Whoever wrote the solicitation copy for Mr. Higgins Comes Home, Mike Mignola and Warwick Johnson-Cadwell's new original graphic novel, sure knew what they were doing. Said copy calls the book a "send-up of classic vampire stories...as outlandish as The Amazing Screw-On Head," comparing this work of Mignola's to his 2002 one-shot was enough to convince me to pick up this $14.99/50-page hardcover. After all, The Amazing Screw-On Head was an amazing comic.
I did not regret doing so.
The particular classic vampire stories, according to Mignola himself on the title page, are those from Hammer Films and, most noticeably, Roman Polanski's 1967 The Fearless Vampire Killers (on Mignola's recommendation, I checked it out; I wasn't as impressed as he was). The influence of Polanski's comedy will likely seem pretty obvious if it is as fresh in your mind as it was in mine upon reading this--I watched the movie one night and read the comic the next night--although Mr. Higgins is more inspired by The Fearless Vampire Killers then derivative of it.
Like the film, the graphic novel features among its protagonists an older, mustachioed professor character devoted to the study of and eradication of vampires and his younger assistant. There is a ball of the undead not unlike that at the climax of the film. And artist Warwick Johnson-Cadwell's artwork seems to have based the layout of Castle Golga's courtyard and crypt on those seen in the film.
The other similarities are mostly related to tone and spirit, although I actually found Mr. Higgins much funnier. It moves at a very quick clip, and the sincerity of Mignola's horror work makes for particularly effective humor, when he so indulges in it (In that respect, if he had drawn the book himself, I can't help but wonder if it might have had a more deadpan type of humor to it; note the cover, which is the only part of the book Mignola drew himself, is indistinguishable from any of his other, serious horror work).
A long time ago in a village between the Carpathian Mountains and the Black Sea, Professor J. T. Meinhardt of Ingolstadt University and his assistant Mr. Knox--a very big, very bald tough-looking guy with a funny-shaped head who couldn't contrast more with Polanski's Alfred--are on their way to Castle Golga in an attempt to rid the world of Count Golga. Their plan is to pick up a secret weapon, one Albert Higgins. Higgins is a werewolf who lived in the Golgas thrall for a time, and who can show them how to enter the crypt in exchange for them killing him (He hasn't been able to figure out how to do so himself). In an attempt to turn the tables, Count Golga invites the three of them to his Walpurgis Night celebration as guests, where he and his fellow ghouls worship the devil; and he won't have to worry about them sneaking around the grounds to do him in if they are on the guest list.
Things go sideways for almost all involved, and though our trio of protagonists all survive and the vampires all die, none of it goes quite according to anyone's plan. Except maybe Satan's.
There's a great bit of deus ex machina--or, perhaps more precisely, diabolus ex machina--that allows for the professor and Mr. Knox to credibly escape relatively unscathed and the would-be devil-worshiping vampires to get what is coming to them.
Mignola's artwork has such a distinct visual style that it is sometimes difficult to read a Mignola comic that is only half a Mignola comic, although regular readers of his somewhat sprawling in scale Hellboy comics should at this point be used to Mignola-written comics not drawn by Mignola himself.
As much as I would have welcomed Mignola art within, Johnson-Cadwell does a brilliant job of it. His artwork is very loose, very exaggerated and rather cartoony, and helps sell the humor. His character designs all look funny, so even though the proceedings might not at first present themselves as, say, comedic, the presence of professor or Mr. Knox might be all we really need to remind us how seriously to take things.
I really liked how full and cluttered with detail all of the "sets" of the book were, from the rustic cabin our heroes stay at in the first scene to the occult tchotchke-filled halls of Castle Golga, and the exaggerated proportions of the monsters. The first vampire the professor encounters has enormous arms that fill his entire room (above). The werewolf looks as big as a house, and seems to grow in proportion to the violence it commits. The vampires are all purple and blue-colored, suggesting Sesame Street's Count. Satan appears as a weird-eyed black goat and, later, as a gentleman of an extremely goat-like countenance.
It's a very fun book, filled with familiar horror movie tropes jumbled into new form that strikes just the right balance between silly and spooky. It's a very delicate balancing act of tone, but Mignola and Johnson-Cadwell pull it off.
It's not really as outlandish as The Amazing Screw-On Head, but then, few comics actually are. And I can't actually begrudge Dark Horse for selling it as such, given that doing so certainly did the job of selling the comic to me.
Dark Horse's second miniseries featuring Robert E. Howard's late 17th century Puritan vanquisher of evil, Solomon Kane: Death's Black Riders was published in 2010. Like its predecessor, The Castle of the Devil, it was the work of writer Scott Allie and artist Mario Guevara, and based on an unfinished fragment of Howard's...with an adaptation of short story "Rattle of Bones" nestled somewhat uncomfortably within the extrapolated title story.
It's a pretty strong piece of pulp fiction turned elegantly illustrated pulp comics. Still wandering the Black Forest after his adventure in the previous series, Kane comes across a strange scene. A band of gypsies was in the process of being robbed by a pair of highwaymen, when the entire group was attacked by bizarre and hideous monsters. Kane intervenes, killing most of the creatures, and then he and one survivor hole up in a lonely inn called "The Cleft Skull," where "Rattle of Bones" is adapted...and then the monsters return in greater numbers to besiege the inn.
As with the previous volume, Mike Mignola provides a great cover, one so solid in design and execution that I wished the interior art was in the same style, and Guy Davis provides the monster designs, as the generous portion of backmatter makes clear.
And man, these are some really great monster designs. So great, in fact, that it almost seems a waste that Davis septn so much time and creative energy so thoroughly designing them, right down to forms of locomotion and the way the creatures might store their weapons on their bodies, that it seems a shame that they exist only in this miniseries, and even then, Guevara has somewhat redesigned them (Also as with the previous volume, there's a short comics story in here as well; "All the Damned Souls at Sea," which is drawn by Guy Davis and originally appeared in a pair of MySpace Dark Horse Presents issues. In it, Kane fights a scary-looking witch, and then a curse-created monster built out of boat pieces).
It's my understanding that the "Death's Black Riders" fragment is just that, a fragment, with only a few lines actually completed by Howard. Those lines involved Kane meeting, in the words of whoever handles the Sa olomon Kane Wikipedia page, "a shadowy ghost rider on the road."
In designing the riders, Allie said he wanted a monster that could be mistaken for Solomon Kane on the road at first sight, and, indeed, here is Guevara's first image of a rider from the story:
Davis said that, additionally, they didn't want the riders to resemble centaurs...which Mignola's monster on the cover rather does...aside from the gaping mouth where the human abdomen would be on a centaur. So, what Davis did, was to first sketch a silhouette of Kane on Horseback, and then reverse-engineer a monster that could make that shape from there, taking care to not simply make it into a centaur.
What he came up with is pretty fantastic:
This seems to be a rather early design, but it's probably my favorite. I like who the entire front of the creature is one big, weird head shape. It looks a bit like the shadow of a centaur, but is rather some kind of scary quadraped with an large head, more vertical and rectangular than orb-like.
That design couldn't hold a sword, however, so Davis then gives his rider arms, and it looks almost completely alien now:
Not only does it have six limbs rather than four, but it's arms are all "wrong" by our standards, with multiple elbow-like joints. I also like how it retains the big, giant face. Davis basically further refines this design, even coming up with a neat solution as to how the creatures might walk around when they don't need their arms to fight with:
Guevara then took the designs and ran with them, coming up with several different variations, some of which do resemble monstrous, desiccated centaurs:
As they finally appear in the story, they have a pair of mouths, a detail that I didn't really like, as it seemed like a more generic, lazy monster; that is, assigning exaggerated human features or additional body parts, whereas the one-mouthed creatures had a bizarre, alien sense of anatomy; that is, they didn't look like men with mouths in their stomachs; the "other" mouth near the eyes make them seem a little too human.
Guevara draws each of the creatures a little different though. Here are some images of them:
They have individualized modes of dress, and some have quite different faces, and a few even seem to have different numbers of limbs.
Finally, how artist Darrick Robertson, who drew the individual covers for each of the issues in the series, rendered the riders:
It would be very easy to imagine this story being completed with very different antagonists, more standard-issue monsters like Tolkein's Nazgul, or spectral or skeletal men on spectral or skeletal horses or something centaur-like, but the lengths that Davis and Guevara went in order to make unique monsters really elevated the proceedings into something worthy of fascination...atop the expected pleasures of the pulpy, tough guy-fighting-horrible monsters story.
Mike Mignola provides a fine cover for the collection of Scott Allie and Mario Guevara’s Solomon Kane miniseries, which is designed to resemble an old movie poster or trashy paperback cover. It’s a fine cover, but somewhat unfortunate in how poorly it reflects the contents.
Those too are gorgeous, but in a completely different style, making this a graphic novel particularly difficult to judge by its cover (Speaking of covers, when originally published as a miniseries, this one had a lot, and the collection includes them all, including a fine one by Joe Kubert—who Dark Horse should try and convince to do a whole story—and others by Mignola and John Cassaday).
The story stars Conan creator Robert E. Howard’s wandering Puritan warrior character, who resembles in appearance, attitude and capacity for violence the more popular Conan extremely closely, but has somehow never caught on in comics adaptations the way Conan has.
Dark Horse’s Conan editor Scott Allie has adapted this story from a fragment by Howard. The action is set in Germany’s Black Forest, where Kane meets bandits, a monstrous wolf and a traveler of questionable character before journeying to the titular structure.
It’s a castle built upon a ruined abbey, ruled over by a mysterious lord and his more mysterious Persian bride and full of some rather dark and terrible secrets, of a supernatural, or perhaps paranormal, variety.
I found the story took a little too much time to get going, and am glad I read it in trade rather than in its original serial format, as I probably wouldn’t have wanted to read the second issue after the first, let alone the rest of the series. There’s some extremely cool stuff in the book, but Allie doesn’t frontload it, so the folklore-meets-horror aspects (of a variety that should be familiar to Dark Horse’s many Hellboy readers) don’t appear until the second half of the story, or with much force until the climax.
Guevara’s a fine artist, but Dave Stewart’s painterly color art gives the images a milky, gauzy, almost blurry appearance that took me some getting used to. It looks comparable to the publisher’s earlier Conan comics, but I found it rather jarring after turning from the Mignola cover, and I generally prefer harder, darker lines and flatter, more comic book-y coloring.
It’s a very, very violent book, as befitting a Howard-derived comic, although it’s occasionally hilariously so, as when Kane stabs a foe and his organs start to seep out immediately, as if they were spring-loaded by a special effects guy.
At one point, Kane cuts a guy’s face off with a sword, which is something I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a comic or movie, despite all of the comics and movies I’ve seen involving dudes fighting with swords.
Among the foes Kane turns his sword on in this story are a werewolf and monstrous, man-eating “angels.” The former changes shape from image to image, fluctuating between a huge wolf and a more humanoid wolf, which is an interesting take, and, incidentally, the first dramatization I’ve ever seen of the legend of an aristocrat who could turn into a wolf by using a special garment with knowledge learned form the devil. The latter bear many wings and many mouths, and they use all of their mouths when devouring victims, leading to still more rather gory scenes.
In addition to the title story and all of the many covers, Castle of the Devil also contains an eight-page story entitled “The Nightcomers” from MySpace Dark Horse Presents (and collected in MySpace Dark Horse Presents Vol. 2, which I reviewed here) and 13 pages of concept art from Guevara (including a page full of neat, original weapon designs that weren’t used) and Guy Davis, who designed the angel monsters and the castle.
So the plan for tonight's post was an art-heavy one, but I was unable to get access to my scanner (and by "my" I mean "the one at the public library that I use"), so that post is now a no-go. As I don't want to let a day pass without any new content here, however, here are two reviews of recent Dark Horse Comics trade collections, which originally ran in Monday's Best Shots @ Newsarama column. (I don't know, do you guys even read Newsarama? How about Best Shots?). Fresher content tomorrow, and I'll probably do that art-heavy one on Monday, when people are actually reading again...
The latest volume collecting Dark Horse’s long-running series of series based on the 20th Century Fox aliens with a capital-A boasts the same amount of bang for your buck that all the company’s omnibus volumes do: $25 gets you some 371 full-color pages worth of comics.
This particular volume has the added bonus of being full of stories by people who you wouldn’t expect to be doing Aliens comics and, while the results aren’t always great comics, they are always interesting comics.
The collection climaxes with “Havoc,” a Mark Schultz-scripted jam comic featuring a different artist on almost every page, with the who’s who in comics contributors including Ducan Fegredo, D’Israeli, Arthur Adams, Peter Bagge, Kelley Jones, Jay Stephens, P. Craig Russell, Sean Phillips, Gene Ha, Sergio Aragones, Moebius, Tony Millionaire and 30 other similarly disparate artists.
There’s a John Byrne story in which a ship bearing an Alien crash-lands on 1950s earth (It sucks, but still; John Byrne Aliens!), a story about religious fanaticism featuring art by horror master Richard Corben (That's a Corben alien on the cover above), a story by Jim Woodring, Justin Green and Francisco Solano Lopez, and another drawn by Guy Davis, and that’s only about half the book.
Regardless of how you feel about the films, or the seemingly endless life they’ve taken on in the comics (Personally? I kinda dig them), this particular trade is well worth at least a flip-through for almost any comics fan. Who can resist Guy Davis’ spindly, inky monsters, or Peter Bagge’s high-energy panels of a space marine going nuts with a machine gun, or Sergio Aragones’ downright cute Aliens?
In B.P.R.D. 1946, the second world war has just ended, and the ruined Berlin is split in half, with the American and Russian armies co-occupying it, each side scrambling to scoop up everything of value before the other can get their hands on it. In Mike Mignola’s Hellboiverse, this includes not only Nazi treasures and rocket scientists, but also Hiter’s occult weapons and mechanically augmented ape warriors.
It’s basically The Good German, with demons, vampires and simian cyborgs.
Back then, Hellboy is still just a boy, and the B.P.R.D. is similarly young, so when Trevor Bruttenholm arrives to start combing Berlin and cataloging Nazi occult programs, his only allies are the solders the U.S. military assigns him. His Russian rival is a creepy little doll-like girl, who is wise (and powerful) well beyond her years, and they slowly uncover something called “Project Vampir Sturm.”
Mike Mignola and co-writer Joshua Dysart tease the plot out so that the story starts off quite realistic, slowly becomes something of a mystery and then something of a ghost story that gets a little scarier with each page turn. Right up until the climax, at which point it explodes into the sort of full-on zany pulp horror readers have come to expect from Mignola’s Hellboy related efforts.
Tonally, the book is something of a labyrinth, with Mignola and Dysart leading readers from a more-or-less true war story into a Hellboy comic.
It’s taking a lot of willpower not to reveal the final application of Hitler’s vampire weapon, as it’s so giddily inspired, but discovering it as the protagonists do is one of the best parts of the book.
Mignola's contribution to the art stops at the cover, but Paul Azaceta’s art is perfectly suited to the story, as he excels in the bombed-out, post-apocalyptic period details and the more ethereal horror elements, and his aesthetic isn’t too far from that of Mignola’s own, nor other B.P.R.D. artists like Guy Davis.
All in all, it’s a remarkably new-reader friendly trade; you could quite easily get away without not knowing anything about Mignola’s ever-growing franchise and still enjoy this on its own merits.
This was by far the best comic book writing in Joss Whedon’s short comic-scripting career, perhaps in large part because of the tossed-off nature of it.
His previous endeavors have involved big-name properties—Buffy “Season Eight”, Astonishing X-Men and, to a much lesser degree, Runaways—and the attendant expectations that come with them (not to mention the attendant expectations that follow any creator to have found success in another medium trying their hand at this one), but the three short parts of this rather random story add up to little more than Whedon goofing around with enough half-ideas to make for a very fun short story.
All-girl (plus one robot) band Sugarshock are on their way home from a battle of the bands when they get invited to another battle of the bands—in outer space!—that turns out to be a battle of the bands sans bands.
Each of the characters has a few super-quirky character traits (for example, lead singer Dandelion believes she works for a top-secret government agency and she also really hates Vikings for some reason), and Whedon’s plot is the wild, anything-goes sort that will flash to a scene featuring the Greek god Pan for all of one panel simply because he’s thought of an amusing Pan joke to get in there somehow.
The one thing I didn’t like is when Dandelion used “the saddest song in the world” as a weapon, mainly because it seemed too similar in concept to an aspect of Guy Maddin’s 2003 film The Saddest Music in the World. It only accounts for about a page worth of jokes, so it doesn’t ruin the whole story or anything, but it was certainly distracting.
If you haven’t seen The Saddest Music in the World, by the way, you totally should; it’s one of my favorite movies.
“In the Deep, Deep Woods” by Tony Millionaire
This is a two-page, six-panel Sock Monkey strip that reads pretty much like your average Maakies strip, the only differences being that the panels are bigger, stacked horizontally instead of laid out vertically, and it’s in color.
Like Maakies, it’s deeply weird, and funny on two levels: The literal level in which the crude thing that happens is kind of amusing, and on the conceptual level that, “Hey, Tony Millionaire thought this weird, crude chain of events was funny, and worthy of him drawing in his meticulous style.”
So, you know, it’s like all of Millionaire’s work: Awesome.
“A Circuit Closed” by Ezra Clayton Daniels
This is a moody little story featuring a sort of YA novel version of magical realism. It’s about a little kid with a fantastic device on an unusual quest of great personal import.
Daniels is able to quite effectively tell a whole story, complete with foreshadowing, climax and a punchy ending, in just ten pages, in large part due to an interesting Q-and-A format narration, although the art is strong enough that if you took the narration away completely, the story would remain the same, although it would naturally be much more vague.
Geary, master of murder comics, presents a two-page, 18-panel story pretty much summed up by the title. There’s not a lot to it, really, nor much of a story there at all, but hey, it’s nice to see Rick Geary included along with some of these other creators, especially if it gets some Buffy or My Chemical Romance fans to check out his comics.
“Safe & Sound: Featuring The Kraken, Formerly of The Umbrella Academy” by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba
I like how when he punches out the gypsy, the sound effect is “CRACK,” since his name is The Kraken and all…
“Founding Father Funnies” by Peter Bagge
Two one-page gag strips featuring President and Mrs. George Washington, as drawn by Peter Bagge. Yes, it’s just as great as it sounds.
“Gear School” by Adam Gallardo, Nuria Peris and Sergio Sandoval
On it’s own, there isn’t really much of anything to this story, aside from the fact that Peris is a great designer, both of characters and, even more so, of the weird vehicle called a “gear.” It looks a little like a small, personal mech version of a cross between a Japanese motorcycle and a frog.
It wasn’t until I hit the ads at the back of the trade until I realized that Gear School is actually a graphic novel from Dark Horse. I’m not sure that this short sketch which introduces readers in passing to the characters and that neat frogcycle thing actually makes me want to read the trade—reading the solicit for the text excited me more than the contents of this story, as well as cluing me in that this story was meant as a sample of the actual trade—so I don’t know how effective the story was as an ad.
Still, pretty great art.
“Samurai” by Ron Marz and Luke Ross
This is a perfectly fine, straightforward genre piece about a samurai who kills some guys. Like the previous story, it is something of a sample of a comic, Samurai: Heaven and Earth.
“Who da Uber-mensch?” by Adam Warren
Adam Warren’s series of original graphic novels, Empowered is, honest-to-God, probably the best superhero comic around at the moment. It’s fun, funny, sharply written, sharply drawn, bursting with new ideas and starring deceptively realistic characters.
This is a full-color story in which Empowered helps her teammates in the Superhomeys take on The Crimera, which is a sort of half robot, bipedal chimera that commits crimes. And that alone is genius, but it’s just one of many little bits of ingenious super-writing that punctuate this story (like all of Warren’s Empowered stories).
It’s a nice intro to the characters and the concept of the Empowered trades, as well as answering a question about super-fights. Specifically, throwing a car at an opponent is pretty bad-ass, but isn’t there a more effective way to strike them with a car?
It looks like this story is also included in Empowered Vol. 4, which was just released, so Empowered completists need not buy MySpace Dark Horse Presents Vol. 1 just for this story. (They can buy it for all the other good stories, though).
“Chickenhare” by Chris Grine
I didn’t get it.
In fact, I never really got past the title character, who is apparently some kind of human/chicken/hare hybrid…? He and some other Wuzzles play a prank on another Wuzzle.
Perhaps if I had prior experience with the character and his/its comics, I would have appreciated this two-page story more.
“The Nocturnal Adventures of Scratch and Suck” by Steve Niles and Brian Churilla
Niles turns in a neat little eight-page story about a vampire and werewolf that fight crime together as a sort of superhero buddy cop team, with a little old school EC horror type twist at the end.
I’m completely perplexed as to why Niles called his super-werewolf Scratch though; DC Comics, a company Niles is currently writing two titles for, has a werewolf superhero-type character named Scratch that Niles surely must have heard of before.
“Tricks of the Trade” by Brodie H. Brockie and Katie Cook
Like the Niles story that precedes it, this is a short horror story with a twist ending. It’s also a much, much more effective one, with the horror and violence implied—involving the reader in putting two and two together to enjoy the four—and Cook’s super-cute art subverting the nature of the story.
For more Cook art, click here. And if you only read one thing on her site, make it The Smashy Adventures of The Hulk, a strip so cute I can barely stand it. Marvel should pay her $1 million dollars to run those at the end of every Hulk comic.
No seriously; check out Cook’s site, it’s awesome.
How awesome?
This awesome:
“The Axeman” by Haden Blackman and Cary Nord
A short history of American serial killers, as told to an almost-victim by a serial killer who can see the future, the better to tell the almost-victim—and thus the reader—all about these serial killers who weren’t around just yet.
Since the story is essentially just an ineffective framing device for a few anecdotes of lesser known killers, it makes the whole endeavor seem kind of pointless, especially give the fact that the whole thing is only sixteen pages long.
“The Christmas Spirit” by Mike Mignola and Guy Davis
This was probably my favorite story in the book. Mignola scripts and Davis draws, a division of duties that the Hellboyiverse collaborators are clearly quite comfortable with at this point.
It’s Christmas Eve in what looks like either Victorian England or America, and a priest labors fruitlessly to exorcise a demon from a little boy’s body. He must break to handle Christmas mass.
Meanwhile, Santa Claus/Saint Nicholas/the titular spirit, intervenes, plucking the devil out of the boy, wandering gigantic through the urban city at night, and decorating a huge tree with the demon.
The imagery is beautiful, both as subject matter and as rendered on the page by Davis and colorist Dave Stewart.
“Eat The Walls” by Matt Bernier
Another short, scary story with a neat twist at the end, this one involving a man trapped in the belly of a whale. A dead whale. It’s a pretty neat story.
Now who is this Bernier character, exactly? A pretty damn good artist, that’s who. If you don’t believe me, I invite you to click here.
“Fear Agent” by Rick Remender, Kieron Dwyer and Hilary Barta
While I’m aware of the existence of a comic called Fear Agent that I know is written by Rick Remender, I’ve never read any of it, so this was my first exposure. It’s not a bad introduction—better than the Chickenhare and Gear School stories at introducing their comics, although it’s longer too.
From what I can gather, it seems to be a sort of sci-fi tale that reads like it was published by 2000 AD, which I mean as a rather high compliment.
The story? A manly-man space guy runs around from action scene to action scene, with cool drawings of cool monsters, sets and characters everywhere he goes, but all is not as it seems.
Oh, and by the way? I love Hilary Barta.
“The Goon” by Various
The collection ends on a high note with this four-chapter story featuring Eric Powell’s Goon and his supporting cast, although Powell himself doesn’t seem to be present, beyond the Maltese Falcon-like set-up, in which the Goon and Franky must find a friend’s missing pecker.
Four different creative teams handle the different chapters, making for a story told a bit like a chain letter. A chain letter involving baboon’s with razor-sharp boomerangs, chimps with sai, dismemberment, corn chowder, a giant spider on a bombing run, punching, kicking, more punching and a whole lot of dick jokes. That all comes courtesy of the all-star team of Bob Fingerman, Herb Trimpe, Al Milgrom, John Arcudi, The Fillbach Brothers, Rebecca Sugar, and Frans Boukas.
While I didn’t like every single story between the covers, I liked most of them, some of them so much that they more than made up for any of the weaker contributions and/or ones that just weren’t to my personal tastes.
If I had one criticism of the book, it was that it lacked contributor’s notes in the back. I realize with the Internet, that may seem superfluous—every contributor whose work I was curious about I ended up being able to find with a simple Google search—but since so many of the creators involved aren’t “name” creators like Whedon, Mignola, Niles, Bagge and Warren (at least, not yet), it would have been nice to be able to simply flip to the back of the book to see what, say, the Fillbach Brothers have done before, or why Cook’s art looks so familiar.
That is all.
Otherwise, I eagerly await Volume 2, which I will read when it’s printed on paper, and pay for the privilege, rather than read the stories for free online. Because I am old-fashioned.
If you’re less set in your ways than I, and aren’t yet sure if you should borrow this from the library or, if you’ve got $19.95 to spare on a pretty awesome anthology, buy a copy for yourself, you can read most if not all of these stories at myspace.com/darkhorsepresents.
Superman and Darkseid sure seem to fight one another a lot, don't they? I wonder why that is, exactly.
I mean, yeah, sure, Superman is the ultimate hero in the DC Universe, and Darkseid is the ultimate villain, so it makes a certain amount of sense that the two would cross paths at some point, but, on the other hand, they belong to two very different franchises, each with their own fairly rich settings and casts.
In fact, if Jack Kirby didn't end up working on Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen at the same time he was creating his Fourth World saga because he lost a bet or took a dare or whatever, the delicate connective tissue between the two characters would be severed.
If I had to offer a theory as to why the two clash so often, I would guess that it's because Superman doesn't have any really great villains that can go toe-to-toe with him (or, more accurately, Superman's writers traditionally don't really like to write any of his really great villains that can go toe-to-toe with him, and/or create new ones that could). And that while Orion and Lighray are cool and all, Darkseid doens't really have a hero with a Q-rating equivalent to his own within the DCU.
The thing I dislike about Superman and Darkseid conflicts is that too often they devolve into fisticuffs, and seeing Darkseid getting smacked around by Superman just really seems to suck all the coolness out of the character for me. I'm a fan of the godlike Superman who can fly faster than light, keep pace with the Flash, hurl planets and do just about anything, but even if it's conceivable that he could kick Darkseid's ass, I don't like to see it happening, because as godlike as Superman may be, he's still a mortal, and Darkseid isn't just godlike, he is an actual freaking god (or ancient alien entity that thinks it's a god. Whatever) and should thus either be able to whomp on Supes or, better still, never lower himself to exchanging blows with him.
My favorite portrayal of Darkseid is probably the one in JLA arc "Rock of Ages," in which he is a stone giant whose Omega Beams were inescapable and would end you if they touched you. I mean, what's the point of calling your eye beams "Omega Beams" if they just knock a dude down? The Darkseid/Superman conflicts I like to see are the ones in which the Apokaliptian tyrant is sort of like a cosmic Lex Luthor, manipulating Superman and watching as Big Blue brawls with his underlings like Kaliback and company because while he could take him down with his neat little zig-zaggy eyebeams at any moment, he tells us Supeman just doesn't deserve to die by Darkseid's hand (Or eye. Whatever).
When Superman and Darkseid go at each other man on man, with Supes shrugging off Omega Beams just as easily as Darkseid shrugs off heat-vision, it reduces Darkseid to just another Superman-level bruiser, akin to a Mongul or Zod or Bizzarro instead of what he is, the universe's ultimate bad guy.
Plus, every story I've ever read in which Darkseid and Superman fought each other has pretty much been terrible (Even those that weren't written by Jeph Loeb).
Which brings us to the subject of this post, The Greatest Superman vs. Darkseid Fight Ever.
It occurred during Cosmic Odyssey. To set the thing up for those of you who haven't yet had the pleasure of this fantastic story (full of great Mike Mignola pencil art), basically Highfather has summoned a group of Earth heroes to New Genesis to discuss a threat, and Supes turns a corner and walks smack into Darkseid.
Their brief fight—two blows exchanged?—manages to make both of them look super-powerful, without actually showing us what exactly happened, so we don't have to look at and contemplate the two of them acting like kids on a school yard. We simply see Superman fly at Darkseid, get knocked down, and then get back up to go at him again, and think "Woah, Superman's hardcore! He flew right at Darkseid like he was nothing! And even after getting totally pwned, he's back on his feet!" And, because Superman got thrown back, we also think, "Woah! Darkseid must be pretty damn powerful! He totally sent Superman flying!"
And because others break the fight up, we don't see any resolution to the question of who's more powerful, and thus neither character is diminished by having his ass totally kicked by the other. (By contrast, after Loeb had Superman beat up Darkseid in Superman/Batman arc "Supergirl," imprisoning him in the Promethean Wall by hand, it was hard to take the big D. seriously as a scary evil god. When we see him in the beginning of Countdown, he seems like just another supervillain. How threatening is the site of him playing with Heroclix now? I mean, if worse comes to worst, we know Superman or Supergirl or Powergirl or Wonder Woman or Martian Manhunter of Captain Marvel could just travel to Apokalips and shove those toys down his throat, right?).
But what really makes this the greatest fight between the two ever?
It's not just the subtle way Starlin and Mignola characterize the combatants, nor the amusing choreography—it's Darkseid's facial expressions. Seriously, look at the grin he gives Supes over Highfather's shoulder, or the boastful "That's right!" glare he gives Superman when no one else is looking.
Man, that's why Mignola is a master of comic book drawing, right there. It's just two throwaway panels, and he does more to characterize Darkseid than just about any of Starlin's words do.
Those panels tell you everything you need to know about the villain: He's an asshole.
(As always, click to enlarge. Sorry about the crappy scans; I erred on the side of not-breaking-the-spine-of-my-trade. The dialogue isn't important to the fight).
Doctor Strange and Doctor Doom: Triumph and Torment (Marvel Comics), by Roger Stern, Michael Mignola and Mark Badger
Why’d I Wait?: As far as I can tell, this original graphic novel was released in 1989, which was actually a few years before I started reading comics. So unlike a lot of the books I feature in these “Delayed Reaction” segments, I didn’t wait to read it so much as I completely didn’t know it existed until fairly recently. It’s unfortunately long out of print, despite the fact that it features pencils by Mike “King of the Hellboy Multi-Media Empire” Mignola.
Why Now?: Synchronicity, I guess.
A few months back I re-read Cosmic Odyssey and kept thinking how crazy it was to see a big-deal artist like Mignola drawing the likes of the J’onn J’onnz and Orion for DC.
Retailer Mike Sterling at EDILW favorite Progressiveruin.com recently mentioned Triumph and Torment in the context of, “Hey, wouldn’t it make good business sense for Marvel to have this book available for sale?” (With a Dr. Strange direct-to-DVD ‘toon in the works and another Fantastic Four film just months away, the book seems like one that it would be easy to foist on all sorts of readers, not just Hellboy/Mignola fans).
Then last weekend I was selling some old comics to my local Half-Priced Books, I found it sitting among the graphic novels for a scant $8.50 (Also scored: A Killraven graphic novel with art by P. Craig Russell for just $3).
Clearly the universe wanted me to read this story, and who am I to argue with the universe?
(Above: Doom's very nice fire place, as drawn by Mignola and Badger. Richards may be smarter and more virtuous than Doom, but Castle Doom is much more tastefully appointed than the Baxter Building)
Well?: It’s actually a pretty strange artifact, from the days when graphic novels were still pretty brand new. It’s relatively short—only about 80 pages—but it’s a hardcover, and an oversized, album one at that. This is the biggest I’ve ever seen Mignola art, and it’s quite a treat (if Marvel ever gets around to reprinting it, though, I suspect it would sell better as a traditional-sized trade paper back).
Roger Stern handles the writing, and it’s a fairly simple story, with the most complex part being the portrayal of Doctor Doom as a less evil guy than his name might imply. He’s actually a pretty complicated guy.
Stern opens in the Himalyas, where a crazy old mystic by the name of the Aged Gehngis is ranting and raving to his Wong-like servant, and then off he flies to do the work of The Vishanti, whom turn out to be actual deities, and not just an empty swear word Strange uses when frustrated or excited. Once every 300 years they declare a worldwide magic contest, and the winner gets the title “Sorcerer Supreme,” as well as a sacred task—to grant a boon to the runner-up.
Strange wins, naturally enough, but it’s Doom who comes in second, and so Strange must help Doom.
What he wants isn’t any magical assistance getting revenge on Richards or anything so pedestrian. Rather, he needs Strange’s expertise in the realms of the mystic to help him free his sorceress mother’s soul from Hell, where’s Marvel’s Devil Mephisto keeps it.
The rest of the book basically consists of Marvel’s two baddest doctors in Hell, shooting beams at hordes of Mignola-designed demons, while a gigantic Mephisto lounges on his throne in the background.
There’s some very nice melodrama in here, as the title promises there will be, and while I’ve read very little of Stern’s writing in the past—certainly not enough to get excited just by seeing his name on the cover—I was quite pleased with how it reads here. Clearly he approached working on a graphic novel as something a little more special than just another comic book script, and he really upped his game.
Mignola is inked by Mark Badger, and his art has yet to be refined down to the bare essentials that it’s currently at, but it’s awfully close to the style on display in his Hellboy stories (And it’s more Hellboy-esque thant it was even in Cosmic Odyssey).
Mignola’s characters have always had a thickness and a blockiness about them, something which I’ve always felt makes him and ideal artist for Marvel characters, as you can draw a line from the work of Jack Kirby to that of Mike Mignola.
His Doom is therefore unsurprisingly utterly perfect, and his Mephisto is probably the best I’ve ever seen.
I didn’t care for Minola’s Strange all that much, however, in part because Steve had a more ‘80s/Metallica-looking moustache here instead of the Vincent Price one I so like, and, in greater part, because Marcos Martin so spoiled me with Doctor Strange: The Oath that I don’t think I’ll ever like a visual interpretation of the character as much.
Would I Travel Back in Time to Buy it off the Shelf?: Well you’d pretty much have to in order to buy it now, wouldn’t you? In the mean time, you can see several pages of it (and some very colorful color commentary on those pages) at Scans_Daily.
J. Caleb Mozzocco is a freelance writer who lives and works in Ohio.
Creators and publishers who would like their books considered for review here (and/or anywhere else he contributes) may feel free to contact him at jcalebmozzocco@gmail.com.
Editors at respectable publications who would like Caleb to write for them are also welcome to contact him and offer him work. He loves money.
