Disco Apocalypse Now

Superman in the Seventies, Introduction by Christopher Reeve; featuring stories written by Jack Kirby, Paul Levitz, Elliot S. Maggin, Martin Pasko, Cary Bates, Denny O'Neil, and others; illustrated by Curt Swan, Murphy Anderson, Dick Dillin, Dick Giordano, Bob Oksner, Werner Roth, Jack Kirby, and others (1970-79; collected 2000):

Solid collection of mostly stand-alone adventures of the Man of Steel from the Me Decade. Arranged thematically with one-page essays introducing each section, the book covers a broad range of treatments of the Man of Tomorrow.

Stand-outs include "Make Way for Captain Thunder!", in which Superman and a thinly disguised Captain Marvel do battle (Superman would meet the real deal a few years later); "I am Curious (Black)", a Lois Lane story that aims at racism and social issues; and a couple of sympathetic treatments of Lex Luthor, never more interesting a character than he was here, willing to save Superman's life if he wasn't going to be the one who defeated him. The Jack Kirby Jimmy Olsen story is a bit of a peculiar inclusion, as it ends on a cliffhanger -- there are several other Kirby Superman stories that might have better served this collection.

Classic Superman penciller Curt Swan works on a lot of the stories included here, to great effect. He's terrific on the Captain Thunder story, and on "Kryptonite Nevermore!," the early 1970's story that attempted to modernize (and Marvelize) the Man of Steel. That latter story also ends without complete resolution, as the storyline would play out over the course of a year.

The 1970's Superman stories often move into uncharted territory for the character. Clark Kent gets moved to television and now answers to media mogul Morgan Edge for several years. He also loses his perennial blue suits for some occasionally funky 1970's business attire. New additions to the Superman cast include annoying sports broadcaster Steve Lombard, the somewhat bizarre space-cowboy Terra-Man, the ultra-powerful Galactic Golem, and a host of other new friends and enemies.

Throughout, we see attention given to making Superman and his Clark Kent alter-ego more fallible and occasionally troubled, though he soldiers through regardless. The volume also includes a nice array of classic covers from the era, including the Neal Adams gem that kicked off the "Kryptonite Nevermore!" arc and a number of great pieces from Nick Cardy when he was DC's line-wide cover artist. All in all, a nice piece of work. Recommended.

Hawks of the North Star

Showcase Presents Hawkman Volume 1: written by Gardner Fox and Bob Haney; illustrated by Joe Kubert, Murphy Anderson, Gil Kane, and Carmine Infantino (Collected 2008): While he was never an A-List hero at any point in comic-book history, Hawkman nonetheless wears one of the five or six best-looking costumes a superhero ever put on.

Initially designed in the 1940's by Sheldon Moldoff doing a fair imitation of Flash Gordon writer-artist Alec Raymond, the costume would be tweaked a bit by the great Joe Kubert when Hawkman was rebooted in the early 1960's. Every re-design after Kubert has been a falling away from greatness.

DC Comics editor Julius Schwartz, the guiding light behind DC's 1950's and 1960's 'Silver Age' reboots of 1940's 'Golden Age' superheroes, does with the 'new' Hawkman something similar to what he had his writers and artists do with the reboot of Green Lantern: he switches the character's origins from magical to science-fictional. Instead of a reincarnated Egyptian hero, Hawkman is now a police officer from the planet Thanagar, which orbits the North Star.

He comes to Earth with his wife and police partner Shayera (then-Hawkgirl) in pursuit of a dangerous criminal and subsequently stays on Earth to study human police methods. Schwartz and company preserved some of the flavour of the Golden-Age Hawkman by having the new character's secret identity be a museum director, and by having Hawkman and Hawkgirl fight many criminals using ancient weapons rather than scientific ones, with the explanation being that the two police officers don't want to run the risk of having sophisticated Thanagarian technology fall into criminal hands.

So the Hawkman costume, once an emulation of the hawk-headed Egyptian god Horus, becomes the standard uniform of the Thanagarian police officer. Schwartz and Fox are to some extent borrowing from another of Schwartz's Silver-Age reboots, Green Lantern, whose one-off Golden-Age costume would be reimagined and redesigned to be the uniform of an entire galaxy-spanning Green Lantern Corps.

In several issues, they also borrow from the Silver-Age Flash's idiosyncratic method of costume storage, as Hawkman gains a ring from which can expand an entire uniform, wings and all. This last borrowing is one of those things that we should pretend never happened, and never speak of it again.

Fox's stories are his loopy brand of faux science-fiction that often works a lot more like fairy-tale magic. They're fun without being memorable for the most part. Kubert's art on the first ten appearances or so of the new Hawkman, though, is terrific -- he makes even fairly dopey concepts such as the Man-Hawks look believable and strangely menacing, and another Hawkman villain, the Shadow Thief, is a weird triumph of comic-book design and execution. Once Kubert leaves, the solid and dependable Murphy Anderson takes over. The flair is gone, and the series really becomes a fairly standard DC offering for the time.

One of Kubert's original designs -- that for Hawkgirl's costume -- is also quite striking, possibly because the eyes of her mask make the character look insane. It's a design that has persisted into modern-day comics and animated cartoons with fewer alterations than Hawkman's. Though she does wear more clothing on top than Hawkman's X-crossed, wing-bracing belts. Recommended.

Fun-Sized Superhero

The Atom Archives Volume 1: written by Gardner Fox; illustrated by Gil Kane, Murphy Anderson, and Mike Sekowsky (1961-63; collected 2005): When the great DC editor Julius Schwartz decided to reboot the humdrum Golden-Age Atom for DC's ascendant Silver Age, he wisely gave the character actual super powers.

The Golden-Age Atom had been a short guy who was pretty good in a fight. The Silver-Age Atom was a scientist who figured out how to shrink himself while also controlling his mass.

This latter ability -- which allowed the Atom to be light as a feather or to weigh his full 180 pounds when he was six inches tall -- really could have been dangerous, as he could conceivably have been the first superhero to be constantly in peril of collapsing into a black hole. But apparently the Atom kept good track of his mass-to-size ratio and avoided this terrible fate.

This new Atom allowed for Gardner Fox and Schwartz to play with size and perspective within a quasi-scientific framework. The explanation for how the Atom could travel down phonelines required a half-page of text, and actually explained to me how the sound of a voice or what-have-you supplied power to analog phone lines. Science!

The elegant and dynamic Gil Kane and the detailed Murphy Anderson made a really nice art team on these early adventures. As with most Silver Age reboots, the Atom eschews a cape. And Kane makes the little fellow quite balletic and acrobatic, just as he did the Silver Age Green Lantern. A lot more fun and engaging than I expected. Recommended.

Undead Puritans in the Hands of an Angry God

Showcase Presents The Spectre Volume 1: written by Gardner Fox, Neal Adams, Steve Skeates, Michael Fleisher and others; illustrated by Murphy Anderson, Jerry Grandenetti, Neal Adams, Jim Aparo, Jim Starlin and others (1966-1983; collected 2012): The first collection of the Spectre's Silver- and Bronze-Age adventures at DC Comics is quite a bargain at over 600 pages for less than $20. It's also a bargain because of the 20-year period spanned by the collection. It's like a miniature cross-section of DC Comics in three different decades.

The Spectre was created in 1940 by Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel and artist Bernard Baily. He began as a murdered detective -- Jim Corrigan -- who was brought back to a sort of un-life by a mysterious voice whom most writers have strongly hinted was God.

Charged by the voice with seeking revenge on evil, Corrigan found himself host to one of the odder-looking superheroes of any age of comics, the Spectre. He seems to be dressed in white with green trunks, cape, hood, and boots. He isn't. The white part is the Spectre's body colour, ectoplasm or dead white flesh, depending on the writer. Yeesh.

The Spectre started off as judge, jury, and often very creative executioner. But he wasn't all that popular, though I've always been a bit confused about how companies assessed popularity in the 1940's comic-book industry. The Spectre never had his own book, and his adventures were usually eight to ten page shorts published in the anthology book More Fun Comics. They don't title comics the way they used to!

In any case, the powers that be at the comic-book company that would eventually be known as DC Comics soon changed the tone of the Spectre's adventures and paired him with a comic sidekick who eventually became the lead in the strip, with the Spectre as a helpful ghost. It was quite a comedown. The Spectre continued to act more like his original self in the Justice Society's adventures, but the late 1940's and early 1950's would soon end the ghostly creature's adventures.

Then came the Silver Age, and two Earths of DC characters, one being established as the home of the Golden-Age versions of everyone from Superman to Green Arrow. And finally the Spectre returned in the mid-1960's, less vengeful and more cosmic, in what seemed to be an attempt to emulate Marvel's supernatural hero Dr. Strange. The literal-minded Murphy Anderson was mysteriously chosen for the first few adventures collected here, written by the high-speed human typewriter of DC's Silver Age, Gardner Fox. They're certainly interesting stories, though the Spectre is a bit off a stiff. And not in a good way.

Different artists and writers followed in relatively quick succession, all sticking to the Spectre's new role as loveable cosmic avenger. Only towards the end of the Spectre's short-lived 1960's series does the character's vengeful streak come out, resulting in the hero being reprimanded by that Voice again just prior to cancellation.

There's some splendid cosmic art here from Neal Adams, along with some weird stuff from Jerry Grandenetti, who seems to be channeling the art of Dr. Strange's Steve Ditko in some of his more outlandish character designs, and the spirit of unintelligibility in some of his weirder page and panel layouts. Grandenetti can't make undead Puritans scary but he gives it the old college try, God bless him.

Five years after that 1969 cancellation came the character's post-Golden-Age career highlight: ten adventures in Adventure Comics (briefly retitled Weird Adventure) written by Michael Fleisher with help from Russell Carey and mostly illustrated by perennial Batman artist Jim Aparo. Fleisher returned the Spectre to his violent roots, in the process getting away with a surprising amount of graphic violence for a 1970's comic book.

The Spectre turned people into wood and then buzz-sawed them into pieces. He reduced them to skeletons. He melted them into screaming pools of dying goo. He cut them in half with giant scissors. He chopped them up with flying cleavers, fed them to alligators, and had magically animated stuffed gorillas tear them limb from limb. It was awesome.

Aparo illustrated all this with a weirdly unsettling matter-of-fact style augmented by suggestion rather than illustration at certain points due to the censorious Comics Code Authority: scissors man, for instance, is shown as being cut in half at the waist, but curtains are wrapped around the character below that waist. The empty area where the legs were is just a deflated expanse of curtain. Fleisher also works around things by having a character turned to wood before being segmented into pancakes of flesh, though Showcase's B&W reprint eliminates the colouring that made the character woody in the original publication. Now he's just a pile of flapjacks made out of person. Mmm.

After Fleisher and Aparo's delightful run (also collected on its own, in colour), the Spectre returned to a slightly less violent form of himself, guarding the boundaries of the universe and playing nice with other superheroes. The character's recurring omnipotence and near-omnipotence always seems to make him a hard sell. Later attempts at Spectre solo books have run longer than the attempts here, but none of them for that long.

The character has been rebooted an astonishing number of times, with different characters (including Green Lantern Hal Jordan during his dead phase) acting as hosts for the Spectre. Different explanations have been given for the Spectre's role in the universe, and why he needs a human host in the first place (short explanation: the Spectre, God's second attempt at a cosmic spirit of vengeance, goes completely loopy without a human host to ground him). As of 2012, he seems to be back again as the deceased Jim Corrigan, and sorta pissed about it. At least he's not comic relief. Yet. 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.