Columbus gets a new superhero; no one in Columbus cares

I've been fairly fascinated with the National Hockey League/Stan Lee team-up, in which the latter helped create 30 new superheroes, each one named after and given powers to represent the name of an NHL team. The Guardian Project, as it's called, seemed like a pretty fun idea when it was first announced, and in the course of my (week)daily link-blogging for Blog@Newsarama, I've picked up quite a few interesting items relating to the Guardian Project: Complaints that The Penguin is derivative of Cyclops, jeering at The Maple Leaf, Chris Sims' noble attempt to narrow the 30 bat-shit crazy super-characters down to just “the Ten Most Insane” characters, Toronto Life’s snarky paragraph “reviews” of each Guardian, Heidi MacDonald's declaration that the surreal project may be “Stan Lee’s greatest achievement yet” and so on.

It wasn't until very recently that I remembered that Columbus, Ohio—my adopted hometown from 2000-2010—had an NHL team of its own, and thus Columbus has its own Stan Lee-created superhero: The Blue Jacket.

Why did it take me so long to put 2 and 2 together, "so long" being relatively lengthened by the fact that I was reading articles about the NHL Guardians on a daily basis for the last few weeks?

Well, probably just because I'm a little dense. Maybe too because I left the city limits of Columbus last year, returning to my ancestral home off the shores of Lake Erie, and have been therefore thinking of Columbus more as my former hometown than my current hometown, and thus I now feel less ownership over fictional characters that live there. Surely my not giving a shit about sports at all was also factor.

But despite all of those other certainly relevant factors, another remains: Columbus, Ohio still doesn’t seem to have really integrated having its own NHL hockey team into its essential, core being just yet.

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Columbus was, and is, a great sports town.

Saturdays during college football season there are semi-religious affairs, and, if that Saturday’s game happens to be a home game, many parts of the city become embroiled in a sort of strange, fevered pagan holiday feeling—those days are like Easter, Super Bowl Sunday and St. Patrick’s Day combined, only it happens every other weekend.

The city spends a ridiculous amount of money on police officers to direct traffic and to arrest fans for pissing in the public and/or rioting and setting things on fire (During one period in the early part of last decade, when the campus area was rocked by house parties-turned-riots on a weekend-ly basis, the streets in the neighborhoods on game day would have a positively surreal amount of different police vehicles present: Police cars, police trucks, police helicopters, bike hops, mortocycle cops, horse cops (those are the best cops), and even a few of these weird high-tech mobile home-sized mobile command center things.)

Also, and this is true, you can shout “O! H!” at nearly any group of two or three people in Columbus, Ohio, and you could count on this group to shout back “I! O!” This is apparently a cheer that is popular at Buckeye games (I don’t know; I’ve never been to one).

Yes, Columbus is a great sports town—as long as that sport is Ohio State University football.

I know Columbus is a great sports town because during that first half of a decade I spent in Columbus, I was a reporter for a (since-de-alt-ified) alt-weekly newspaper, on the Things That Aren’t Music or Arts beat (although I ended up covering music and arts in my “spare” time too), and would end up covering things like the debut of the Columbus Destroyers arena foot ball team, or the Columbus Landsharks indoor lacrosse team.

Both of them shared facilities with the Blue Jackets, both of them were announced with great fanfare, their owners citing Columbus’ embrace of OSU as a sure sign that they would enthusiastically embrace these exciting new sporting endeavors, and both have been gone for years now—The Landsharks started playing in Columbus in 2001, but relocated to Phoenix after the 2003 season, while The Destroyers moved to town from Buffalo in 2004, and folded in 2008, while

The Blue Jackets obviously fared much better than the Destroyers or Landsharks, yet they’re still nowhere near as beloved nor as inextricably entwined with the city as the Buckeyes are.

If you were to rank various sports teams in Columbus’ collective heart, I would guess the Blue Jackets are somewhere near The Clippers, the city’s minor league baseball team.

Of course, the Buckeyes had a massive head start—their first season was 1890, and they’ve been playing in their current stadium since the early 1920’s.

The Blue Jackets became an official NHL expansion team in 2000, but began influencing the city a bit before that, when the city’s biggest employer and biggest business (last I knew), Nationwide, along with Columbus’ last-remaining daily newspaper The Dispatch and other entities, built Nationwide Arena in downtown Columbus. It was sold as an effort to revitalize the dead, ghost town of a downtown (Downtown is filled with people form 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, but abandoned the rest of the time—in fact, finding a place that will sell you a cup of coffee on a Saturday in downtown Columbus is extraordinarily difficult).

I don’t know how well it’s worked exactly; I guess the level of development and night life and weekend life downtown is now much better than it was in, say, 1999, but I think it’s more than fair to suggest that downtown is more more vital than it is revitalized.

Anyway: Columbus has an NHL team, and while Columbus doesn’t mind the team, and in fact some folks in Columbus like it quite a bit, Columbus still isn’t a hockey town, and the Blue Jackets are a distant, distant, distant second or third in the hearts of Columbus sports fans.

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The team name comes from the uniforms of the Union Army during the Civil War. While it was fairly firmly part of the North and the Union, Ohio isn’t generally thought of as a big Civil War state, and its role in the conflict is thus sometimes surprisingly striking.

When Lincoln requested that Ohio raise ten regiments to fight for the Union at the beginning of the war, the state more than doubled his request, offering up 23 volunteer infantry regiments. Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman were both Ohioans, as was George Custer and Philip Sheridan. Ohio also produced a number of great Civil War figures, including William Tecumseh Sherman, Ulysses S. Grant, Philip Sheridan, and George Custer. As for Columbus, there were two Civil War-era military bases there, Camp Chase and Camp Thomas.

The team name was derived via a contest in local, terrible newspaper, the Dispatch. This occurred before I moved there and had to pay attention to such things, but I’m told there was a contest in the paper to name the team, and “The Columbus Cows” or “The Columbus Mad Cows” received the most votes.

See, Columbus is referred to, both derisively and self-deprecatingly as “Cowtown” due to, uh, it’s general lameness and the fact that it’s perceived as more rural than urban by more urban parts of the country, so apparently the cow was regarded as a good animal mascot for a sports team based in the city.

I kinda like Mad Cows—why not name a sports team after a terrifying, deadly disease derived from the horrors of modern factory farming practices?—and think white uniforms with mottled black patches on them could have been rather neat looking. (An earlier Columbus hockey team, The Columbus Chill, apparently went by Mad Cows and had special jerseys made for at least one game)

But the powers that be went with The Blue Jackets instead; I guess Union Soldiers are cooler than cows. There was also an 18th century Shawnee war chief who went by the name Blue Jacket in Ohio, but the Blue Jackets’ logos and art usually feature elements of Civil War uniforms.

The Jackets’ mascot wasn’t a Union Soldier, however, but a red-eyed, yellow or green-neon-colored, bee-like stinging insect named Stinger, who wore a Union soldier’s uniform. I guess he was a play on the similarities between the words Blue Jacket and Yellowjacket. Wikipedia, which is never wrong about anything ever, says “The Blue Jackets have since distanced themselves from Stinger, removing him entirely from the jerseys beginning in the 2005 season.” What is the reason for this friction between Stinger and The Blue Jackets? I don’t know, but it’s probably for the best that the giant bee-man has had less to do with the team of late, as he didn’t influence the creation of Stan Lee’s Blue Jacket superhero.

Perhaps if Stinger were still part of the team’s logo, Lee would have given us a superhero akin to Marvel’s Yellowjacket, the name Ant-Man/Giant-Man Hank Pym would later adopt. Yes, Blue Jacket might have just been Yellowjacket, only blue.

Instead, this is Blue Jacket:

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Here’s what his “bio” at The Guardian Project website says about him:

The Blue Jacket is entirely encased in a metal suit of armor…For weaponry he has an armada of 1857 Napoleonic Cannons strapped all over his body. The cannons on his wrists, shoulders and thighs fire cannon balls loaded with explosives. At his side hangs the state flag of Ohio, only this is no ordinary flag. He can throw the flag and envelope his opponent, something he calls ‘cocooning’; temporarily freezing them in their tracks.

In design, he looks like more of a robot than a man in armor, a la Iron Man or Steel. If you look at his thighs, they look like pieces of girders, with no real room for a human leg in them. His costume is blue, steel gray and red. His metallic gray face and glowing red eyes call to mind DC superhero Captain Atom, although he wears a Union Soldier cap with the Blue Jacket’s logo atop it. His chest is open, and shows some clockwork-like gears in it, a neat little detail, giving him a sort of steampunk look, appropriate for a 19th century-themed superhero.

His cannons, which are ridiculous in number (I count eight) are all old-school cannon-shaped, and while his bio says he shoots exploding cannonballs, all of the art so far makes them look more like lasers or something.

Over all, it’s a pretty cool design, especially compared with many of his peers in The Guardians, which are…well, “pretty cool” isn’t the first, second, third or forty-first descriptive phrase that comes to mind when looking at some of them.

Although I’m not sure why he has a obelisk-shaped cod-piece, sticking straight up, over his crotch, the NHL logo on its tip. A surprise, ninth cannon, for those situations where eight cannons just aren’t enough, I assume.

One of the genuinely endearing aspects of Lee’s Gauridans is how complex they are; like, they never just have one power, or set of powers, but have something else thrown in. For example not only does The Shark have titanium teeth that can bite through anything, the ability to summon and command sharks, razor water-skis and enhanced senses, but he can also "telepathically interface with computer software."

Overkill? Probably, but overkill can be kind of charming in the world of superheroes, particularly ones from the hyperbolic mind of Stan Lee. It’s as if he thought to himself, “In the ‘60s, I was just giving every superhero one power each, how can I top that! I know, I’ll give these heroes three of four powers each!”

Kind of like if, in addition to his extra-sensory powers, Daredevil could also shoot eye beams and telepathically command his enemies to perform actions against their will, so long as his commands are phrased in the form of a dare.

So no only does The Blue Jacket have all these cannons, but he also has that stupid flag gimmick.

And the official press release from The Blue Jackets themselves goes into much greater detail than the bio at The Guardian Project website, unveiling a mystical power in addition to the old-fashioned, high-tech armor:

A great military mind, the Blue Jacket lives to fight and he has the power of mediumship to communicate with the Union Civil War Generals that he idolizes. In battle, he relies on his heart and intelligence and not on modern technology. The Blue Jacket is entirely cased in a metal suit of armor that houses a devastating array of weaponry. For weaponry, he has an armada of 1857 Napoleon Cannons strapped all over his body. The cannons on his wrists, shoulders and thighs fire cannon balls loaded with explosives. At his side hangs the state flag of Ohio made of astral plasma. He has the ability to cocoon his victim with the flag, giving the illusion the victim has disappeared when in reality, the victim is temporarily suspended in time.

So not only does he have this boss, cannon-filled armor, not only does he have a flag of “astral plasma,” but he also has the power of mediumship to communicate with the Union Civil War Generals he idolizes.

So The Blue Jacket is kind of like Iron Man, if Iron Man was The Haunted Tank.

I’m not going to lie—I completely love The Blue Jacket.

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This is very important: THE BLUE JACKET is essentially IRON MAN, IF IRON MAN'S ARMOR WAS MADE OUT OF THE HAUNTED TANK. And the tank were haunted by more than one Civil War general. And the ghost-generals fought for the right side of the conflict.

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Quick aside: If the type of cannon that comprises Blue Jacket’s armada of cannons sounds awfully specific, there’s actually a reason for it—The Blue Jackets have an 1857 Napoleon cannon housed at Nationwide Arena, which they fire off to celebrate certain good things happening during the course of their games. I think they pretend to fire it off, rather than actually shoot cannon balls, but I don’t know; the only Blue Jackets games I had to attend were pre-cannon acquisition.

They also have lots of t-shirt cannons, but those are of 21st century origin.

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Each Guardian stars in a short little comic book adventure, which you can download and read from the “Battles” page of the Guardian Project website. The Blue Jacket stars in a five-page comic, complete with a cover that recalls the cover designs of the earliest of Marvel’s Ultimate line of books, with a character posing, and a bar of solid color running vertically off to the side of the image, to set it off.

The story is written by Chuck Dixon, which both excited me—Cool, I like Chuck Dixon!—and made me kind of saddened me—Aw, why’s Chuck Dixon writing this instead of comics about Batman being awesome, or the Punisher punishing people?. Tony Chagrin gets a story credit, which is sorta funny, given that “the story” is simply this: Bad guys show up, Blue Jacket shows up, they fight, Blue Jacket wins. An Al Bigley and Bob Almond are credited with pencils and inks respectively, and Stan Lee gets a “Chief Guardian” credit, which is kinda vague, along the lines of his “Grand Poobah” credits in his Boom Studios super-comics.

The first panel is a blurry aerial photo of The Battelle Institute, near OSU’s campus, on King Avenue and near the bank of the Olentangy River. (If you want to go to the trouble, if you download the comic, and then open up the “About Us” section of Battelle’s website, you’ll see that it looks like the comic used the exact same image of Battelle that is on Battelle’s site—four different views of parts of Battelle alternate on that page, and one of them is a non-blurry version of the first panel of The Blue Jacket comic).

A narration box doesn’t quite name Battelle, although the photo and a later drawing make it pretty clear what it is, if you’ve ever heard of and/or seen it: “A local Columbus research facility…The world’s largest, independent research and development organization and a treasure house of classified projects.

There are probably legal reasons explaining why they didn’t name it, but they missed out on the opportunity to entitle the story “The Battle for Battelle.”

Anyway, “world’s largest, independent research and development organization and a treasure house of classified projects” sounds about right.

I’m not so sure about the narration box in the second panel, however: “And also a magnet for spies and international thieves.”

Here the spies and thieves are a uniformed group being called Hammersmith,” and they’re about to battle the police when Blue Jacket shows up.

Fun fact: The Columbus Division of Police uniform consists of a white shirt and white hats tucked into dark pants, not the all-blue outfits drawn in this comic. Also, their patrol cars are all white with read and blue stripes on them, and are not the traditional, generic black-and-white police car design.

Even more fun fact: It took me less than a minute of googling to find a photo gallery on the Columbus Division of Police’s home page with plenty of photo reference of what their uniforms and cars look like.

After the first page, there’s not much city-specific about the story. Blue Jacket talks in a computer-like font, his dialogue bubbles square and outlined by blue borders.

Hammershmith shoots at Blue Jacket, he re-boots by plugging a downed power line into the cogs in his chest (“Yeah…that’s what I’m talkin’ about!”), he shoots Hammersmith into submission, and when they start to run away (“You win this time, Jacket! But we’ll be back and you’ll be sorry”), he throws a giant flag on them.

At no point does he consult with any of the ghosts of any Union Generals, but the Dixon/Lee/Chagrin team only had five pages and 20 panels to work with here—I think a story exploring all of the potential awesomeness inherent in a Columbus, Ohio-based superhero who is kind of like Iron Man and kind of like The Haunted Tank is going to need a lot more room to breathe.

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Fortunately, it sounds like there will be more room to breathe for all of these guys, if the NHL and Stan Lee get their way. From a Washington Square News story:

The animated debut at the All-Star Game is merely the first step in a Guardians media blitz. The Guardians' online presence will include back-stories and animations, social media websites that parse out Guardians information and a game in which fans will battle with their chosen Guardian. Graphic novels, as well as a full-length novel, will be created. A major piece of the puzzle, however, is to "eventually expand into animated TV series, feature films, and console video games," [Guardian Media Entertainment’s chief creative officer Adam] Baratta said.

That all sounds very optimistic, probably naively so in the case of a feature film, but you can’t fault a chief creative officer for being super-ambitious.

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Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find any one in Columbus paying any attention to the debut of The Blue Jacket. I visited the websites of Columbus’ two faux-altweeklies, The Other Paper and Columbus Alive, and could find nothing. I was particularly surprised that neither Googling nor poking around The Dispatch’s archives yielded any results, since The Dispatch is basically just a big daily sports page with a hard-right Republican editorial page and a bunch of wire features attached.

Cursory searches of both donewaiting.com and columbusundergroun.com didn’t yield any results either.

In fact, all I found was able to find was the following:

—Three sentences on a Dispatch site, linking a joke another paper made about The Blue Jackets.

—A January 30 post on Fire That Cannon, a Blue Jackets-specific blog

—Dara Naraghi posted a bit about the project on the Ferret Press/Panel blog, and several of Naraghi’s fellow Panel-ists weighed in.

And that’s all I could find and, you know, I’m not sure if the Panel posts even “counts,” given that it is from comic book-people on a comic book dedicated blog—if the goal of the Guardian Project was to get folks talking about/excited about NHL and/or they’re new heroes, than I assume the target audience is people who can’t recognize Neal Adams artwork or tell you which Marvel characters Stan Lee co-created, and with which collaborator.

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One of the regular features on The Ferret Press blog that I dig is their “Character Wednesday,” where they pick a comics character of some sort—Goody Rickles, Black Panther, Ralph Wiggum, Stilt-Man—and they all contribute their drawings of said character.

I think it is Panel’s duty as Ohioans and Columbusites to devote a future installment of Character Wednesday to The Blue Jacket.

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A frequent topic of conversation here on the comics blogosphere is the way black people, women and, really, any “minority,” with “minority” here being defined as “any group other than white, heterosexual males of the sort that defined the superhero genre when it arose in the 1930s-1950s,” are represented and portrayed in comics. One frequent sub-topic being the fact there are so few black superheroes, or so few superheroines, or no good gay superheroes, or non-stereotypical characters of Asian or Latin descent.

It occurred to me while scrolling through the 30 Guardians on The Guardian Project that they are a) all male and b) all white, excepting the ones that have unnatural skin colors (Avalanche is ice-colored, Blue Jacket is steel-colored, etc), are half-animal/half man (Bruin’s a bear man, Wild’s a werewolf type, The Shark has a shark head, etc) or have their faces and bodies completely encased in a skin-color-hiding costume.

And isn’t it kind of weird that there are clearly more bear-men and shark-men on The Guardians then there are black dudes?

Now, this isn’t meant to be a rant about race, and I’m not accusing The Guardian Project of anything malicious here; I’m just offering an observation.

The lack of ladies on the team could easily be explained away by the fact that these are heroes based on various National Hockey League teams, and there are no women on any of the NHL teams.

I’m not sure what the racial make-up of the NHL is, but it’s been my understanding that professional hockey—and hockey in general—is a “whiter” sport than many other sports.

So maybe that was a consideration…?

But, honestly, I doubt it. I think it was more a matter of just not thinking about race at all when creating the characters, and perhaps the subconscious default state of the superhero in the minds of the creators were white dudes. And bear- and eagle- and shark-dudes.

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I have a question about The Guardians: What is their relationship to the hockey teams they take their names and logos from within the context of the fictive setting they inhabit?

That is, in the Columbus that appears in that little Blue Jacket comic, is there even an NHL hockey team called The Blue Jackets? Because if so, and that Columbus is home to both an NHL hockey team called The Blue Jackets and a superhero who calls himself The Blue Jacket and wears the Blue Jackets’ logo on his head (not to mention an NHL logo on his crotch), then he would either have to be working with the NHL and Blue Jackets in some capacity, or else he would be violating their copyrights and trademarks and would likely be at odds with the team whose name and icon he bears, right?

And what are the chances that 30 cities in this fictional North America would all have superheroes in that exact same situation, in relation to professional sports teams in the same cities?

Unless there is no coincidence involved, and the back-story involves the NHL creating, licensing and employing all of these superheroes to fight crime and evil in their 30 host cities, but if that’s the case then the whole thing gets kind of disturbingly meta, doesn’t it?

Meanwhile, on Blog@Newsarama...

Well it's been almost two weeks now, and I've so far managed not to cross-post anything both here and at my new home away from home, Blog@Newsarama.com, but today I wanted to post a heads-up here about review there, as it may be of special interest to my fellow Columbusites.

Local artist, comics creator and musician/performer Phonzie Davis had a new comic book hit the new comic rack this past Wednesday. It's a real, live, full-size, staples-and-everything comic book, it's called Left-Handed Sophie and it's pretty damn good. You can read me discussing it in greater detail over at Blog@ by clicking here.

The other reason I'm kinda sorta cross-posting this is because I can't figure out how to post large images at Blog@ on account of my not knowing how to do anything on a computer besides type (and, on occasion, beat the hell out of Kanjar Ro's space pirates).

So, here's the title character battling a bully in the school cafeteria:


And here's a page from later in the book, demonstrating how information-dense some of the book is:


If it looks or sounds like something that might be up your alley, word on the street (i.e. the Internet) is that Davis will be signing books at The Laughing Ogre at 4 p.m. this coming Wednesday (December 17).

Special Thanksgiving-related review: Downs #1

Thanksgiving isn’t that easy a holiday to comics-blog about. (Is that a verb? ‘Cause I’m using it like a verb). Unlike Christmas and Halloween, for which there are thousands upon thousands of comics that celebrate the commercialization of the celebration of the birth of Christ co-opting pagan winter tree-worship and the commercialization of pagan fall devil worship (respectively), there are relatively few comics that celebrate Thanksgiving.

So I was quite pleased to open a manila envelope from Columbus writer Tony Goins to find a slick new self-published book entitled Downs and find that the middle story in the mini-anthology was heavy on turkey content:


“It’s a Free-Range Celestial Tie-Dyed Freak-Out, Turkey” is a ten-page story by Goins and artist Brent Bowman.

It opens with our pupil-less heroine Susan Downs, ancient Chinese agriculture deity Sovereign Millet, and a loosely organized band of hippies (one of whom is a ghost hippie), about to storm a poultry barn defended by gun-wielding rednecks. Why?

“First, I have to tell you about this turkey I had the other day…” Susan says, and we flash back to her in her kitchen, about to engage in her annual eating of meat, which leads to a kind of psychic freak-out brought on by the treatment of factory-farmed poultry. She can feel the birds' pain, and the horrible environment in which it was raised.

Oh, Susan has some sort of psychic-y powers…or super-ninja powers. Possibly of the Daredevil variety…? That’s referred to in the opening story of the collection, a five-page tale illustrated by Steven Russell Black (who also provided the cover image above) entitled “Dual Cultivation.” Basically, she can’t see with her eyes, but she can see with her mind.

Susan tracks the bird she tasted back to the West Virginia commune that was supposed to have sent her a free-range bird. Scant panels into her investigation, she’s brained from behind with a shovel, and wakes up tied up amid the poor penned-up, mistreated birds.
That’s when Sovereign Millet shows up.
He unties Susan, introduces her to the ghost of Rainbow, one of the hippies who ran the free-range turkey farm, which some rival turkey-farmers violently took over, murdering him and kidnapping his fellow hippies in the process.

Which brings us back to the edge of the face-off the story started with. A violent splash-panel later—in which Susan and Millet bust out kung fu, and the hippies outnumber the guys with NRA hats—the bad guys’ leader Skykes makes a run for it. Susan follows, only to have him push a stack of turkey cages at her, threatening to bury her alive in caged turkeys.

Instead, she’s miraculously saved by turkeys.
You just don’t see many panels like the one above that often.

And as for the man she was pursuing, well, he was found dead…
…a stalk of millet growing through his forehead.

The bad guys punished and the free-range turkey farm saved from the wicked factory-farming McCain/Palin voters, Susan and friends proceed to one of the twelve traditional happy endings:
Everyone gets together for a drum circle.

There’s one more story in the book, a nine-page one drawn by a “Matias T!” and called “The Girl Who Wasn’t There.” This one isn’t as clever or as fun as the turkey farm one, and is a more straightforward supernatural P.I. kind of tale, albeit one with a Tales From The Crypt sort of twist ending. It involves a health nut, a rock star and a necklace containing a vial of blood.

Taking all three stories together, it’s an awful lot for a single issue, and I suppose each of the stories could have benefited from more space to develop and breathe; while the first story works fine as a brief character introduction/prologue, the latter two seem a little abbreviated, with plot dominating the proceedings at the expense of character. Like, I’m still not sure what’s up with Susan and her eyes and mind powers and her time at an Eastern temple learning sex magic and kung fu, and maybe I’m not supposed to be—the cover does say “issue one,” after all—but I think I would have rather spent some more time with Susan and got a feel of who she is, where she’s at and what she’s all about, rather than getting so many stories in so small a space.

On the other hand, Goins pursuing this particular strategy does give us a good sense of the kind of scope of conflicts his heroine deals with, and the range of possibilities for future adventures: She knows Chinese deities on a first name basis, can feel the lives of turkeys through their meat, can see people’s souls and knows a bit about different kinds of magic.

The art is all quite solid, particularly for a self-published effort like this. Black’s cover image above speaks for itself; click through his name and you can see a lot more of his work. He’s great at single painted images, and while the short story he works on here doesn’t give a great sense of it, he’s skilled at sequentials as well.

I probably enjoyed Bowman’s work the best, although he did get the most space and the most to work with. “Matias T!” isn’t bad, and shows some aptitude for character design, but many of the panels seemed to contain dubious spatial relations between the subjects, and he (or she?) seemed less comfortable with backgrounds and settings, and the way these things related to the characters.

Anyway, that’s 24 pages of comics for $3, making this a much better comics-to-dollars value than, say, Secret Invasion or any of Marvel’s current miniseries. And since I failed to provide Goins with anything very blurb-worthy in this post, I’d just like to close by saying “Tony Goins is a thousand times the comics writer than Brad Meltzer is.” (But then, who isn’t?)

If Downs sounds like something you’d like to read for yourself, you can click to tonygoins.com for ordering information, webcomics and suchlike. Goins also contributes to the Panel group blog, which you can read here.

Billy Ireland's Chris Columbus

Uncle Sam is probably the greatest character creation of political cartoons, a symbol/character who has never gone out of style there, and has gone on to a great career in armed forces recruitment and WWII era propaganda (not to mention superhero-ing).

While he seems to be the most successful and most often-used political cartoon character, others have appeared over the years and still show up fairly frequently—Lady Liberty/Statue of Liberty, England’s John Bull, the Russian Bear and, of course, the Democratic Donkeys and Republican Elephants.

Columbus cartoonist Billy Ireland had a few creations of his own, which he used quite often in his work. One was Old Man Ohio, who, like his name implies, was an old man who symbolized the state of Ohio. The other was Chris Columbus, sometimes spelled “Kris” because, I don’t know, maybe spelling things with a K was funny to people in the early 1900s.

Chris Columbus was drawn with hair and clothes to resemble Christopher Columbus from that Sebastiano del Piombo portrait which seems to be his most common portrayal. His physical appearance would vary greatly depending on the subject matter Ireland was addressing in the cartoons; he was generally more realistic looking in the political cartoons, but given a more abstracted and highly animated, silly design when appearing in Ireland’s “Passing Show” (which was discussed in Friday’s post).

Ireland used Chris as a symbol for the city; as Uncle Sam was to the United States, Chris Columbus was to the city of Columbus, Ohio. It’s probably an obvious idea, but I still think it’s pretty inspired. After all, how many modern American cities share their names with an easily identifiable and caricature-able historical figure?

I’ve seen other local cartoonists—um, the guy they had at the Dispatch before the guy they have now, at least—draw Columbus to stand in for Columbus the city too, but Ireland’s usage is differentiated by the fact that he was, oh, let’s say ten thousand times a better artist (Um, nothing personal, guy who used to work for the Dispatch whose name I can’t remember!).

In a cartoon featuring the foundation of the city’s park system, Ireland drew Chris standing around with a couple of other guys, one marked “City Council.” Another had him hanging out with Santa Claus and William Byrd (I don’t really know what that subject was, really). When drawing a cartoon about a proposal to fix up the city, Ireland drew Chris at a tailor’s, getting his measurement taken.

One of my favorites, which I didn’t scan either, was a part of a “Passing Show” in which I think a new airport opened…or maybe a new airline…? Whatever it was addressing exactly, it dealt with airplanes somehow bringing Columbus and the city of Los Angeles together.

Ireland drew Chris and a beautiful angel woman marked Las Angeles before a clergyman airplane performing a ceremony that concluded, “I now pronounce you…neighbors.” While, off to the side, two proud and happy looking train engines looked on.

It wasn’t easy to find scan-able images of Ireland’s Chris from the collection of cartoons Lucy Shelton Caswell authored (more on that book in Friday’s post too), but here are a few I managed.




In this (pretty poorly) scanned detail of “The Passing Show,” Chris leads a visitor to the city on a tour of the place, taking care to angle the umbrella just so to keep the not so nice looking buildings out of view at all times.

This is one of Ireland’s looser versions of Chris, in which he is drawn more like a mascot or funny character. Ireland must have been using him in “The Passing Show” for some time at this point, because he doesn’t even bother to tag him as “Chris” or “Columbus” as he sometimes did.

I love the expressions on the faces (or is that façades?) of the derelict buildings in this sequence…how they start out all proud and eager in the first panel, and then are increasingly crestfallen as it progresses.

Here are two of the political cartoons featuring Chris. City Council wasn’t always presented as his wife, but here are two examples in which she, er, it is:



These are three years apart, but not how different Chris looks in each, aside from wearing the same clothes. And his wife sure has changed! In the second one, she even gets a name, “Mrs. Councilella Columbus.”

I really like the relationship Ireland infers between the city of Columbus and its City Council—that of a somewhat henpecked husband constantly being railroaded and dragged around by his wife. The city and its council were in a voluntary relationship, but one was clearly in charge of the other, and the city had to always go along, even if it wasn’t excited to do so.

Don’t feel too bad for Councilella and Chris though. They did share happier times, too. In one panel of a “Passing Show,” for example, they’re shown joyfully taking their kids to the circus when it stopped in town. And that Councilella was much prettier than the one with the crazy collar window shopping up there.

Who is Billy Ireland?

(Above: A detail from “The Passing Show” featuring “Carmen Ohio.” That’s the name of a 1902 OSU football song that’s still quite popular, but is here anthropomorphized into a symbol of the team)


Now that I know who he is, it seems strange that I’ve gone this long being completely ignorant of Billy Ireland, despite having lived in Columbus for about eight years now and being as interested in comics and cartooning as I am.

You see Ireland was, according to Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library curator Lucy Shelton Caswell, Columbus’ greatest cartoonist. And this is a city that can boast of having been home to several great cartoonists, from Milton Caniff to James Thurber to this Jeff Smith character you’ve probably heard of, so it’s actually quite a heap to be said to be at the top of.

I first heard his name just a month or so ago, when I saw the listing in the Wexner Center for the Arts’ calendar for Caswell’s lecture on “Columbus’ greatest cartoonist,” whom she’d previously authored a book on. Simply titled Billy Ireland, it was first published in 1980 by Ohio State University Libraries*, but a newer, updated version** was more recently released, which prompted the lecture.

I tracked down a pretty battered copy of the 1980 version from my library. It was an oversized trade paperback held together with tape, and it didn’t take too many pages before I became deeply impressed with Ireland’s ability to draw. But it’s the back section of the book, in which his weekly “The Passing Show” is collected, in which merely being impressed turned to flat-out awe.

In an odd synchronicity, that week I was reading a (extremely boring) book about the history of a local suburb, and both Ireland and “The Passing Show” showed up in it. Apparently, he was quite the prominent figure in Columbus during the first third of the 20th century, and an event in the suburb getting covered in his cartoon was a big enough deal to be put in the city’s history.

How did I manage to live here this long without having ever heard of him?

The book certainly went a long way toward rectifying that, and I went to check out Caswell’s presentation yesterday to see what else I could learn. I’m going to share all that with you now, like it or not.

It was not a pleasant day in Columbus yesterday. It had been snowing big, fluffy flakes for much of the morning, and while it wasn’t enough to shut anything down, it was just enough to make leaving one’s house inconvenient—you’d have to clean off your windshield, your feet would be wetter and colder than usual and, as is usual in inclement weather, one’s fellow Columbusites would forget how to drive.

Visiting OSU’s campus is never terribly pleasant either, at least not for the poor/cheap. I used to live a few blocks from the heart of campus, so attending events there was simply a matter of a few minutes’ walk, but now I have to drive in from a suburb, and spend twenty minutes driving around back-alleys and sidestreets trying to find a parking spot within a few blocks. That, or shell out three bucks to park in the garage conveniently located right next door to the Wexner Center’s film/video theater, which is where the talk was to take place.

I don’t know if the snow, cold and/or inconvenience of ever going to campus for any reason was a factor or not, or if it was perhaps the 4:30 start time, before those with day jobs would punch out and be able to attend, but the theater wasn’t exactly crowded.

I counted 25 people there, counting Wex staff and volunteers, friends of Caswell’s and yours truly. The smallness of the crowd was accentuated by the size of the theatre (it sits about 300 people), but it reminded me that no matter how many graphic novel reviews you see in respectable newspapers, how many hundreds of Marjane Satrapi profiles are written or how often Joe Quesada gets asked on the radio or TV to talk about the latest lame event in the fictional lives of Captain America or Spider-Man, there’s still a certain small-ness to comics.

At the start of her lecture, Caswell put the front page of The Columbus Dispatch from the day Ireland died up on an overhead projector, as a way of emphasizing how important he was to the city at the time. Ireland’s death was the front page; there were four huge pictures of him, several articles and remembrances, and the sorts of headlines usually reserved for wars. (Nowadays the Dispatch devotes that same amount of front-page coverage to each and every OSU football game).

Caswell then spoke briefly about Ireland’s biographical details, the same ones covered in her book, before turning to the work itself. She put up several of his political cartoons dealing with local, state, national and international topics—all given the same weight in terms of the quality of the drawing and complexity of the image and message construction—and then dove into “The Passing Show.”

And, as I noted earlier, this is where admiration easily turns to awe in earnest.

Caswell said the best way to describe “The Passing Show” was as “an illustrated column” dealing with whatever was of interest to Ireland. But it was a page long. An entire newspaper page. And he did it every single week. For 27 years.

Each “Passing Show” had a unique title strip across the top, with the words “The Passing Show,” “by” and a shamrock representing Ireland, all arranged into little scenes, like the letters all playing baseball or football, or forming a bridge, or baby birds in a nest, or captured German soldiers or whatever. Below that would be a dozen or so little mini-features or cartoons. There were more or less regular features within the page, like one-panel strip “The Jedge and Jerry” and caricatures highlighting local people and their interests and accomplishments, but the bulk of the page were standalone text and cartoon pieces dealing with nature, corn on the cob, OSU football, city politics, fashion and whatever the hell Ireland felt like drawing that week.

The dozen or two little pieces didn’t really interact with one another, and Caswell said the page was designed to be read over the course of the day, with some people returning to it throughout their reading experience, while others sat there and read the whole thing.

Appearing fairly regularly was Ireland himself. Not just as the shamrock-headed caricature in the title panel,
but also as a little, fat white-haired guy in a janitor’s outfit; the page was his page, and he saw himself as in charge of its maintenance.

You probably can’t tell from that little scan there,

but each one of these things was a massive amount of work (The smaller reproductions in the book were still too big for the scanner, and Photoshop couldn’t take the size of the image when I was saving pages to re-post here).

(A detail from the above "Passing Show," guest-starring J. Wellington Wimpy)

I mean, you’ve probably heard cartoonists complaining about how difficult it is to crank out six daily strips and a Sunday strip, right? Well compare that work load to Ireland’s on “The Passing Show,” and keep in mind he’s not simply drawing the same simple character talking to each other for three panels like in, say, Dilbert or The Boondocks (to name two strips I really like, neither of which are exactly brilliantly drawn), but this involved a considerable amount of planning, character design and drawing each week.

Caswell pointed out in her talk that Ireland not only cranked out a weekly page of the newspaper for those 27 years, he was also responsible for four to seven editorial cartoons a week.

(Part of a "Passing Show" from the week of a Columbus auto show; note the top half of the badly-scanned page is arraned to resemble the front of an automobile)

I would have loved to have watched him work at the drawing board; it’s hard to imagine a man’s hands moving fast enough to produce so much work, especially considering that he was married, had kids, and was very involved with the Dispatch’s business, city politics and policy, and, according to Caswell, loved to hunt, hike and golf (That last one being a passion shared by 99% of today’s newspaper strip cartoonists, based on the number of limp golf-focused jokes I’ve seen in them over the years).

Actually, the way he worked at the drawing board is one of the things that Caswell covers in the book. He’d hold the page against his desk with his left hand (which usually also held a cigar) while drawing with his right.

During the question and answer portion, someone asked Caswell if it were possible for someone to do something like “The Passing Show” today, and she said it was possible, but difficult, and that “very few people have it in them to do it.”

Me, I would probably have straight up laughed if I were her. Even if there were artists capable of that kind of weekly workload, can you even imagine a newspaper turning over an entire page to a cartoonist today? And a local one at that, one who is mainly cartooning on topics of local interest?

Back to Ireland’s bio for a moment: He was born in 1880 in Chillicothe, Ohio, and started working for the Dispatch as an 18-year-old in 1898, remaining at the paper through his death in 1935.

I don’t know how unusual it was for the cartoonist to be as influential and powerful within the paper as Ireland was, but he definitely seems to have been, and I’ve always thought of cartoonists as somewhat marginal figures within their papers.

In 1905, Robert F. Wolfe and Harry P. Wolfe, owners of the Wolfe Brothers Shoe Company, purchased the Dispatch, and became friends with Ireland (Particularly Robert, Caswell said). This friendship allowed Ireland to buy stock in the company, and become involved with its general editorial direction, with he and the Wolfes taking up the same local causes back in the day (Interestingly and/or depressingly, over a century later, the Wolfe family still owns the Dispatch, which has grown into a local media empire, including TV and radio stations, suburban papers, a Spanish language paper and what used to be Columbus’ alternative newspaper).

Caswell repeated anecdotes from Will Rogers saying he subscribed to the Dispatch just for Ireland, and that William Randolph Hearst had tried to entice Ireland to syndicate his work, going so far as to promise to build a color printing plant in Columbus, but Ireland turned him down, being more interested in the city and state than what was going on outside it.

She also repeated one about Milton Caniff (which is apparently pronounced “Cuh-niff;” I always thought it was “Cane-iff;” good thing I’ve never had occasion to say his name out loud, I guess). It was Ireland who hired Caniff at the Dispatch, allowing him the means to continue going to college. When Caniff was considering a career change, forsaking cartooning for acting, Ireland told him, “Stick to your ink pots, kid. Actors don’t eat regularly.” And thus Terry and the Pirates was saved.

As for the work itself, that is easily the most valuable thing about Caswell’s book, which reproduced plenty of political cartoons and “Passing Shows” (The book is mostly a collection of these, with a relatively small percentage of the book devoted to Ireland’s bio).

The political cartoons are a bit of a revelation in that they are so clearly the work of an age long gone—the earliest one reprinted in the 1980 volume is 120 years old now—and yet in some ways share the strengths and weaknesses of today’s political cartoons (Has political cartooning really just not changed much over the last century?).

Ireland’s artwork is somewhat old-timey in just how detailed and representational it is. There are an awful lot of ink lines in almost every one of them that is represented in the edition, and terribly few of them have any sort of serious abstraction within them. In many cases, the drawings themselves aren’t trying to be funny, just good drawings, and humor will come from juxtapositions.

I mean, check this out:
That’s a really nice drawing of a really realistic snake, you know? Ditto the dove drawing. The most abstracted part of the drawing is the German dude, and he’s not exactly what you’d think of as “cartoony” looking.

One thing I can’t help but notice—and lament—in Ireland’s work is the need to relentlessly label everything. This is something that drives me crazy about the bulk of modern political cartoons (and, to expand a bit, about comics in general—the need to use more verbal communication than necessary, when the visual handles it just fine). It’s easy to forgive Ireland because, hell, it was the early 20th century and political cartooning was still new-ish, so I’m not going to hate on him the same way I would on someone political cartooning today, but there’s a real excess of labeling in that image above.

The German doesn’t have the word Germany written on him, and yet its clear, even a century later, that that’s what he’s supposed to represent. A dove holding an olive branch is a pretty universal symbol for peace, did it need to be labeled “Dove of Peace,” with the branch redundantly further labeled “peace?”

Probably not. It’s still a nice image and a strong cartoon, I just wanted to point out that over-labeling was a problem as far back as the early 1900’s. And Ireland would sometimes accomplish it in strange ways, having tags sort of sticking off his figures identifying them, as if they were huge washing instructions on their clothes or whatever.

Seeing so many of his cartoons gathered in one place, it’s easy to get a sense of what issues he was passionate about. In addition to attacking Germany, Europe and the League of Nations around World War I, he would commonly speak up in favor of women’s suffrage and better support for veterans, against both Ohio’s KKK and FDR’s New Deal, and, in what was apparently a pet issue of his, in favor of keeping the quail on Ohio’s songbird list (thus keeping it illegal to hunt). Caswell noted that among the local issues he was most passionate about was the sad state of the riverfront, which he and Robert Wolfe campaigned to have cleaned up.

They eventually succeeded, which, during her talk, Caswell said she likes to think of as proof that one person can make a big difference in their city. You can literally drive around Columbus today and see streets that look the way they do now because of Ireland' campaigns.

After reading about Ireland and looking at his work, I'm beginning to think Columbus needs another public campaign—one to erect a statue of Ireland somehwere around here.



Billy Ireland Weekend will continue here at Every Day Is Like Wednesday tomorrow and Sunday, with a couple of looks at some of Ireland’s cartoons, and many, many fewer words than I subjected you to tonight. Promise. We'll get back to making fun of superhero comics and posts about how awesome Martian Manhunter is*** on Monday.



*I found a copy at my local library, but it might prove more difficult to track down outside of the Buckeye State; here’s a great site for finding where the closest library to you that owns a particular book might be. You’ll probably want to bookmark that shit, cuz it’s hella useful.

**I understand the new version is a hardcover, and features quite a bit of color art; the original is all black and white. For those of you outside of Columbus and thus nowhere near OSU, it looks like you can buy the book for $35 online here.

***Very awesome.

K. Thor Jensen's Columbus Adventure

K. Thor Jensen's recent 300-page graphic novel Red Eye, Black Eye is the NYC-based cartoonist's choronicle of his adventures going Greyhound in late 2001. You can read the first 16 pages here, and my review of it here, but the long and the short of it is that Jensen reaches a point in his life where he feels like he has nothing left, so he buys Greyhound's "Ameripass," which allows him to take as many buses as he wants for a certain period of time, and he becomes a hobo and drifter, criss-crossing the country and crashing at friends' houses.

Most of that time is spent drunk or getting dunk, which, coupled with the freedom of the hobo and drifter, allows him to do things you probably wouldn't consider doing in your own home town. The story is a lot more interesting and a lot less gimmicky than it might sound. Jensen gets stories from each person he meets—many of which are quite crazy—and the graphic novel has a strange but oddly gripping conflict in that his landlady owes him $1,000 and is dithering about depositing it. It's all the money he has, so if he doesn't get it, he has to do things like dance on street corners for money (which he does). Okay, it's not Galactus threatening to devour the planet, but it's something you can relate to, you know?

Oh, and he's a hell of a cartoonist, too. That also helps make it a great read.

He visits 17 cities in 60 days, a total of 10,000 miles. These include San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Seattle, Austin, Minneapolis and Gainesville, but the two most fun chapters are undoubtedly Birmingham and our own great city of Columbus.

The capital city is actually Jensen's second stop in Ohio, following a stay with his friend Chet in Cleveland. There he is interviewed by (and interviews) a person named Mike whom I suspect is Plain Dealer staffer and occassional Newsarama.com columnist Michael Sangiacomo. I say this only because his name is Mike, he looks like Sangiacomo and Jensen's avatar refers to the guy's paper buying them lunch, which in Cleveland most likely means the Plain Dealer (it's the city's only real daily paper as far as I remember... I haven't paid much attention to the north east Ohio newspaper scene since I moved down here a few years back).

I mention this only because the chapter-within-a-chapter entitled "Mike's Story" is about Mike driving off to find himself and ending up at an outdoor Canadian rock and roll festival, where two girls high on drugs fight over him, which climaxes with one pulling a knife. And well, if you've read as much of Sangiacomo's writing as I have (we grew up with a Plain Dealer subscription), it's not the kind of situation you usually imagine Sangiacomo getting into, you know?

Anyway, on to Columbus.

As the image above attests, Jensen had some harsh words to say to some in our fair city. But keep in mind, Jensen was probably drunk when he said it, and had just been thrown out of a karaoke bar.

Also, Jensen is out to "find himself' as Mike was. When Mike warns him not to look for trouble, he responds, "Are you kidding? Trouble is all I'm looking for. I'm not gonna be satisfied if I go home without a black eye." (Hence, the title).







Chet drives Jensen down to Columbus, and they stay with his friend Chris, in this houses, which Jensen refers to as "a chalet." I have no idea where that is. Nor do I know who Chris or Jensen's other apparent Columbus-based friends Walker or Mark are. This is remarkable only because Columbus, despite being the country's fifteenth largest city in the millennial census (deal with it!) is an incredibly small place, where the normal six degrees of seperation is more like one-and-a-half degrees. If both you and Kevin Bacon lived in Columbus, you probably would have either dated him, shared an apartment with him, worked with him or gotten into a barfight with him within a year of living here.

It's late October when Jensen visits, and he plans to stay through Halloween, to make Chris a chestvagina. Which is just what it sounds like. Using papier mache, coathangers and scans of vaginas from the Internet, he makes a gaint vagina which Chris can wear on his chest (Since I use a library scanner, I'm not even gonna attempt scanning it. Although, it would be intersting to see if including "chestvagina" in the label for the post brings any interesting visitors to my site. Or not.)







On the way to the art supply store, they stop at this place, which they refer to as a "goth store" and look around, eventually taking umbrage with the fact that all the ghosts on the walls were white and make a scene until they're tasked to leave ("You like to wear black, but you don't like blacks?"). I have no idea where it is, or if there eve is or ever was a "Dark Masque" goth store in Columbus.

I suppose Jensen could have changed the name and that it could have been the magic store in the Short North on the corner of Fifth and High (which has since closed), which is on the way to an art supply store if you're coming down high from the north. I can't remember the name of that place, but I don't think it was "Dark Masque." There was also that place Clintonville off High (which has also since closed), but I think it had the word "Shadow" in the name. How bad is my memory? I once interviewed the second place's ownder and wrote a profile of his store for a local paper, and now I can't even remember the name of the place.








The next day he goes here to do a little laundry. I don't know exactly which laundromat this is either, but then, I'm not terribly familiar with the laundromat scene in Columbus.








He and his friends visit a club to enter a costume contest which is giving away cash prizes. I assume it's Red Zone (note the title), but having never actually been to Red Zone, I can't say for sure. If it is Red Zone, I should point out that it has also since closed. So anyone outside Columbus reading Red Eye, Black Eye thinking, "Man, that place is awesome! Let's totally drive there and check out the goth store and club K. Thor Jensesn went to!" I should caution you that we probably can't offer you a complete Red Eye, Black Eye guided bus tour at this point.

Chris' Macho Man Randy Savage costume is totally defeated by a girl's Lara Croft costume (which, yes, is just a tank top and short, with a braid in her hair).









Aftwards, they go out for pizza at this place. I'm not 100% positive where this is, but I'd hazard a guess that it's Hound Dog's, based on the fact that they go there at night after leaving a club and it's packed (Also, the drawaings of the interiors feature some booths that look Hound Dogs-ish.

There Jensen and his friends are unable to find a table large enough to accomodate them, so he asks two girls occupying a huge booth if they'd mind vacating for a smaller table. When they say no, he then politely asks if they'd mind if he and his friends "pull a train" on them. When they ask what that is, he says "Oh, I'm sorry. Pull a train. That'd be were me and my friends take you to an abandoned watertower and take turns hate-fucking you unconscious."

Jeez, the things you learn when reading comics.

Apparently, K. Thor is not a psychopath, but this was part of his attempt to get a black eye ("I was hoping they'd have big dumb Ohio agriculture college boyfriends I could try to fight").










The next day, he walks to German Village and seems excited to learn where he is. German Village, it turns out, is a popular destination for visiting comic book characters. While there, he kicks a brick in the sidewalk out of place, and then continues on his way for a bit before thinking "I gotta go put that brick back," and running back to put it back in place.







Finally, they go here for a big costumed karaoke contest. Again, I have no idea where this is supposed to be. I know there's a Champps at the Lennox Town Center, but I always just assumed it was an Applebee's-like restaurant. Googling Champps and Columbus, I guess it's actually a sports bar, and there are three of 'em within ten miles of me.

At any rate, Chris is now dressed like Macho Man Randy Savage, but with a chestvagina. He's asked to take it off because Champps is a family establishment, so Chris must cover it up beneath his jacket. On stage, he sings that annoying song that I think is called "Rumpshaker" (You know, that "I'll I wann do is a rooma zoom zoom" song) while in character. When someone in the crowd tells Jensen that his friend is "totally gay," Jensen freaks out on him, in a six-panel sequence that scared me as a reader, during which he pantomimes getting dicks in his mouth and ass while shouting, "Wait, what do you mean, he' s gay? You mean he's gay like he takes dicks in the mouth? And dicks in the ass?" He repeats this until he's screaming, but no luck, no fight comes out of it.

On stage, the karaoke routine climaxes with Chris opening his jacket Clark Kent-style to reveal the chestvagina, and soon a phalanx of bouncers is hauling him off stage, while Jensen screams "We won!" and "Give us our money!"







That's when he busts out the epithet with which this post begins, but despite the crushing loss, Jensen leaves Columbus by bus with a smile on his face, which is much better shape than he leaves a lot of the cities he visits. Based on this book, Columbus would seem to be one of the most fun cities in the country, topped only by Birmingham, which is where the cover image comes from. No, that's not symbolism. Jensen does rid a burning couch hauled by a pick-up truck in Birmingham.

Weekly Haul: February 14th

52 #41 (DC Comics) Slow weeks like this one are exactly why I love this title—even when there’s relatively little else out, I can count on at least one book I’m excited about being there. This issue’s pencil art, by Giuseppe Camuncoli, is a little messy (I had no idea what was going on in some of the panels in the first space scene), and the storyline was split between the two I find the least interesting (the space thread and the Montoya thread), but it was still a solid read. There’s a very nice bit of dialogue from Adam Strange that delves rather deeply into his character, and other positives include no first-person narration during Montoya's scenes, Waid’s cute punchline at the end of Starfire’s origin story and a surprisingly strong list of suggestions in this weeks “Essential Storylines.” On the negative side, how is it that Montoya doesn’t recognize superheroine/ambassador/celebrity/war criminal Wonder Woman? And am I the only DC reader tiring of Mogo appearances? The first time Alan Moore told the joke it was kinda clever; now it’s getting to the point where you can’t leave Earth’s atmosphere without bumping into the big guy. He’s like the Wolverine of celestial bodies.

Batman #663 (DC) I’d seen a preview of this issue, so I went in with lowered expectations, and yet Grant Morrison and team still found a way to burrow beneath them. I’ll post a full review later, as the book demands more attention than these little blurb reviews allow, which, in and of itself, is something to reccomend it—it takes a special kind of talent to deliver a godawful comic that warrants more discussion than derision.

Darkman Vs. Army of Darkness #3 (Dynamite Entertainment) Like every Army of Darkness miniseries I’ve tried, the idea for this story sounded a lot better than the story itself actually was, and I began to lose interest half way through the second installment. I almost left this on the shelf today, until I noticed the George Perez version of the cover tucked behind a couple of Nick Bradshaw’s version. It’s so hard to resist Perez art.

JLA: Classified #34 (DC) Welcome to “The Fourth Parallel” part 2B. This chapter occurs simultaneous to the last chapter, only in a different reality, hence it being labeled part 2B instead of part 3. Cute. This reality differs from the previous one in that now Dan Jurgens’ lay outs are being finished by Jerry Ordway (multiple artists on a single story arc in an anthology series like this are kind of silly, but at least Ordway’s presence makes sense, since this is supposed to be an alternate reality). Oh, and here the Red King tries being a supervillain and blackmailing the League into submission with a doomsday device he accidentally sets off. That gives the JLA just 98 hours to terraform the planet Mars and evacuate all of earth’s people, animals, resources, cities and cultural achievements. It’s a big, crazy challenge worthy of the League, and it’s pretty fun to see things like Superman shrinking and bottling earth cities or Wonder Woman talking to the animals, plus one spread of Earth’s heroes that contains the likes of Ronnie Raymond, Ted Kord and Ray Palmer. The dialogue is pretty bad, but the story is definitely worth slogging through it.

Justice Society of America #3 (DC) Some random, unorganized thoughts on this issue: That’s the worst piece of Alex Ross art I’ve ever seen; Cyclone’s eyes and smile look creepy and dead, her costume seems to be made out of wrapping paper rather than cloth, and she forgot to wear panties, a must for all flying superheroines. The villains all look awesome (well, except maybe Blitzkreig); that’s by far the coolest and scariest Captain Nazi has ever looked. Hawkman is such a dickhead: “Do you know what you are, Swastika? Bleeding." Okay, Swastika is a Nazi murdering a kid, he probably deserves a mace to the face, but does anyone deserve Hawkman’s lame Thanagarian humor? The new Commander Steel has one of the grossest origins ever—he’s going to get his power thanks to a substance that a villain vomited up out of a mouth wound onto him? Ew. The caption said “Franklin County,” but clearly the Henshaws are in the heart of downtown Columbus, as evidenced by the big buildings in the background. Say Columbus, Johns, say it! (Also, Columbus police wear white uniform shirts, not blue). Did you see that ad for Justice League of America Action Figures Series 1? One of them is “Red Arrow;” which means Roy Harper’s new costume and codename have debuted in a house ad for a toy line based on his comic book before actually appearing in said comic book (Speed it up, Meltzer!). Um, excuse me JSA, but you should you guys really be taking Cyclone off to fight super-Nazis on her first day on the job? Holy crap, Wildcat III’s the dude form Kingdom Come! This book was so jam-packed with action, conversation, humor and drama I can scarcely believe it. Johns is totally on fire with this relaunch, and Dale Eaglesham rules. There, I told you these thoughts would be totally random and unorganized.

Thunderbolts #111 (Marvel Comics) The political analogies between Marvel’s “Civil War” storylines and our real, post-9/11 America have been somewhat strained since the beginning, but this is the title that completely breaks them. The closest real world analogue to the Superhuman Registration Act would be something along the lines of national registration (which was proposed after 9/11 but never got too far) combined with a military draft (a proposal that would be D.O.A.). Even if we believe that Stamford disaster would make the Marvel Universe’s U.S. pass such a crazy-ass law, the hiring of it’s scummiest super-killers to enforce said law is just silly, even in a universe where guys dress up like goblins and throw pumpkin bombs from bat-shaped hoverboards. In this issue, we see the ‘bolts and SHIELD spend many millions, if not billions, of dollars just to take down Jack Flag, a semi-retired vigilante fighting neighborhood crime in Cleveland, Ohio. Experienced in a vacuum, devoid of “Civil War”’s political allegories and press conferences about how it’s a story for our times, it’s much easier to enjoy this as super-silly superhero fiction written much more sharply than similar stories (like the above JLA: Classified, for example). Mike Deodato’s art is still too photorealistic for my personal tastes (particularly all the females’ faces, which seem to straight colored into existence rather than penciled or inked), but at least he’s laid off the obvious photoreference. If Tommy Lee Jones made a guest appearance again this issue, I didn’t spot him. Bonus points to Ellis for introducing me to a new word, “toyetic.” (Ironically, however, Bullseye does have toys made of him in the real world, while Songbird doesn’t).

Captain Marvel's Columbus Adventure

I love DC’s Showcase Presents line, which has been releasing phone book-sized collections of black and white reprints of their Silver Age material. Kind of like Marvel’s Essential line, except DC’s tends to reach back further. I’ve devoured nien of the collections they've released so far and enjoyed them all immensely, but the best by far has been Showcase Presents: Shazam!.

These issues come from the 1970’s DC revival, which paired new material with reprints of classic, Golden Age stories (only the ‘70s stuff is collected). The stories, oirignally drawn by C. C. Beck himself, explain where Marvel Family and Foes have been since the ‘40s, and then rather quickly acclimate them all to the “present.”

Captain Marvel, Captain Marvel Jr., Mary Marvel, superpower-less Uncle Marvel, and Tawky Tawny appear throughout, with the Lieutenant Marvels appearing in just one story. Classic villains Dr. Sivana (and his kids) and Mr. Mind appear the most, although Ibac gets a few spotlight stories, and Mister Atom and Black Marvel each get an issue apiece.

These stories are all Pre-Crisis, so they’re still set on “Earth-S,” although that only comes up once, and some other DC characters make some notable appearances. Lex Luthor appears by way of a dream and/or a malfunction of his recently invented “magic accumulator”, and he quckily teams up with Mr. Mind (“You’re my kind of man—er—worm, Mr. Mind!” Luthor sneers on the cover). Superman's likeness appears on a molten steel robot, which Cap clobbers (Can and Superman punching each other—it's like a staple of DC comics, isn't it?) A short-haired, young Kid Eternity guest-star in one tale and, man, has he ever changed in the last 30 years.

Late in the collection, the focus shifts from Golden Age-esque one-offs set in Billy’s nameless home city to more closely conform to the format of the Shazam! TV show, which had just hit the airwaves. Uncle Dudley grew a moustache, and he and Billy started traveling the country in a van, calling up the immortals who lend Captain Marvel his powers on the “Eterni-Phone” whenever necessary.

This road trip story spans the last eight issues collected in the book, and centers on Billy and Dudley’s trip to record patriotic pieces for their employers at Whiz TV. Coincidentally, first Dr. Sivana and then Mr. Mind are planning on destroying America one city at a time (for the Bicentennial celebration, naturally), and their targets neatly line up with Billy’s travel agenda. They’re all written by E. Nelson Bridwell, and feature pencil art by either Kurt Schaffenberger or Tenny Henson.

Each issue takes us to a different city, where we watch Cap have some sort of regional adventure (in Washington D.C., Sivana kidnaps Congress; in Pittsburgh, Sivana builds an army of steel robots to destroy all the steel mills, et cetera).

I was pretty surprised when I got to issue #31, in which Captain Marvel visits Columbus, Ohio. Ours isn’t a city that sees a whole lot of superhero action, and perhaps for good reason. While Captain Marvel’s visit to Detroit has Tawny trying out for the Detroit Tigers, a and his visit to Indianapolis involves him racing Mr. Atom in the Indy 500, Bridwell seems to have trouble finding something Columbus-specific for Cap to do while in town.

The adventure that follows, “The Rainbow Squad,” could happen just about anywhere. Unless Bridwell was using the title to make a coy reference to Columbus’ large, active gay population…? I don’t know; I was only seven months old at the time it was originally published, and I didn’t live in Columbus then, so I have no idea how gay the town was back then.

But if Columbus doesn't come across as well as Philladelphia or Buffalo do, at least our story is the one which reveals Captain Marvel’s Achilles heel—women.

“No man has been able to beat Captain Marvel, the World’s Mightest Mortal,” Bridwell’s breathless narration begins, “But women are another matter—that’s where Cap’s weakness lies—and he needs help from another hero—one from the Golden Age of comics—when he’s confronted by six super-females called…The Rainbow Squad.”



In the first panel, the Shazam van pulls into Columbus’ German Village, a building of which seems to be scanned into the background. I’d love to see an original of this, to see what it looks like in color, but here the background really seems to stand out as not drawn. No idea what building that is.

At any rate, Billy decides to stop at Jack Weston’s restaurant, humbly named “Weston’s,” for lunch. Jack welcomes our heroes at the door, and they remark how odd it is that he’s become a restraunteer, to which he mentions all the time he spent on K.P. in the war.

“Only because the sergeant didn’t know you were really Minute Man, The One-Man Army!” Billy says, and an asterisk lets us know that “Minute Man appeared in Master Comics, America’s Greatest Xomics and his own magazine from 1941 to 1944.

Wait, so Columbus has it’s own superhero—or, at least, it did in 1976—and his name is Minute Man? Well, I suppose it had different connotations back in the day, referring to the Revolutionaries and not Weston’s performance in bed. Now, what was an all-American hero with a patriotic name like Minute Man and a star-spangled costume doing in a comic with a name like Master Comics? Was Fascist Adventures all filled up?



Once Billy and Dudley tuck in to their meals, a man with terrible hair enters, and Dudley announces, “I see an old friend entering—Ron Scheer—Vice President of the Scott Krauss News Agency!” I suspect that this is a real person, based on Schaffenberger’s careful rendering of his face, Dudley's use of his title as if he were reading it off a business cardm and the fact that each city has a similar media executive type appearing to foreshadow the conflict.

While they make small talk with Scheer, in rush the Rainbow Squad, six women in silly costumes who want everyone's valuables.

“Those dames must be loony! They don’t even have guns!” a male patron says, and the men all wade into the women, expressing their reluctance to punch women in the face. But wait, what’s this? They each have a superpower, and make asses out of all the men.

Enter Captain Marvel, but they have a secret plan to deal with him.



“Can’t think straight—have to get out,” Cap thinks to himself while fleeing. Outside, he walks sadly away, completely ignorant of Dynamoll’s blasting him with atomic radiation from behind, as he talks to himself about his predicament: “I don’t understand why beautiful women making a fuss over me does that to me—but I can never get my head straight when it happens!What can I do? I can’t beat up on those girls!”

Meanwhile, the ladies return to the hideout of handsome, vain and slightly off Mr. Wonderful, the man who gave them all their miraculous superpowers through his rainbow machine. He explains, “I chose women because I knew they constitute a weakness on Captain Marvel’s part!”

Meanwhile, Weston and Dudley consult Achillies via Eterni-Phone, and the elder who gives Cap his courage advises them that “Women can be troublesome… It was a woman who caused the Trojan War--and a quarrel over another led to my decision to stop that conflict!” He goes on to cryptically tell Weston to avenge Cap’s defeat.


Meanwhile, Cap is still wandering the city, contemplating his problem of not being able to clobber girls, and we see him in front of City Hall (It’s hard to tell in the black and white reproduction, and my crappy scan of it, but that black blob seems to be the statue of Christopher Columbus downtown).


Dynamoll sneaks up on Cap again, and this time she uses lighting on him, as Mr. Wonderful advised. Changed back to Billy, they put place im under a five ton weight which is somehow suspended near the ceiling by a thin rope, which he intends to cut, Billy “like a worm!"

But in rushes Minute Man at the last, er, minute to pull the gag from Billy’s mouth. Two syllables later, the weight crumbles harmlessly on top of Captain Marvel’s invulnerable head.

It’s Captain Marvel versus the dames, round two!

This time, the Squad eschews seducing Cap for plain old super-violence. He’s still afraid to hit them, but once Minute Man starts getting his ass kicked (figures our hero would have a lame name and be no match for the Rainbow Squad), Cap rallies and enters the fray, letting the women take themselves down by running into one another and bruising their knuckles against his invulnerable chin.

Having brought an end to the Rainbow Squad, Cap attends to thier leader. One Marvelous punch knocks Mr. Wonderful into a thousand pieces with a “KRAA-AMM!” What's this? Mr. Wonderful is just a robot? And inside the head—why, it’s an old foe.

“You mean we’ve been working for a worm ?” an incredulous Squad member asks.



Mind slithers away to safety, and the CPD arrive to load the Rainbow Squad into the back of the paddy wagon. Minute Man vows to stay in the hero game, “I realize now what my life’s been lacking these last few years--excitement! You may be seeing Minute Man in harness a lot from now on!”

Or we may not. That’s the last Minute Man appearance I’ve ever seen, but who knows, maybe he went on to totally defeat all super-crime in central Ohio over the next 30 years, before deciding to go back into retirement. That would certainly explain why there are no supervillains in Columbus at the moment.