BOUGHT:
Thought of in this light, it becomes apparent—and remarkable—just how weird and half-formed the heroes of the 1940s like Hourman, The Spectre, The Sandman, Dr. Fate and Johnny Thunder are. Even the heroes who would inspire more popular reinventions a generation later like The Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman and The Atom were, at their inception, truly odd leading men, often engaged in aimless but insane-sounding doings.
Why did these and so many other characters become also-rans, instead of making it quite as big as The Man of Steel and The Dark Knight, and why didn't they end up having such long, fruitful careers as those two, and a handful of other Golden Agers...?
Maybe it was a matter of visual design. Or hook. Or adaptability. Or supporting cast. Or milieu. Maybe it was all of it. But it sure is weird to read the early solo adventures of the founding members of the Justice Society of America, and those that were soon added to their club, like Dr. Mid-Nite and Starman.
And a club is really what the Justice Society originally was, at least according to this volume, which collects ten issues of All-Star Comics published between 1940 and 1942.
Their very first meeting involves them gathering for a nice dinner at a hotel and swapping stories of their most exciting adventures, like a sort of pre-war superhero Canterbury Tales. In the second issue, they are each given orders from the FBI to smash up a fifth column plotting against the United States, which they follow individually and only meet up in the final panels. In the third issue, they are each individually targeted by elements of the organized crime, at the direction of the mysterious Mr. X.
And so it would be throughout the rest of the volume, the Society members acting as individuals rather than teammates on their adventures; for the most part, the only time you will see multiple heroes in a single panel is when they were around a table at a meeting.
Reading these comics in 2024, the title story is particularly interesting—and more than a little chilling—in its relevance. That's the aforementioned second issue (and title story), in which the Society's vigilante crime-busters are all recruited by the FBI to combat a wildly extensive plot by "dictator countries" to undermine, sabotage and perhaps even overthrow the United States.
Writer Gardner Fox, who is responsible for the vast majority of the collection (so much so that the table of contents only credits a writer in the rare instance where it's someone other than Fox), seems to go incredibly far out of his way in this issue to not ever use the words "Nazi" or "Germany" or "German", but he's hardly subtle otherwise. The movement is referred to as "the grey-shirts", and, in addition to working for a "dictator country" or "dictator countries," they speak of the "Fatherland", mention a could-be ally's "Teutonic" heritage and, in one instance where The Flash enters one's home, we see posters with swastikas on the wall.
The idea of fascists physically infiltrating America and conducting such large-scale operations against the country might have read as far-fetched a decade ago, but that's only because today's pro-fascists (and/or anti-anti-fascists) tend to consider themselves as being, or at least profess to being, the real Americans, rather than having a greater allegiance to European "dictator" countries...although with the amount of Russian talking points and propaganda that makes its way into Republican and far-right thought and speech, there are certainly plenty of Americans who seem sympathetic to at least that particular dictator-run country's point-of-view.
Today, we have a fairly large segment of the population who want a dictator and/or a fascist movement (and just voted that way), they just want a home-grown one.
It was The Sandman story in this issue that made me the queasiest on that front. Sure, it was a presumably pro-German "grey-shirt" movement that had a militia training in the Texas desert, but it was evocative of the modern militia movement, and some other panels seemed more relevant still, like ones telling of a newspaper receiving bomb threats for its editor writing opinion pieces criticizing an unnamed dictator's country, or others on the prevalence and effectiveness of pro-fascist propaganda in the U.S., or one in which a newspaper secretary confesses to The Sandman that her own little brother has signed up for the grey-shirts, as have other Americans, because it gives him "excitement."
The Sandman's solution? Walking into grey-shirt's nearest headquarters as Wesley Dodds, an average American, and punching anyone who stands in his way, beating up their leader to convince the others that believing in America's traditional values doesn't make you a "sissy." This violence has the effect of convincing all the young men who have signed on to a fascist movement to reject it and sign up for the United States army to fight fascism, a choice that will give them real excitement.
If only it were that easy to defeat today's grey-shirts, the red-hats.
Of course, at this early date in comics history, the still-dawning superhero genre was still a fairly basic power fantasy, with the physical prowess and supernatural abilities of the colorful characters embodying a basic might makes right worldview that can be a little uncomfortable to read these days.
So, for example, in that same storyline, The Flash is tasked with taking on foreign influence in the union movement, which felt, to me (a reader who has happily been in unions for the majority of his adult life, and is the child of union members), to be unfairly furthering the idea of communist influence in the American union system, or at least questioning the very idea that demanding better working conditions from employers is somehow un-American. Here it is, of course, the grey-shirts at work again, and their riling up the unions in this particular story is quite literally un-American, an act of foreign subversion.
We see how un-American at the climax of The Flash chapter, when he invades the local leader's home, and readers see a pair of swastikas, the most obvious linkage between these malefactors and the real-life Nazis in the story. The bad guy complains about The Flash violating his right to privacy, and, just as I was thinking that the Nazi had a good point regarding The Flash's lack of due process, Fox has our hero strike him for objecting.
"That's just like you rats!" Flash says while punching him out, "Yelling about your 'rights' under a constitution you're trying to overthrow! It's only in a free country like America that there is any privacy!"
Now that isn't respecting the norms of a free and democratic society, Flash.
But then, that's at the heart of the superhero comics of this era, where they use their abilities not on other super-powered opponents—this volume is devoid of what we think of as super-villains, or characters with power-levels similar to those of heroes—but, instead, they always rather easily overpower their very human, very mortal opponents, who tend to be gangsters and street criminals. (The closest the Society ever gets to a fair fight in this collection is in issue #10, "The Case of the Bomb Defense Formula!", wherein they travel into the year 2442, and find that the soldiers of the future are so healthy that they can't be overpowered in the same manner that their 20th century opponents usually are.)
The superpowerless guys like The Sandman and The Atom, the latter of whose pitch is simply that he's a short guy who is really, really good at fighting (no wonder he didn't catch the public's imagination in quite the same way as Superman or Batman), do get occasionally knocked down or out, but, for the super-powered among the Society, it takes more unusual (and weirder) circumstances to add even a few panels worth of tension.
For example, the fact that Green Lantern is only impervious to all metals means that wood or glass can still hurt him when it strikes him on the head, or, in a particularly outlandish case, The Spectre, who at this point is basically just a ghost who can do anything, is temporarily made helpless when a hired thug who ignorantly, randomly happens to be wearing a magic ring punches him, temporarily reducing his seemingly omnipotent powers.
A few months after Pearl Harbor—and after the U.S. officially joined the war—Fox seems much freer to name the Society's foreign enemies, and even has them temporarily disband while most of the team enlist in the armed forces in their secret identities.
In All-Star Comics #9, "Hemisphere Defense," the head of the FBI once again comes to the Society for help, giving them eight individual assignments in the countries south of the border to tackle the spies and saboteurs of the Axis powers that are targeting those countries in preparation for an eventual U.S. invasion from the south.
Here Fox uses the words "German" and "Italian" as well as "Nazis" and "fascists", and all of the bad guys seem to be Nazis, both in name and portrayal, much of their dialogue sprinkled with imitations of German accents.
And then in issue #11, "The Justice Society Joins the War on Japan!", seven of the eight men currently serving on the team—by this time, The Flash and Green Lantern had become "honorary members," having graduated to their own titles, while Hourman simply disappeared without comment between issues—resign to join the army or, in Johnny Thunder's case, the navy.
The only one who doesn't? The Spectre. "As a ghost, I'll keep just as busy working on the home front--There's plenty to do!", he explains. Perhaps, being dead, he wouldn't be able to pass the physical?
His chapter of the issue is thus filled by Wonder Woman, "Guest Star in a National Emergency", drawn by her co-creator H.G. Peter. (In the next issue, she would volunteer to be the Society's secretary and appear in three panels of the framing sequence.)
She's already serving in the war effort, of course, both as a star-spangled warrior and, in her Diana Prince identity, a nurse. As for the men, they, somewhat curiously, all volunteer, get their assignments, go through training and are then involved in battles, during which each of them slips away, shed their uniforms, assume their heroic identities and use their extraordinary abilities to sink ships, flip tanks and knock airplanes from the sky.
In almost every case, their fellow soldiers realize that The Sandman or Starman or whoever must actually be enlisted in their outfit under their real name, but vow to keep that fact a secret.
With such powerhouses fighting against Japan, it shouldn't take long for the United States to wrap up the war, right? Well, by story's end, the men's service also ends, or at least changes. With generals all arguing over who is the best fighter among the Society members, it is decided that the Society should serve together as a special battalion, the Justice Battalion of America!
And so, in the very next issue, the heroes are all back in the U.S., again fighting spies and saboteurs, this time all guided by "The Black Dragon Society", a secretive group that claims to be behind the events of recent Japanese history ("I started the Russo-Japanese war! I started this war with the United States! I am the power behind Japan-- I will make her great!", boasts its leader in one panel). They've targeted eight different American inventors and stolen their latest, greatest inventions to turn against the U.S., and it's up to the Society/Battalion to stop their plans.
In these last few issues, the content turns—somewhat upsettingly but also completely predictably—ugly. Fox went from being careful not to use the words "Nazi" or "German" a year or so previous to regularly peppering the dialogue with the slur "Jap," and there's a steady stream of references to the Japanese as "yellow" and being small in stature.
They also speak in broken English, sometimes shout made-up Japanese characters in their dialogue balloons, and are more often than not drawn in exaggerated, ugly caricatures, with Peter perhaps being the "best" at making them looking sub-human and/or cartoonish.
Now, it's not like the preceding issues were particularly enlightened when it came to depicting non-white people—the Sandman chapter of All-Star Comics #7 features a fairly racist portrayal of a Chinatown criminal named Mu King whose every "r" is replaced with an "l"—it just never really came up. Suddenly, though, the Society finds itself spending whole issues full of Japanese people, who all happen to be their enemies and, at the time, enemies of the United States.
The Atom chapter in "The Black Dragon Menace" does feature a good American-born Japanese character who aids the hero in his adventure, so good on Fox for making a distinction, although this character still uses the word "Jap" and, in this very same story, the Atom takes off his costume and adopts a "yellow-face" disguise ("Am I glad I learned to talk Japanese," he says, "Now with a little stain on my face and hair, and my short stature, I can pass as a Jap, and find out what goes on!")
DC seems to handle this material in the best way possible, by including a semi-apologetic note on the table of contents: "The comics reprinted in this volume were produced at a time when racism played a larger role in society and popular culture, both consciously and unconsciously. They are presented here without alteration for historical reference."
That is, I think, better than trying to edit the original work to make it more palpable to a modern audience, although I can imagine some of these stories would be particularly hard for a lot of readers to take today. Obviously, a majority of the readers interested in this work are going to be so because they are interested in them for their historical significance, rather than because they are looking for solidly entertaining superhero comics.
The art is fairly all over the place, which makes sense, given how many hands there are in creating it, each chapter of each story generally drawn by a different artist. There's work from names that should be fairly familiar to many readers, like Sheldon Moldoff, Martin Nodell, Jack Burnley and the aforementioned Peter.
Much of the art is rather rough, crude and primitive looking, as one would probably expect for this early date in the genre and medium.
Moldoff, who draws all of the Hawkman stories, seems to be head-and-shoulders above everyone else, and the artist seems to rely on reference quite a bit, as many of his non-Hawkman characters look like their poses and even rendering were suggested by models, photos and/or other, finer artists. It's quite different than that of all the others. He also tends to give us quite a bit of what must have passed for cheesecake in the early 1940s, with Shiera often drawn reclining—sometimes in bed and in her nightclothes, sometimes knocked down or unconscious—or in the act of slipping on her Hawk costume (which she gets in the third issue of the collection, although she's never referred to as "Hawkgirl" in the volume).
Burnley, who draws the Starman chapters, also seems to be more realistic in his style, and Cliff Young, who draws the Sandman stories, tends to have a pretty energetic, perhaps even dynamic style, which seems to become more pronounced later on, once The Sandman adopts his later, lamer tight-fitting yellow-and-purple costume. I kind of like the work of Stan Asch, particularly on the Dr. Mid-Nite stories, which looks a bit smoother and cartoonier than some of the other art and suggests Golden Age Batman.
For America and Democracy is ultimately a pretty rewarding read, and a pretty great dollars-to-comics value, especially considering the great age of the comics collected and the relative obscurity of the characters (That is, they're not Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, whose Golden Age adventures DC has previously collected some of in their various Chronicles collections).
A second volume, DC Finest: Justice Society of America: The Plunder of the Psycho-Pirate, is scheduled for a June release, and will pick up right where this volume left off (And, from the sounds of the title, finally introduce a super-villain for the Society's heroic super-bullies to face off against). And, of course, March will see the release of DC Finest: Plastic Man: The Origin of Plastic Man, featuring almost 600 pages of Jack Cole's magnificent Golden Age Plastic Man.
I hope these volumes sell well (as I hope the DC Finest line in general sells well), because I would love to get more Golden Age comics in this format in the future, particularly collecting under-collected characters that DC now owns (Particularly Captain Marvel and the Marvel Family, although the Justice Society and Plastic Man are a great start).
DC Finest: Zero Hour: Crisis in Time: Part One (DC) I've been reading superhero comics for just about 35 years now, and yet in all of that time, I have never once read a line-wide crossover event in its entirety, picking up each and every one of its tie-in issues (Not even in the first decade of the '00s, when I had the time and money to actually do so, had I really wished to).
Instead, I would usually pick up the main series that served as the spine of the event, and the tie-ins that occurred in books I was already reading or featuring characters I was particularly interested in. That usually meant, for the DC events of the '90s anyway, that I would end up reading the main mini-series or bookends, the various Batman-related tie-ins, and maybe a Superman comic or three, my participation in the event limited both by the amount of money I had to spend on comics at the time and my interest in the publisher's line and character catalog.
I'm not entirely sure how common a way this is to experience DC and Marvel's various line-wide events, but I suspect that's how most readers approach them, with the individual reader looking at the many offerings as some kind of comic book buffet, and essentially curating their own, personal version of the event.
That was one the things that made DC's February release of a Zero Hour: Crisis in Time Omnibus so appealing. The massive, 1,000-page collection seemed to include not only the five-issue miniseries by Dan Jurgens and Jerry Ordway, which I already had in singles as well as in a trade paperback collection, but every single one of its tie-ins.
I resisted the urge to buy the over $100 book last winter, in large part because of my dislike of the omnibus format, and I'm glad I did. DC seems to have essentially split the contents of the omnibus in half to publish in two volumes of their new DC Finest format of thick, $40 trade paperbacks. The first half, labeled as Part One, was released this month, while a Part Two is scheduled for a May release.
Finally, then, I would have a chance to experience a line-wide crossover event in its sprawling totality.
I don't know that that's the ideal way to read such an event, but after all these years of reading them the other way, I was excited by the opportunity to read one this way.
After having completed Part One, I'm pretty certain reading every tie-in isn't the way to go, at least not for this particular 1994 event series, a kinda sorta sequel to 1985-1986's Crisis on Infinite Earths that was meant to, among other things, address some of the niggling continuity questions that DC's first official cosmic rejiggering had left to irritate a certain segment of their readership.
The main story began with a sort of prologue in the pages of the anthology series Showcase '94 and then comprised a five-issue mini-series by writer/penciler Dan Jurgens and inker Jerry Ordway, numbered countdown style, so that the series started with issue #4 and ended with #0. A bunch of the rest of the books in DC's line at the time then tied into the events of the miniseries.
The plot revolved around the villain Monarch, introduced in 1991's Armageddon 2001 crossover event series (which has never been collected, but we'll get to that later), gaining new and greater powers, a costume redesign and the codename Extant (Or, in one instance, "The Extant"). He would use his vast powers to unleash a wave of entropy at the end of time that would then wash backwards, essentially de-creating the universe, and causing wild and unpredictable time storms in the process.
That meant, for the purposes of the tie-ins, the story really needed only have some sort of "time goes crazy" plot, allowing creators to pull characters and events from outside of the official continuity for their exploitation, along with stuff like dinosaurs or wooly mammoths on the rampage.
Most of the tie-ins I read in 1994 when the event was originally unfolding were easily accessible, standalone stories involving the heroes confronting the fallout of this "time goes crazy" premise. (And most of them were fairly evergreen, as I learned when I recently revisited them in a pair of franchise-specific trades, 2017's Batman: Zero Hour and 2018's Superman: Zero Hour).
Batman finds the police talking to his parents in Wayne Manor, telling the how Bruce had just been shot to death in an alley after seeing a movie, and, knowing the identity of the shooter, he seeks to avenge his own murder. Batman and Robin find a strange, new-to-them Alfred in the Batcave, one who is exceedingly clumsy and wishes to be a detective and help them in their crime-fighting duties. Superboy meets the original, Silver Age Superboy in the streets of modern Smallville.
I had always just assumed all of the tie-ins were something like those ones, but it turns out, that is not at all the case. Looking at the table of contents now, it looks like of the 16 tie-ins included here, I had already read half, either as they were originally published in 1994, or in later collections.
Of the remaining eight, not only had I not read these particular issues, but many of them were from titles I had never read any issue of, comics like Darkstars, L.E.G.I.O.N. '94, Legionnaires, Team Titans and Valor.
A surprising number of these are not of the standalone nature of the various Batman ones, which were entirely dedicated to the crossover, but rather seem to keep advancing whatever plotline was already planned and then trying to incorporate some element of a timestream gone mad.
That seems to be the case with the Man of Steel tie-in I remember fondly, in which Louise Simonson, Jon Bogdanove and Dennis Janke send several different Batmen from several different timelines, all drawn in the style of different artists, to Metropolis, seeking Superman's help dealing with the time crisis ("Not going 'hippie' on us, are you?", a Neal Adams-style Batman askes Superman of his then-long hair).
It still holds up quite well, thanks in large part to the fun premise and Bogdanove and Janke's commitment to their homages, in which they don't translate the designs of, say Adams' Batman, or Frank Miller's Dark Knight or the first, 1939 appearance of the character into their own style, but instead ape those other artists' style, filling the pages with what I guess we'd call swipes.
Even still, pages are devoted to an ongoing plotline, involving the destruction of Metropolis and...Jimmy Olsen dating a heavy metal singer, who is actually a vampire...?
The issue of Legionnaires and the issue of Valor are actually labeled as parts four and five of an ongoing story arc. Some of this is, of course, quite understandable, given the timing of the event in relation to what was going on in those particular books. The tie-in issue of Green Lantern, for example, is only five issues into the story introducing the new Green Lantern Kyle Rayner; in fact, he's still fighting Major Force after the murder of his girlfriend Alex as the tie-in begins. Similarly, Steel and Flash seemed to be in the middle of something and thus had little room to spare for tie-in material.
And so some of the entries are barely tie-ins, as that issue of L.E.G.I.O.N. '94, in which the only thing Zero Hour related that seems to happen is that the corpse of someone Vril Dox once killed in the past mysteriously reappears before him; otherwise, the issue seems to continue the weird-ass plotline it was already involved in telling, which included Dox's ruthless, brilliant baby trying to usurp his powers...?
The issue of Outsiders included doesn't seem to have any Zero Hour-related content at all, other than the "Zero Hour" logo above the title on the cover.
Somewhat disappointingly, then, the best tie-in issues in this collection are the ones I've already read and re-read before: The three Batman comics and the aforementioned issues of Man of Steel and Superboy.
While many of the comics were still easy-to-follow and featured very good art, making them entertaining enough even when experienced in this somewhat strange, sample platter-like format, some were, I'm not going to lie, a real slog to get through. The Legionnaires and Valor chapters in particular were rough-going for me, and they might as well have been written in a different language, as little as I got out of them (Surprising too, considering they were written by great writers like Mark Waid and Kurt Busiek, and the latter was drawn by Colleen Doran...although I didn't recognize her style in the published art at all.)
The Team Titans issue felt similarly insane, featuring a handful of characters I recognized (Bumblebee, Herald Mal Duncan, Flamebird, Aqualad, Mirage and Terra), and a whole bunch I had never even heard of (Hero X? Metallik? Automation? Hellebore? Wonder Boy? Green? Mystery?). This issue at least fully embraced the time-gone-mad premise, and basically just featured a large group of weird-ass superheroes trying to navigate circumstances like a stampede of wooly mammoths trampling a pioneer family's log cabin, anti-war protests from a bunch of different wars comingling, Napoleon running into Nelson Mandela, and so on.
There are certainly pleasures to be had here, including some of the previously mentioned stories and a lot of great art by the likes of Bret Blevins, Jon Bogdanove, Tom Grummett, Mike Manley, Graham Nolan and Paul Pelletier (and, of course, the extraordinary Jurgens/Ordway team on the main series; there's a two-page spread in Zero Hour #3 showing pretty much the entire DC Universe circa 1994 that pretty spectacular). And that Superboy issue? It contains what is one of my all-time favorite comics pages. (It's page 15 of the original comic, and page 311 of the collection; I'd scan it if I could, but these collections are so thick that it's hard to scan pages from them.)
And, again, I did appreciate the chance to read a crossover in its entirety for the first time...as well as the sort of snapshot of the publisher's offerings during a particular month or so that such a story allows for.
Part One includes the Showcase prologue and just the first two of the five issues of the Zero Hour miniseries proper, both of which are interrupted quite a bit by all the tie-ins included. Thus, the main story doesn't really have any sense of momentum, the many discursive stories coming in fits and starts and not lining up particularly well with the events of the main storyline.
If you've never read Zero Hour before, I'm not sure I'd recommend doing it via these new DC Finest collections or the omnibus collection. Rather, you're probably better off trying to find and read a Zero Hour: Crisis in Time collection straight-through first (one was last published in 2018) and then consulting the DC Finest or omnibus version for the tie-ins, none of which are completely necessary to following the story.
Now I know I've talked about this book long enough already, but please allow me a few more paragraphs.
Aside from the relative novelty of getting to read a crossover event series in its entirety, do you know what else really excited me about this particular collection? It's cover, with the word "Events" preceding the title Zero Hour, indicating that this is the first of other DC Finest editions collecting event series.
Perhaps that just means we will see future volumes collecting 1995's Underworld Unleashed or 1996's Final Night, the main series of which were both rather recently-ish collected in trade paperback, which will also include all of the tie-ins, similar to these new Zero Hour collections.
But given the size of these collections, and DC's willingness to spread an event collection over multiple volumes, maybe that means we will finally get collections of DC's various annual event series, like the aforementioned Armageddon 2001, Eclipso: The Darkness Within and Bloodlines, all of which I'd eagerly snap up (I've tried finding all of the participating annuals in back-issue bins over the years, but haven't had all that much luck, and would prefer them all collected together in an easier to read format anyway).
And then there are the later annual events, which didn't all tie-in to a single story, but were rather thematic: 1994's Elseworlds, 1995's Year One, 1997's Pulp Heroes...maybe even 1996's Legends of the Dead Earth, which didn't seem as compelling a concept as the others to me, and which I thus read relatively few of. There were a lot of great comics among those, particularly the Pulp Heroes annuals.
The '90s closed out with a couple of far more limited events: 1998's Ghosts, 1999's JLApe and 2000's Planet DC. If I recall correctly, the first two were basically Justice League-specific events, while Planet DC was a bit wider, and was meant to introduce new heroes from different countries to the DCU, although I fear none of them really ended up catching on.
Anyway, I'm really excited about the DC Finest format and reprint program (as you can probably tell from the verbiage I've spent on two of its offerings so far in this column) and I hope it lasts long enough to collect the events of the '90s, as well as various un-collected or under-collected stories from throughout the publisher's history.
I rediscovered this fact in November, when I went looking for a new Josie and the Pussycats one-shot, which I only knew of the existence of thanks to a Dan Parent post showing off the movie variant cover he created for it.
It was the same week that IDW and Viz released the first issue of their Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Naruto crossover, and I wanted to snag a copy of that to review for Good Comics for Kids (Which I did, here). I figured I could pick up the Josie comic at the same time.
I visited the nearest shop to my new/old home, a short ten-minute drive away. It was my first time in the little shop, which opened sometime after I last moved away from my hometown. The south wall held big shelves full of recent-ish books from many publishers, the north wall had a few back-issue bins, and much of the rest of the space between those walls was full of what looked like collectible toys to me. A small rack of maybe a dozen or so comics were on the front counter near the register; these were the new week's releases.
While they did have the new TMNT crossover, they told me they didn't have the Josie book—in fact, they don't carry Archie Comics at all.
The next place I looked was a shop some 70 miles west. Don't worry, I didn't drive all that way just for a comic book; I just happened to be in the neighborhood of that shop a week or so later. This was the shop from which I had previously purchased Archie: The Decision in August. It turns out they didn't have the Josie one-shot either; the clerk pointed out a copy of "Tom King's The Decision," noting they don't typically carry Archie Comics unless it's a special one like that.
Finally, I turned to the Internet and ended up ordering a copy of it from archiecomics.com. As I was paying a couple extra bucks for shipping from Riverdale or wherever anyway, I also ordered a copy of the September Sabrina Annual Spectacular #1, as it was my understanding the Josie story was a continuation of one begun there. (It turns out I was half right! In Mike Pellerito's "Editor's Notebook" feature in the back of Sabrina, he explains that the story continues from Sabrina into October's Archie Halloween Spectacular, and then into Josie, so I guess I shoulda ordered that Archie spectacular too.)
About a month after its initial ship date to comic shops, the book finally arrived on my snow-covered front porch. Whew! What a saga!
It turns out that the $3.99, 24-page book wasn't really worth all the trouble, as it's a rather slight offering, including an original five-page story by writer Ian Flynn and artists Steven and Lily Butler (The art team responsible for the pretty strong cover that adorns the book), and then a pair of reprints.
These aren't marked as such, but the second one is an eight-pager drawn by the late, great Dan DeCarlo and inker Jim DeCarlo (the faded coloring, the girls' fashion and Valerie's tight afro betraying its age). The third story, by Holly G!, looks much more modern, with normal-looking coloring and Valerie's hair matching that on the cover, but there is a panel of Josie talking on a very small, out-of-date looking cell phone.
The short Flynn and Butler story has exceptionally strong artwork and has Josie frenemy Alexadra Cabot calling Sabrina to help rescue the hypnotized Pussycats from a gig at Eyegore Estates, where the mummified-looking Mother Striga is forcing them to play non-stop for a similarly hypnotized audience of "monster-people."
There are a few panels of Salem teaming up with Alexandra's cat Sebastian, who is here apparently a magic-user who knows Salem, and the cats are able to break Mother Striga's spell, while Sabrina and Alexandra, the latter of whom apparently has some latent magical abilities, take on Amber Nightstone and her friends.
Again, it's only five pages, so there's not much to them, but they are well-drawn pages.
The DeCarlo story, which isn't credited to a writer, is entitled "The Falcon's Claw," and is a straight-up horror story, with almost no gag content at all, and much of the story told in rather purple narration. In it, Josie buys a magical necklace at a garage sale, and she, Melody and Valerie follow clues from a nightmare to a haunted house, where they are assailed by frightening figures until they accidentally burn the house down.
The art is, of course, great, featuring a few panels of a restless Josie lolling about in her nightclothes and, atypically for DeCarlo given the books he worked on, a great deal of spooky and scary content, including many panels of ghosts and monsters. It's an extremely weird offering, but I was glad I got the chance to read it.
Finally, Holly G!'s story, "Ice Princess of the Lost Civilization", finds Alan and the Pussycats stumbling upon a frozen lost civilization while taking a break from an Alaskan cruise gig. The white-haired tribespeople speak in "melody" and believe Melody is their long-lost queen, given her resemblance to their statuary.
She and Salem investigate, only to run into Amber Nightstone's partners in the Wicked Trinity, who keep them busy outside while Amber casts and elaborate spell to raise the ancient witch Mother Striga, who is only shown in shadow or silhouette in this story, a story that ends with a panel reading "Not The End!" (It would apparently continue in similarly short stories that appeared in the pages of Archie Halloween Spectacular #1 and Josie Annual Spectacular #1, the latter of which is discussed above).
In these, Aunt Hilda (dressed, as her aunts will be in all of these strips, like a 17th Century witch) thinks she sees a UFO that ends up being Harvey's "Frizbee" (Or does it?); Sabrina and her aunts move into a new house that crooks try to convince them is haunted, only to be surprised to learn that they like that fact; Harvey attempts a January garage sale of some of the Aunt Hilda' old junk; and, finally, when Sabrina thinks Harvey may be dating another girl, she casts a love spell on Archie Andrews to make Harvey jealous. (This last one also has appearances by Big Ethel, Veronica and Pop Tate, and features DeCarlo art.)
There's "Christmas is Cancelled," in which "Semi-Private Eye" Jughead Jones dons a trench coat pulled from under the booth seat at Pop's and takes up a case Big Ethel offers him that seems to hinge on a romance between a substitute teacher and an elf; a Flynn and Steven and Lily Butler story teaming Betty and Veronica's Superteen and Powerteen with two different versions of The Jaguar; another Betty and Veronica story where the girls give superhero Powgirl a last-minute makeover and costume redesign before she meets The Crusaders; and, finally, an Easter egg and cameo-filled story in which Archie teams up with The Shield (here appearing in his classic iteration, wherein the previous story he had a gray beard) to find a stolen supervillain weapon during the middle of a holiday party at The Mighty Legends of Justice Museum.
Man am I glad I did. It's such a great comic, and my first exposure to cartoonist Kyle Starks.
As for that weird title, as Old Head himself Nash Gliven explains to his 12-year-old daughter, "Old Head is what they call a guy who's been around too long." It also, quite cleverly and rather hilariously, has a double meaning that becomes clear as Starks ties Gliven's history to the climactic action, which seems to be the realization of his destiny.
These are the "goons" the synopsis spoke of, and after an extremely weird and awkward few pages of dialogue, they reveal the fact that they all follow the man "who got more trim than anyone in history", Dracula, who they seem to worship as the world's greatest pick-up artist (They even detail the six rules of "The Dracula Method.")
I can't really say enough good things about this book.
Of course, Persephone was a fantasy adventure, whereas Pocahontas is a true story...or, at least, a story based on real people and real events in the real world. I have to imagine some liberties were taken, and some creative decisions made regarding which versions of the truth to integrate, Pocahontas' story being over 400 years old at this point, and many aspects of it having long since passed into legend.
Each page is laid out in a strict, six-panel grid, with very few exceptions (usually just a single, horizontal panel replacing two of the smaller, square panels in the gird), giving the book a solid visually rhythm that carries throughout the story. The most dramatic departure from the format comes on the last page of the book, a dramatic splash panel showing our heroine's ship sailing toward the horizon...technically back towards the New World after her time spent in England, but, in actuality, towards her death.
Smith is captured and about to be executed when she intervenes, saving his life...and, in the eyes of her people, tying her fate to his. Her people immediately start calling her "Pocahontas," which, an asterisk tells readers, means "shameless whore."
I was obviously pretty surprised to hear this. They really named a Disney movie a word meaning "shameless whore"...? I consulted Wikipedia, fount of all knowledge (no matter what Elon Musk may think), and there it states the name meant "little wanton," meaning something closer to "playful one" than "shameless whore," and that the Powhattan used it out of superstitious fear of the English learning her true name and thus having magical power over her. (As for its meaning being "shameless whore" here, I don't know if that's on Locatelli-Kournwsky or French-to-English translator Sandra Smith; at any rate, it's an indigenous American language term that was translated to French and then translated to English here.)
She takes refuge in a church and befriends a John Rolfe, who she will ultimately marry and move to England with, where she is feted by the king and queen. She kinda hates London, though, and they move to the English countryside. The book ends with their return trip to America, although it ends on the way there.
From what I've gleaned from Wikipedia, it's not clear if she ever actually made that trip, as it sounds like she died from unknown causes before ever actually making that intended trip. The graphic novel also makes no mention of her ever having had a child, which seems to be another place in which Locatelli-Kournwsky may have deviated from real life in order to streamline his somewhat tragic story of a young woman out of place in her own world...whichever of the three worlds she briefly belonged to.
Beautifully drawn and beautifully told, it's certainly a book worth seeking out if, like me, you missed it upon its initial release eight years ago.
While writing that paragraph or two, though, I realized Dracula and Frankenstein's very omnipresence and over familiarity might, when looked at a certain way, be construed as a sort of virtue. That is, if you were going to write, draw and publish a Dracula or Frankenstein comic book in the Year of Our Lord 2024, particularly one featuring the original filmic iteration of one of those characters, you had damn well better be confident you're bringing something new or interesting to the table.
In the case of Dracula at least—Universal Monsters: Frankenstein isn't due in collected format until April—the answer seems to be yes, and a yes with relatively little in the way of qualification.
Instead, Tynion and Simmonds' Dracula is essentially a remake of the original film...albeit in the comics medium.
There are several points in the book that refer to scenes that aren't actually in the book, including one of Dracula talking to Mina, and another in which Van Helsing and Seward confront Dracula with a mirror, both of which are referred to in dialogue (The latter one, Simmonds super-imposes in the background of the conversation about it). Apparently, one is meant to have seen the original film then. (Which admittedly took me aback; on both occasions I ended up going back and flipping through the pages to make sure I hadn't inadvertently skipped something).
As in the film, Renfield is the only living man found aboard the Vesta (here, the entire crew seemingly brutally slaughtered, as if by a wild animal), and he's taken to a sanitarium, where he is under the care of Dr. Seward.
Renfield, who Simmonds depicts as something of a cartoon goth, with a messy shock of black hair, black-rimmed eyes and black lips that seem to be the result of heavy make-up, a luminous white face and, odder still, no nose (Only rarely, when he's posed at certain angles, does one see suggestions of a nose on his face). The other characters, even Dracula, are far more realistic and representational in their appearance.
Though Renfield and Van Helsing both seem to state that all of London is imperiled, if not the world itself, the act of dealing with Dracula is fairly easy once he's suspected. The greater conflicts involve those between science and superstition, mankind's own inherent weaknesses and his innate holy virtues, society's norms and he temptation of subversive thrills. And these conflicts mostly play out in the conversations and debates between Seward and Van Helsing, the former representing the modern age of reason, the latter the still-clinging age of religion and monsters.
All of this makes Tynion's take on Dracula quite interesting, despite the fact that it barely deviates from its source material in terms of plot or action, those few deviations mainly being made to afford Simmonds the chance to draw Dracula doing Dracula stuff.
Now the pair turns to one of the world's premier comics stars, for an original graphic novel that seems to adapt the Donald Duck animated shorts of the character's golden age, particularly those like 1940's Donald's Vacation, into a Love-like format. On-again, off-again Donald Duck antagonists Chip 'n Dale and Humphrey Bear appear in prominent roles in this book.
Donald being Donald, while he's able to shrug off some of the disasters that befall him, he can't abide his enemies getting the last laugh, and so his conflicts with the local wildlife escalate until the point that the woodland creatures all have a late-night meeting that culminates in drastic action, and then Donald engaging in still more drastic action of his own.
A rather unique entry into growing library of excellent Disney work from all over the world and throughout comics history that Fantagraphics has been assembling for years now, Vacation Parade is a must-read celebration of Donald Duck's animation roots.
