Greg Rucka's Wonder Woman Volume 2

Greg Rucka's Wonder Woman Volume 2 (2004-2005/ Collected 2017): written by Greg Rucka; illustrated by Drew Johnson, Rags Morales, and others: Greg Rucka is one of Wonder Woman's three or four best writers. His early oughts work on WW gave us an Amazon who fought mythical monsters, talked to the animals, and acted as the Ambassador of the Amazon Nation of Themyscira to the United Nations. 

While several long arcs continue all the way through this volume of a year's worth of Wonder Woman, there are also satisfying short arcs and single-issue stories here as well. The volume begins with the revenge of Medusa and the Gorgons against Diana and ends with Wonder Woman descending into Hades to bring Hermes back from the dead. It's all fun and engaging, with solid and occasionally inspired art from Drew Johnson and Rags Morales. 

A successful Olympian coup of the major female Greek gods over Zeus and his brothers Poseidon and Hades drives the overall mythical arc -- as Athena's Champion, WW is drafted into the conflict.  Wonder Woman's on-going battle with a shadowy, high-tech and deep-pocketed enemy on Earth continues into and through its second year. Highly recommended.

Justice League (2017)

Justice League (2017): written by Joss Whedon, Chris Terrio, and Zack Snyder; directed by Zack Snyder and Joss Whedon; based story-wise on works by James Robinson, Gardner Fox, Nicola Scott, Mike Sekowsky, Geoff Johns, and Jim Lee; starring Ben Affleck (Batman), Gal Gadot (Wonder Woman), Amy Adams (Lois Lane), Ezra Miller (The Flash), Jason Momoa (Aquaman), Ray Fisher (Cyborg), Jeremy Irons (Alfred), Ciaran Hinds (Voice of Steppenwolf), Amber Heard (Mera), Diane Lane (Martha Kent), and Henry Cavill (Superman):

Saw Justice League at the 12:45 p.m. show in Galleria on opening day. The 'print' arrived late so they hadn't done a sound-check before showing it. Oops! 

The first ten minutes played without any noticeable treble in the mix (seriously!), which made for an interesting audio experience. I wondered if Christopher Nolan had done the sound mix until they stopped the movie, fixed the sound, and started again from the beginning.

Then for another ten minutes or so, the theatre made almost inaudible announcements that it was seeking out the source of the fire alarm (which we couldn't hear) and not to panic. Friday was a PA Day for kids. Damn kids going to a superhero movie in the afternoon and pulling fire alarms! Rascals!

Also they never quite got the movie framed properly. But then we all got free passes at the end of the show, so really, who's complaining? Though it did all make me wonder if Disney is paying people to sabotage the film.

As to the film -- well, the stitches between the fairly light-hearted, earnest or snarky Whedon scenes and the glum, occasionally straining-to-be-funny Snyder scenes are pretty obvious. Whedon also turned up the Brightness, which means Superman is actually dressed in bright blue and red for the first time in the DCEU movies, so that's good. 

Whedon clearly also had the job of hacking and slashing the movie down to two hours, and having it be basically 'stand-alone' rather than Part One. So Darkseid gets only one mention, though it's clear that the big bad works for him (the villain is Steppenwolf, who is a Kirby New Gods character whom writer James Robinson promoted to Darkseid's world-conquering general in the Earth-2 comic series from 2012). 

The hacking and slashing results in some pretty funny 'infodumps' which end up feeling like homages to the crazily fast-paced, Gardner-Fox-scripted Silver Age Justice League comics from the 1960's. The explanation of what a Mother Box is is especially... compact... as is an exchange between Aquaman and Atlantean Mera (Amber Heard) which condenses Aquaman's back story into about 45 seconds of dialogue.

The acting is pretty solid. The Flash is genuinely funny and charming. Jason Momoa's Aquaman seems to have been written as a surly underwater hillbilly Wolderine by Snyder and as a jolly underwater stand-up comedian by Snyder. Cyborg is, well, a cipher.

Also, somebody (probably Snyder) basically restages the opening battle against Sauron from Fellowship of the Ring as part of the backstory of Steppenwolf's previous invasion of Earth, and even frames it in terms of it being the last time the various races of Earth (Atlanteans, Amazons and Greek Gods, and what seems to be King Arthur and his knights) united against a common foe. I kid you not. Wonder Woman narrates, per Galadriel in LOTR: TFOTR...

Bonus points for including parademons and getting a mention of Kirby's New Gods into the dialogue. Fun fact: the movie's 'Unity' seems to pretty clearly Jack Kirby's Anti-Life Equation restated euphemistically.

Though the only two rational explanations for Superman's unintentionally funny, late-movie line to Bruce Wayne ("How did you get the farm back from the bank ?!?!?") are that Superman doesn't understand how money works or that Lex Luthor owned the bank that foreclosed on the Kent farm.

Also, maybe it's swim-suit season on Themyscira, Snyder-haters! Did you ever think of that?

There are two end credits sequences, one early and one right at the end. Plan accordingly.

Hey, the movie is only 2 hours and one minute long. Kudos! My butt thanks you!

Far better than a lot of superhero movies, a list that includes Whedon's studio-garbled Avengers: Age of Ultron, The Dark Knight Rises, Superman III, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, Spider-man 3, Amazing Spider-mans 1 and 2, X-Men: The Last Stand, Guardians of the Galaxy 2, the first two Thor movies, Dr. Strange, the two Hulk movies, Wolverine: Origins and The Wolverine, Batman Forever, Batman and Robin, X-Men: Apocalypse, Ant-man, Superman Returns, Man of Steel, Batman v. Superman, Suicide Squad, and many others. 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.

Complicated without Complexity

Darkseid, fussy.

Justice League: Origin: written by Geoff Johns; illustrated by Jim Lee and Scott Williams and others (2011-2012): Fan favourites Johns and Lee seem to have turned the rebooted Justice League into DC's most popular monthly title, one that is still outselling every other title, DC or other, seven months after its launch.

The League has seemed to move through a set cycle, reboot or not, since the late 1970's: a line-up fronted by one or more of the 'Big Three' (Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman) makes the book popular; some or all of them leave; the book becomes less popular as lesser-known heroes take over; the book gets cancelled and then relaunched with one or more of the Big Three; and so on, and so forth.

Johns and Lee certainly make this an event book again, as the League forms for the first time to combat a massive alien invasion. Along with the usual suspects (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Flash, and Green Lantern) and without original founding member Martian Manhunter, the league's seventh founding member turns out to be Cyborg in this iteration.

Historically, Cyborg did appear on the 1980's version of Super Friends, and he is a founding member of the League on Smallville. And he's African-American, which make the League look a little less white.

A lot of things blow up. Much Marvel-style bickering and posturing occurs among the superheroes before they figure out how to work together. Humanity, afraid of these relatively new super-heroes, comes to embrace them after they see them battling aliens in defence of humanity.

Lee's often hilariously fussy costume redesigns are distracting and often far goofier than previous iterations. His Darkseid is especially ugly, fussy, and over-complicated. Not much of interest happens here, but it happens loudly and repeatedly for emphasis. Lightly recommended.

The Last Race

Showcase Presents: The Trial of the Flash, written by Cary Bates and Joey Cavalieri, illustrated by Carmine Infantino, Dennis Jensen, Frank McLaughlin, Klaus Janson and others (1983-85; collected 2011): I can't think of a major superhero who became tragedy's punching bag more than DC's Flash did in the late 1970's and early 1980's. And I'm not sure why this was allowed to happen. But happen it did. His greatest villain killed his wife, and that was just the beginning. A couple of years later that same villain -- 25th-century speedster Professor Zoom, aka The Reverse-Flash -- tried to kill the Flash's fiancee on their wedding day. In the ensuing super-speed struggle, the Flash breaks Zoom's neck, killing him.

And so begins one of the longest storylines ever contained in a single DC title, The Trial of the Flash, which would ultimately span nearly three years and end with the cancellation of that title. It was a story so long that several peripheral issues of the title are omitted here to allow the collection (still the longest in the Showcase reprint series) to avoid requiring two volumes. It's still enough, and maybe too much.

By 1985, DC had decided to reboot its entire line of superheroes, beginning with a massive crossover event/line-wide reboot and purge called Crisis on Infinite Earths. The Flash would play a pivotal but heroically self-sacrificing role in that event. After the Crisis, his nephew Wally West would take over as the Flash in the brave new post-Crisis world. Ultimately, this is The Last Flash Story But One. Sort of. To paraphrase Algis Budrys, in comic books death is always conditional.

The Barry Allen version of the Flash helped usher in DC's Silver Age in the 1950's, as new characters were given the names of cancelled heroes of the 1940's, most prominently the Flash, Green Lantern, the Atom and Hawkman. They apparently lived on a different Earth than their 1940's forebears (in the first appearance of the Barry Allen Flash, Barry is seen reading a comic-book issue of the 1940's Flash from whom, after gaining his super-speed powers, Barry ultimately takes his superhero name).

Writer John Broome and penciller Carmine Infantino made the Flash a zippy, fun, quasi-super-scientific thrill ride over the character's first decade. (In-story 'Flash Facts' gave explanations of certain speed and scientific effects seen in the story, such as how a boomerang works). In The Trial of the Flash, Infantino has returned to the character after nearly 20 years away, staying with him to the end with pencils that are much more stylized and 'loose' than his Silver Age work, but still often possessed of a quality of speed and quickness and time-bending simultaneity that most other Flash artists have lacked.

Longtime Flash writer Cary Bates puts the Scarlet Speedster through quite a wringer here, as various parties try to wipe out the Flash's defense lawyers, kill him before the trial, or just do the usual super-villain thing of mayhem and thievery. It's a surprisingly harrowing and often downbeat ride, though it does have a conditional happy ending -- conditional because the Flash's fate in Crisis will supercede any ending in his own title and, indeed, that fate had already been published before the storyline herein ended.

It would take more than 20 years for the Barry Allen Flash to return from the dead -- several eternities in superhero comics -- and his history has recently been purged and restarted once again. There are some absurdities here, and one major annoyance (that would be the frankly ridiculous mental health issues of Flash's fiancee Fiona), but overall this is a lot of melodramatic fun. It would have been interesting to see what occasional cover inker Klaus Janson (so integral to Frank Miller's art on Daredevil and The Dark Knight Returns) could have done with Infantino's interior pencils -- the Infantino covers Janson inks are terrific -- but the interior art remains solid and sometimes startling. Recommended.

Make the Warrior Princess Take Notes...

All-Star Comics Archives Volume 1, introduction by Don Thompson, written by Gardner F. Fox, illustrated by Sheldon Moldoff, Bernard Baily, Everett Hibbard, Howard Sherman, Howard Purcell and others (1940-41; collected 1992): A combination of exhilaration and exasperation accompanies my reading of most Golden-Age (that is, 1937-1949) American superhero comic books. One can see both a genre and a medium being defined and refined, sometimes boldly, sometimes wrongly, sometimes ineptly. And as per Sturgeon's Law, at least 90% of it is crap. Maybe 99%.

Before the Avengers, the Justice League of America, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the X-Men -- before all other superhero teams and superhero groups -- was the Justice Society of America, debuting in 1940 in issue 3 of All-Star Comics, just less than 3 years after the appearance of the first American superheroes. The group comprised the company now known as DC's Golden Age superhero stable, with a few notable exceptions: Superman and Batman were honorary members who almost never appeared, as the Society was used to help promote 'DC's' less popular heroes, while Wonder Woman would generally only act as recording secretary and not an actual fighting member of the group.

The most active original members of the JSA would range from the fairly famous (the original Green Lantern and original Flash) to the more obscure (comic relief Johnny Thunder and Red Tornado, the original Atom, Hourman, Dr. Fate, and the Spectre). Heroes with earth-shaking cosmic powers (the Lantern and his magic ring, Flash, Fate, Spectre and, surprisingly perhaps, Johnny Thunder and his magical intelligent pink thunderbolt) sat beside heroes with limited powers (Hourman, whose Miraclo pills gave him an hour of enhanced strength), powerful gadgets (Starman, Dr. Midnite, Hawkman, Sandman) or no powers or gadgets at all (the dreary Atom, whose power was that he was really strong for a height-challenged person. And he wasn't a really strong dwarf or midget -- he was maybe 5'2". Really, every JSA adventure should have ended with the dead body of the Atom being taken to Paradise Island to be revived with the super-healing Purple Ray, his revival being accompanied by the other heroes standing around laughing about how he got killed in every adventure by someone with a handgun or just a pointy stick. It wasn't until the Silver Age that a character named Atom got appropriate, and appropriately awesome, super-shrinking powers).

The first two issues of All-Star Comics published individual adventures of what would soon be Justice Society members; the third issue featured the origin of the Justice Society. And what an origin! A bunch of superheroes decide to get together in a hotel banquet room and talk during dinner!

OK, dramatic it's not. In the 1970's, writer Paul Levitz and artists Joe Staton and Bob Layton would give the JSA a truly awesome origin story, complete with Batman and Superman, but for now they are a jovial, joking sausage party (Wonder Woman was still a year away). They don't even fight crime together in that first issue, instead telling tales of individual heroism. But by issue 4, they were fighting crime in what would be the first model of a JSA story, individually tackling criminals in stories drawn by different artists (but all written by Gardner F. Fox) before coming together at the end of the story. Eventually, they'd do more teaming up, at least in pairs or trios, prior to the final gathering.

The art ranges from awful through competent to interesting. Sheldon Moldoff, later a Batman artist with a much different style, here does his best Alex Raymond impersonation on Hawkman; Bernard Baily does some really peculiar work on the Spectre; Howard Sherman does his typically weird, offbeat stuff (including the oddest lettering of the Golden Age) on Dr. Fate. The only real greatness here is the core concept of heroes getting together. As one can see from the hype surrounding next year's Avengers movie, that's still a concept with a lot of pop-cultural heft. Recommended.

The End of 2009

Comics:

The Order (2002) by Kurt Busiek, Jo Duffy, Matt Haley, Ivan Reis, Dan Jurgens, Chris Batista and others: Marvel's Defenders never get enough love, though their most powerful four-person line-up (Hulk, Sub-mariner, Silver Surfer and Dr. Strange) is about as powerful as four-person supergroups get without creating a team with Galactus on it. Their long-term cast of secondary heroes (Valkyrie, Black Knight, Nighthawk, Hellcat, Gargoyle and a few others) isn't bad either -- I mean, any of those could probably at least take Hawkeye in a fight. Come to think of it, Hawkeye was in the Defenders for awhile.

In any case, this was the six-issue finish to the Defenders' short-lived, early 21st-century title. For reasons that are explained in the narrative, the Big Four go boopy and decide to force peace on Earth by almost any means necessary while the secondary Defenders try to figure out what's gone wrong with the big guns. It's quite a bit of fun, and it's nice to see the Defenders kicking everyone's ass, even if for dubious reasons. In many ways, this is The Last Defenders Story, as they wouldn't be treated seriously again and Marvel's current continuity makes it difficult to reunite the group. As such, it's a pretty good one -- indeed, better than most of those [Insert Hero Name Here]: The End miniseries Marvel's been doing for the last decade or so. Recommended.


JLA Classified: The Hypothetical Woman by Gail Simone, Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, Sean Phillips and Klaus Janson (2007): If someone ever gets a Justice League of America movie off the ground, they would be well-served to give this six-issue arc a read. In many ways, it's an ideal blueprint for a JLA movie. The heroes deal with both 'real-world' concerns (deposing a murderous dictator at the behest of the United Nations) and the super-heroic catastrophe that develops from that action. The dictator, granted asylum in China against the wishes of the JLA, comes up with a pretty good plan: he asks the various rogue states and dictatorships of the world to let him deploy their anti-super-hero weapons against the JLA. They'll have plausible deniability and possibly a world without super-heroes, and the dictator will get both revenge and power. And so they do, and he does, and hilarity ensues.

Simone does a great job of combining Silver-Age wonkiness (she comes up with a particularly interesting spin on Starro the Star-Conqueror, an early JLA foe who seems to be a giant, telepathic, alien starfish) and nods to the problems of imagining super-heroes within an at least nominally realistic world. Garcia-Lopez, one of DC's great artists of the 1970's and 1980's, is in fine form here -- he's one of the few super-hero artists other than Gil Kane whose art can justly be described as 'balletic.' Highly recommended.


Flash: Emergency Stop by Grant Morrison, Mark Millar, Paul Ryan and John Nyberg (1997-98; coll. 2008): Morrison and Millar's relatively brief stint scripting the adventures of The Fastest Man Alive gets off with a bang, as the Flash battles...an evil super-costume called The Suit. It's perfectly in keeping with the Flash's Silver-Age adventures, which is sort of the point -- for several years in the 1990's, the Flash under Mark Waid and then Morrison and Millar was the lone bright spot in a super-hero comic-book industry descended into cynicism and ultra-violence. Actually, several characters discuss this very thing in one of the issues collected here. Oh, Morrison and Millar are cheeky monkeys! But they do give good Flash. Recommended.


BPRD Volume 1: Hollow Earth and Other Stories by Mike Mignola, Christopher Golden, Tom Sniegoski, Ryan Sook and others (1998-2002): Unless I'm missing something, the Golden Army of the Hellboy movie makes about a three-panel appearance herein prior to getting blowed up real good. And Hellboy's not around all that much, as he's left the BPRD (the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense) to go walkabout, leaving things in the able hands of Abe Sapien, Roger the Homunculus, Johann the gaseous spirit-guy voiced by Sean MacFarlane in Hellboy 2, and Liz once she gets rescued from her sabbatical gone pretty much awry. There's lots of great stuff involving underground civilizations and weird water terrors and other things. Recommended.


Irredeemable Volume 2 by Mark Waid and Peter Krause (2009): The Plutonian, the world's greatest superhero, has gone bananas. Millions are dead, both superheroes and supervillains are on the run, and no one has figured out yet what exactly happened to turn the Plutonian from a loveable, Superman-like champion of justice to a genocidal prankster who can hear people complaining about him pretty much anywhere on the planet...and act on that, if he feels like it. Great, great stuff. And why are there so many African-American superheroes with electrical powers? Highly recommended.


What if? Classic Volume 5 by Mark Gruenwald, Jo Duffy, Mike Fleisher, Mike Barr, Steven Grant, Roger Stern, Peter Gillis, Frank Miller, Alan Kupperberg, Ron Wilson and others (1981; collected 2008): The Frank Miller-illustrated 'What if Matt Murdock had become an agent of SHIELD?' is fun. Pretty much the rest of the book is depressing stuff, as the first run of 'What if?' had settled at this point into a rut of depressing alternatives to famous Marvel storylines and events. It was sorta like a preview of the late 1980's and early 1990's. What if Phoenix hadn't died? She destroys much of the universe. What if Korvac had remained alive? He destroys the entire universe. What if Wolverine killed the Hulk? Wolverine and Magneto end up dying as well. What if the Thing ran off in a hissy fit instead of staying with the Fantastic Four? Well, pretty much every superhero in the Marvel universe never gets his or her superpowers. You get the idea. It's quite a run of dismal results. Not recommended.