Plastic Man: On the Lam!: written and illustrated by Kyle Baker (2004/ Collected 2004): Kyle Baker's brilliant, hilarious run on Plastic Man begins here. He won the comics industry Eisner Award for best new series back in 2004 for his take on the Golden Age's stretchable FBI agent. That didn't keep the book from being cancelled after 20 issues despite it getting a rave review from Entertainment Weekly as well.
But you should buy this. Really, you should buy anything by Baker. He's a swell writer-artist, never sweller than when he's writing his own stuff. He can draw pretty much any way he wants to, though the fallback on Plastic Man is anarchic cartooning that pays homage to Plastic Man creator Jack Cole's zany work even as it also nods to a host of other influences, including Warner Brothers cartoons.
One of the ten or 15 greatest things DC Comics has published in the 21st century, it even manages to make its metacriticism of superhero tropes and stereotypes and oddities specific without being an in-joke inaccessible to non-expert comic-book readers. The Baker Plastic Man deserves an Absolute hardcover edition, stat! Highly recommended.
Airboy: written by James Robinson; illustrated by Greg Hinkle (2015): James Robinson's comic-book writing career has been distinguished by many superhero series, most notably the Cold War Justice Society miniseries The Golden Age and his terrific, lengthy run on his legacy version of the Golden-Age DC hero Starman, the reluctantly heroic son of that now-retired hero.
Here, Robinson takes the almost-forgotten Golden-Age comic-book aviator Airboy into the realm of metafictional, quasi-autobiographical, scatological satire.
And it's terrific. To describe too much would spoil things. But suffice to say that versions of Robinson and artist Greg Hinkle are characters along with Airboy and friends. But 'Robinson' is drug-and-alcohol-addled, self-destructive, and despondent over what he feels is his failed career as a writer. Poor old Hinkle and his gigantic, often-displayed penis come along for a story session that turns into a Bacchanal that turns into a trip into the realms of comic-book-land.
It's very funny, completely NSFW, and politically incorrect -- a scandal erupted over Robinson's use of trans characters early in the series, though the last issue recontextualizes that use in such a way that the complaints seem to be fully addressed. That didn't stop Robinson from having to issue an apology/justification before the last issue ever came out. So it goes. This is terrific stuff in terms of both Robinson's writing and Hinkle's funny, cartoony, and often grotesque cartooning. Highly recommended.
Superman: Secret Identity: written by Kurt Busiek; illustrated by Stuart Immonen (2004): Busiek takes a decidely Meta concept inspired by a Superman comic book of the 1980's and extrapolates it into a moving tale about the Man of Steel. In a weird way, OUR Man of Steel.
The Superman team-up series DC Comics Presents offered an odd story towards the end of its run in the 1980's. In it, the Superman of DC's main Earth, Earth-1, met the Superboy of Earth-Prime. But the thing was, Earth-Prime was, in DC's multiverse, 'our' Earth, one without superheroes, one upon which all of DC's heroes were simply characters in comic books. That included Superboy and Superman. So Superboy of Earth-Prime found himself with superpowers on an Earth where he was already a fictional character.
Borges, eat your heart out!
Busiek takes this initial concept and, not in a situation to write an ongoing, in-continuity series about Superboy-Prime, instead writes a non-continuity story that follows a Superboy from a world where he's a fictional character through the course of the super-powered portion of his lifetime.
This Superboy has been teased for years because his parents thought it would be cool to name a male baby with the last name Kent who hails from a small town in Kansas (Pickettsville, not Smallville)...Clark. And one night, when he's 13, Clark suddenly wakes up with a pretty fair approximation of all of Superman's powers.
What follows is a really charming story which allows Busiek to explore the aging of a superhero. Most 'adult' superhero books explore either the beginning or the end of their hero's career. Busiek's best work lies here in exploring the middle -- adulthood, parenthood, grandparenthood. His Superman, who consciously adopts the classic costume in part because it means people who see him won't be believed, operates in secrecy, leery of a U.S. government that apparently wants to dissect him.
But as a fundamentally decent person, Clark continues to help people, despite the risk of being followed home. His powers aren't great enough to always protect him from being knocked unconscious, but he keeps going anyway. And perhaps the government will eventually decide that he's not a threat -- or develop superheroes of its own.
Busiek and artists Immonen, who's never done better work than he does here, do a lovely job of pointing out the ways in which it would be great to be Superman, both through the soaring, two-page vistas that periodically appear to show the world as Superman sees it, and through the little things that he takes for normal, such as being able to go to any restaurant in the world whenever he wants to. It's a great take on Superman, wonderfully told, with expressive character work by Immonen. Recommended.
