Rocket to the Crypt

The Rocketeer/The Spirit: Pulp Friction: written by Mark Waid; illustrated by Paul Smith, Loston Wallace, and J. Bone (2013): The only real disappointment with this early 1940's crossover between the L.A.'s Rocketeer and Central City's The Spirit is that classic X-Men, Dr. Strange, and Nexus artist Paul Smith only ended up drawing one issue before bowing out. Loston Wallace picks up the baton admirably in issue 2 -- Dynamite should look at putting him on one of their pulp-hero titles, as his style works very well with retro-action -- and J. Bone finishes up on issues 3 and 4 in his pleasingly exaggerated, cartoony style.

Mark Waid's writing here is excellent, as it has been throughout his work on the resurrected Rocketeer comics. He'd also be a good pick for some pulp heroes over at Dynamite. One of the interesting things that Waid portrays throughout is that the Rocketeer, while a character 40 years younger than the Spirit in reality, is in the chronology of the two heroes the one who's been doing super-heroing for a longer time when they meet. That superheroing experience doesn't stop the Rocketeer from bring freaked out that the Spirit lives in a crypt within a cemetery, however.

The initial 'hook' riffs on either the beginning of Stephen King's The Colorado Kid or on the first chapter of a Doc Savage novel from the 1930's, Devil on the Moon -- take your pick -- but the destination is much different. Waid also gets a lot of comic mileage out of the byplay among the supporting characters of the two heroes, along with one perfectly understandable reaction to wearing a heavy metallic Rocketeer helmet inside for too long. In all, an enjoyable romp. Recommended.

Spirited

The Spirit: Femme Fatales, written and illustrated by Will Eisner and others (1940-1949; this collection 2008): I'm not always in the mood to read classic Spirit stories, but when I am, I read a lot of them in a row. They're always 7 pages long. And models of narrative economy and experimentation within a rigidly constrained format (those 7 pages).

The Spirit, blue of suit, red of tie, headquartered in Wildwood Cemetery in crime-ridden Central City, is more hard-boiled detective than superhero, his only concession to superheroics being a tiny mask. In that little domino mask and his blue suit, the Spirit always seemed embarrassed to nominally be considered a superhero. His primary attribute was an unrivalled ability to take punishment and bounce back up, which is a good thing given that no superhero has ever been hit on the head more often. I shudder to think what the Spirit's mental state would have been in later life.

The Will Eisner studio wrote and drew these gems during the 1940's and early 1950's with Eisner supervising more and more and writing and drawing less and less as time went by -- the studio produced a lot of work. But Eisner's innovative fingerprints (and his committment to experimenting with the embryonic rules of the comic-book page) are all over each story; very few of the writers and artists involved would ever reach such heights on their own.

Herein we get 23 stories about the Spirit's various female antagonists, all of them extremely va-va-voomish femme fatales, some of them entirely bad, some of them on the same side of the law as the Spirit. All the women and most of the men here have the half-joking, half-WTF names that Eisner handed out to all of his non-regular characters. We get the semi-heroic Sand Seref, the manipulative P'Gell, the tragic Plaster of Paris, the sinister Lorelei Vox, the homicidal Lorelei Vox, and so on, and so forth.

For what are formative, foundational texts in comic-book history, the Spirit's adventures remain remarkably fresh and engaging, and they're still studied by writers and artists today for their narrative and formal innovation and excellence. And their awesome splash pages. Highly recommended.

Botch Sauvage

First Wave, written by Brian Azzarello, illustrated by Rags Morales, Ed Bryant and Phil Winslade (2010-2011): My God, what a fantastic fucking botch DC Comics' resurrection of pulp hero Doc Savage in his own weird little comic-book universe turned out to be. Cancellation now seems to be set in stone, and all I really care about is whether or not DC will still publish the Showcase compilation of Marvel's great, short-lived Doc Savage B&W magazine-sized comic of the mid-1970's. Now that was a resurrection!

It looked so promising to begin with, as Doc, an alternate take on Batman, the Spirit, the Blackhawks, the Avenger, and a number of other reconfigured DC characters would fight evil in a reimagined 1930's where the inventions of Doc and other heroes and villains had essentially started the 21st century 70 years early.

Unfortunately, grimness and moral murkiness dominated -- it all felt like a reboot from the grim 'n gritty late 1980's. Furthermore, this introductory miniseries took forever to get anything going in the way of an interesting plot, and was perennially late to boot (as in, close to 18 months for 6 issues). And here and in the First Wave Doc Savage series, fun was pretty much nowhere to be found. Instead, we got a grim slog and a paucity of likeable characters.

I suppose a further problem arose from the concept itself (that is, a universe reconfigured by Doc's presence). Alan Moore's Doc Savage homage, Tom Strong, pretty much followed the same premise. The difference lay mainly in the fact that Alan Moore was writing that in his full jolly metafictional mode, making Tom Strong's adventures a delight whereas NuDoc just kept giving me more and more of a headache.

Future pulp reboots should probably leave Azzarello out of the mix -- I can think of few good contemporary comic-book writers less suited to updating a frothy pulp hero originally aimed at a readership of 14-year-olds. Tom Strong is awesome, though, as are the appearances of Doc-like heroes in Warren Ellis's Planetary and Dave Stevens' Rocketeer. Buy that stuff instead. It may be time for the original Doc to be reabsorbed by the eternal slurry of the pop underverse. Not recommended.