulp magazine heroes of the 1930's. It's part of Hellboy continuity, which means the reader knows Johnson's fate. So it goes. Johnson possesses traits of pulp heroes The Spider, The Shadow, and Doc Savage, while wearing a costume that's part standard superhero, part-Green Hornet.

The Iron Prometheus was the first of the Lobster Johnson miniseries. It's pulpy fun, with the mysterious, masked Lobster Johnson battling Nazis and monsters and an ancient evil to secure a super-weapon with magical properties. Mignola's tendency to underwrite was well underway here -- for a five-issue story, The Iron Prometheus is awfully thin at times. As written, it's 40 pages of story spread out over more than a hundred. We get characterization for a supporting character, but none really for Johnson's associates, much less Johnson himself. And one of the late sequences is almost completely opaque when it comes to clearly portraying what happened. It's fun, but almost too minimalist to be successfully pulpy. Lightly recommended.

Doc Savage: The Silver Pyramid (1987-88/ Collected 2009): written by Dennis O'Neil; illustrated by Andy and Adam Kubert: DC Comics' late 1980's revival of the Doc Savage pulp hero series as a comic book was intermittently successful -- indeed, successful enough that, while short-lived, it's probably no worse than the second-best comic-book Doc Savage, just after Marvel's 8-issue B&W Doc Savage comics magazine of the 1970's.

Writer Denny O'Neil scripted DC's beloved Shadow comics revival of the 1970's. He's tapped here as well, to uneven but mostly successful effect. There's a lot of stuff to get in -- the story spans 40 years -- and O'Neil keeps things moving along while also supplying a fairly dense plot, as the Savage novels often did. There's super-science, lost civilizations, Nazis, and new members of Doc's rollicking band of associates. It was successful enough to launch an ongoing series that lasted 20 issues -- not bad for a Doc Savage revival series. Actually, that's the longest lived Doc Savage comic series since the 1940's!

The Kubert Brothers -- artistic sons of legendary DC artist and mentor Joe Kubert -- are very young here. It shows sometimes as they have trouble maintaining consistent faces for some characters. And they're still too similar to their great father. But overall, the art works. They've already got fair command of action and of opening up the pages to one- and two-page compositions. Their interpretations of Doc's two most popular aides, Monk and Ham, are dreadful, but I don't think they designed them on their own. But they are terrible. Oh, well. Recommended.

Multiple Earths

Showcase Presents Justice League of America Volume 6: written by Len Wein, Martin Pasko, Elliot S! Maggin, Cary Bates, Denny O'Neil, and Gerry Conway; illustrated by Dick Dillin, Frank McLaughlin, Dick Giordano, Nick Cardy, and Ernie Chan (1973-1976; collected 2013): Fun collection of 1970's Justice League stories that synchronizes with my own first JLA comic books.

While editor Julius Schwartz used a lot of different writers at this point on the title, penciller Dick Dillin was a constant throughout. Indeed, JLA only had two different pencillers for the first 17 years or so of its existence, Mike Sekowsky and then Dillin. Dillin was solid, straightforward, and dependable -- so far as I know, he never missed a deadline, and he only left the book because he died (!).

He's "the" JLA artist for people of a certain age, an emblem of professionalism who knew how to tell a story, and could occasionally startle with some effects (here, he does some really interesting and memorable things with a wisp of smoke that gradually resolves itself into The Spectre over the course of an issue, as well as a fascinating couple of pages in which supervillain Libra expands while also losing all materiality). Also, Dillin's clean pencilling really looks good in the black-and-white Showcase format.

The stories are a lot of fun as well, with the post-Marvel psychology boom resulting in a certain amount of hand-wringing and soul-searching on the part of the Super Friends. Three unusual inter-universal crossovers appear, including a trip to Earth-X, where the Nazis won World War Two, and to Earth-2, the home of the Golden Age Justice Society which comes under attack by...a super-powered DC Comics writer named Cary Bates, previously of "our" Earth, Earth-Prime. Oh, Meta! All this, and Black Canary knits Red Tornado a new costume to replace the purple-and-red horror he'd been stuck with since his first appearance! Recommended.

Superman and...

Showcase Presents DC Comics Presents Superman Team-ups Volume 1: written by Martin Pasko, Cary Bates, Len Wein, Paul Levitz, Denny O'Neil, Gerry Conway and others; illustrated by Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, Joe Staton, Ross Andru, Murphy Anderson, Dick Dillin, Jim Starlin, and others (1978-1980; collected 2011): Back in the Bronze, Pre-Crisis Age of DC Comics, this was the first new regular Superman title to be released in about 30 years.

As heroes still didn't cross willy-nilly over into one another's books all the time (even over at Marvel), the team-up book was still a viable concept. Indeed, long-running Superman/Batman team-up book World's Finest had briefly turned into a Superman/everyone-else book in the early 1970's.

Reading Superman comics from the late 1970's and early 1980's, I'm struck by what a beating the Man of Steel takes during what revisionist comic-book history has portrayed as his 'too powerful to be interesting' phase, a phase which supposedly led to the John Byrne reboot of Superman in 1986, a reboot that radically depowered the Man of Steel. He's still very powerful in these stories, but he can be knocked out, chained up, and even frozen. And this is a good thing -- there should be a sense of peril, especially when one needs two superheroes to solve a problem.

A lot of the art contained herein is terrific, especially those issues illustrated by Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, an artist's artist whose work seems to be more famous among fellow comic-book artists (the aforementioned Byrne is a big fan) than among fans. It's fine-lined, detailed, exquisitely composed art (DC is releasing an all-Garcia-Lopez Superman reprint volume in the next month or so, a great idea). He's also the sort of artist whose work looks incredibly good in the black-and-white Showcase format.

The only reason he didn't draw more comics was that Warner made him the main Superman artist for non-comic-book material, which is to say everything from Superman lunchbox art to Superman French Fries (!!!!!!!!!!!!!).

There's other solid work here from Jim Starlin, Joe Staton, and others, and the writing is generally solid as well, with most of the writers having a firm grasp on Superman's personality and morals. The only real misfire collected here is a Superman/Swamp Thing team-up written by Steve Engelhart and illustrated by Hawkman and Superman veteran Murphy Anderson. Engelhart makes Superman terribly dense, while Anderson simply cannot draw Swamp Thing. But other than that issue, the book is very enjoyable, maybe never moreso than when an amnesiac Superman teams up with Sgt. Rock and East Company. Recommended.

Aaron Burr in Space

DC Showcase Presents Green Lantern Volume 5: written by Denny O'Neil and Eliot S Maggin; illustrated by Neal Adams, Dick Giordano, Mike Grell, Dick Dillin and others (1970-75; collected 2012): The classic Green Lantern/Green Arrow stories herein, mostly by writer Denny O'Neil and penciller Neal Adams, are available from DC in a variety of formats. I like this one because B&W is a nice way to appreciate Adams' art. Also, Adams doesn't redraw the work in this volume for contemporary publication, making this the real deal as it was when it was published.

By 1970, DC's Green Lantern title was foundering in sales. Along came editor Julius Schwartz, O'Neil, Adams, and a mandate that could really only come in comic books: team Green Lantern up with another character whom he shared a dominant colour with. Thus was born the somewhat oddball pairing of cosmic policeman and non-super-powered bowman.

O'Neil and Schwartz decided to make the series "relevant" by having the characters confront social problems that include racism, over-population, and pollution. These social problems were often rendered melodramatically or even parodically, but they were nonetheless a departure for DC Comics and for Green Lantern, both of which had always been more comfortable in a more complete fantasy world.

The pairing didn't save the title from cancellation (though Green Lantern would be back on his own soon enough, first as a back-up in The Flash and then in his own book again). It certainly made for a historically interesting ride, though. How well do these things stand up now? Well, Adams' hyperrealism still looks terrific 40 years later. O'Neil's scripts creak and groan a lot under the weight of their own hyperrealism (which is not the same as realism) and melodrama, but there remain a number of strong moments of writing.

The social consciousness rapidly vanishes once Green Arrow is gone, while the straight-forward superheroics return. An O'Neil-penned tale about how aliens abducted Aaron Burr after his murder of Alexander Hamilton and made him their leader stands out in the later stories, though perhaps not for the right reasons. It's completely bonkers. All in all, recommended.

Saving Superman

DC Comics Classics Library: Kryptonite Nevermore, written by Denny O'Neil, illustrated by Curt Swan, Murphy Anderson, Dick Giordano and Neal Adams (1971-72; collected 2009): The comic-book Superman seems to accrete mythology at a faster and more expansionary rate than any other long-running superhero, often to the detriment of decent storytelling.

The Last Son of Krypton's powers grew and grew over the first thirty years of his existence so that by the early 1970's, he was almost omnipotent. His supporting cast grew as well, with so many other Kryptonians added to the mix that it seemed like the real question was, did anyone other than Superman's parents die when Krypton exploded? Kryptonite now came in 31 flavours, and was so readily available that pretty much any street punk could lay his hands on a chunk.

Legendary Silver-Age editor Julius Schwartz took over the Superman books in the early 1970's and decided to shake things up. Clark Kent moved from newspaper to television. Superman gained a certain number of doubts and insecurities about his role on Earth. And, in the first major storyline in the Superman comic book after Schwartz took over, a reactor accident destroyed all Kryptonite on Earth.

This development turned out to be a fairly inspired bit of invention, as what initially seemed to be an attempt to make Superman less vulnerable instead made him less powerful: the accident had spawned a mysterious sand-creature which, over the course of a year, siphoned off a large portion of Superman's powers prior to their (seemingly) inevitable confrontation.

The art in this volume is the real selling point. Curt Swan had already been illustrating various adventures of Superman for more than a decade when Schwartz took over, but here, paired with inker Murphy Anderson, Swan's work soared with its unique mix of the grounded and the bombastic. Denny O'Neil's scripts aren't quite up to Swanderson's art -- he was much more at home with Batman. His Superman is bull-headed, a bit whiny, and occasionally something of a prick.

Later 1970's and early 1980's Superman writers such as Martin Pasko, Eliot S! Maggin and Cary Bates would work more fruitfully under Schwartz's editorial guidance, giving us what is, in retrospect, the finest sustained run on Superman comics in history. However, Superman's powers would rapidly ratchet up after O'Neil's stint as writer; Kryptonite would return; Superman would be, by the mid-1980's, again viewed as being hamstrung by the immensity of his powers and his mythology, leading to the complete reboot of John Byrne's Man of Steel miniseries. And now, 25 years after that, Superman is pretty much back in the same jam. Reboot, anybody? Recommended.