Project Superpowers: Chapter One

How many times will the Watchmen be attempted again?  Granted, Dynamite's go at it here is more than 30 years later, but if you're not bringing something really new to the table I'm hard pressed to say why I should be interested.  But, I didn't have to be.  Lee was, or someone before him for all I know, and now it's arrived on my doorstep.

Like Watchmen, we have a bunch of old timey heroes that no one remembers.  Actually, these guys are probably even less known than the cast of Watchmen's foundational characters.  Our cast consists of The Fighting Yank, Samson, The Target, Mr Face, Masquerade, The Flame, The Death Defying Devil, Pyroman, The Black Terror, V-Man, Hydro, The Green Lama, The Scarab, and The Arrow.  The only female in the bunch is Masquerade.

And lest we get into any of our recent controversy about spoilers in material that's 4 years old, I'm going to talk about the plot of the book, ok?  If you're saving up to read this sometime down the road and have a particular fondness for surprises in plotting, stop now.

Not that there's anything much that's surprising here.  Part of it is that I never felt like I had a feel for who the characters were the way I did with Watchmen.  By the end of those twelve issues I knew what kind of people they were, what motivated them, and what their weaknesses where.  Here there's a larger cast and only 8 issues worth of story.  Really, more like 7 1/2, as the collection is issues 0-7, and 0 was just a teaser thing.

So, here's the gist.  The Fightining Yank is the center of the story.  He and all but The Scarab were heroes fighting the Nazis in World War II.  Once the Germans surrendered they went to Japan.  In fact, their last mission in the war was to try to get the Japanese to surrender before the second atomic bomb was dropped on August 9, 1945.  They did manage to stop the dropping of the bomb on the first target but the plane just continued on to Nagasaki instead.  Samson was blinded in trying to stop the bomb and The Flame disappeared, apparently killed by his own flames that he couldn't control.

What was really going on was that The Fighting Yank, at the direction of the ghost of an ancestor who had fought with George Washington during the Revolutionary War, was trapping his teammates in Pandora's Urn (not a box) so that they, representing hope, would cause the evils of the world to return to the urn and leave the Earth.  When he proposed this idea to the team they refused, but he surruptiously started taking them out while on missions, starting with The Flame.  He manages to get them all except Samson and The Green Lama, who's a mystic sort who has returned to whatever mystic province he inhabits.

The story really starts in the present, on a world not much like our own.  It's run by Dynamic Man and his family of dynamic beings.  They're all actually robots  but people don't generally know that.  They don't directly run the world but have a major corporation that essentially has a large influence on the US, at least.  They're running wars for the US that no longer involved Americans dying.  See, they just take the dead bodies of soldiers who died in previous conflicts and reanimate them, using them to fight instead.  They mostly look like the stereotypical Frankenstein's monster, with the flat top and black hair.  Each time they're knocked out of commission they're sent to a hospital that revives them, so long as they can be cobbled back together.  Obsessions of the moment being what they are, they're mostly fighting in the Middle East over oil.

The Dynamic Family has the urn and doesn't want the missing heroes returned but The Fighting Yank, now elderly, gets it and breaks it, returning the heroes to the world from the dimension they had been all this time.  Some are changed by their stay in this other dimension.  The Face, for instance, who wore a demon mask, now finds it permanently attached to his face. 

There are number of things going on, few of which are resovled in this arc.  The Fighting Yank's ancester turns out to be a demon trapped in Hell who had thought that getting the heroes trapped in the urn would somehow atone for his betrayal of George Washington during the Revolution, freeing him from Hell.  That's really the only arc that has some resolution, as that plot fails. 

There's more with Dynamic Man trying to get a seat on some secret cabal that's actually directing him, and which turns out to have The Scarab as a member.  The Scarab was operating under the radar in the Middle East, not letting anyone see him, even in costume.  The Black Terror's sidekick hasn't reappeared from the urn's diminsion, though he was taken into it at the same time as The Black Terror.  The fact that they showed up at different points on the globe and not in NYC where the urn was broken is never explained.  I don't think they returned to the places they originally disappeared because The Flame returned in LA and disappeared in Japan. 

Clearly this is an ongoing series, as is clear by the end of this volume, not to mention in the name - Chapter One.  What this is bringing to reading enjoyment is nostalgia for an era.  There's not much in the way of nostalgia for these largely unknown characters, but plenty for the World War II era and the heroes spawned in comics at that time.  There's far too little development of the characters and far too much hopping around the globe chasing various conspiracy threads.  At the back of the book are pages and pages of Golden Age characters drawn by Alex Ross, many of whom are not even in this volume.  I don't know if this means they'll show up in some future stories (now past, I suppose, as I write this 4 years later), but more than anything this line up shows how often the characters were redundant of one another.  That and some really awful names.  Martin The Marvel Man?  Professor Supermind & Son?  Yank & Doodle?  Really?  Did even pre-puscent kids think these were great?  I think my favorite is Jack.  How's that a nom du guerre?  It's just a version of John.

The credits say Alex Ross and Jim Krueger were behind the story, with Krueger doing the scripting.  The original covers were by Ross but the interior art was mostly Carlos Paul, who did 1-7, with Douglas Klauba doing 0.  It's a pretty piece of work, even without Ross doing any interiors. 

I think the strength of The Watchmen is that it told one story limited to 12 issues.  It was a large story with a lot of elements, but it had a huge amount of character development in those 12 issues and kept focused on the getting from point A of the Comedian's death to point B of Veidt's plan to unite the world.  Oh, and that's a spoiler about The Watchmen, in case you haven't read it in the last 30 years.

Some odds and ends From Lee

Some odds and ends that Lee sent me recently.  This is Thomm, by the way.  A recently blog difficulty ended up with this being posted under Lee's name.

Higher Earth 1 from Boom! Studios is by Sam Humphries and Francesco Biagini. Strangely enough, I got the last issue of Incorruptible after getting this issue from Lee, and there’s a preview for it in the back of Incorruptible. Seems a bit of the cart before the horse to have a preview when the issue is already out. This book is a future sci-fi story with a lot of explosions and constant fighting. There’s a Sliders sort of thing going on with travel between parallel Earths, but that’s about all I got out of it. There’s not much in the way of character development so far.

G.I. Combat 1 from DC has work by J.T. Krul, Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti, Ariel Olivetti, and Dan Panosian. The front end story is The War that Time Forgot by Krul and Olivetti. It’s very pretty but makes no sense so far. On physics alone I couldn’t figure out some things. For one, how is a pterodactyl flying in from above on a helicopter and not being torn to pieces by the rotor? The second story is another version of The Unknown Soldier. This one’s in Afghanistan when he’s “created”. Unlike the original character, we’re getting a back story to know who he is right away. I don’t know if that’s going to work. Some of what was great about the original was that he was a cypher. In the more recent Vertigo version in Uganda it was an entirely different sort of story, too, with the only similarity to this one being that we knew who the soldier is. Gray and Palmiotti, with Panosian on art, may get this moving into something interesting, but it’s not there yet.

Spider 1 from Dynamite is by David Liss and Colton Worley. It and The Shadow 1 & 2 by Garth Ennis and Aaron Campbell, also from Dynamite, have the same theme going. Bas ically, a largely forgotten old character, and the Spider is more unknown than The Shadow, is revived as a Punisheresque killing machine. I don’t know why I’m supposed to like these characters, as a reader. They’re angry. They’re unrelenting. They’re indiscriminate. They’re also uninteresting. I can go around shooting people who offend me. Doesn’t make me interesting to read about or worthy of some sort of adulation. Not my cup of tea, either of them.

Finally, we had Point One, a one shot from Marvel. It reminds me of the old History of the DC Universe that was put out after Crisis on Infinite Earths so that readers could get up to speed on the status quo at DC, post all the big changes. This isn’t nearly as comprehensive, though. There are just little look-ins on various characters, via the deus ex machine of a couple of guys raiding The Watcher’s place while he’s doing some sort of download to his home planet. Nova, Age of Apocalypse, Scarlet Spider, Coldmoon & Dragonfire, Doctor Strange, and The Avengers are all visited. I know nothing about Scarlet Spider or Coldmoon & Dragonfire. The latter appeared interesting, if improbable. After seeing Scarlet Spider I have to wonder if there are any heroes in the Marvel U that don’t have some nefarious knock off running around, or at least who’s now being reformed into some sort of flawed hero, which is kind of funny, considering Marvel specialized in flawed heroes from the beginning.

Black Widow: Deadly Origin

I should really thank Lee for this one.  (Thomm writing here.  Blog issues caused this to go up under Lee's name.)

 It’s a wonderful reminder of why I don’t read Marvel anymore.

Black Widow: Deadly Origin by Paul Cornell, Tom Raney and John Paul Leon is more amusing than it has a right to be. It’s a strange attempt to clean up the history of a character who has been so manipulated and convoluted over the last 50 years that she’d have to spend the rest of her life in a maximum security mental facility if she were a real person. In fact, it’s the total removal from any semblance of reality that, in the end, makes this read so unsatisfying.

Granted, my experience with the Black Widow is largely limited to the Miller and Mazzucchelli era of Daredevil. Then she was a strong, well balanced individual. In fact, she was something of a touchstone of sanity for Matt Murdock during his first run of dark stories. I think I’ll hold onto those stories for my view of the character and leave this aside.

So, here’s the story. Someone’s trying to destroy the Black Widow through something called Icepick Protocol, which launched out of the remains of Russian security. The operation particularly targets her loved ones and close associates, past and present. The first to go is Ivan Petrovitch, a longtime colleague who she views as a father figure. And when I say a long time, I mean a really long time.

Jim has frequently mentioned that Marvel’s time line of stories seems to put the origin of characters 10-15 years in the past, regardless of where we are in the present, but, like Captain America who’s still supposed to be a veteran of WWII, the Black Widow is still supposed to have been born in 1928 in the Soviet Union. A Soviet version of the Super Soldier Formula has kept her and Ivan young, with her in her 30s to all appearances and Ivan in his 50s. The character’s first appearance was in 1964 so the Super Soldier Formula explains a lot for her but what about all the characters she met in the 1960s and onward who don’t have these life extending formulas?

See, that’s the thing with this story. It doesn’t reboot the character. It tries to explain all her various permutations since 1964 into one convoluted story of betrayals, institutionalizations, revivals of the program that created her to create others who sometimes substituted for her, and on and on. Hell, Bucky Barnes ends up in there at several points, and I still like it better when he was just dead all those years after WWII.

But if she’s been around as a Marvel character since 1964 and met many of the current characters a long time ago, she couldn’t have done so because they’ve only been around 10-15 years. It’s a time conundrum. I hate time conundrums.

But, even leaving that aside, the story’s not much. The villain is easy to see a mile away if you have any experience reading super hero and super spy works. His motivation as a spurned lover is unintentionally hilarious, too. At least I think it’s unintentional. Here’s this woman who’s had nothing but poorly pursued and badly ended relationships, and who’s made it clear she’s not romantically interested in him, but he’s sacrificing his own humanity and trying to kill everyone around her before killing her. It’s a Rube Goldberg revenge. I suppose it’s de rigueur for comic book super hero villains, but it just seems funnier than it’s supposed to be.

Ah, well. At least it looks nice. Raney does all the scenes in the present in a very clean style while Leon does the various flashbacks in a rougher edge. That part reminded me of the Miller years, which was nice.

I don’t think reaffirmation of why I avoid Marvel super hero comics is what they were going for, though.

Snake Pit 2007 and 2008

And the last of the most recent mailings from Lee.  This is two books by Ben Snakepit.  Each book is 365 three panel comic strips that feature something going on in his life for each day of the year.  Ben works in a retail store as a manager and plays in a couple bands.  Ben also gets drunk and stoned a lot.  Ben has a girlfriend who also likes to get drunk and stoned a lot.

The problem with these books is that, as far as I could tell, that's all that happens.  To be fair, I only made it half way through 2007 because it was just the same things over and over.  There was one really long road trip one of his bands took that was interesting, but that was a very small part of it.

Now, truth be told, no one's life, seen on a daily basis, is probably all that interesting, which is a question of format for this book.  On the other hand, the life of a slacker is particularly uninteresting to me.  I might have more interest in the daily tribulations of parenthood and responsibility, both of which are nowhere in evidence in Snakepit, but even then it'd be a tough sell.

Really, does anyone want to read about my daily work investigating, negotiating, settling, and litigating (well, guiding litigation) auto claims?  With the wide variety in crazy and stupid things that show up in claims, that might be more interesting.  Of course, I don't have the free time of a slacker to write it up.  It's enough to try to write up these posts and my own daily posts on my own blog.

Edible Secrets

More stuff from Lee.  While Henry And Glenn Forever was amusing, this is a polemic that's trying to be funny and failing. 

The premise of the book is that declassified documents can be funny because of their pedestrian references to food in the midst of reports about international and domestic affairs.  And that can be pretty funny, because when you get right down to it, most classified documents are boring and meaningless.  Documents are over classified as secret and contain really pedestrian affairs far more than anything of significance to the government collecting the information.  Hell, most often they events chronicled aren't significant to the people performing them.

The problem with this book is that its an utter fail.  If humor was its aim, it misses the entire firing range, let alone the mark.  Ok, there's the unintentional funny of it.  In this era of right wing conspiracy being primary (mostly about the Kenyan radical Muslim/Communist/Facist/traitor President) it's funny to see a left wing conspiracy book.  Takes me back to a course in law school that I took called Race, Racism and Radical Legal Thinking.  Man, was that ever full of unfounded assertions.  So's this.

Much of its problem is that it takes the assertions of subjects of the classified documents at face value and dismisses the investigations of the government as automatically baseless.  That may be so, but there's no evidence presented.  There's also an automatic presumption that capitalism is a bad thing.  Unfettered, I'd agree, but that's not the case, particularly in the time of a lot of these documents.  Before Reagan, capitalism in the US was a lot more restricted than it is now.

Here's a brief quote from the book.  I'm pretty sure it'll tell you whether this is your cup of tea.

"We must rember that while accusing the innocent marks everyone as a potential target, attacking actual Leftists unmakes political activity and intellectualism, sewing seeds of fear and distrust into Leftist communities.  The louder the government spoke against communism, the more difficult - or risky - it became for citizens to speak.

To say the 1950s were quiet years lacking in dissent would be a mischaracerization, falling prey to mediated images of nuclear families and uncomfortable marriages.  The Left was alive, it always is.  Resistance is ever present.  But the climate of fear and the publicity of punishment surrounding the Rosenbergs' trial and executino froze the Left out of political life."

Um, yeah.  'Cause there were no Democrats in the 1950s.  Or they weren't sufficiently Left.  One of those.

To me, you could make this entire assertion, which, by the way, comes from the use of a Jell-o box in the Rosenberg case, into a cry of resistance by the Know Nothing/Tea Party of today.  Just substitute a few words and its the same kind of paranoia.

Henry & Glenn Forever

Lee sent me some more of the leavings of his Alexandrian library of comics related material.  I'm going to take these one at a time because they're just that...curious.

First is Henry & Glenn Forever, a publication of Igloo Tornado.  This is a 6x6 book and, scarily, is the best of the bunch.  Not for being overly professional in presentation, because it's lacking a bit there, but it's the most entertaining. 

All it is  is a series of one off panels operating on the premise that Glenn Danzig and Henry Rollins are lovers.  As two of the hardest of hard core rockers, this is a pretty funny premise.  The writers make it a bit more so by implying they're living in fear of retribution.  Oh, and Daryl Hall and John Oates are the gay couple next door who are Satanists.

The panels themselves are hit and miss.  There are various creators, based on the differences in art in the panels.  My favorites tended to be the ones where Glenn is depicted as a sort of Little Orphan Annie/Goon character. 

For no particular reason there's also a panel where Wolverine asks Colossus if his pants make his butt look big.  It's that kind of out of left field that pulls it back for me, because when it's on, the book has some really funny takes on issues ranging from homosexuality and abortion to vanity and Satanic rituals.  Not likely to be to a wide audience taste, but a good read if you don't mind being offended every now and again.  Just don't tell Glenn.

Lee's comment:  If you're familiar with heavy metal and the music of Henry and Glenn, there are lots of references to lyrics which make many of the pages even funnier.

The Shadow: Blood and Judgment

Lee's doing his utmost to remind me why my once fond memories of Howard Chaykin's work have receded so much. Sending me this four issue mini-series from 1986, I realize it's a good thing I hadn't read this before I read American Century, or I might never have read it.

As I recall, I read the ongoing series written by Andy Helfer and drawn by Bill Sienkiewicz in 1987-1989, but I never picked up this mini-series. I don't think Chaykin was on my radar at that point, and I wasn't keeping up with comics too much at the time due to being in college, but I'd guess I got the ongoing because of Sienkiewicz on the art. I was a big fan of his work on New Mutants back then.

While the ongoing series was set in the usual 1930s, Chaykin told his story in 1986, or thereabout. He crafted a rationale for Lamont Cranston still being alive, hale and hearty, by having The Shadow disappear more than 40 years prior. It's not a great rationale. The Shadow goes off into whatever mystical, mountainous land he was in when he first became The Shadow, where he doesn't age, but he does have a couple of sons, who are also adults now.

I don't really get the appeal of this land. It's supposed to be more advanced than the outside world, in technology and enlightenment. But the land Chaykin crafts seems to be populated mostly by cold blooded killers whose primary interest is keeping their technology from the outside world.

There's a whole back story with the actual Lamont Cranston, who's a low level scum who tosses his own girlfriend out of an airplane to save is ill gotten cargo. Naturally, this guy's still alive 40 years later, too, and trying to get back to the misty mountain hop to take all the technology.

There's also a story line involving The Shadow's girlfriend from the '30s and '40s, as well as his sidekick. Several of The Shadow's old associates have been killed. If memory serves, that's part of the scummy Lamont Cranston's plan to draw out The Shadow. No idea why The Shadow, with his mysoginistic and superior attitude would care much about these people he abandoned 40 years ago, but that's the raison d'etre.

The biggest problem with this book is that I cared not a whit about any of the characters. The most appealing was the one time sidekick, who at least kept alive the old Shadow mythos and shot his way out of trouble. The Shadow himself is a tool with no love for anyone, so far as I can see. His sons are just kind of there. There's no relationship between them, and I wouldn't have known they were his sons but for it being stated at some point. From the look of them their mother was Asian, which is fitting considering that's the location of the mystery land, but I guess any relationship between The Shadow and the mother wasn't worth mentioning.

The Shadow's former girlfriend isn't very appealing, either. She's a once glamorous woman who seems washed up an beyond her prime. I don't much get her anger at The Shadow 40 years later. Is it worth holding onto for 40 years? No wonder she's not pleasant if she's been hanging onto that as the center of her existence all that time.

All in all, I didn't miss anything in not reading this 26 years ago. Just another nail in the coffin of my interest in Chaykin work.

If I stick to his series in Dark Horse Presents I'd be better off. That was pretty good.

Avengers 1959

There was a time when Howard Chaykin was a lure for me to buy a book. I especially like American Century from Vertigo, but at this point I'm finding that Chaykin just doesn't have the same drawing power.

That's meant both figuratively and literally. Where once his art work would be enough for me to check out a book, I find now that it pains me, more often than not. A lot of that is because of the frequent pained expressions on the characters he draws, regardless of whether the circumstance calls for a pained expression. Look at the cover to the first issue of this mini, for instance. Three of the six characters are grimacing. I think they're meant to look fierece, but they look like vampires with bowel problems, especially Sabretooth and Namora.

That sort of thing occurs in the interior art, too. Characters who are supposed to be smirking look like they stubbed their toe. Even smiling the characters look uncomfortable. Something about the corner of the mouth that makes it look like the smile is forced, I think.