The New Teen Titans Omnibus Volume 1 (1980-1982)

The New Teen Titans Omnibus Volume 1 (Collecting material originally published between 1980 and 1982/This edition 2017): written by Marv Wolfman with George Perez; illustrated by George Perez, Romeo Tanghal, Curt Swan, Carmine Infantino, and others:

The original Teen Titans debuted in the 1960's as a group of DC sidekicks. 1960's members included Robin, Wonder Girl, Kid Flash, Speedy [the Green Arrow's sidekick], and Aqualad. The roster changed over the years, with an extremely unliked 1970's revival adding long-forgotten characters that included Lilith, Bumblebee, Mal, and the Geico Caveboy.

That latter-day revival made writer Marv Wolfman's pitch to do a New Teen Titans seem doomed to fail before it had even been approved for a series in 1980. Instead, Wolfman and the terrific but then up-and-coming artist/co-plotter George Perez conjured up a comic book that became DC's chief sales rival (and thematic rival) to Marvel's ascending super-team the X-Men. It helped make George Perez's reputation as the go-to artist for superhero action and melodrama, and did something similar for Wolfman's career.

Wolfman took a core group of Titans -- Robin, Wonder Girl, and Kid Flash. To them he added a pre-existing teen hero (Beast Boy, dubbed 'Changeling' for this revival). Then Wolfman and Perez added three new heroes to the mix: the alien princess Starfire; the haunted half-demon Raven; and the cybernetic Cyborg. And unlike Mal, Bumblebee, and the Geico Caveboy, these new characters DIDN'T SUCK!

The rest was history. The New Teen Titans rapidly became DC's best-selling book. As these were the days when Marvel and DC were still on speaking terms, this even led to an inter-company crossover between  the X-Men and Teen Titans that pitted them against DC uber-villain Darkseid and the X-Men's Dark Phoenix. Ah, those were the days. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Titans is certainly an 'Art Book' because George Perez was great at both bombastic battle and nuanced character descriptions and even body types. Perez's women and men actually look different from one another. This is rarer than one might think in superhero books. 

He's matched by Wolfman's densely written mini-epics. Wolfman was one of the most melodramatic of superhero writers, and I mean that in the best way. It was a time when reading a comic book could actually take more than 5 minutes because there were words in them and no one was ashamed of that fact. Such, such were the joys!

This volume contains the 16-page 'Preview' inserted with another comic book, the first 20 issues of New Teen Titans, a back-up story from one of DC's digests, and the four-issue 'Origins' miniseries that fleshed out the back-stories of the 4 less-familiar characters -- Changeling, Raven, Starfire, and Cyborg. It's all aimed more at teens than children, though Wolfman keeps the more adults problems of the Titans obscure enough to allow children to read the comics.

As all this occurred before the days of 'decompressed storytelling,' these 26 stories cover a lot of ground. The Titans battle Raven's demonic father Trigon on extra-dimensional worlds. They take on super-assassin Deathstroke (here still generally called The Terminator as these issues predate the James Cameron movie), super-villains The H.I.V.E., the Brotherhood of Evil, the original Soviet hero also dubbed Starfire, ancient Hindu gods, and the Greek Titans of myth. All that and several standalone, character-development issues. Whew. 

It all still works beautifully as long as one adjusts for a bit of period nonsense (Changeling still comes across like an ad for sexual harassment at times, or an ad against toxic masculinity, or something; Wonder Girl's civilian job as a fashion photographer never seemed like a good idea, nor Starfire's first human job as a buxom model in jeans ads shot by Wonder Girl). So it goes. Highly recommended.

Superman/Batman 1942

Batman: The Dark Knight Archives Volume 4 (Collecting Batman Issues 13-16, 1942-43/Collected 2003): written by Bill Finger, Don Cameron, Jack Schiff, and Ruth Lyons Kaufman; illustrated by Bob Kane, Jerry Robinson, Jack Burnley, Ray Burnley, and George Roussos:

Batman's co-creator Bob Kane leaves most of the art chores to other people in this volume of Batman stories from 1942-1943. And the prolific Don Cameron writes the majority of the stories, with an assist from Batman co-creator Bill Finger, who was otherwise writing most of the Batman stories in Detective Comics while Cameron handled Batman in Batman.

One of the pleasant surprises here, other than Cameron, is the art of Jack Burnley. He's not as good at the comic grotesques of those stories with artist Jerry Robinson on them, but he supplies a very straightforward, cleanly rendered adventure version of Batman. 

The Batman Mythos was rapidly coming together by this point, barely three years after the Caped Crusader's first appearance. Robin is fully entrenched as Batman's sidekick, and villains such as Catwoman, the Joker, and the Penguin are already making repeat appearances. 

Standouts in this volume include the following stories:

"Here Comes Alfred" by Don Cameron, Bob Kane, and Jerry Robinson introduces the (initially fat) butler to the Batman saga.

"The Grade 'A' Crimes by Ruth Lyons Kaufman and Jack Burnley features a rare Golden Age story written by a woman. 

"The Boy Who Wanted To Be Robin" by Cameron and Burnley introduces the idea of a criminal training himself to be a sort of 'anti-Batman.'

"The Two Futures" by Finger and Burnley offers a grim vision of an Axis victory in WWII.

"Swastika Over the White House" by Cameron and Burnley is a rare WWII story in which Batman actually battles Nazi saboteurs.

"The Adventure of the Branded Tree" by Cameron and Burnley may be the first example of a strange sub-genre of DC superhero stories, those that are narrated by an inanimate object, in this case a roll of paper. It's also part of a fairly widespread tradition of showing superheroes reading about their own exploits in the comic book that they're appearing in. You'd be amazed how often this sort of meta-fiction shows up in comics of the 1940's.

In all, an enjoyable and surprisingly dense read. The comics of the 1940's often had crude art, but they generally offered a surprisingly generous amount of prose along with that art. They certainly weren't for the illiterate as they were so often accused of being. Recommended.

The Superman Chronicles Volume 9: (Collecting Action Comics 47-52, World's Finest 6-7, and Superman 16-17, 1942/Collected 2011): written by Jerry Siegel; illustrated by Joe Shuster, John Sikela, Fred Ray, Leo Nowak, and Ed Dobrotka:

The chronological reprinting of Superman stories from the beginning, regardless of what title the stories appeared in, continues here with an offering from several months of 1942. America has just gone to war, and while the covers reflect this -- Superman doles out punishment to Hitler on one cover, for instance -- the stories have not yet caught up to reality. 

We do get some great battles with super-villains, however, and a not-yet-omnipotent Superman.  The Man of Steel's powers are still developing four years after his first appearance. He still seems to be vulnerable to poison gas, for instance, and he still needs to push off from something to fly. 

The gems of the volume are two linked stories pitting Superman against Lex Luthor, previously a red-headed evil scientist who has now mysteriously gone bald like another early Superman foe, the Ultra-Humanite.  "Powerstone" and "When Titans Clash" see Luthor gain powers greater than Superman's from the mysterious, titular Powerstone. For once, Superman's wits and knowledge of Luthor's psychology must save the world, not his strength.

One bizarre story all but recreates the story of The Natural, as Lois Lane and Clark Kent discover a baseball prodigy while on a train ride to MLB spring training. Did Bernard Malamud read Superman comics? Annoying unpowered foes The Prankster and The Puzzler also make their first appearances. They really seem like rejects from Batman's Rogues' Gallery. 

The volume also offers a battle against a mind-controlling tyrant self-dubbed The Emperor of America and a battle against the first iteration of long-time Superman foe Metal[l]o, here a guy who's taken "super-serum" and dressed in a suit of impregnable metal, but later to become the Man with the Kryptonite Heart.

Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel keeps the ideas cracking. This Superman is a bit more Establishment than Siegel's original version, though still much less authoritative and pompous than he would become in the 1950's. And he still seems to operate in a world where he's at least partially an Urban Legend -- many criminals don't know who he is, thus leading to much fruitless gun-play and fisticuffs. 

Superman's artistic father Joe Shuster only illustrates one story here, "Man or Superman?," and parts of it seem to be traced from his previous work. Even this early in the game, Shuster was being undone by his declining eyesight. John Sikela and Leo Nowak do solid work as Shuster's ghosts. Sikela is perhaps the closest to Shuster's style of all the ghosts, though he's more polished and less pleasingly raw than Shuster. Nowak gets more of Shuster's cartooniness in his art, but even less of that raw power and dynamism. In all, recommended.

Supes in the 90's and Bat's in the 40's.

Krisis of the Krimson Kryptonite!: written by Roger Stern, Jerry Ordway, and Dan Jurgens; illustrated by Dan Jurgens, Jerry Ordway, Curt Swan, John Byrne, Bob McLeod, Brett Breeding, Art Thibert, Dennis Janke, Dave Hoover, Kerry Gammill, and Scott Hanna (1990/ Collected 1996): An entertaining, short story arc from the various Superman titles in 1990. Why they decided to go with a title that spells out 'KKK' in acrostic is a really good question, though. 

Coming four years after John Byrne and company had rebooted Superman into a less god-like version of himself, Krisis offers us a Superman who already seems as comfortable as an old shoe. And there's nothing wrong with that. The art is also solid, workmanlike, no-fuss stuff. The three writers give us a Superman who's as noble as ever, faced with a situation in which his powers have mysteriously vanished because of Red Kryptonite.

As there is no Red Kryptonite in the rebooted world of Superman post-1986, this offers an intellectual challenge for the Man of Steel. Not only does he need to find out why he's a normal human now, he also finds himself obligated to continue fighting super-villains by whatever means necessary. My only regret is that the writers didn't figure out how to bring back the Super-mobile, a toy from the late 1970's that was forced upon the Superman creators of the time as something that just had to appear in the comic books. See also the Spider-mobile. 

The supporting cast is likeably constructed here, from the tough Lois Lane to the mostly competent Jimmy Olsen and onwards to relatively new cast addition Professor Hamilton. The main villains of the piece are Lex Luthor and Mr. Mxyzptlk. Luthor is dying of Kryptonite exposure because he's been wearing a green K ring on his hand for several years to ward off Superman. Mr. Mxyzptlk has undergone an unfortunate redesign in the post-1986 Superman universe: the skinny, almost snake-like look wouldn't survive much longer, thank Rao. 

Along the way, we do get a terrific joke that brings Superman reboot co-architect John Byrne back to the Man of Steel after a two-year absence with a funny riff on alternate universes and Byrne's work on the Fantastic Four prior to his work on the Superman comics. Recommended.

Batman: The Dark Knight Archives Volume 2: written by Bill Finger; illustrated by Bob Kane, George Roussos, Fred Ray, Jerry Robinson, and others (1941/collected 1993): Bob Kane worked out a sweet legal deal in 1939 with what would become DC Comics. It got him sole credit in perpetuity as the creator of Batman. This also screwed over writer Bill Finger, who by all accounts came up with about 90% of Batman's recognizable features. 

Kane generally got full credit on art and story for Batman stories until the 1960's. It's not entirely clear whether he actually did anything other than supervise the stories included here from 1941 issues of Batman magazine. So it goes. 

The stories collected here are interesting in a historical sense -- this is not the hyper-competent Batman who has really only existed in comic books since Frank MIller's 1985-86 miniseries The Dark Knight Returns. Instead, he's more of a costumed adventurer with an incredible propensity for getting knocked unconscious by everyone he fights. 

Seriously, post-concussion syndrome should really be the Golden Age Batman's Kryptonite. That and Robin the Boy Wonder's ability to get taken hostage at inopportune moments. They're stories for kids (as, indeed, most stories about super-heroes should be), capably illustrated by Kane (?), Jerry Robinson, George Roussos, and others. 

Bill Finger's pulpy inventiveness was already in full swing by 1941. My favourite example here involves Batman fighting a professor who's been exposed to too much radium radiation. He may be a mad, highly radioactive scientist, but his heart was in the right place: he wanted to cure disease. The Joker makes three appearances in the course of the collection (which spans one year of comic books in 1941). Yes, he was already being over-used. But while he's kooky, he's also a homicidal criminal And, as always, something of a dick. Recommended.

Red Helmet

Batman: Under the Red Hood, written by Judd Winick, directed by Brandon Vietti, starring the voices of Bruce Greenwood (Batman/Bruce Wayne), Jensen Ackles (Red Hood), Neil Patrick Harris (Nightwing), and John DiMaggio (the Joker) (2010): There have been four 'in-continuity' Robins in Batman history, with Jason Todd being the second, following Dick Grayson after Grayson graduated to college and became the costumed hero Nightwing.

Todd's history was bizarrely twisted. DC's post-Crisis revamp of continuity in the mid-1980's turned Todd from a circus kid like Grayson before him to a surly street punk. Looking back, it seems obvious that Todd's ultimate fate was years in the making post-Crisis, thanks in part to a bit in Frank Miller's ostensibly out-of-continuity The Dark Knight Returns in which Todd's death is one of the defining moments of an aging Batman's retirement from crime-fighting.

And so, in the late 1980's, DC held a phone poll to decide whether or not Jason Todd would be killed by the Joker. By a vaguely suspicious margin of 72 votes, death won, and Todd got bludgeoned and exploded to death in A Death in the Family, a horrifyingly bad story arc in which Iran names the Joker as their ambassador to the U.N. because...well, because it's a really stupid storyline.

Either that or we were about to find out that the Joker had been a Muslim terrorist all those years.

So the Joker, in his new role as U.N. ambassador, brings a nuclear missile to the United Nations and threatens to blow it up. Yes, the Ayatollah Khomeni was even loopier in the DC universe than in ours. A couple of years later a new, more loveable Robin -- Tim Drake -- debuted, and Jason Todd seemed to be consigned to the dustbin of Bat-history.

Cue the mid-oughts. Todd returns. And from that return comes this animated movie, well-made but depressingly similar to the depressing, doom-haunted Batman comics of the late 1980's and early 1990's. The animation, voice-work and writing are all solid, and writer Judd Winick wisely drops the whole Iranian connection for a slightly more workable plot involving super-terrorist Ra's Al Ghul's bone-headed decision to hire the Joker to distract Batman. The overall effect of this dark, violent movie, though, is pure Debbie Downer.

The Red Hood also offers one of the more curious naming choices in comic-book history -- in this new incarnation, as in his original 1950's first appearance, he doesn't actually wear a hood. It's a red helmet. I guess Red Helmet sounded too goofy even in the 1950's, though no goofier, ultimately, than Green Lantern. Or Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man. And would someone just kill the Joker already? Lightly recommended, and not for kids.

The Kids in the Hell

Brat Pack, written and illustrated by Rick Veitch (1990-91; this edition 2005): When Veitch started work on Brat Pack back in late 1989, DC's ridiculous phone-in campaign to determine whether Robin would live or die was fresh in everyone's memories. Of course, this wasn't the Dick Grayson Robin, but Robin II, Jason Todd, who'd been rewritten after the company-wide Crisis on Infinite Earths to be a maladjusted teen-aged jerk...almost as if killing Robin was always on someone's mind (his original origin was pretty much the same as Dick Grayson's -- circus performer, daredevil, nice kid; after the Crisis, he was a street punk whom Batman selected to be Robin because...wait for it...Jason Todd stole the wheels off the Batmobile).

Kid sidekicks sorta worked in the 1940's, when child labour was still at least partially acceptable in the U.S., and when superhero comic books didn't strive for quasi-realism. Ostensibly, child sidekicks (Robin seemed to be about 10 at the beginning) worked as wish-fulfillment/identification figures for the child readers of superhero comics, though great American cartoonist (and once-upon-a-time comic-book sweatshop artist) Jules Feiffer once noted that he never met anyone, including himself, who identified with Robin -- kids want to be Batman.

In any case, kid sidekicks proliferated once Robin was introduced into the Batman canon in 1940; the most notable were Green Arrow's Speedy, Captain America's Bucky and, much later, Wonder Woman's Wonder Girl and the Flash's Kid Flash, though the latter two generally appeared on their own or with other teen superheroes, only teaming up rarely with their mentors (ditto for Supergirl). The first kid sidekick to die in action was Bucky, as revealed in Captain America's return to comic-book action in the early 1960's, though more than 40 years later Bucky would (like most comic-book characters) un-die.

Brat Pack meditates, sometimes horrifically, sometimes offensively, on both sidekicks and their changing meanings within comic books and the culture at large. 1950's psychologist Frederic Wertham saw in Batman and Robin an offensive homosexual couple (yeah, I know -- technically Batman would be a pedophile, given Robin's apparent age, but Wertham, like a lot of later bigots, doesn't differentiate); in Wonder Woman, a lesbian bondage queen; in superheroes an endless parade of offense to the morals and minds of America's youth. Oh, Wertham.

Veitch's thorniest problem lies in his characterization of Batman stand-in Midnight Mink as Wertham's version of Batman. Many critics characterized this as homophobia, missing the point, I think -- Veitch's commentary is on just that sort of thinking applied to children's books by adults. There's also a strong sense of disgust at how the adultification of superheroes in the 1970's and 1980's made child sidekicks logically untenable but commercially ever-necessary: corporations almost never willingly lay down a copyrighted character so long as there may be more money to be made.

Even the Robin phone-in is thrown in, as the citizen's of Veitch's Slumburg phone in to a radio show to voice their desire to see the kid sidekicks of Slumburg's four remaining major superheroes die (Superman-alike Maximortal left ten years earlier, plunging the city and the world into a crime-filled depression that they've never recovered from, and causing the remaining superheroes to become debased, ultraviolent parodies of themselves. Yep, just like mainstream superhero comics in the 1980's!).

And so another blisteringly satiric ride through superhero tropes and histories begins, along with a climax that crosses over into Maximortal. This is great, angry work. Highly recommended.

Growing Pains

Batman and Robin: Batman Reborn, written by Grant Morrison, illustrated by Frank Quitely, Philip Tan and Jonathan Glapion (2009): Having Bruce Wayne out of the picture for two years turned out to be a godsend, primarily in the form of the Batman and Robin title. First-Robin Dick Grayson (aka Nightwing) reluctantly gives up his own superhero identity (Nightwing, natch) to give Gotham City its hero back, with the genetically modified, League-of-Assassins-trained, 10-year-old Damian as the new Robin.

Both experience job-related growing pains both existential (Dick doubts himself; Damian is a spoiled, potentially homicidal brat) and mundane (people keep noticing that the new Batman, who's supposed to be the old Batman after a temporary layoff, is a good six inches shorter now). Much zippy, occasionally macabre fun is had by all: the Batman R.I.P. storyline has left a number of new villains roaming the streets of Gotham, including Le Bossu and Professor Pyg, and Batman and Robin have to hit the ground running in order to deal with them. Luckily, Damian has got the new flying Batmobile working.

A confrontation with cuckoo-banana second-Robin Jason Todd, now the Red Hood, also looms. Todd wants to replace the new Batman with himself, a Batman-surrogate who kills. Ultimately, this doesn't sit well with anybody, least of all Gotham's mob leaders, who up their violence levels to respond to this new crime-fighting threat. And they call in super-assassin The Flamingo. Seriously. He wears a lot of pink and he likes to eat people's faces, or watch them eat their own faces. He's ten tons of fun, in other words.

Frank Quitely'a art on the covers and the initial three issues is splendid as always, and Philip Tan is no slouch either -- though the book purposefully ran a relay-race of artist-exchanges every three issues, the result was pretty much always good. Highly recommended.