Starman Volume 4: Times Past: written by James Robinson; illustrated by Teddy Kristiansen, Craig Hamilton, John Watkiss, Russ Heath, Matt Smith, J.H. Williams III, Lee Weeks, Phil Jiminez and others (1995-2000; collected 2001): Robinson and company tell tales of the history of the various Starmen who've borne that name over the decades, from Golden Age hero Ted Knight to his son, and eponymous current Starman, Jack Knight. Amoral occasional hero, occasional villain The Shade narrates in a series of prose pieces. A nice gateway volume for the series, and an eclectic mix of artists. Recommended.
Starman Volume 5: Infernal Devices: written by James Robinson; illustrated by Tony Harris, Mark Buckingham, Steve Yeowell, Wade Von Grawbadger, and others (1997-98; collected 2001): Starman Jack Knight must save Opal City from a truly mad bomber and a couple of super-villain henchmen. And he's got a new girlfriend, Sadie, whom he's totally in love with -- and who has her own secret reasons for first meeting him. Thankfully, new heroes are rising in Opal City to help out. Or new-old heroes, anyway. And the mystery of eternally resurrecting monster Solomon Grundy, who's been a great guy in this incarnation, is finally revealed in all its weirdness. Recommended.
Starman Volume 6: To Reach the Stars: written by James Robinson and David S. Goyer; illustrated by Gary Erskine, Gene Ha, Peter Krause, Steve Yeowell, and Tony Harris (1998; collected 2001): With his girlfriend Sadie's secret revealed, Jack Knight contemplates a trip into space in search of a lost and until now presumed dead hero of the 1980's and early 1990's. But first, we get a team-up of Starmen now and during World War Two with Fawcett Comics heroes Captain Marvel and Bulletman. And Bulletman is awesome. Also, he must have an incredibly hard head beneath that bullet-shaped helmet. Recommended.
Starman Volume 7: A Starry Knight: written by James Robinson and David S. Goyer; illustrated by Peter Snejberg, Keith Champagne, and Tony Harris (1998-99; collected 2002): Starman Jack Knight and former Starman Mikaal, a blue-skinned alien who fought crime during the disco era, take to outer space with the help of anti-hero The Shade and the Justice League on the basis of Starman's fiancee Sadie's belief that her brother, another hero formerly known as Starman, still lives somewhere out there, despite having been seen dying in battle with the dark god Eclipso several years earlier. Along the way, Mikaal and Jack will meet up with DC's space-faring heroes such as Adam Strange, old frenemies like Solomon Grundy, and an entire planet terraformed by a space-travelling Swamp Thing back during the 1980's. Meanwhile, back home in Opal City, something dark is rising. Recommended.
Starman Volume 8: The Stars My Destination: written by James Robinson and David S. Goyer; illustrated by Peter Snejberg, Keith Champagne, Stephen Sadowski, John McCrea, and Tony Harris (1999; collected 2003): Starmen new and old team up with assorted science-fictional comic heroes to overthrow a murderous dictator -- and solve the mystery of whether or not fallen Starman Will Payton still lives. Meanwhile, back in Opal City, things are starting to look very, very bad for everybody. Opal needs Starman Jack Knight back! Recommended.
Hail the Conquering Hero: written and directed by Preston Sturges; starring Eddie Bracken (Woodrow Truesmith), Ella Raines (Libby), Raymond Walburn (Mayor Noble), William Demarest (Sgt. Heppelfinger) and Franklin Pangborn (Committee Chairman) (1944): Writer-director Preston Sturges had a run of movies during World War Two that may be unparalleled for quantity and quality among Hollywood comedy directors. Six years, about a dozen movies, and then a tremendous drop-off in quality -- but what a six years!
I'd rank Hail the Conquering Hero right up with Sullivan's Travels and The Palm Beach Story in Sturges' brief but mighty All-Star run. Eddie Bracken plays a young man with a war hero father from WWI whom he never met and a reputation to live up to. But his hay fever gets him kicked out of the Marine Corps.
Ashamed, Bracken tells his mother he's in the Marines anyway and hides out in San Diego for a year, until his kind act of buying a bunch of moneyless Marines drinks and food at a bar sets off a chain of events that leads his entire town to believe he's a war hero. And then a bunch of people decide to run him against the venial Mayor they already have.
Bracken is good as a kid who's pushed by events into worse and worse situations, and Sturges's crack team of character actors -- William Demarest as a sergeant who fought alongside Bracken's father chief among them -- are terrific as well. There's a moral at the end, a surprisingly pointed one that probably wouldn't make it into a Hollywood movie today. Throughout, the performances and the dialogue sparkle. Highly recommended.
Robocop 2: written by Frank Miller and Walon Green, based on characters created by Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner; directed by Irvin Kershner; starring Peter Weller (Robocop/Alec Murphy), Nancy Allen (Anne Lewis), Belinda Bauer (Dr. Juliette Faxx), Tom Noonan (Cain), Galyn Gorg (Angie), Gabriel Damon (Hob), and Dan O'Herlihy (The Old Man) (1990): There's 25 minutes of good-to-great in Robocop 2 and about 75 minutes ranging from bad to embarrassingly racist, sexist, or just plain awful.
The movie features some of the worst acting I've ever seen in a major motion picture. It's truly astounding. Belinda Bauer and Galyn Gorg (!) are especially terrible as a mad scientist and a drug lord's main squeeze, but there's lots of other bad thespianism as well. The writing is intermittently dreadful, and the tone is so jarringly all over the place that the movie sometimes seems to have been made by three different groups. One group loves satire, another loves action, and the third keeps intruding with bits of mawkish sentimentality in inappropriate places.
But some of the satire is pretty good, especially that of corporate mores. Old Detroit is bankrupt! And its mayor is an unbelieveably awful Stepin Fetchit African-American who, in one of those mawkish moments, suddenly gives a rousing speech about community values before lapsing back into eye-popping a-scaredness. Ameliorating the racism is the basic fact that pretty much everyone in Robocop 2 is scum with the exception of most of the cops and a couple of other people. Otherwise, though, why Robocop bothers saving anyone is a question best left unasked.
Also, the movie looks like it was filmed on videotape for long stretches. It's hard to believe that the director is Irvin Kershner, beloved director of The Empire Strikes Back, the best-looking of all the Star Wars films when it comes to cinematography. This film looks awful. It makes the intentionally cruddy looking They Live look like The Godfather by comparison.
The stop-motion stuff, though, is a lot of fun, and the design of Robocop 2, who is actually the antagonist as well as the title, is pretty keen. The two Robocops have a lengthy, enjoyable superhero battle that will probably cause you to wonder why the police don't make their armor out of whatever Robocop 2's wearing. He's nigh-indestructible! I love stop-motion cyborgs punching each other! The battle is awesome!
Throughout, Peter Weller does his best to imbue Robocop with some semblance of character, much of it through body language rather than dialogue or facial movements (after all, with the helmet on, only Weller's mouth is visible). He's a trooper. As bad as much of it is, it's still better than about 75% of the CGI-heavy superhero movies released with increasing frequency and decreasing effect (and affect) today. Not really recommended, but I'll probably watch it again someday.
Beat the Devil: written by Truman Capote and John Huston, based on the novel by James Helvick; starring Humphrey Bogart (Billy Dannreuther), Gina Lollobrigida (Maria Dannreuther), Jennifer Jones (Mrs. Gwendolen Chelm), Edward Underdown (Harry Chelm), Robert Morley (Peterson) and Peter Lorre (Julius O'Hara) (1953): Oddball cult favourite that parodies movies like director John Huston's own The Maltese Falcon. Apparently, few realized it was a parody at the time, so its purposeful aimlessness seemed instead like accidental plotlessness.
The whole thing features a gang of criminals looking to acquire mining rights for uranium in Africa through a certain amount of skullduggery and offscreen murder. They've retained scoundrel Bogart to help secure these rights once they reach Africa. But when the film begins, they're stuck in Italy waiting for their ship's engine to be repaired. An impoverished Brit pretending to be landed gentry attracts Bogart's eye, as does his wife. And Bogart's wife has eyes for the Brit.
And then...well, the plot-oriented parody pretty much centres on the fact that things remain completely stalled for the first hour of this 90-minute movie. And then they stall again on the cruise to Africa. And then the movie finishes in a rush.
One's enjoyment of Beat the Devil will pretty much depend on how enjoyable one finds the actors (including long-time Bogart co-star Peter Lorre as a fugitive Nazi who's adopted an Irish last name) and the dialogue, and, finally, how much one appreciates the structural parody of movies focused upon the acquisition of an object or piece of land by competing groups of crooks. I enjoyed it, but I'm not sure I'd ever watch it again. Recommended.
Icon: Mothership Connection: written by Dwayne McDuffie; illustrated by M.D. Bright, Mike Gustovich, and others (1994-95; collected 2010): This volume collects one lengthy storyline from the flagship book of the 1990's Milestone Comics line. Milestone Comics encompassed a far more multi-cultural, ethnically diverse superhero universe than the mainstream had ever seen before.
Icon was the African-American Superman figure of the line, an immortal alien trapped on Earth in the 1850's. His escape pod reconfigured his body to look like the first member of the dominant species it could scan. As the alien had crashed in the pre-Civil War South and was found by a slave, he'd soon learn first-hand about the problems of humanity.
Nearly 150 years later, the alien is a rich and successful lawyer who's been guilted into using his superheroes to help and inspire others by a 15-year-old girl who broke into his house. The girl is given alien technology by the alien so that she can fight crime beside them, and they become Icon and Rocket.
Here, Icon finds out he can go home again. And so he does, to be debriefed on what he's learned about life on Earth, and whether or not humanity should be allowed to continue, or be exterminated before it becomes more dangerous. So Rocket -- herself forced to take a superheroic leave of absence because of pregnancy -- recruits a new Icon, a 1970's blaxploitation African-American superhero previously encountered by Rocket and Icon named Buck Wild.
Late, much-lamented writer Dwayne McDuffie and main artist M.D. Bright turn Wild into a very specific (and hilarious) parody of the 1970's and early 1980's version of the Marvel superhero Luke Cage, Power Man.
But Buck Wild also becomes a vehicle of parody for a long list of often egregiously awful African-American superheroes from DC and Marvel: superheroes with comically ridiculous and incorrect 'street' speech patterns; superheroes who apparently absolutely positively had to have the adjective 'Black' at the start of their superhero names because otherwise one wouldn't know they were black; superheroes and supervillains with insultingly stereotypical African-American character traits and careers...well, the list goes on.
Through it all, though, Buck Wild is granted some form of relevance as an attempt at something, if not a particularly accomplished rendition of said thing. Though it's still a very good thing for Dakota City when Icon elects to return to Earth, though whether or not he'll stay is another question. Superior superhero stuff. Christmas! Highly recommended.
Astro City Volume 1: Life in the Big City: written by Kurt Busiek; illustrated by Brent Anderson and Alex Ross (1995-96): The first Astro City collection immediately sets the template for the entire series, in which meta-commentary on the history of American superhero comics helps structure tales of Astro City, the New York of another world where super-heroes have been kicking around for decades.
Astro City stands apart from most such 'adult' examinations of superhero comics because it's not deconstructionist, it's not satiric, and it's not a 'realistically' hyper-violent reimagining of children's characters. Superheroes are, for the most part, good in the way they once were, but that doesn't mean they're uncomplicated.
And while annotations on the various homages and references herein could fill their own book, the 'meta' can safely be ignored in order to enjoy a good story. One doesn't need to know that Busiek has used a Who's Who of comic-book-creator names for the streets, subdivisions, and locations of his imaginary world. Or that characters and situations homage famous comic-book characters and situations, not to mention historical publication eras.
Busiek manages the tricky feat of filling an intensely meta-fictional book with sympathetic characters, cosmic moments, and pointed bits of commentary that stay just this side of satire. And he jumps right into the two-fold narrative approach that will dominate the book for its existence. The stories of Astro City will sometimes center on what ordinary, non-powered people feel like given that they live in a world teeming with super-powered beings. And the stories will sometimes focus upon what those super-heroes and super-villains are like not only behind the masks, but in the mundane aspects of their private lives. These two approaches made Astro City unique at the time it started, as did its lack of cynicism and hyper-violence.
The twinned artists of Astro City -- cover artist and designed Alex Ross and interior artist and designer Brent Anderson -- form a fascinating study in contrasts. Anderson still fits roughly into the Neal Adams school of hyperrealism, but he's tempered his approach over the years to become a fine renderer of the mundane and the commonplace. The faces of his characters are distinctive and unique, a necessity for this sort of book, and while he can portray freaky cosmic battles with some alacrity, he keeps the characters involved in those moments rooted in the real.
Ross, on the other hand, may model his photorealistic painted figures on real people, and he may obsess over how a costume would actually look if it were made from real-world materials, but he's nonetheless at his best setting these sometimes discomfortingly 'real' looking characters against gigantic, earth-shattering situations. He can do the small moments, but it's the uncanny effect of photo-realistic characters in the middle of events that couldn't possibly have been photographed that's his strongest suit. They are both in rare form here. Highly recommended.
Astro City Volume 3: Family Album: written by Kurt Busiek; illustrated by Brent Anderson, Willie Blyberg, and Alex Ross (1997-98): One- and two-issue stories flesh out some of the world of Astro City. The mystery of what happened to good-guy The Silver Agent in the 1970's begins to deepen, but this occurs in the background for the most part.
We instead focus on the travails of generational superhero Jack-in-the-Box (partially a nifty homage to Steve Ditko-designed crime-fighters Spider-man, the 1960's Blue Beetle, and The Creeper, but with a distinctive personality and look all his own); the attempts of third-generation super-heroine Astra to find out what normal pre-teen girls do at school and in play; and the weird life of Loony Leo, a Humphrey-Bogart-like animated lion brought to life by a super-villain and then stuck living in the 'real' world for decades. In all, a perfect gateway book to the Astro City universe. Highly recommended.
Astro City Volume 6: The Dark Age, Part One: Brothers & Other Strangers: written by Kurt Busiek; illustrated by Brent Anderson and Alex Ross (2007-2008): Charles and Royal Williams were just kids when they lost their parents in 1959 to a murderous henchmen of the super-villain organization Pyramid. They've had a grudge against that henchman, and against good guy Silver Agent for not saving their parents the way heroes are supposed to, ever since.
Careers as a cop and as a minor criminal, respectively, parallel the descent of Astro City into what residents would later call the Dark Age, a period spanning the 1970's and early 1980's when heroes, villains, and the general population became increasingly violent and disaffected. And while we follow the Williams brothers as they gradually formulate a plan to find that henchman, we also finally begin to learn the tragic story of the Silver Agent himself, hinted at pretty much since the beginning of the Astro City series. Highly recommended.
Astro City Volume 7: The Dark Age, Part Two: Brothers in Arms: written by Kurt Busiek; illustrated by Brent Anderson and Alex Ross (2008-2010): The quest of the Williams brothers for vengeance against the man who murdered their parents builds to an apocalyptic climax, with their personal revenge drama interweaving with the increasingly dire state of Astro City itself. New vigilantes stalk the streets as the 1980's begin, happy to maim and kill criminals, while the older heroes either retire or seem to become irrelevant.
But the time-hopping Silver Agent has promised that everything will get better, even though he may need the help of the grudge-holding Williams brothers, who believe him to be a failure for not saving the lives of their parents twenty-five years earlier, to secure that better tomorrow. This volume probably marks the most pointed commentary of the entire Astro City series when it comes to 1980's and early 1990's trends in superhero comics -- the names get goofier and sometimes redundant ('Lord Sovereign'), the costumes get fussily complicated, and the heroes become ultra-violent.
The meta-commentary, and the complicated plot, both sometimes undercut the more under-stated strengths of the Astro City series, but Busiek and company nonetheless manage to satisfyingly conclude the 16-issue storyline. Recommended.
13 Short Horror Novels: edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh (Collected 1987), containing the following stories:
"Jerusalem's Lot" (1978) by Stephen King: Fun riff by King on Lovecraft's horror stories, most obviously "The Rats in the Walls", told through a series of letters. Has nothing to do with 'Salem's Lot.
"The Parasite" (1894) by Arthur Conan Doyle: The creator of Sherlock Holmes indulges his love of the paranormal, specifically hypnotism, here. Boy, people thought hypnotism (or 'mesmerism') could do some crazy stuff in the 19th century. Here it allows for the telepathic takeover of other people's bodies!
"Fearful Rock" (1939) by Manly Wade Wellman: Excellent Civil War period piece from Wellman, as a patrol of Union soldiers finds itself confronted with supernatural evil.
"Sardonicus" (1961) by Ray Russell: Classic story from Russell is a blackly humourous character study written in a 19th-century epistolary style. Made into a movie called Mr. Sardonicus.
"Nightflyers" (1980) by George R. R. Martin: Once upon a time, the Game of Thrones creator was an excellent horror and science fiction writer. He combines the two here for a locked-room-in-space horror show. Made into a terrible movie of the same name.
"Horrible Imaginings" (1982) by Fritz Leiber: Weird, relatively late-career novella from the great Leiber riffs much more grimly on his years in San Francisco after his wife's death than similar works of the same period that include "The Ghost Light" and Our Lady of Darkness. Not great, but spellbinding nonetheless, with a completely bizarre conclusion.
"Jane Brown's Body" (1938) by Cornell Woolrich: Interesting combination of the horror and hard-boiled crime-fiction genres. Gangsters, mad scientists, and a tragic ending you know is coming, as inevitable as death in a world where death has been temporarily conquered.
"Killdozer!" (1944) by Theodore Sturgeon: Sturgeon goes full-on Basil Exposition here as he explains pretty much everything you ever wanted to know about how to operate a bulldozer and a backhoe. I kid you not. There's pages and pages of handy bulldozer operation knowledge here. An interesting premise (an electromagnetic monster takes over a bulldozer; hilarity obviously ensues) bogs down in interminable explanations of how everything works. If you're fascinated by the heavy machinery of 1944, this novella is for you. Made into a movie of the same name.
"The Shadow Out of Time" (1936) by H. P. Lovecraft: One of Lovecraft's least horrifying, most science-fictiony and sublime meditations on cosmic stuff and time abysses. The aliens here -- 12-foot-tall rugose cones dubbed "the Great Race" -- are probably Lovecraft's least threatening, most benign race of super-aliens. Also, they're socialists.
"The Stains" (1980) by Robert Aickman: Aickman is at his creepy, ambiguous best here in a story of a buttoned-down widower who starts a new life with a young woman who is...well, I don't know. Baffling, oblique, and utterly haunting, but not for anybody who wants some sort of minimal explanation of what is actually happening.
"The Horror from the Hills" (1931) by Frank Belknap Long: Gonzo Exposition from Long's Gonzo Exposition Cosmic Horror Period that also yielded such distinctive, Lovecraft-lecture-series gems as "The Space-Eaters" and "The Hounds of Tindalos." A man-sized, vaguely elephant-shaped idol comes to life and threatens all life on Earth. And only a museum director, a cop, and an occult inventor can save us in a final battle staged in...New Jersey! Paging Jules de Grandin!
"Children of the Kingdom" (1980) by T. E. D. Klein: I've read this novella at least ten times over the course of 32 years and find something new to ponder every time. This time around, it's the fact that in this story of racism and xenophobia in the decaying, crime-ridden New York of the late 1970's, the ultimate horrors that move literally beneath the surface are fish-belly white.
"Frost and Fire" (1946) by Ray Bradbury: Disquieting and propulsive bit of science-fiction-as-metaphor by Bradbury, as humans stranded on a highly radioactive planet by a spaceship crash are born, age, and die in the space of eight days (!). A telepathy mutation allows the children to rapidly learn, but can one determined man find a way to reach the last extant starship and find a way off the planet?
Weird Tales Volume 1 edited by Peter Haining, containing the following stories: The Man Who Returned by Edmond Hamilton; Black Hound of Death by Robert E. Howard; The Shuttered House by August Derleth; Frozen Beauty by Seabury Quinn; Haunting Columns by Robert E. Howard; Beyond the Wall of Sleep by H. P. Lovecraft; The Garden of Adompha by Clark Ashton Smith; Cordelia's Song by Vincent Starrett; Beyond the Phoenix by Henry Kuttner; The Black Monk by G. G. Pendarves; Passing of a God by Henry S. Whitehead; and They Run Again by Leah Bodine Drake (1923-1939; collected 1978):
Solid anthology (well, the first half of a hardcover anthology, divided for paperback publication) of stories from the first 15 years of Weird Tales, the pulp magazine that got its start in 1923. This half is quite heavy on the novella-length story, with lengthy entries from Robert E. 'Conan' Howard, Seabury Quinn, Henry Kuttner, and Henry S. Whitehead.
The Howard piece is an interesting, intensely racist story of supernatural revenge set in the two-fisted South. Kuttner's story features his sword-and-sorcery hero Elak of Atlantis. Seabury Quinn's supernatural detective Jules de Grandin tackles Bolsheviks and suspended animation in a fairly un-supernatural outing.
Solid shorter stories come from H.P. Lovecraft, August Derleth, and Edmond Hamilton (the latter Quinn's only real rival for the title of 'Most popular writer among the then-readers of Weird Tales). Clark Ashton Smith's entry is a grotesque humdinger. And the now-little-known Henry S. Whitehead contributes a truly bizarre piece about voodoo and...stomach tumours??? It's not a tumour!!! Recommended.
Captain America: War and Remembrance: written by Roger Stern and John Byrne; illustrated by John Byrne and Josef Rubinstein (1980; collected 2010): One of the three or four highest of the high points for the patriotic Captain America's comic-book career. Some sort of bizarre (and typical) infighting at Marvel Comics in 1980 truncated Roger Stern and John Byrne's run on Captain America at nine issues, which is a shame, though Stern would move over to a fine run on Spider-man while Byrne would soon be writing and drawing the Fantastic Four.
Standalone high points include a retelling of Cap's origin that attempts to fix some pretty odd continuity problems that had accreted over the years, problems that Stern and Byrne also address in an earlier story in the volume. They send Cap out against familiar villains (Batroc, the French mercenary), villains commonly associated with other super-heroes (the Fantastic Four's Dragon Man and Thor's Mr. Hyde), and Cap villains from long ago (Baron Blood, a World War Two vampire enemy of Cap's from the then-recently cancelled WWII supergroup book The Invaders).
Everything included here is extremely good superhero stuff, but the Baron Blood two-parter is probably the finest thing in the collection. It's also one of the finest pieces of superhero adventure Stern and Byrne ever created together or separately. Josef Rubinstein's heavier inks are perfect here for Byrne's pencils in a way that a more fan-praised Byrne inker such as Terry Austin would not have been, making thing moody and shadowy when needed. Byrne and Rubinstein manage a real sense of menace throughout the two-parter, and the whole thing is satisfyingly dense on the narrative level. I'd imagine a 2013 retelling would run about 12 issues and be about 1/12th as satisfying.
Stern and Byrne work well together -- Stern is a master of keeping readers caught up with events of previous issues without bogging the story down in exposition, and he and Byrne structure some fairly stunning action scenes here, with the best being Cap's last battle with Baron Blood. Highly recommended.
Astro City Volume 4: The Tarnished Angel: written by Kurt Busiek; illustrated by Brent Anderson, Willie Blyberg, and Alex Ross (1997-98): The fourth collection of Busiek and Anderson's great Astro City series focuses on a small-time supervillain dubbed The Steel-Jacketed Man, or Steeljack, as he gets out of prison after 20 years and tries to go straight. In a way, this is an extended homage to the Lee/Ditko Spider-man story "A Guy Named Joe," about a similar small-time hood, though Busiek's character actually craves some form of redemption for the disappointments his criminal life visited upon his now-deceased mother.
While the entire Astro City series is intensely metafictional in its characters, settings, and storylines, Busiek nonetheless frames the metafictional elements within stories of loss, discovery, redemption, and betrayal. It's a sort of metafiction of sentiment rather than commentary (ironic or otherwise) on the history of superhero comic books. Samaritan may be the Astro City analog of Superman, and his first appearance may coincide both in year and in event with John Byrne's Superman reboot at DC in 1986, but he's also his own character through whom Busiek can explore issues of character and motivation in a fantastic context.
Steeljack's story plays out as an homage to hardboiled detective fiction, but with superheroes and supervillains. Someone has been killing minor supervillains, so the residents of Kiefer Square, a slum area populated by supervillains and their families, decide to pay Steeljack to investigate the murders, hoping that his nigh-invulnerable living-steel body may keep him alive long enough to solve the mystery. A plot oriented around the killing of minor villains also riffs on the hero-killer plot of Watchmen.
The story then follows Steeljack, with the sort of copious first-person narration from his viewpoint that will be a familiar device to anyone who's seen a hardboiled detective movie or read a novel. Plagued by doubt and loss, Steeljack makes for a sympathetic protagonist even as he also functions as a fairly potent evaluation of mainstream supervillains. Why don't some of these people go legit and make money from their inventions and powers rather than endlessly robbing banks and getting caught?
Why indeed. They are trapped in a social loop of poverty and crime, as are criminals in the real world, but criminals in the real world aren't invulnerable or possessed of super-technology or super-strength. Some of Steeljack's most poignant moments come in pondering this fantastic problem: why did he allow himself to slip into the life of a sueprvillain? And is there any way out?
Brent Anderson's art is, as always, perfect for the series, fairly naturalistic (especially when compared to a lot of younger artists and artistic approaches at DC and Marvel), rooted in character and telling detail, but also quite dynamic when the story calls for it. Alex Ross's covers are their usual source of painterly goodness. Highly recommended.
