Gun Machine (2013) by Warren Ellis

Gun Machine (2013) by Warren Ellis: Warren Ellis, a long-time comic-book writer (Transmetropolitan, The Authority, and Planetary, among many others) and acerbic futurist, creates one hell of a smart Pop detective thriller here. 

Lonely, burned-out, never-was NYPD detective John Tallow starts Gun Machine with a bad day that quickly gets worse. The violent events of the first few pages open a door into a secret Manhattan world of murder and weird maps. And guns. Lots of guns. Hundreds of guns from flintlocks to modern, near-metal-less handguns. An otherwise empty apartment filled with guns arranged into a mysterious, incomplete pattern. And every gun attached to either an unsolved murder or a murder now known to be incorrectly solved.

Tallow's detective instincts get jump-started by this room of mystery, especially after the case is dumped on him  because the NYPD not-so-secretly wants Tallow to fail and the cases to vanish as quickly as possible. A bad detective gets born again, though that rebirth may be short-lived. Conspiracies of power don't want the secret of the guns solved.

Ellis' prose is as pungent and cynical as ever, densely packed with information. The plot rockets along. Tallow and the other characters are sharply drawn. Sharply drawn, too, is our attention to the secret maps of Manhattan which Tallow discovers. A financial map based on the time it takes for financial offices to communicate with Wall Street. A map of gun crimes in Manhattan and the other boroughs. And the map the killer carries in his head, of Manhattan before Europeans came, a map that still surfaces in surprising places in the postmodern landscape.

It's a dark romp that engages with social and technological questions as it zips along, dialogue crackling and sparking, the narrative casting a cold eye on the modes of NYPD evidence collection, the surveillance state, the technical specifications of guns used in famous murders, the difficulty of parking in New York, the meaning of Occupy Wall Street, the malign rise of private policing, the dangers of too much exercise, an assortment of Native American tribes and rituals, and the politics of the police bureaucracy. 

Gun Machine is too densely packed to make a great movie, but it would make one hell of an HBO miniseries. Highly recommended.

Normal (2016) by Warren Ellis

Normal (2016) by Warren Ellis: In Normal Head, Oregon exists a recovery center for futurists who've gazed too long into the abyss of the future and gone mad. The center's population divides itself into camps of civilian and military predictive experts. Into this strange place is dropped Adam Dearden, who's worked both sides of the street and finally had a massive nervous breakdown.

Normal is a short, pithy novel about the Surveillance Earth we all live in now and the many repercussions physical and mental of always being observed and recorded. Ellis has his moments of satiric fun, especially with energy drinks (seriously). Normal's a dead-serious novel, though, populated with eccentric characters who seem less and less eccentric as the novel goes along.

A 'locked-room mystery' drives most of the plot, with Dearden the man who has to solve it --and why it happened. The explanation lies in whatever drove Dearden over the edge, an incident that Dearden can barely start to ponder without collapsing into a weeping wreck on the floor.

The futurists are a fascinating bunch. Ellis has spent a lot of time dealing with such forward-thinkers. Their (former) jobs here run the gamut from theories of water and waste management in the face of global warming to how best to deploy killer-drones in an urban environment. Along the way, one realizes that New York City will be destroyed by its own water and waste management problems should the city ever get hit with a hurricane above Category 1. And it will.

And the drone theories make perfect sense. They may already be in place, set there by governments and corporations and think tanks. Whee!

As is usual for Ellis, he's written something both funny and deeply disturbing. One may start longing for a personal EMP generator after reading it. Is there no escape from Brother Eye? Highly recommended.

Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. (2007)

Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. (2007): written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by Stuart Immonen and Wade Grawbadger: Warren Ellis' brilliant, fractured satire of all things superhero somehow got 12 issues from Marvel in 2007, possibly because Ellis was and is such a popular, ostensibly sort-of mainstream writer of superheroes.

With Stuart Immonen on art, best known for fine work on Superman and other DC characters, Ellis crafts a Marvel book that feels more like a revisionist DC book -- Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol most specifically, from the late 1980's and early 1990's. Nextwave is a bit more Juvenalian in its satire, though -- the heroes are pissier and the metacommentary doesn't show much love for the weirdness of the characters it lampoons.

A lot of those weird characters -- Machine Man, Fin Fang Foom, Devil Dinosaur -- are oddballs from one of Jack Kirby's stints at Marvel. Some are riffs on 'real' Marvel characters from the pages of Dr. Strange. H.A.T.E. parodies S.H.I.E.L.D.. Ellis even brings characters previously seen only in the pages of Marvel's short-lived superhero parody comic Not Brand Ecch! on stage, with ridiculous results.

The Nextwave team itself consists of has-beens and never-weres, most prominently Monica Rambeau, Marvel's second Captain Marvel, then Photon, now just going by her real name. Machine Man also now goes by his civilian name. The Captain is one or another or possibly all of those lesser-known characters who used 'Captain' in their superhero monikers. There's a minor X-Men/X-Force superheroine with a major shop-lifting habit and the ability to make things explode by pointing at them. And there's Lady Bloodstone, daughter of a really minor 1970's Marvel monster-hunter and Doc Savage knock off.

It's funny and nasty if you know all the characters and situations Ellis chooses to pummel. It's hilarious if you don't. As Ellis pummels many of his own superhero writing tics, it all seems fair among the figurative and literal blood-letting. Immonen is an able collaborator, looser and more cartoony than I remember him, shining especially in stretches that parody the art styles of others and in a series of two-page action spreads that are both dynamic and completely ridiculous. Tik tik tik BOOM! Highly recommended.

Ultimate Karnak

Karnak: The Flaw in All Things (2016/ Collected 2017): written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by Gerardo Zaffino, Roland Boschi, and Antonio Fuso: A six-issue miniseries disguised as a quickly cancelled title, Karnak follows the adventures of the only one of Marvel's Inhumans to lack a superpower caused by the Terrigen Mists. Instead, Karnak, created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee in the late 1960's along with the other Inhumans in the pages of the Fantastic Four and now destined for a 2017 TV series, can see "the flaw in all things." Hence, you know, the title. 

Of course, this originally meant that Karnak could pinpoint the physical weak spot of anything so as to attack it. Writer Warren Ellis expands Karnak's ability to include everything from personalities to entire ideologies. It's an interesting idea that could bear more development -- the 'need' for fight scenes repeatedly stops the interesting stuff for yet another fight scene. And none of the credited artists (three for a six-issue run!) are anything more than mediocre at drawing and choreographing fight scenes. Indeed, one late battle is about six pages of boredom and confusion. Karnak is better than most things Marvel because of Ellis's writing, but this is far from great Ellis. Lightly recommended.

Ultimate Fantastic Four Volume 1 (2004/ Collected 2004): written by Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar; illustrated by Adam Kubert: If it weren't for the art of Adam Kubert, Ultimate Fantastic Four Volume 1 would actually be worse than the 2015 movie it served as a template for. It's certainly just as boring, and it certainly supplies the world with an unlikable group of teens who become the FF. Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar seem to be clueless as to how to write the Fantastic Four, so they graft them onto a Professor X/Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters template and spin their wheels from there. 

And if you thought the original 1961 FF villain Mole Man was a little over-determined by looking vaguely like a mole, wait until you meet Bendis and Millar's version -- he looks like a mole, he has the word 'mole' embedded in his last name, and he's covered with moles! Truly, Bendis and Millar are great creative talents! Not recommended.

Through Time and Space with Warren Ellis

Stormwatch: Force of Nature (1996/ Collected 1999): written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by Tom Raney, Randy Elliot, Pete Woods, and Michael Ryan: This volume reprints the first six issues of Warren Ellis' writing stint on Wildstorm's Stormwatch. Prior to Ellis, Stormwatch was an undistinguished superhero comic with an interesting premise -- its superheroes worked for a United Nations strike force. Ellis made the series more political and much weirder pretty much from the get-go, setting up a later transition from Stormwatch to The Authority. The art from main penciller Tom Raney is solid, but it's Ellis' cynical yet hopeful take on superheroes that is the main attraction here. Recommended.

Stormwatch: Lightning Strikes (1996-97/ Collected 2000): written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by Tom Raney, Jim Lee, Randy Elliot, and Richard Bennett: The second volume of Warren Ellis' Stormwatch focuses on the new heroes Ellis has brought to the team, most notably Jenny Sparks and Jack Hawksmoor. Jenny Sparks is the "Spirit of the Century," one of a number of Ellis' Wildstorm characters born at the beginning of the 20th century to act as super-powered anti-viral agents for the Earth. Jack Hawksmoor has been remade by mysterious aliens to be the protector of cities. 

Ellis gives Sparks a clever career retrospective that homages a variety of different comics styles from the appropriate eras -- Jenny's 1930's adventures mimic the art style of Superman co-creator Joe Shuster, her 1980's adventures the look of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen. Tom Raney does especially fine work here on the Sparks issue. Fan fave artist and Wildstorm publisher Jim Lee shows up to draw an issue linked to Wildstorm's WildC.A.T.S. superhero team. Recommended.

Stormwatch: Final Orbit (1998/ Collected 2001): written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by Bryan Hitch, Chris Sprouse, Michael Ryan, Paul Neary, Kevin Nowlan, and Luke Rizzo: The end for Stormwatch (and the birth of The Authority) comes partially in the last issues of their book, partially in the pages of the WildC.A.T.S./Aliens crossover. As those are the aliens from Alien and Aliens, you can probably guess at least some of the reasons Stormwatch ceases to exist. More of a tidying up than anything else, though the Aliens issue is compelling from writer Warren Ellis and artists Chris Sprouse and Kevin Nowlan. Recommended.

Supergod (2011): written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by Garrie Gastonny: Warren Ellis takes superheroes to one logical endpoint in this 2011 miniseries, using them as both metaphorical stand-ins for nuclear weapons and as quasi-realistically imagined horrors in and of themselves. It's bold, bleakly funny, and depressing as Hell. In a world where nations that include Great Britain, the U.S.A., India, Iran, the Soviet Union, and Iraq (hilariously in the latter case with funds diverted from post-Gulf-War-2 U.S. aid) race to develop superhumans, who will win? Well, not humanity. Recommended.

Weird Science Romance Bukkake

Young Romance 2: The Early Simon & Kirby Romance Comics (1947-49/ Collected 2014): edited and restored by Michel Gagne; written and illustrated by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby: A second beautiful job of restoration here by Michel Gagne and friends, rescuing Joe Simon and Jack Kirby's tremendous, tremendously popular romance comics of the 1940's and early 1950's from obscurity.

It's a whole different side of Simon and Kirby (co-creators of Captain America, among many other things), one filled with domestic melodrama and solid depictions of the mostly normal. Entertaining as all Hell -- one can see how these comics rapidly became best-sellers. If it weren't for the Comics Code Authority's implementation in the 1950's, comics like these would have helped the American comics industry mature faster by about four decades. Highly recommended.

Crooked Little Vein (2007) by Warren Ellis: Or, Michael McGill and Trix Search for the Secret Constitution. Seriously. Burned-out PI McGill gets himself hired by the President's heroin-addicted Chief of Staff to find the missing Secret Constitution. It's not just a document. Read aloud, it causes people to obey it -- but only when heard in person, not reproduced electronically. And the Chief of Staff wants to make America great again by hypnotizing people back into a 1950's mindset.

OK! The Chief selects McGill because McGill is a self-described "shit magnet." Weird things happen to him, constantly, a fact the Chief believes will lead him inevitably to the Secret Constitution. So off McGill goes, soon to be accompanied by avant-garde grad student Trix, whom McGill meets at a Godzilla Bukkake Night he's stumbled into.

Yes, Godzilla Bukkake: people who are sexually aroused by giant, filmed Japanese monsters to the point of simultaneous release. Hoo ha! And that's not the weirdest thing in the novel.

Warren Ellis, crackerjack comic-book writer and futurist, has a lot of fun in this novel with strange incidents and people and a book-length parody of the standard hard-boiled-detective novel. His narrator is hapless and generally more acted-upon than acting, with sidekick Trix getting him going at various points in the text. 

It's all provided within a narrative that satirizes Bush 2-era America and the Republican obsession with "family values." The Secret Constitution could conceivably cause gay people to 'turn straight,' all part of 'making America great again.' There's even a reclusive, insane billionaire who made a failed presidential run -- think Ross Perot by way of an X-rated Monty Python skit.

Sure, the novel's not deep. But it's fun and diverting and pointedly satiric. The events recall Hunter S. Thompson; the prose style recalls the hard-boiled school of Chandler and Hammett. It's 21st-century picaresque. Recommended.

Some Call It Sleep

Doktor Sleepless Volume 1: Engines of Desire (2008): written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by Ivan Rodriguez: Interesting near-future dystopia from Warren Ellis that gets better and weirder as it goes. 'Doktor Sleepless' (re)names himself and takes up arms against normalcy in a weird, small city somewhere in America. Strange new cults and fads dominate the post-millennial streets. 

The Great Old Ones seem to be in play. And an angel seems to have arrived in town on a hallucinatory wind. Ivan Rodriguez seems a bit bland and mainstream to be drawing this book, though that may be the point -- a tension between the art and the story mimicking the tension between consensus reality and le massif. Certainly worth reading. Recommended.

Annihilator (2015): written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Fraser Irving: A self-reflexive, genre-mashing superhero story written by Grant Morrison? It must be Wednesday. This is another fun Morrison romp in which a writer and his creation hang out together. Well, go on the run together. But the created may have created the story that the creator now tells to save the created. Or something like that. 

If you like Morrisson, you'll like this. If you hate Morrison, you'll hate this. If you've never heard of Morrisson, this isn't a bad jumping-on point. It may be a bit wacky, but it's straightforward in its own way and isn't part of any larger superhero universe. Fraser Irving continues to grow as an artist, though his distortions of the human form sometimes make it difficult to recognize specific characters. Recommended.

Larry Marder's Beanworld Volume 1 (1981-1995/ Collected 1995): written and illustrated by Larry Marder: Reprinting stories from the early-to-mid 1980's, this volume has been supplanted by newer, larger reprint volumes. You should buy them. Larry Marder's Beanworld is a fantasy creation almost sui generis. There are a few things -- mostly old comic strips -- that it vaguely resembles in art style or writing, things that include Krazy Kat and the E.C. Segar Popeye from the 1920's and 1930's.

But it's also pretty much its own weird, half-funny, half-serious cartoon about a bunch of sentient, bipedal beans getting up to adventures on, um, Beanworld. A labour of love years in development by Marder when it debuted as an Eclipse Comic in 1981, Beanworld is one of the great comic-book achievements to come out of the 1980's in any genre, on any continent. It's strange, charming, funny, enthralling... and a fine piece of fantasy world-building. Highly recommended.

Madwoman of the Sacred Heart (1992-1998/ English edition 2011): written by Alejandro Jodorowsky; illustrated by Moebius; English translation by Natacha Ruck and Ken Grobe: Deeply odd graphic novel from long-time collaborators Alejandro Jodorowsky and Moebius. Sometimes stilted, sometimes passionate, sometimes grotesque. Moebius' art moves from realism through to a cartoony style at the end that resembles that of Tintin's Herge. 

Jodorowsky's writing rampages around from mysticism to erotica to body horror and shame, from androgynous Messiahs to high-living prophets and back again. A 60-year-old French philosopher-academic turns out to be the destined father of the new John the Baptist. Or that's what a sexy, nubile young female student of his believes. 

Indeed, she believes it so much she has sex with him in a confessional booth and then has a tattoo inscribed just above her pubic region indicating that her vagina belongs to the professor. And that's just in the first 20 pages or so of this ~200-page graphic novel. There's a lot more loopy, portentous and sometimes pretentious dialogue and monologue action than there is the sexy sex, though, so don't get too hot and bothered. Not for anyone easily offended, but recommended nonetheless.

Dragons in Underpants

Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. (2007-2008): written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by Stuart Immonen and Wade Von Grawbadger: Fast-paced, hilarious, and nasty. Warren Ellis takes a handful of minor Marvel heroes and uses them to parody pretty much everything about superhero comics past and present while also delivering plenty of high-speed, densely plotted thrills and chills and a certain number of spills. 

Nextwave only survived for 12 issues, which is a shame, though it ends at pretty much the right place. Along the way, Ellis and his brilliant cartooning collaborator Stuart Immonen take the piss out of S.H.I.E.L.D., Fin Fan Foom, Captain America, the United States of America, and boring comic books. This is one of the funniest, funnest things Ellis has ever written. Stuart Immonen's deft, uncluttered cartooning constantly pleases and thrills and elicits laughs at the appropriate places. Highly recommended.

JLA: A League of One (2000): written and illustrated by Christopher Moeller: Moeller was mainly known for his fantasy painting when this graphic novel came out. And it is a fantasy adventure of a sort. A typically oblique warning from the Oracle at Delphi causes Wonder Woman to figure out how to get the rest of the Justice League out of the picture so that she can go it alone against the newly reawakened last dragon. Yes, dragon. 

The Oracle claims that the Justice League will die if it confronts the dragon. The Justice League being the Justice League, Wonder Woman realizes that she'll have to trick them out of the fight -- there's no way otherwise they will let her fight alone against a 200-foot-long dragon. Moeller's painting is fine and often quite interesting -- the dragon looks great, and he gives the members of the Justice League recognizably human-type proportions. He also uses Wonder Woman's connection to Greek myth in effective ways, though having a dragon out of Northern European mythology as an antagonist really isn't Greek at all, is it? 

Like a lot of 'event' graphic novels of its time at the turn of the century, A League of One is embedded a bit too firmly in existing continuity, making it seem at times like a really long Annual rather than a special, standalone volume. Still, more fun than a lot of superhero stuff, and with some appeal to fans of fantasy and sword-and-sorcery. Recommended.

Jew Gangster (2005): written and illustrated by Joe Kubert: The art is typically great Joe Kubert, pared down after seven decades of cartooning (!!!) to an evocative, spare combination of lines and shadows. Kubert's writing isn't as good as his cartooning. The plot is a fairly rote fall-from-grace story of a young man's transformation into a gangster. It also seems to end about halfway through a narrative. But while the characters and situations are often only slightly reworked clichés, the art is finely observed and completely human-sized. Recommended.

Satan's Six!

Satan's Six: written by Tony Isabella, Batton Lash, and Kurt Busiek; illustrated by Jack Kirby, John Cleary, Armando Gil, Steve Ditko, and others (1993): From the dark days of the 1990's collector's boom in American comic books comes this oddity. Topps, the sports card people, published comic books for a time in the 1990's because everyone else was doing it. They also created collector's card series tied into the comic books they published. 

And round it went until the industry collapsed into a black hole.

Satan's Six comes from the Topps Kirbyverse line, which consisted of titles and characters created and owned by comics legend Jack Kirby. Kirby wasn't drawing or writing anything at the time, only a few years before his death, mainly because of problems with his eyesight. However, other creators extrapolated entire series from various sketches, uncompleted stories, and the occasional Kirby-owned character who'd actually been published (Silver Star, for one). The results were uneven but generally fun. The Kirbyverse wasn't the grim and gritty place that much of mainstream American comics had become in the early 1990's.

Kirby supplies eight pages and a cover in the course of this four-issue miniseries, with a Who's Who of comic-book artists inking his work, including Todd "Spawn" Macfarlane and Frank "Dark Knight" Miller. I always love seeing Kirby's art regardless of its provenance, so these nine total pages make me happy. Satan's Six are six souls confined to Limbo who've been tapped by Satan to round up souls on Earth who should be in Hell. However, none of this is played seriously -- Satan's Six: The super-team is tremendously incompetent.

The rest of the comic book, all of it written by veteran scribe Tony "Black Lightning" Isabella, is a bit more uneven. Isabella's writing is fine, surprisingly funny, and maybe a bit too Meta at points. Penciller John Cleary strives for jagged, grotesque, cartoony style that seems to be heavily influenced by Todd Macfarlane's distorted grotesques in Spawn, though Macfarlane always set those grotesques off against his more conventionally, quasi-realistically rendered characters. Cleary's pretty much all-cartoony here. One gets used to it after awhile, though his story-telling sense in terms of coherent panel-to-panel flow is still clearly a work in progress. Still and all, I've read a tonne of early 1990's comic books I didn't enjoy as much as this one. Recommended.

Nexus: Space Opera: written by Mike Baron; illustrated by Steve Rude, Gary Martin, Al Milgrom, and Bob Wiacek (2008-2009; collected 2009): For more than 30 years, Nexus has been the crown jewel of its creators' careers -- those being the estimable comic-book careers of writer Mike Baron and artist Steve Rude. 

The bulk of Nexus came out in the 1980's. This was a time when science fiction and space opera flourished in American comics, mainly thanks to the rise of a number of new comics publishers that included Capital, First, Eclipse, Comico, and Dark Horse. Nexus stood at the top of the great science fiction titles that graced the comics world thanks to this explosion in publishing, perhaps only equaled at the time by Howard Chaykin's terrific American Flagg! and John Ostrander and Tim Truman's Grimjack.

Since the second on-going Nexus series ended in the early 1990's, getting a Nexus fix has involved long waits and at least two different publishers (Dark Horse and a brief time as the only publication of artist Steve Rude's creator-owned RudeDude Comics). Space Opera came out from RudeDude Comics in 2008-2009 and was collected in 2009. 

Rude and Baron are in vintage form for much of the miniseries. Is it worth reading for someone new to Nexus? Maybe. I can't really judge that. But it's great to see most of the major characters of the Nexus universe back in action. Nexus himself, born Horatio Hellpop, still tries to act as the conscience of humanity by executing murderers and tyrants with the help of his telekinetic FuskionKasting powers. He's still married to Sundra Peale, former spy for EarthGov. The imminent arrival of their first child drives the plot of Space Opera.

That's because the homicidal, genocidal, and extremely rapey Elvonics, religious fanatics with an Elvis obsession, have a prophecy that the Son of Nexus will destroy their god Elvon. So they launch a series of escalating attacks on Nexus's home planet of Ylum, a libertarian-democratic haven for refugees from across the galaxy. But there are assassins hired by someone else as well. And Ylum also continues to seek full recognition from the United Worlds.

So things are complicated, wiggy, action-packed, and occasionally satiric. Perhaps one long-time character or two will die. Perhaps a long-dead character or two will return from the dead. Perhaps not. It's all great fun, marred only by an insufficient number of pages over the course of the concluding chapter. A massive space battle involving Nexus and the Elvonic Warfleet ends almost perfunctorily, which is a shame. But there are enough good things for the series to be Recommended.

Doctor Solar: Man of the Atom Archives Volume 3: written by Paul S. Newman; illustrated by Frank Bolle; covers by George Wilson; Introduction by Mike Baron (1966-68/ Collected 2014): The strange 1960's adventures of Western Publishing's Doctor Solar, a one-man race of atomic supermen, continue here. Capable of a whole host of energy-based feats, Solar has to deal with arch-nemesis Nuro and his hilariously named henchman Uzbek (!!! -- is a crossover with SCTV's Hey Giorgi imminent?) on several occasions. 

Solar also splits into millions of microscopic selves to battle bacterial space invaders, takes on an evil robot doppelganger, threatens the world with his own terrible nightmares that become real because his radiation is 'out of balance,' and fights a giant lava monster from the Earth's core. 

The interior art by Frank Bolle isn't flashy, but his characters are indeed full of character and his matter-of-fact, low-key, realistic cartooning makes many of the weird events seem even weirder. Writer Paul S. Newman, who literally wrote thousands of comic-book stories, keeps things moving along and often shows a flair for super-scientific strangeness that's the equal of anything DC Comics writers invented during their Silver Age of the 1950's and 1960's. And boy, cover artist George Wilson is swell -- his paintings are an artistic delight from issue to issue. Recommended.

Batman Incorporated Volume 2: written by Grant Morrison and others; illustrated by Chris Burnham and others (2013/Collected 2014): Writer Grant Morrison concludes a Batman epic that spanned seven years, several Bat-titles, dozens of artist (including the excellent Chris Burnham on most of the art herein)  and at least one company-wide DC Comics reboot. 

Batman's Batman Incorporated (a Bruce Wayne company!) brings together masked crime-fighters from around the globe to defeat the equally globe-spanning Leviathan organization. The climax is crowded and occasionally hyperviolent and features at least one endless combat sequence too many. Maybe two. 

The tangential stories included after the main narrative are quite a bit jollier, as writers mostly other than Morrison tell stand-alone tales of such Batman Incorporated agents as El Gaucho, Red Raven, The Knight, and the Japanese Bat-man. And Bat-cow! 

There's absolutely no point to reading this compilation unless you've at least read the earlier Batman Incorporated volumes. Even then, a number of plot developments cast all the way back to the beginning of Morrison's tenure on Batman in 2006. The whole run is one seven-year, 100-issue story. The whole is superior to this part, though not to some of the arcs contained within it. Recommended, but not on its own.

Grimjack: The Manx Cat: written by John Ostrander; illustrated by Tim Truman (2011): This prequel to the 1980's science-fiction comic book Grimjack explains the significance of several elements in that series. John Ostrander's writes as pungent a science-fantasy swashbucker as ever, and original artist Tim Truman is in fine, grim, and occasionally grotesque form. This would certainly work as a gateway to the original series. 

This time around, there's more than a hint of Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion to protagonist John 'Grimjack' Gaunt as he tries to stop an invasion of alien gods that he himself has inadvertently set in motion by stealing the 'Manx Cat' of the title. Like the Maltese Falcon, the statue of the Manx Cat is something that dreams are made on. Only literally and to increasingly dire consequence. 

Very solid science fiction/ science fantasy. Truman's art only disappoints on the way, way too digitally composed cover of the compilation -- thankfully, it's all pen and ink inside, or at least looks that way. Recommended.

Global Frequency Volume 2: Detonation Radio: written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by Lee Bermejo, Gene Ha, Simon Bisley, Chris Sprouse, Tomm Coker, and Jason Pearson; covers by Brian Wood. (2003-2004/ Collected 2004): The second half of Global Frequency by Warren Ellis and a relay team of 13 artists isn't quite as weird and wonderful as the first, but it's still both an enjoyable read and a great concept. 1001 operatives across the planet work for Global Frequency, a massive, private organization that rescues the Earth from problems the normal authorities can't handle. The threats are a bit more prosaic this time around and the artists a bit more uneven. Still, this is a nifty Mission: Impossible for a crowd-sourced age. Recommended.

Old Heroes in New Gardens

Transmetropolitan Volume 3: Year of the Bastard: written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by Darick Robertson and Rodney Ramos (1998-99; collected 1999): The third collection of Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson's searing science-fiction satire/jeremiad follows TechnoGonzo journalist Spider Jerusalem as he finally begins to cover a presidential campaign in a dystopic mid-21st-century America. Robertson's art is clean as it details very dirty goings-on, while Ellis' writing is furious and sarcastic, hopeful and cynical, as embodied in the often grotesque and occasionally substance-abuse-addled Jerusalem, who's like a cyberpunk version of Hunter S. Thompson.  

There's a certain amount of pulp/superhero in Transmetropolitan's DNA that can occasionally make it seem less like satire than wish fulfillment -- Spider is as hyper-competent and well-connected as Batman or Doc Savage when he needs to be. Great, scabrous fun that occasionally mirrors America's present-day political situation. Highly recommended.

Transmetropolitan Volume 4: The New Scum: written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by Darick Robertson and Rodney Ramos (1999; collected 2000): Gonzo journalist/hero of the future Spider Jerusalem continues to prowl the East Coast urban sprawl known only as The City, trying to decide which presidential candidate is worse. It really seems like a draw. Or does it? 

As Election Night some time in the mid-21st century approaches, Jerusalem digs for conspiracies and tries to change the way things are by writing.  It's probably a doomed effort. Bleak and often hilarious, scatological and profane -- The New Scum takes us places that sometimes seem like the places we've been, or are just in the process of going now. Ellis and artist Darick Robertson continue to make a hell of a team. Highly recommended.

Tarzan: Love, Lies, and the Lost City: written by Henning Kure, Matt Wagner, and Walt Simonson; illustrated by Peter Snejberg and Teddy Kristiansen (1992): Enjoyable revisionist, modern-day take on Tarzan is compromised by some really unfortunate choices in the lettering and colouring departments. The entire story comes to us via several different bits of first-person narration. That first-person narration is rendered as writing, not type, which becomes a bit of a problem once the decision was made to give Tarzan an almost illegible scrawl. 

Then some genius decided to colour the caption blocks differently to differentiate the speaker. But no one seems to have checked to see whether the dark green of one of the speakers was so dark that it made the black writing unreadable. On the production end, it's a mess. 

On the creative end, the main story is awfully low-key for what was Malibu's second Tarzan miniseries. The two back-up stories, written by Matt Wagner and Walt Simonson, adapt a couple of Edgar Rice Burroughs tales of the early life of Tarzan to very good effect. I really like the artwork of Peter Snejberg and Teddy Kristiansen throughout the stories. 

But Jesus, the colouring almost sabotages that as well, going too often several shades too dark. Infuriatingly incompetent on the production end though it may be, you can probably pick it up for a dollar or so complete at your local comic shop. So I don't feel financially ripped off or anything. And Snejberg does do a lovely job of drawing La of Opar and Tarzan's hyper-competent Jane. Lightly recommended.

Fighting American: Rules of the Game: written by Jeph Loeb; illustrated by Ed McGuinness, Nathan Massengill, Rob Liefeld, Larry Stucker, and Mario Alquiza (1997-98): Fun, breezy take on Joe Simon and Jack Kirby's loopy 1950's patriotic superhero. The original Fighting American started off fighting Communists in what was supposed to be a serious comic that nonetheless comes off as insane camp paranoia now. About an issue-and-a-half in, Simon and Kirby started shifting the tone to complete, intentional lunacy. Thus, Fighting American fought increasingly loopy Commies with names like Hotsky Trotsky and Double Header. It's brilliant, almost absurdist superheroics. 

Rob Liefeld, Jeph Loeb, and Ed McGuinness play Fighting American mostly straight here -- he's another retired patriotic superhero called back to the fold. McGuinness' art is just cartoony enough to keep the return of some of FA's absurd foes light-hearted. However, the take on these things needed to be a lot lighter and a lot more absurd. This could almost be a 1990's Captain America miniseries. Lightly recommended.

You Don't Need A Weatherman

Stormwatch: Lightning Strikes: written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by Tom Raney, Randy Elliott, Jim Lee, Scott Williams, and Richard Bennett (1996-97; collected 2000): From 1996 to 2000, Warren Ellis was pretty much the State-of-the-Art in sophisticated superhero story-telling. And he did all his best work at Wildstorm, an Image imprint that would be sold to DC pretty much at the end of the bulk of Ellis' work at Wildstorm. Once Ellis had his feet under him on his first major work for Wildstorm, the pre-existing Stormwatch, he combined Alan Moore's mordant wit and Grant Morrison's Silver Agey hyper-science-fictionalism (!) with his own pragmatically optimistic take on the superhero: maybe they could be just good enough and idealistic enough to save us from ourselves.

Lightning Strikes continues Ellis' introduction of his own characters into Stormwatch, Jim Lee's United Nations-sponsored superhero response team. Stormwatch came complete to Ellis with Justice League-like orbital headquarters and SHIELD-like armies of agents and piles of heavy, science-fictional weaponry. 

It also came with a Nick-Fury-like Director dubbed 'The Weatherman.' This was Henry Bendix, and in this second collected volume of Ellis' Stormwatch, the team is just beginning to realize that Henry Bendix is a homicidal megalomaniac who intends to save the world by taking total control of it. 

But this is just becoming apparent: for now, Stormwatch continues in its missions to save the world from Extinction-level threats. Stories focus on Ellis-creation Jack Hawksmoor, defender of cities, and holdover Battalion, for whom Ellis has plans that will move him away from being team trainer. 

Team co-creator and Wildstorm publisher Jim Lee supplies art for another standalone that pits Stormwatch against some particularly awful results of alien genetic experimentation on humans. Lee's art is perfectly suited to the material, while regular artist Tom Raney keeps things humming along in his installments. Raney's main job was to cleanly depict Ellis' occasionally violently harrowing action sequences while also working with Ellis' words to make the once-cardboard characters of pre-Ellis Stormwatch into appealing individuals. Raney succeeds. There's no epic here yet, but it's coming. Recommended.

Stormwatch: Change or Die: written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by Tom Raney, Randy Elliott, Oscar Jiminez, and Richard Bennett (1997; collected 2000): Warren Ellis's run on Wildstorm's Stormwatch builds to one major event here that will ultimately set the stage for Ellis and Bryan Hitch's 'widescreen' superhero team The Authority in a couple of years. 

We learn more about the enigmatic Jenny Sparks, nearly a century old and not looking a day over 20. She controls electricity. She also claims to be The Spirit of the 20th Century. And as crazy-ass Stormwatch director Henry Bendix's plans for world domination get flushed into the open by the return of an idealistic, Superman-like hero called The High, Stormwatch finally faces the rot within itself. 

Tom Raney and Oscar Jiminez do nice and sometimes startlingly gruesome work on the visuals, as Stormwatch battles an enemy it should be allies with and ostensive allies who are really enemies. It's a little like a John Le Carre novel, only with more punching and exploding. Highly recommended.

Stormwatch: A Finer World: written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by Bryan Hitch, Paul Neary, Michael Ryan, and Luke Rizzo (1997-98; collected 2000): Warren Ellis' version of Stormwatch begins its transition to being The Authority as we meet two soon-to-be members of that follow-up team, Apollo and the Midnighter. They're riffs on Superman and Batman, respectively. They're also lovers. 

And they're on the run from Stormwatch, which they believe still to be run by nutty leader, the Weatherman Henry Bendix. He had them created as part of a secret team and then abandoned them when that team's first mission turned catastrophically wrong, leaving the two as the only survivors. They've been fighting evil in the shadows ever since. But new Weatherman Battalion wants to bring them into the light, preferably as allies.

Artist Bryan Hitch, he of the 'widescreen' action sequences and art that reminds one of comic-book great Neal Adams as funneled through later artist Alan Davis (Excalibur, The Nail), handles the penciling on the Apollo and the Midnighter issues. He'd return to those characters in the first 12 issues of the subsequent The Authority, to widespread fan-love. It's bombastic, finely rendered art, offering a nice counterpoint to writer Warren Ellis' shadowy conspiracies and a nice amplification of Ellis' large-scale action sequences. 

The volume concludes with an alternate world take on Stormwatch, accidentally brought to 'our' Stormwatch's attention by a tunnel in The Bleed, the weird stuff between universes. It's a bit of an oddity -- enjoyable, but overly reliant on the mythology of shared universe book WildC.A.T.S. for its eucatastrophic finale. Michael Ryan's pencils are perfectly solid superhero stuff, though they lack the zing of Hitch or long-time Stormwatch artist Tom Raney. 

This version of Stormwatch had only a couple of issues left in its existence, though somewhat confusingly that, too, would be tied intimately into WildC.A.T.S. (geez, I hate typing that).  Two issues of Stormwatch and an extra-length WildC.A.T.S. Vs. Aliens (yes, the Xenomorphs from the Alien franchise) would end this team's existence. While Stormwatch was always a United Nations-sponsored superteam, The Authority that would follow, with mostly new members, would seek to save the world without government support, and sometimes despite it. Recommended.

Half a Global Frequency is Better Than None

Global Frequency: Planet Ablaze: written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by Garry Leach, Glenn Fabry, Steve Dillon, Roy Martinez, John J Muth, David Lloyd, and David Barron (2002-2003/ This edition 2004): This collection of the first half of writer Warren Ellis' early-oughts 12-issue miniseries gives us six different artists and the most TV-friendly of all of Ellis' comic-book projects. Indeed, Global Frequency did get a TV pilot made, though it wasn't picked up for series. That's a shame because it's a solid take on a solid, much-used concept in TV. In a way, this is Mission: Impossible for the post-industrial, post-governmental, Internet age.

And the artists are all boss. Global Frequency (the agency) employs 1001 agents across the globe, though they're really more heavily compensated consultants than actual employees. Global Frequency (the agency) is sponsored by the G-8 countries (among other sources named or implied) but run independently by a mysterious woman. Global Frequency (the comic book) shows us six missions, rendered by six great artists.

Held together by phone and Internet, members of the team await the call to either consult on a problem or to jump into the fray. They're 1001 experts in thousands of fields, from parkour (no kidding) to quantum physics to assassination. The crises they face arise from both intent and neglect -- forgotten and now-malfunctioning Cold-War super-weapons can represent as great a threat to the world as crazed death-cultists, insane bionic men, or an invading meme from outer space.

It's all fast-paced and breezy, almost Warren Ellis-lite in terms of characterization and plot density. Done right, it would have made a hell of a TV series. As a comic-book series, it's still a lot of fun. Going with different artists each issue increases that fun, whether it's Preacher's Steve Dillon, V for Vendetta's David Lloyd, or the normally painterly Jon J Muth doing something a lot more sketchy. Recommended.

What If? Why Not?

Son of Superman: written by Howard Chaykin and David Tischman; illustrated by J.H. Williams III, Mick Gray, and Lee Loughridge (1999-2000): A fairly straightforward, early piece of work from artists J.H. Williams III and Mick Gray -- pleasing, beautifully composed and clean superhero work. Chaykin and Tischman offer a rejoinder to Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns in this alternate take on Superman.

The Man of Steel went missing 15 years ago. Now, in a world in which the Justice League has been morally compromised by the government and by beloved trillionaire Lex Luthor, Superman's son with Lois Lane suddenly finds himself with superpowers after a solar event. And so he goes searching for his lost father, uncovering a massive conspiracy along the way. Breezy and fun and gifted with crackling dialogue, Son of Superman makes most Superman stories look lead-footed by comparison. Recommended.


Ministry of Space: written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by Chris Weston (2001-2004): The always sardonic Ellis crafts a fascinating alternate-universe tale of a Great Britain that becomes the world's leading space power after World War Two. Ellis apparently started the project after coming across some Dan Dare comics from the 1950's in his attic, comics which seemed to him to come from an alternate Earth.

Chris Weston's art is detailed and enjoyable as it delineates the massive, retro-future spaceships of Great Britain's Ministry of Space and the occasionally wormy people who build and fly them. This isn't a shiny utopia. The price paid for Great Britain's dominance is brutal, and a concluding panel riffs on a classic final panel from an EC Comics story of the 1950's to further establish the moral bankruptcy of a Great Britain whose Empire now extends into space. The whole thing, at about 100 pages, leaves one wanting more, a lot more, which in the end is better than wanting a whole lot less. Recommended.

Spawn of Thor

Marvel Visionaries: Thor: Mike Deodato: written by Warren Ellis and William Messner-Loebs; illustrated by Mike Deodato and others (1996-97; collected 2004): Thor's insane new costume on the cover of this volume would tell some people that this collection comes from the post-Image era of the mid-1990's, when DC and Marvel sought to emulate the success of that upstart company.

In part, this came with the redesign of certain costumes to make them look more like the flowing, chain-heavy costume of Spawn, Image's most popular hero. Except Spawn didn't have a bare midriff. It's like Spawn on Casual Fridays!

However, that costume's only appearance in this volume -- which omits several issues of Deodato's run on Thor -- comes on that cover. Thor is pretty much either shirtless or in another ugly non-traditional costume for the volume. That costume bares a lot of previously unbared Asgardian skin as well and is surpassingly ugly. Apparently, Thor was seeing the Submariner's tailor at this point in Marvel history.

The art is nice in that fetishistic, overstuffed 90's way. Deodato's Thor is so broad in the torso as to appear grotesque at times, while longtime Thor foe (and here lover) the Enchantress now sports a wasp waist and boobs bigger than her head. Warren Ellis writing Thor is, frankly, a pretty weird thing. His storyline, involving somebody somewhere corrupting the World Tree as a means of destroying both Asgard and Earth and ushering in a post-Ragnarok utopia, is at once interesting and weirdly off-key, with a rushed anti-climax of an ending.

Messner-Loebs cleans some of that up in the issues collected here, which led into the cancellation of Thor as part of the Onslaught event and the subsequent brief disaster called Heroes Reborn. Thor would be back in the normal Marvel universe eventually. As with a lot of Marvel collections, the selection seems a bit thin -- why not collect all of Deodato's run? Oh, well. Not recommended unless you're a Deodato completist.

3 > 4

Planetary Volume 1: All Over the World and Other Stories; Volume 2: The Fourth Man; Volume 3: Leaving the 20th Century; Volume 4: Spacetime Archaeology; written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by John Cassaday, Laura Depuy and others (1998-2009):

One conspiracy has stolen humanity's future, systematically eradicating potential heroes and benevolent scientific advances, all in the name of power. That's The Four, a quartet of astronauts gifted with astonishing powers during a secret attempt at a lunar landing in 1961. They are the worst humanity has to offer.

The other conspiracy is attempting to stop The Four and help humanity progress as it was supposed to. To do so, secrets must be unearthed -- of the Four, and of all the strangenesses of the world that have been lost, misplaced, or stolen. That's Planetary.

It's the end of the 20th century when we begin and the beginning of the 21st century when we end. Planetary offices span the globe, but its central investigators appear to be three people: Elijah Snow, born on January 1, 1900 along with a host of other superpowered individuals, able to control temperature and mysteriously bereft of a number of his memories; Jakita Snow, super-strong and super-fast; and the Drummer, who can see, store and manipulate all forms of information.

First they investigate, as the 20th century goes to sleep, a lost world of strangeness and charm, a world familiar to us from popular culture but subtly changed. An island of giant monsters north of Japan. A ghostly, avenging Hong Kong cop. Giant ants created to guard the mysterious Science City Zero in the Arizona desert. The lost space 1851 capsule of the Baltimore Gun Club. 1930's renaissance man and adventurer Doc Brass and his six amazing compatriots, stopping the end of the world on New Year's Day 1945, with the world unaware. A multiverse of extraordinary fractal complexity, shaped like a snowflake. The lost African super-city of Opak-Re. An entire Earth murdered to provide the Four with storage space.

And the loathsome Four. Forged by Nazi science and a hatred of everything human and superhuman. Four extraordinary humans who have spent their lives destroying or stealing the extraordinary. Why? To what purpose? And where did their powers come from?

And who is the mysterious Fourth Man of Planetary, the financial backer behind the scenes?

Warren Ellis's writing remains spare and echoey and witty throughout, leaving the reader space to imagine all the permutations of the jam-packed pop-cultural landscape across which Planetary stalks the Four without moving into the pompous or purple. It's meta, but not in the way that Alan Moore's similar-but-quite-different League of Extraordinary Gentleman is meta: the characters of Planetary aren't fictional characters in a mutating world of overlapping fictions. They're real people in a multiverse whose fundamental laws suggest that everything real resembles fiction, stories, myths, legends, all of it explained by mad science and madder cosmology.

John Cassaday's art justifiably won a number of awards. It echoes the styles of others when it needs to echo, but throughout maintains a marvelous vastness and spaciousness, an epic look nonetheless capable of evoking the familiar and the normative.

There are lovely character moments, moments of profound sorrow and loss, and wide as the widest widescreen moments of revelation and epiphany and wonder. Recurring throughout is Elijah Snow's catchphrase -- "It's a strange world. Let's keep it that way." In these four volumes or in the larger Absolute Planetary volumes, this remains one of the four or five truly essential superhero comic books of the last 20 years. Highest recommendation.

Batman on Earth

Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth: the Deluxe Edition, written by Warren Ellis, illustrated by John Cassaday and Laura Martin (2003; this edition 2011): OK, so it's a shameless money-grab in many ways, reprinting a 48-page story in an oversized 96-page hardcover. On the other hand, the art by Planetary co-creator John Cassaday pretty much warrants the package. He's one of a handful of contemporary comic-book artists whose art looks better the larger it gets.

Taking place some time during the first 12 to 15 issues of the main Planetary comic book, Night on Earth brings a Batman-less Gotham City into the Planetary universe. Strange murders involving what appears to be multiversal shifting have been taking place, so Elijah Snow, Jakita Wagner and The Drummer meet up with Gotham City Planetary office workers Dick Grayson and Jasper (who looks a lot like the Joker) to find out what's going on.

And then their prey, John Black, starts shifting portions of Gotham again -- bringing the Batmen of different worlds (or, from out POV, different comic books and TV shows) into conflict with the Planetary team.

It's all great, meta-fun as Batman and Gotham jump among several major versions from comics and television due to John Black's multiversally shifting brainstorms. Cassaday renders each iteration in marvelous, telling detail, while Ellis gives us both the usual Planetary bickering (100-year-old Elijah Snow is especially grumpy throughout because of his previous experiences with Gotham, which even in the Planetary universe is a really screwed-up place) and some relevant character moments for Batman.

I hope that after the way-too-oversized Absolute Planetary editions are done we'll get something more like this size for future reprints. Cassaday's art really does look great. Warren Ellis's proposal and script for the comic round out the package. Both are pretty interesting, though we're told they were edited for mature language. I want the swears! Highly recommended.

Planetary Realignment

Planetary: Lost Worlds, written by Warren Ellis, illustrated by Jerry Ordway and Phil Jiminez (Collected 2011): This inexpensive, 100-page comic-book style reprint collection replaces (along with the expensive, over-sized hardcover Planetary: Batman reprint) an older reprint volume of Planetary's non-arc one-offs, Crossing Worlds. I don't know how successful these inexpensive DC reprints are, but this one is just about right for the money and the material.

The first story teams super-archaeologists Planetary and super-problem-solvers Authority in a story that mainly seems to exist to show Planetary's worries about the Authority's gradual assumption of more and more political power, to tie up some loose ends from the first issue of Planetary, and to give Warren Ellis a chance to write the most unpleasant (and, historically speaking, inaccurate) version of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft ever. Phil Jiminez does solid pencilling work, but the story seems padded with fight sequences and awfully thin on all other types of sequences.

The second story, drawn by long-time Superman penciller Jerry Ordway, takes place on a parallel Earth on which Planetary runs everything (malevolently) from behind the scenes just as Planetary's enemy The Four do in the regular Planetary comic. Alternate versions of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman take on Planetary, all the other heroes of Earth having been killed off in secret by Planetary and their powers used in new, money-making technologies. It's one of those depressing 'What-if?' tales that again seems padded with fight sequences in lieu of adequate development of the characters and dystopian elements.

Both stories are interesting, and it's hard to argue with the price ($7.99, about half what you'd have paid for the standalone issues back when they came out in the early oughts), but they're pretty light stuff compared to the heavy-hitting regular Planetary material. Lightly recommended.

Planetary Alignment

Planetary Volume 1: All Over the World, written by Warren Ellis, illustrated by John Cassaday and Laura Martin (1998-2000; collected 2001): 27 issues spread over 12 years... that's how long the truly epic story of Planetary took to play out due to a combination of health issues and other artistic and writerly committments.

Elijah Snow, The Drummer and Jakita Wagner -- the three super-powered members of Planetary -- would investigate a wide variety of superheroic and science-fictional events over that time, all tied into the overarching plot that involved the efforts of the super-powered, Nazi-derived Four to do something terrible to all of humanity, something terrible they'd been building towards for decades.

The Four -- a nightmarish version of Marvel's Fantastic Four -- had been systematically holding back humanity for those decades, destroying or suppressing various wonders, technologies and strange visitors from another planet. Against them stands Planetary, "archaeologists of the impossible", funded by a mysterious Fourth Man as the world's last hope for a future. As Planetary seeks out the roots and the aims of the Four's plan, Snow also seeks out the mystery of the identity of the Fourth Man.

Early on, though, the master-narrative was still being alluded to, discovered by the characters as they went along. Snow, capable of generating vast amounts of cold (which of course means that he's really capable of extracting kinetic energy from his environment), begins the book somewhat amnesiac and terminally bored. Recruited by super-strong Wagner and information guru The Drummer, he then takes part in a series of pulp- and comic- and movie-allusive adventures that begin to reveal the secret world under the skin.

Giant atomic monsters on Japan's Island Zero! The secret fate of pulp superman Doc Brass! The Hong Kong ghost-cop and his mission of vengeance! And the origins of The Four, America's first astronauts transformed into something greater and something worse than human. With John Cassaday's often stunningly beautiful art, Planetary quickly became one of the best, and the most interesting, superhero comics ever created. Highly recommended.