It Came from the 1990s: Justice Society of America part two

Welcome back. In my last post I took a look at the Justice Society of America miniseries published by DC Comics in 1991. That limited series was unexpectedly successful, and it led DC to bring the JSA back into current continuity, and to give them an ongoing title.

The Justice Society had previously been exiled to Limbo where they were destined to spend all of eternity fighting to prevent Ragnarök. The four-issue miniseries Armageddon: Inferno written by John Ostrander published in 1992 concluded with the demonic servants of the villainous Abraxis taking the JSA’s place in Limbo, enabling the heroes to at last return to Earth.

The ongoing Justice Society of America series launched in August 1992. Len Strazewski, who had written the miniseries, and Mike Parobeck, one of the pencilers on it, both returned to chronicle the JSA’s modern-day adventures, along with editor Brian Augustyn. They were joined by inker Mike Machlan, letterer Bob Pinaha and colorist Glenn Whitmore.

The JSA were very much the odd men out of mainstream superhero comic books in the early 1990s. Even though their time in Limbo had partially restored their youth & vitality, they were still much older than nearly all of DC’s other characters. The JSA had been the greatest heroes of the 1940s but now, nearly half a century later, they found themselves wondering what role, if any, they had to play in protecting the world from crime & tyranny.

In the first issue the JSA’s triumphant public return is violently interrupted by a giant monster sent by one of their old enemies. They are unable to stop the rampaging behemoth, and it falls to Superman to defeat the creature. To add insult to injury, Superman finds himself thinking how underwhelming his foe is:

“What a sorry excuse for a monster! Compared to some of the dangers I’ve faced, this is kid stuff!”

Obviously Superman doesn’t voice those thoughts to the JSA, heroes who he himself regards as an inspiration for his own battles against evil. Nevertheless, the dispirited JSA cannot help feeling like a fifth wheel.

As the series progresses, Strazewski depicts the various members of the team struggling to adapt to their new circumstances. He does a good job showing the different ways each of the crime fighters react, from Green Lantern and Flash enthusiastic belief that there is still a role for the team to play, to Wildcat’s skepticism and the Atom’s depression, with Hawkman & Hawkgirl deciding to quit the superhero biz entirely to return to their first love, archeology.

Unlike most comic book heroes at DC who were set in a “sliding timeline” where everything always happened within the past 10 or 15 years, the JSA have always had their origins rooted in the 1940s. As such they’ve been some of the few characters to have aged in real time. When they were revived in All-Star Comics in the second half of the 1970s writers Gerry Conway and Paul Levitz were first to lean into the idea of the Justice Society as an intergenerational team. Strazewski  continues that theme in this series.

We see Wally West, the young modern day Flash, seeking advice & guidance from Jay Garrick, the original Flash. Jesse Quick, the daughter of 1940s crime fighters Johnny Quick and Liberty Belle, joins the JSA, with the team serving as her mentors. Johnny Thunderbolt adopts a teenage ward Kiku who discovers she has a rapport with Johnny’s mystic Thunderbolt genie.

I have to admit, back in 1992 I found the circumstances of the Justice Society somewhat difficult to identify with. I was only 16 years old, in high school, and the JSA were pretty much the same age as my grandparents. Three decades later in 2023, well, I’m now middle aged, I’ve got more than a few gray hairs, my joints are starting to ache, and I’ve got advertisements for AARP showing up on my Facebook timeline! So, yeah, I definitely find these guys somewhat more relatable!

The first five issues of Justice Society of America involve the team uncovering the machinations of their long-time adversary the Ultra-Humanite, a body-hopping mad scientist who now controls his own multinational corporation which he uses as a cover to conduct his experiments in genetic engineering. It’s a good, solid setup for the series.

The next two storylines do feel a bit rushed, though. In #6 and #7 the JSA go to Bahdnesia, the tropical island home of the mystic Thunderbolt, to investigate the disappearance of the native population. Then, in #8 to #10, the alien sorcerer Kulak, another old foe of the team, utilizes television broadcasts to hypnotize the entire world and turn it against the team.

I definitely think both of those stories could have used an extra issue. Unfortunately the series was canceled with issue #10. I’m guessing there was probably enough advance notice that enabled Strazewski to truncate the storylines he already had planned. Well, even if they both do end somewhat abruptly, at least they were told in some form or another.

There’s also what appears to be an odd continuity mistake in issue #10, a flashback to the team’s last encounter with Kulak featuring Doctor Mid-Nite, Black Canary, Flash and Green Lantern, with a footnote refers readers to All-Star Comics #2, published in 1940. I was wondering how that could be possible, since the JSA’s first appearance was in All-Star #3, and they didn’t actually work together on a case until issue #4. I looked on the DC Database and according to that “The Curse of Kulak” in All-Star #2 was a solo story featuring the Spectre. And the team fought against Kulak in All-Star Squadron #28, which took place in 1942.

I fielded the question on the Justice Society of America group on FB, and the general consensus was that this was supposed to be a previously-unrevealed JSA adventure, probably set in the late 1940s, and that someone incorrectly added a footnote to All-Star #2.

When I did my write-up of the Justice Society of America miniseries I didn’t comment on Mike Parobeck’s penciling, because I knew I’d be discussing it extensively here.

Parobeck had this really fun, colorful, cartoony style. After the 1991 miniseries he and Strazewski worked together on DC’s Impact Comics imprint, on a revamp of the Archie Comics superhero the Fly. I really enjoyed their work together on The Fly. Unfortunately the Impact line only lasted about a year and a half. I was disappointed at the cancellation of those titles. Parobeck also penciled an enjoyable Elongated Man miniseries in early 1992.

I’m glad that Strazewski and Parobeck had the opportunity to work together again so soon on the ongoing Justice Society of America series. Much like The Fly, I wish that had lasted longer.

Parobeck’s style was regrettably looked upon as “simplistic” or “silly” by too many readers in the early 1990s, as the hyper-detailed work of the Image Comics founders and those they inspired was ascendent in mainstream superheroes. That was a huge shame, because Parobeck’s work was just such a joy to behold. He had some dynamic storytelling abilities, and his covers were exciting and well-designed. It was definitely a pleasure to re-examine his work during my re-read of this series.

Parobeck did finally gain some much-overdue recognition when he became the regular penciler of The Batman Adventures with issue #7 in April 1993. That series was set in the continuity of the hit Batman: The Animated Series. It was specifically targeted to an all-ages audience, and readers were expecting an “animated” style, so Parobeck’s work was very warmly received.

Tragically, Parobeck passed away in July 1996 at the much, much too young age of 30. It’s been subsequently observed that he was ahead of his time, his work presaging the highly-popular “cartoony” styles of artists such as Mike Wieringo and Humberto Ramos.

There is one scene in Justice Society of America, though, where I was sort of left squirming. In issue #10 Kulak is molesting a hypnotized Hawkgirl with his tongue. That just feels so wrong when rendered in Parobeck’s cartoony style, and I really wish Strazewski hadn’t included it in his plot.

Like, ewww, dude! Geeze, what do you think this is, a Chris Claremont comic book or something? 🙂

AHEM! Moving along…

The main inker on Justice Society of America is Mike Machlan, another creator who had a prior connection to the Justice Society. Machlan had previously worked on several issues of All-Star Squadron, and he had co-created the spin-off series Infinity Inc. with Roy Thomas & Jerry Ordway which featured the sons & daughters of the JSA in the present day.

Machlan does a really good job inking Parobeck. I feel they made an excellent match. Machlan is another good, solid, underrated artist. Regrettably there seem to be all too many of those working in the comic book industry, never receiving the recognition they probably should have earned for their work. It’s certainly a shame.

I do want to briefly comment about the sudden cancellation of Justice League of America. There’s been some debate over the years as to the reasons. Officially, the reason cited by assistant editor Ruben Diaz in the lettercol of #7 was that, after the first issue did very well, sales then fell “substantially” on subsequent issues.

However, it’s been alleged that the series was actually selling well, and that other factors were at work. In a 1998 interview Strazewski had this to say about the cancellation:

“It was a capricious decision made personally by Mike Carlin because he didn’t like Mike’s artwork or my writing and believed that senior citizen super-heroes was not what DC should be publishing. He made his opinion clear to me several times after the cancellation. As a result, I think it would be nigh onto impossible that I will work at DC again.”

To the best of my knowledge Mike Carlin has never publicly commented on Strazewski’s allegations. Neither had Brian Augustyn, the actual editor of the series, who regrettably passed away last year.

Speaking only from my perspective as a reader, in general I’ve found Carlin to be a highly qualified editor. He was in charge of the Superman family of books when they had basically become a weekly series produced by four separate creative teams, something that must have been a logistical nightmare to maintain the schedule for, but one that he kept running smoothly for several years. Carlin also edited The Power of Shazam, which as I’ve blogged about in the past is one of my all-time favorite comic book series.

It does seem, though, that the cancellation gave someone at DC the idea that the JSA were passé. A year later in the 1994 crossover Zero Hour several members of the team were brutally, senselessly killed off, something myself and other readers found very disappointing.

But just as I feel Mike Parobeck’s artwork was ahead of its time, so to do I think the revival of the Justice Society was, as well. In 1999 writers James Robinson & David S. Goyer launched an ongoing JSA series, once which really developed the intergenerational aspect of the team. Strazewski & Parobeck’s creation Jesse Quick would become a prominent member of this incarnation of the team. JSA was very successful, and since then, the occasional absence due to DC’s periodic cosmic reboots aside, the original team of superheroes have never gone away.

So, while Justice Society of America may not have been a success in the early 1990s, it did set the stage for the team’s latter triumphs.

Unfortunately, DC has never reprinted the Strazewski & Parobeck series. I recommend searching out the back issues. They’re pretty affordable and easy to find.

It Came from the 1990s: Justice Society of America part one

The Justice Society of America was the very first team of comic book superheroes, making their debut in All-Star Comics #3, published in November 1940 by All-American Publications, one of the two companies that later merged to form DC Comics.

For its first two issues All-Star Comics had been, like nearly every other title published by the nascent American comic book industry, an anthology series, in this case featuring several of All-American’s superheroes. It was with issue #3 that writer Gardner Fox and editor Sheldon Mayer devised the idea of having All-American’s costumed crime fighters joining to form a team. In that first story the Justice Society of America only appeared in a framing sequence drawn by artist E. E. Hibbard as the members recounted various solo exploits. But with the very next issue the members of the JSA were shown working together on a single case.

Justice Society of America #8 cover penciled & inked by Tom Lyle

The JSA featured in All-Star Comics thru to issue #57, released in December 1950, a ten year long run. At that point the superhero genre was very much in decline, and with the next issue the series was re-titled All Star Western.

A decade later, during the superhero revival of the Silver Age, the JSA returned, with Gardner Fox and editor Julius Schwartz revealing that they dwelled on “Earth Two” in a parallel reality, with the popular revamped heroes of the Justice League of America situated on “Earth One.” Between 1963 and 1985 the JSA and JLA met up in annual team-ups. The JSA eventually starred in a revival of All-Star Comics, and then appeared in the World War II era series All-Star Squadron along with the various other DC heroes from the early 1940s.

I was born in 1976, and I didn’t begin following comic books regularly until the late 1980s. By that time Crisis on Infinite Earths had resulted in the elimination of all of DC’s alternate realities. This ended up playing havoc with a number of characters’ histories, including the JSA, creating all sorts of continuity problems.

By the time I was reading DC Comics the JSA were in limbo, both figuratively and literally, having completely vanished from DC’s books. The in-story explanation for this had been depicted in 1986 in the Last Days of the Justice Society special written by Roy & Dann Thomas and drawn by Dave Ross & Mike Gustovich. To prevent Ragnarök from destroying the whole of reality, the JSA had been spirited off to a mystical dimension where they would have to fight against a cosmic evil for all eternity.

Justice Society of America #1 written by Len Strazewski, penciled & inked by Rick Burchett, lettered by Janice Chiang and colored by Tom Ziuko

Long story short (too late!) my first exposure to the JSA was in 1991 when DC Comics published an eight issue Justice Society of America limited series, bringing the team back into print for the first time in five years. In the present day the team was still trapped in the realm of the Norse gods, but in this miniseries set in 1950 several members of the JSA were pitted against one of their deadliest foes, the immortal conqueror Vandal Savage.

“Vengeance from the Stars” was written by Len Strazewski, penciled by Rick Burchett, Grant Miehm, Mike Parobeck & Tom Artis, inked by Burchett, Miehm & Frank McLaughlin, lettered by Janice Chiang, colored by Tom Ziuko & Robbie Busch, and edited by Brian Augustyn & Mike Gold, with cover artwork drawn by Tom Lyle. Gold wrote a text piece for the first issue that explained the history of the JSA, an invaluable source of info for a young reader such as myself in those pre-Wikipedia times.

Interestingly, this miniseries came about because DC’s plans to publish Impact Comics, a reboot of the Archie Comics superheroes, met with delays. Justice Society of America was done to give work to Strazewski and several of the artists who had committed to working on the Impact books and who now found themselves in a holding pattern. Considering its origins, this miniseries turned out to be a remarkably good read.

The heroes featured in “Vengeance from the Stars” are the original Golden Age versions of the Flash, Black Canary, Green Lantern, Hawkman and Starman. In addition to Vandal Savage, the team faces the lumbering undead swamp monster Solomon Grundy, Savage’s gangster henchmen, and an awesomely powerful trio of living constellations.

Justice Society of America #2 written by Len Strazewski, penciled & inked by Grant Miehm, lettered by Janice Chiang and colored by Tom Ziuko

I have to confess, back in 1991 I found the structure of this miniseries somewhat odd and off-putting. The first four issues are solo adventures of the Flash, Black Canary, Green Lantern and Hawkman. Issues five and six had team-ups of the Flash & Hawkman and Black Canary & Green Lantern respectively. The final two issues at last had all four heroes at last working together, with Starman, who had been Savage’s prisoner for the previous six issues, joining the fray.

Having subsequently read a number of JSA stories from the 1940s via reprints, looking at this miniseries in 2023 I now understand that Strazewski, Augustyn & Gold were emulating the structure of the All-Star Comics stories. In those original JSA tales the team would, after learning of a particular adversary or mystery in the first few pages, split off and have solo chapters, each drawn by a different artist, before teaming up at the end of the issue for a final battle with the bad guys.

The only thing missing here is the prologue which shows the team together before they all split off for their individual missions. In the lettercol in issue #3 Gold explains the reasoning:

“I always wondered why the superheroes would get together first and then just happen to encounter a menace worth of their combined might. Because this is a miniseries, Len could introduce the heroes one at a time as each encountered the menace.”

While I certainly understand Gold’s reasoning, I do wonder if he miscalculated. Several of the readers’ letters published wondered when the JSA would be working together as a team, and expressed a certain disappointment that the early issues were solo adventures. I myself only bought the first four issues when they were published, and I did not get the second half of the miniseries until a year or so later as back issues, and part of the reason for this was that I really wanted to see the JSA members working as a team.

It makes me wonder if having a first issue which had the team together for a few pages, as was done back in the 1940s, would have ameliorated the concerns of myself and other readers. Perhaps it would have, as Gold argued, been a bit contrived. But at the same time it would have given the audience a taste of the entire team before everyone went off on their side quests, sating our appetite for team action until everyone got back together for the climactic battle.

Justice Society of America #4 written by Len Strazewski, penciled by Tom Artis, inked by Frank McLaughlin, lettered by Janice Chiang and colored by Tom Ziuko

What’s called “writing for the trade” was really not much of a thing back in 1991, but this miniseries now feels like a very early example of it. I think it works better as a “graphic novel” than as individual comic books released across a span of eight months. When read in a single sitting it actually does feel like an extra-large issue of All-Star Comics, and it also made the wait for team action much more tolerable.

That criticism aside, Strazewski did write an enjoyable story. Looking at it for the first time in three decades, I found it to be a really fun, exciting tale. I’m glad that Augustyn & Gold put this project together.

I also had a much greater appreciation for the work of the various artists this time around. I was only 15 years old when the miniseries was released. Back then I really did not pay all that much attention to such things as layouts & storytelling, to mood, atmosphere & pacing. Now, however, it really strikes me at what a superb job Burchett, Miehm, Parobeck and Artis all did on this miniseries.

One of the stand-out aspects of the miniseries was the Black Canary solo chapter in the second issue. Miehm did absolutely fantastic work showing Canary’s athleticism in her battle with Savage’s goon squad and the brutish Solomon Grundy. As I commented in a previous blog post, I feel Miehm was one of the more underrated comic book artists of the 1990s, and my re-read of this miniseries gave me even more of an appreciation for his work.

I was also struck by the two issues that Tom Artis penciled. I bought & read all of the Impact Comics titles in the early 1990s, and I remember that I was somewhat underwhelmed by Artis’ work on The Web. I now wonder if that had to do with Bill Wray’s inking. On Justice Society of America Artis’ pencils are inked by the incredible Frank McLaughlin, and the collaboration between the two looks amazing. McLaughlin’s slick line really enhances Artis’ penciling, which resulted in me paying much more attention to the storytelling he utilized on his two issues.

Justice Society of America #1 written by Len Strazewski, penciled by Mike Parobeck, inked by Rick Burchett, lettered by Janice Chiang and colored by Tom Ziuko

Speaking of inking, it’s interesting to contrast Miehm’s inks over his own pencils on issue #2 to Burchett inking him on #7 and #8. It’s another good example of just how much of an impact an inker can have on the look of the finished artwork.

Also, I did feel Tom Ziuko’s coloring on the first six issues was more effective than Robbie Busch’s work on the final two.

Janice Chiang has always been one of my favorite letterers, and so I was happy to discover she had worked on this miniseries. It’s another one of those things I didn’t pay enough attention to back in the early 1990s. This time, though, Chiang’s lettering immediately leaped out at me.

An interesting fact is that, even though the JSA had been around for half a century at this point, they’d never actually had a comic book featuring their name. Yes, there’d been a four issue miniseries America vs. the Justice Society in 1985, and the Last Days of the Justice Society special a year later. But this miniseries was the first comic book to actually be titled Justice Society of America. Strange but true.

Justice Society of America #7 written by Len Strazewski, penciled Grant Miehm, inked by Rick Burchett, lettered by Janice Chiang and colored by Robbie Busch

On a more serious note, looking at this miniseries in 2023, it’s depressing to realize how many of the creators involved in it are no longer with us, some of them having died fairly young. Mike Parobeck, Tom Artis, Tom Lyle, Frank McLaughlin and Bryan Augustin have all sadly passed away in the intervening years. I hope that the other creators who worked on this project will still be around for many more years to come.

This miniseries was finally reprinted in a hardcover edition titled The Demise of Justice in 2021. I do question the wisdom of DC releasing it as a hardcover, because a less expensive trade paperback would undoubtedly have sold much better. Still, it’s nice that this is back in print in some form or another.

Next time I’ll be taking a look at the excellent but short-lived Justice Society of America ongoing series which came out in 1992.

Leiji Mastumoto: 1938 to 2023

I was sorry to hear that acclaimed Japanese manga artist and anime creator Leiji Matsumoto had passed away on February 13th at the age of 85.

Matsumoto first worked professionally as an artist in 1954, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that he found acclaim, first for his work on the anime Space Battleship Yamato in 1974 and then for his creation of the popular manga series Space Pirate Captain Harlock and Galaxy Express 999 in 1977.

The universe that Matsumoto conceived & designed was populated by a colorful, dynamic cast of characters: the swashbuckling freedom fighter Captain Harlock, his associate & fellow space buccaneer Queen Emeraldas, her enigmatic sister Maetel, and the young orphan Tetsuro Hoshino who travels with Maetel on the outer space locomotive train known as the Galaxy Express.

Matsumoto’s stories were space opera, and his distinctive design sensibilities are what would later come to be known as steampunk. In the retro sci-fi / space Western future that he conceived, Matsumoto’s characters frequently found themselves fighting against totalitarian forces, be they human-ruled dystopian regimes, alien invaders, or cyborg tyrants who sought to transform the galaxy in their image.

I first discovered Matsumoto’s work via the Galaxy Express 999 animated movie which was released in 1979. I vaguely recall seeing it as a child in the early 1980s on HBO, and I eagerly purchased it when it was at last released on VHS in the United States in 1996. The sequel Adieu, Galaxy Express was also released on video soon after. I really enjoyed both movies. In the early 2000s the four part serial Harlock Saga and the prequel Maetel Legend, the later of which told the origins of Maetel and Emeraldas, were released on DVD, and I got those, as well.

Matsumoto’s characters have, of course, appeared in comic books, movies and animated television series produced in Japan, but they have been popular enough to occasionally have new stories created for an English-speaking market. In the early 1990s American publisher Malibu Comics released several Captain Harlock series written by Robert W. Gibson and drawn by manga-inspired artists Ben Dunn & Tim Eldred. I found several of those comics in the back issue bins after I became a fan of Matsumoto’s work. More recently in 2021 Ablaze Publishing released a six issue Space Pirate: Captain Harlock miniseries by Matsumoto and French creator Jerome Alquie.

Leiji Matsumoto’s character & designs were truly memorable, his characters simultaneously romantic & larger than life and grounded in humanity, his stories a deft blend of dynamic action & poetic, philosophic contemplation. He will be missed by his legion of fans worldwide.

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Comic book reviews: Hardware: Season One

Several months ago I did a post titled “Hawkman is now black… and that’s okay” in which I discussed how the comic book tie-ins to the Black Adam movie featured an African American version of Hawkman, and how I felt that this was a good thing. A poster with the screen name “Be Human First” left a comment that included the following observation:

“There are some really, truly amazing superheroes who were, at inception, POC. Why are we playing these games when those stories could be told?”

And I had to respond to say that, yes, they had a valid point. For instance, Milestone Media had some great superheroes who were people of color such as Static and Hardware, and it would be great if they could be adapted to live action.

Milestone Media is an imprint of DC Comics founded in 1993 by Dwayne McDuffie, Denys Cowan, Michael Davis & Derek T. Dingle. The intention of Milestone was to provide African American creators with the opportunity to create comic books featuring minorities who had historically been underrepresented in American comic books.

McDuffie was born on February 20, 1962. He tragically passed away in 2011 at the much too young age of 49. On what would have been his 61st birthday, and on the 30th anniversary of Milestone’s founding, I wanted to look at the recent revival of one of his creations, Hardware.

I regret to say that as a teenager during the early 1990s I all but ignored the Milestone books, outside of the first few issues of Hardware, which I had difficulty relating to. I know I found the title of the first issue’s story, “Angry Black Man,” to be off-putting.

I don’t think I understood just how interesting the Milestone universe was until the Static Shock animated series. Featuring super-powered 14 year old Virgil Hawkins, aka Static, the series ran for four seasons between 2000 and 2004. It was an enjoyable, well-done show.

In 2023, looking back at my initial reaction to the Milestone line with the benefit of three decades of hindsight, I realize, unfortunately, that there was definitely some unconscious bias at work on my part.

I’ve always considered myself progressive and open-minded, but I’ve come to realize that as a white male who grew up in the United States it was inevitable that on some subconscious level I would inevitably be influenced by this country’s long, tragic history of institutionalized racism. I really wish I hadn’t been so quick to pass up the Milestone books as a teen. Fortunately as an adult I really have made a conscious effort to read a genuinely diverse selection of material, both in terms of the characters featured and the creators who are creating those stories. But, yeah, I’m still very much a work in progress. I guess the first step in making things better is in admitting your own failings so you understand what you have to work at to become a better person.

The majority of the Milestone titles were canceled in 1996 when the industry imploded. DC at long last revived the Milestone imprint in September 2020 beginning with the Milestone Returns special written by Reginald Hudlin & Greg Pak, which rebooted all of the characters. This was followed by four “Season One” miniseries featuring Static, Icon and Rocket, Hardware and Blood Syndicate.

I finally had an opportunity to pick up the hardcover which collects the Milestone Returns: Infinite Edition special and the six issue Hardware: Season One miniseries which was originally published between August 2021 and May 2022. Here are some of my thoughts on it.

Created by McDuffie & Cowan, Hardware is a brilliant scientist named Curtis “Curt” Metcalf. A teenage prodigy from midwestern Dakota City, Curt was discovered by industrialist Edwin Alva, who mentored the young man, eventually hiring him to work for his multinational conglomerate. Curt came to regard Alva as a father figure and believed that he was being groomed to be the industrialist’s heir. Curt’s inventions made Alva Industries millions; however, when Curt asked his boss & mentor for a cut of the profits, Alva coldly informed the scientist that he was nothing more than an employee, a literal cog in the machine, entitled to nothing.

The disenchanted Curt hacked into Alva’s computer systems, hoping to locate something he could use as leverage against his employer, only to discover Alva was the spider at the center of a vast web of crime & corruption. Trying, and failing, to expose Alva’s crimes, Curt finally constructs the Hardware armor in order to fight against his employer’s crooked machinations.

Hardware: Season One does tweak the setup of the series slightly. In this new reality, Alva’s refusal to give Metcalf a cut of the profits for his inventions is merely the initial wedge in their relationship. Curt invents the chemicals later used by the Dakota City police department against a Black Lives Matter protest. Those chemicals result in the “Big Bang” that causes dozens of teenagers to become disfigured & develop superpowers. Alva, realizing that he has a public relations nightmare on his hands, destroys the reports that Curt submitted stating the gas was too dangerous to be used and sets the scientist up as a scapegoat to take the fall for the tragedy. On the verge of being arrested, Curt dons the Hardware armor and goes on the offensive against the Dakota City PD and Alva’s private security forces.

Hardware: Season One is written by Brandon Thomas, based on McDuffie’s original storylines. Truthfully, I did feel that the original four issue origin story by McDuffie from 1993 was somewhat more effective since it seemed like it had more room to breathe, and to introduce the characters.

The comic book market is obviously very different than it was three decades ago. Back then Hardware, as well as the other Milestone characters, were all given ongoing series. Milestone & DC Comics are clearly cognizant that as matters currently stand the characters are more likely to be successful in a series of miniseries which are designed to quickly be collected together in hardcovers editions. As a result, Thomas regrettably has a lot less space to develop the characters & events, having to fit everything into six issues.

As someone who has repeatedly criticized decompression in mainstream comic books, it no doubt sounds counterintuitive, but I truly think Hardware: Season One would have benefitted from being longer. Really, my belief is that a story should be as long as it needs to be, whether that length be two issues, or six, or more. I feel that if this miniseries had been eight issues instead of six, it would have flowed much more naturally.

I felt that Curtis Metcalf definitely needed to be developed more fully in this story. Curt’s defining characteristic is that his parents having divorced when he was a young boy, he so badly needed a father figure that he ignored all the signs that Alva was a corrupt, manipulative bastard until it was much too late. We really don’t get any insight into how he feels about his role in the Big Bang; yes, Curt warned Alva that the gas was dangerous, but he is still the one that developed it, and you would think his inadvertent part in the creation of the Bang Babies would weigh on him.

There also isn’t all that much of a look at Curt’s relationships with his ex-girlfriend Barraki Young or his current love interest Tiffany Evans, even though both of them play central roles in the story. And I would have liked to have learned more about these two women.

Ironically, Edwin Alva feels like the most fully-developed character here. Thomas does a good job at writing Alva as a narcissistic control freak while nevertheless showing how the industrialist has managed to completely convince himself that HE is in the right, that Curt is actually the one who betrayed his trust & friendship.

Alva epitomizes an overriding, rapacious characteristic present throughout capitalism. He truly believes that because it is his company, his money, therefore HE is the creator of everything his empire produces & manufactures. In Alva’s mind, if he had not provided Curt and the other scientists working for him with the funding & opportunities for their experimentation, their discoveries, their creations, then none of it would ever have existed; therefore he is entitled to everything. And anyone who disagrees is a selfish ingrate who doesn’t know his place.

And, yes, in that way Alva definitely felt to me like a stand-in for every comic book publisher who has ever exploited its creators, with their attitude of “If it wasn’t for our company your characters & stories would never have gotten published, therefore they belong to us.”

Back when I was a teen I really did not perceive Edwin Alva to be racist. A corrupt, ruthless criminal, yes, but one motivated solely by greed. But now I see that, yes, Alva is racist. Not in a “wears white sheets and burns crosses on people’s lawns while dropping the n-bomb” manner, but rather on a much more subtle, insidious level, possessing a condescendingly paternalistic attitude towards Curtis Metcalf and all other black people, and in the fact that Alva, a billionaire, perpetuates systems of economic injustice that are especially harmful to communities of color.

Thomas reuses the “Angry Black Man” title for his own first issue. And, truthfully, it’s appropriate, because Curtis Metcalf has every right to be angry.

If there is a second “season” then I very much hope it will delve more into Curtis Metcalf and his relationships with Barraki and Tiffany and his family.

Hardware’s co-creator Denys Cowan returns to the character to pencil Season One. Cowan’s work is very stylized, and over the decades it has certainly become more abstract. That creates an interesting dichotomy, in that Hardware is a very detailed, precise, hi-tech figure, but Cowan’s work here is often almost surreal. That quality is certainly enhanced by the inking of Bill Sienkiewicz.

Their scratchy-lined work together on Hardware: Season One sort of feels like what would happen if someone drew an Iron Man adventure in the style of a particularly shadowy, noir-ish Batman or Daredevil story. It’s perhaps an unusual choice, but one that does provide the story with a palpable atmosphere of tension & paranoia. Cowan & Sienkiewicz have worked together before, and they’ve always made an interesting art team.

The coloring by Chris Sotomayer effectively enhances the mood & tone of artwork. The lettering by Rob Leigh is also well done, giving most of the characters an organic feel, while having a more mechanical sort of text for Curt when he’s in the Hardware armor, and utilizing a style between those two points for the armor’s computer system P.O.P. which is a replica of Curt’s father’s voice.

The cover artwork & coloring for the Hardware: Season One miniseries is by Mateus Manhanini. His style is a lot slicker & smoother than Cowan & Sienkiewicz, giving much more of an emphasis to the sleek, hi-tech quality of the title character. There are also some nice variant covers by Sienkiewicz, Cowan, Sotomayer, Ricardo Lopez Ortiz, Edwin Galmon and Canaan White that are included in this collection.

While not without its flaws, I nevertheless liked Hardware: Season One, and I look forward to Milestone’s creators doing more with the character in the future.

Star Wars reviews: The Bad Batch season two part one

We’re now at the halfway point of the animated series Star Wars: The Bad Batch season two, so I wanted to take a quick look at the episodes so far. The incredible Dee Bradley Baker returns to voice the entire Bad Batch and every single other male clone character on the series, with Michelle Ang as the Batch’s young ward, the teenage female clone Omega.

With the Batch believed dead and their former comrade Crosshair having thrown all-in with the Galactic Empire, the members of Clone Force 99 now hope to extricate themselves from their obligations to the Trandoshan smuggler Cid (voiced by Rhea Perlman) so they can go on their own path and secure a stable future for Omega. Cid suggests the Batch travel to Serenno, where the Empire is preparing to ship offworld the massive war chest accumulated by the late Count Dooku during his time leading the Separatists. The Batch’s efforts to make off with a portion of the wealth quickly goes pear-shaped, and they barely make it off Serenno in one piece.

I found the two-parter “Spoils of War” and “Ruins of War” to be somewhat underwhelming. Probably the strongest aspect of the story was the Batch meeting the elderly Romar Adell (voiced by Hector Elizondo), one of the few survivors of the Empire’s invasion of Serenno.

Adell informs the Batch that Dooku’s war chest was acquired not just by the Count looting the worlds of the Republic but his own home planet. It’s a vivid demonstration of how very far the former Jedi had fallen. In the recent Tales of the Jedi anthology series showed how Dooku’s disillusionment with the Republic was caused by him realizing how many of the politicians in the Senate were lining their own pockets at the expense of the people they were supposed to be representing. Now we see once again that, by joining Darth Sidious, Dooku ultimately became everything he started out fighting against.

“The Solitary Clone” was a definite improvement. The episode focused on Crosshair, whose blind loyalty leaves him isolated even from the other clones still serving the Empire. The ruthless, ambitious Admiral Rampart (Noshir Dalal) places Crosshair under the command of Commander Cody and dispatches them to the planet Desix to rescue Imperial Governor Grotton (Max Mittelman). The Governor has been taken hostage by the former Separatist Tawni Ames (Tasia Valenza) and her band of freedom fighters in a desperate attempt to safeguard their world’s independence.

This episode is a very effective inversion of the format established in The Clone Wars animated series. Cody leads a squad of clone troopers against the Separatist droid army to liberate a world… and I very quickly found myself rooting not for the clones but for Ames and her battle droids.

Cody genuinely believes he is doing the right thing, fighting for peace & security. He manages to talk down Ames, getting her to surrender, and is then horrified when Grotton orders her to be executed on the spot, an order Crosshair carries out without hesitation. Witnessing the start of the Empire’s brutal occupation of Desix, a shaken Cody at last realizes he’s on the wrong side.

Later, back on Coruscant, Cody confronts Crosshair about his unquestioning loyalty to the Empire:

“You know what makes us different from battle droids? We make our own decisions, our own choices. And we have to live with them too.”

The next day Crosshair is once again summoned before Rampart, who informs him that Cody has gone AWOL, further cementing the Admiral’s conviction that the Clone Army needs to be replaced with conscripted Stormtroppers who will be blindly loyal to the Empire.

Episode four, “Faster,” shifts the focus back onto the Batch as Tech, Wrecker and Omega accompany Cid to the planet Safa Toma where her droid TAY-0 is an entrant in a violent, high-speed “riot race.” TAY-0 loses when crime lord Millegi (Ernie Hudson) has his own racers cheat, and Cid finds herself heavily in debt. Tech participates in a second race to win Cid’s freedom.

This felt like another fairly standard episode but unremarkable, except for two things. One, we at long last got an episode spotlighting Tech. Two, at the end Millegi, handing Cid back to the Batch, he questions why the clones are risking their lives for her, attempting to warn them that she’s not worth their loyalty. Omega refuses to heed Millegi’s advice, but it does once again establish that, while the Batch working for Cid may have been a necessity in the short term to ensure their survival, in the long run they’re better off not being beholden to the smuggler.

“Entombed” was another fun but seemingly-throway episode as Cid’s sassy space pirate associate Phee Genoa (Wanda Sykes) convinces the Batch to accompany her on a search for a legendary treasure. This felt like an affectionate homage to Raiders of the Lost Ark, complete with ancient ruins, puzzles, death traps, and music that evoked John Williams’ scores for the Indiana Jones movies.

I feel the season started to get back on track with “Tribe,” the sixth episode. The Batch are running yet another errand for Cid, delivering forged chain codes to a group of droids on a space station, until Omega discovers those droids have a prisoner, a young Wookie. Impulsively leaping to the Wookie’s rescue, Omega learns that Gungi (Jonathan Lipow) is actually a Jedi, one of the few survivors of Order 66. The rest of the Batch immediately drop their mission and fight their way off the space station, taking Gungi with them.

Transporting Gungi back to Kashyyyk, the Batch are horrified to learn the Wookie homeworld is being pillaged by Trandoshian slavers working with the Empire. Citing the fact that the Wookies were their allies during the Clone Wars, the Batch join Gungi and a tribe of Wookies in fighting off the Empire.

This was a good one because it saw the Batch once again realizing that they have better things to do than getting tangled up in Cid’s criminal enterprises, that they’re much better off helping others who are being oppressed by the Empire. It was also nice to see the bond form between Omega and Gungi.

That brings us to the shocking mid-season two-parter “The Clone Conspiracy” and “Truth and Consequences.” On Coruscant, Admiral Rampart is aggressively pushing the Senate to pass into law the Defense Recruitment Bill which will phase out the Clone Army and enable the Empire to begin drafting its citizens into a new force of Imperial Stormtroopers.  Several Senators are opposed, with Riyo Chuchi (Jennifer Hale) forcefully arguing that the clones, having done their duty to protect the galaxy, should not just be cast aside, as well as questioning why, with the Separatists defeated, the new Empire even needs a standing army.

“After all they have sacrificed, you now wish to discard them? Leave them with nothing? Is that how we repay them for our service? How can we debate commissioning a new army without a plan in place to care for our current one?”

Star Wars has been political right from the beginning. Despite the preponderance of British accents among Imperial officers, it’s clear that George Lucas regarded the Galactic Empire as the dark side of the United States. That really comes to the fore with these two episodes.

Rampart argues there simply isn’t the money to both support the veterans of the Clone Wars and to fund a new military, so the former will have to be sacrificed in favor of the latter. That is exactly the position we’ve seen again and again here in America.

Somehow there’s always the money available to build billion-dollar tanks & airplanes and to wage unending wars in the Middle East in the name of “national security.” But when it comes to helping veterans struggling with physical wounds and PTSD, to finding them housing, to funding the Military Health System and the Department of Veterans Affairs, well, suddenly politicians will start arguing for “fiscal responsibility” because now we seemingly cannot afford any of that. It is an absolute disgrace.

There’s an uncomfortable scene in “The Clone Conspiracy” where a group of clone troopers, realizing they are going to be cast aside, and not knowing if they are even going to have a future now that the galaxy no longer needs them, are experiencing a mixture of fear, disbelief and outrage.

Captain Rex summons the Batch to Coruscant in “Truth and Consequences” to help Chuchi expose that Rampart had Kamino and its cloning facilities destroyed so that the Empire would be forced to transition to an enlisted army. The Batch is able to locate evidence of the cover-up and gets it to Chuchi, who presents it before the Senate. However, the Emperor (Ian McDiarmid), ever the consummate chessmaster, quickly spins this to his advantage. Appearing before the Senate, the Emperor feigns shock & outrage and orders Rampart arrested. The Admiral is dragged off, all the while protesting that he was only following orders.

The Emperor then addresses the Senate and argues that the fact that the clones unquestioningly followed Rampart’s orders to destroy Kamino is proof that the galaxy needs to switch to the new Stormtroopers. A dispirited Chuchi watches as the Senate finally passes the Defense Recruitment Bill, ensuring the Emperor will have his standing army.

While most of the Batch were infiltrating Rampart’s star destroyer to recover evidence of the plot, Omega joined Chuchi in the Senate. Omega asked Chuchi what a Senator does, and the latter replied that Senators represent their people, serve as their voice in the government.

At least, that is supposed to be how it works. We see in these two episodes that all-too-many of the members of the Senate are complicit in helping Rampart push through the Defense Recruitment Bill because it’s a way for them to amass more wealth & political power.

Authoritarian despots such as the Emperor rely on such ambitious, avaricious public officials to maintain their grip on power.  Like Rampart, those officials all think they’re going to come out ahead, only to be shocked when, their usefulness at an end, they get cast aside by their supreme ruler. And all the other lackeys & functionaries, despite witnessing this happening again and again, somehow manage to convince themselves “It won’t happen to me.” We saw this repeatedly during Donald Trump’s time as President, and, really, this is always a fixture of governments headed by narcissistic sociopaths. In the end despots are only loyal to one person: themselves.

“Truth and Consequences” ends with the Batch realizing they’ve been outmaneuvered by the Emperor. Echo decides that his place is no longer with the Batch, but with Captain Rex, helping their fellow clones who now more than ever will have to fight for their rights & freedoms. The implication is that the rest of the Batch are now also going to seriously reconsider their future.

Hopefully the second half of the season will follow on from the interesting character & plot threads set up throughout these first eight episodes and have a more focused direction.

It Came from the 1990s: The Invaders miniseries

At the end of my last blog post I promised to look at a much more successful project to come out of editor Mike Rockwitz’s office at Marvel Comics in the early 1990s. The Invaders was a  miniseries which revived the World War II era superhero team for new adventures.

Roy Thomas loves the Golden Age of comic books. Thomas was born in 1940, so he grew up reading the early adventures of the Justice Society of America from DC Comics and the various superheroes from Marvel precursor Timely Comics.

The unusual things about Timely is that, even though their heroes frequently appeared together on dynamic covers, they never actually met in the stories within, other than the occasional fight or team-up between the original android Human Torch and the hybrid anti-hero Namor the Sub-Mariner. The only exception to this was the two appearances of the All-Winners Squad in All-Winners Comics #19 and #21, which were published in late 1946 and written, respectively, by Golden Age pioneers Bill Finger and Otto Binder. Namor and the Torch were joined by Captain America, Bucky, Toro, Miss America and the Whizzer in the All-Winners Squad.

After Thomas came to work at Marvel in the mid-1960s he began to utilize the Timely characters of the 1940s in his own stories. By 1975 he hoped to revive the All-Winners Squad in a series that would be set in the early 1940s and see the team operating during World War II. Then-publisher Stan Lee disliked the All-Winners Squad name and Thomas, who himself had never been too enthusiastic about it, came up with the alternate title The Invaders, as the heroes would be invading Hitler’s Fortress Europe to liberate it.

The team made their debut in Giant-Size Invaders #1, cover-dated June 1975, in a story written & edited by Thomas and penciled by Frank Robbins. Set in late December 1941, the story saw Captain America, Namor, the Human Torch and teen sidekicks Bucky and Toro fight against the super-powered Nazi agent Master Man. At the story’s end the five heroes resolved to work together to fight against the Axis menace.

The Invaders quickly became an ongoing series, running for 41 issues between August 1975 and September 1979, with an Annual being released in the Summer of 1977. Thomas edited the entire series and wrote nearly all the issues, with Don Glut coming in to pen the last few.

Thomas left Marvel for DC Comics in 1981 and created All-Star Squadron, an even more successful superhero series set during World War II. Thomas returned to Marvel in late 1986 and within a few years he was once again writing books set during the Golden Age. His editor on the majority of these, including The Invaders miniseries, was Rockwitz.

As Thomas recounted to Jim Amish in Alter Ego # 136 from TwoMorrows Publishing, he and Rockwitz had a good working relationship.

“Generally speaking, we got along quite well. He kept coming back to me for projects. And he wouldn’t demand to know every plot twist in a story in advance, which I’d have found boring and off-putting.”

The Invaders four issue miniseries was published in early 1993. In addition to Thomas and Rockwitz, the creative team was penciler Dave Hoover, inker Brian Garvey, letterer Pat Brosseau and colorist Paul Becton, with Ian Akin stepping in as co-inker for the third issue. The cover logo was designed by Todd Klein.

The first issue of the miniseries opens on the evening of June 22, 1942, picking up shortly after the conclusion of the ongoing series. Cap, Namor and the Torch discover a Nazi u-boat in the waters of New York Harbor. To their surprise, the craft is smuggling in a quintet of super-powered Nazi agents. The Invaders are even more startled when they realize that each of the five members of the Battle Axis is actually American.

Caught off-guard, the trio of heroes are defeated and barely make their escape. They retreat to the headquarters of the home front team the Liberty Legion in Times Square, where they are reunited with the dimension-shifting Thin Man. The Invaders relate their encounter with the Battle Axis to the Thin Man. Hearing their description of the Nazis, The Thin Man, who has been keeping track of American superheroes in order to enlist them for the war effort, is shocked to realize that all five of the Battle Axis were themselves, until now, costumed crime fighters.

Elsewhere, the romantically involved Miss America and the Whizzer are walking along the East River in their civilian identities when they stumble across the Battle Axis coming ashore. The Whizzer is captured but Miss America just barely escapes. Fleeing to Liberty Legion HQ, she tells the Invaders what has happened, as well as what she overheard said by Dr. Death, the ruthless leader of the Battle Axis: the Naxi agents are heading to Los Angeles as part of “the Fuhrer’s supreme plan –to knock America out of the war!” The Invaders quickly head west in pursuit of their dangerous foes.

The Invaders miniseries was definitely enjoyable, so I’m not going to go into too much detail about the story. If you’re a fan of these characters I definitely recommend seeking out these issues for yourself, or picking up one of the collections in which it’s been reprinted.

In addition to the Invaders and Liberty Legion members, Thomas utilizes obscure superheroes Blazing Skull, Silver Scorpion and the original Vision, all of whom hadn’t appeared since the early 1940s. He also brought back a pair of characters he had co-created with Frank Robbins in The Invaders series, the Blue Bullet and the Golem.

Thomas had actually wanted to have the original Vision, who was an other-dimensional alien named Aarkus, join the Avengers way back in 1968. However editor Stan Lee instructed that Thomas have an android join the team, and so Thomas created a brand-new android Vision who was visually similar to the original. My pal Alan Stewart offered a comprehensive look at this in his retrospective on Avengers #58.

So, finally, a quarter century later, Thomas at long last had the opportunity to write the Golden Age Vision in this miniseries. Hoover’s cover to The Invaders #3 featuring the Vision is even a homage to the android Vision’s first cover appearance on Avengers #57 by John Buscema & George Klein, which in turn was inspired by the alien Vision’s introductory splash page from Marvel Mystery Comics #13 by Jack Kirby & Joe Simon in 1940.

Okay, I’ve heard of double vision, but triple?!?

The Battle Axis are also bona fide Golden Age superheroes. Thomas’ original idea was to have several obscure Timely heroes join the Nazi cause, but editor Mark Gruenwald balked at the idea. So Thomas dusted off a handful of even more obscure characters from the 1940s from other publishers who had fallen into the public domain and had them turn evil.

I thought Thomas actually made the heel-turns by the various Battle Axis members fairly plausible. In the late 1930s there were very strong isolationist feelings held by many Americans, as well as a fairly significant pro-Nazi movement in existence in the United States. Just because the country finally entered World War II in December 1941 did not mean that the people who held those beliefs would change them overnight. So it makes sense that you could have a handful of costumed vigilantes who for personal or ideological reasons would throw in with the Third Reich.

Thomas helpfully provides some detailed information on the various characters appearing in this miniseries in a trio of text pieces in the back of the first, third and fourth issues. Keep in mind that in 1993 the majority of readers would not have been alive when the original Golden Age comics came out, very little of that material had yet been reprinted by Marvel, neither had the original run of The Invaders been collected, and there was no Wikipedia. To put it in perspective, in the first piece Thomas notes that if you would like to read All-Winners Comics #19 and #2, both issues are available on microfiche!

I found Thomas’ text pieces invaluable, and I’m sure others did too. I appreciate that Thomas wrote them, and that Rockwitz encouraged him to write them rather than running ads in the spaces.

The artwork by Dave Hoover on The Invaders really was fantastic. I was a big fan of Hoover’s work. He’d recently drawn some nice fill-in issues of Excalibur, Nick Fury and Wolverine, as well as She-Hulk and Iron Fist serials for Marvel Comics Presents. So it was definitely a pleasure to see him penciling this miniseries.

Rockwitz clearly appreciated Hoover’s work, as a year later he gave him the regular assignment of penciling Captain America. I really liked Hoover’s depiction of Cap in The Invaders, and it was nice to then have him draw the character’s monthly series, on which he also did good work.

Brian Garvey & Ian Aiken had contributed some really rich, textured inks / finishes over Sal Buscema’s pencils on Rom Spaceknight a decade before this, so I was also a fan of their work. I feel they provided very nice embellishments on The Invaders, effectively complementing Hoover’s pencils. It’s a very attractive-looking miniseries.

Hoover sadly passed away on September 4, 2011 at the much too young age of 56. I addition to enjoying his work, I met him at comic conventions a couple of times, and he seemed like a good person, so I was definitely saddened by his death.

Rockwitz was very happy with how The Invaders came out. On the text page of issue #4 he describes it as “a dream come true for me.” As Thomas later related in Alter Ego #136:

“Mike said one of the proudest things of his editorship – and he didn’t sound like he was kidding – was being able to have me do another Invaders series. I don’t know why that should be the high point of anybody’s life [chuckles] but I certainly appreciated the thought.”

There were apparently tentative plans by both Thomas & Rockwitz for further Invaders stories. In issue #4 Rockwitz mentions the Invaders would be appearing “in an upcoming Captain America mini-series due out this year” but as far as I know that project never came to fruition.

Ultimately Thomas & Rockwitz would only ever be able to do one more Invaders-related story after this. Thomas wrote a fill-in story for Captain America #423 (January 1994) which revealed the never-before seen first encounter between Cap and Namor. Pencils were by M.C. Wyman and inks by Charles Barnett III, with letters by Diana Albers and colors by Ovi Hondru. It’s another enjoyable story with gorgeous artwork.

I’ve always felt Wyman had a style reminiscent of John Buscema. That was especially the case when he was inked by Barnett, whose inking really evokes a Bronze Age feel to it. I always enjoyed seeing Barnett’s inks over various pencilers during the early to mid 1990s. Wyman & Barnett only worked together a few times, unfortunately. They made a great art team.

Roy Thomas is a good, imaginative writer, one of the architects of the modern Marvel universe, who successfully wove together the interesting yet disparate strands of the company’s early history into a rich tapestry. I’m glad that Mike Rockwitz was able to afford him so many opportunities to write new stories in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The books they produced together were a lot of fun. Rereading them 30 years later, those comics are still enjoyable.

It Came from the 1990s: Starblast

In my previous post I took a look at the unusual Questprobe project Marvel Comics published in the mid 1980s. I indicated this would lead into an installment of “It Came from the 1990s.” That brings us to today’s post, where I will be looking at the Starblast crossover from Marvel that came out in late 1993.

Often I put together these “It Came from the 1990s” entries to spotlight comic books from that decade that I feel are overlooked or underrated. Unfortunately, this is NOT one of those series.

Starblast has regrettably been described as one of the worst comic book crossovers of all time. I was reminded of it by longtime Marvel editor Tom Brevoort on his own WordPress blog in which he took a look at Quasar #56, which he brands with the label of “Worst Cover Ever.” Brevoort’s piece reminded me of Starbast, which in turn got me thinking about Questprobe, as the later indirectly inspired the former. And here we are.

Starblast #1 cover by Claudio Castellini

It would not be accurate to say that no one ever sets out to make bad movies, or TV shows, or music, or artwork, or whatever. There are some people who recognize that crap sells, that there is an audience for absolute drek, and so they produce terrible products because they know it will make money.

Having acknowledged that, it is my general observation that the majority of creators who go to work in the comic book industry do so because they truly love the medium, they desire to work within it, and they wish to create genuinely good stories & art. The fact that they don’t always succeed is down to a number of factors, such as unforgiving deadlines, poor pay rates, difficult marketplace conditions, clashes with editorial, and the existence of management that is frequently unsympathetic to talent.

I really do believe that the creators behind Starblast set out to produce a good comic book; the fact that they did not succeed offers a sad snapshot of the comic book industry three decades ago.

Mark Gruenwald was the main creative force behind Starblast. As both a writer and editor Gruewald enjoyed utilizing the more obscure elements of Marvel continuity. He frequently drew on these elements in Quasar, the ongoing series that featured everyman Wendell Vaughn as the reluctant Protector of the Universe. It really felt that Gruenwald was personally invested in the character of Quasar, with Gru even giving Wendell some of the same personal background that he had.

Gruenwald spent two years building up to Starblast in the pages of Quasar. First he had Wendell temporarily acquire the incredibly-powerful cosmic force known as the Star Brand from Marvel’s ill-fated New Universe imprint. Wendell accidentally passed the Star Brand on to his girlfriend Kayla Ballentine. She was then abducted by the Chief Examiner from the Questprobe series, who wanted to duplicate the Star Brand’s power to use against the ravaging Black Fleet that was attacking his world. The Star Brand proves to be too powerful for the Examiner to replicate, and so he is forced to battle the Black Fleet with the powers of the other Earth superhumans he’s previously duplicated. Unfortunately this isn’t enough and he’s defeated, forcing the reluctant Kayla to use the Star Brand to obliterate the Black Fleet.

Quasar #37 written by Mark Gruenwald, penciled by Greg Capullo, inked by Harry Caldelario, lettered by Janice Chiang, and colored by Paul Becton, published by Marvel Comics in August 1992

That at last brings us to Starblast. The cyborg Skeletron and his crew of space pirates the Starblasters are the sole survivors of the Black Fleet. Having witnessed his entire armada destroyed by the Star Brand, Skeletron seeks to acquire its incredible power for himself. He dispatches the Starblasters to attack Earth, distracting the planet’s superheroes so he can abduct Kayla.

I feel there was a certain potential to Starblast. It’s an interesting premise. Gruenwald, despite his unfortunate tendency to write Quasar as a dry series of encyclopedia entries rather than an awe-inspiring exploration of the Marvel cosmos, was a good writer. The editor of Quasar and Starblast was Mike Rockwitz, out of whose office a number of enjoyable books were released in the early 1990s.

Regrettably the Starblast crossover just did not come together in the way Gruenwald must have imagined.

Starblast #1 written by Mark Gruenwald, penciled by Herb Trimpe, inked by Ralph Cabrera, lettered by Michael Higgins, colored by Paul Becton, published by Marvel Comics in January 1994

Starblast was a four-issue miniseries, with Quasar #54-56, Secret Defenders #11, Namor the Sub-Mariner #46-48, and Fantastic Four #385-386 all being labeled as parts of the crossover. Starblast and Quasar were both written by Gruenwald, and so the story runs directly between those two books. But the other parts of the crossover are at best peripheral, telling almost-unrelated stories. It seems like there was some problems getting everything coordinated between Gruenwald and the other writers.

The artwork on Starblast is also a major issue. Beneath a gorgeous cover by Claudio Castellini on issue #1 is interior art by penciler Herb Trimpe & inker Ralph Cabrera. Trimpe was a good, solid artist who had been working for Marvel since the late 1960s. However, by the early 1990s his style of art had unfortunately fallen out of favor, and the young, hot artists who worked on the X-Men and Spider-Man books before founding Image Comics were very much in demand. In an effort to make himself more bankable, Trimpe adopted a style inspired by the Image founders.

I am a fan of Trimpe, and I’m usually very charitable towards his work from the 1990s. He was in a tough position, trying to stay employed, doing the best he could. But his art on Starblast is difficult to look at.

Starblast #2 written by Mark Gruenwald, penciled by Herb Trimpe, inked by Ralph Cabrera, lettered by Michael Higgins, and colored by Paul Becton, published by Marvel Comics in February 1994

Trimpe does well enough on the first few pages of Starblast #1, with his weird work actually enhancing the unearthly menace of the alien Starblasters. But as the issue progresses and Gruenwald brings in Quasar and Earth’s other heroes, the wonky anatomy and bizarre layouts become really painful.

It’s sad that in the early 1990s an experienced, reliable artist like Trimpe had to churn this stuff out in an effort to extend his career. I’m just glad that when he finally started getting work in comic books again beginning in 2008 he was able to go back to his normal style.

Trimpe & Cabrera also drew the second issue of Starblast, and the artwork is just as poor. By the third issue they’re gone. Pencils are by Grant Miehm. The credit for inks is “Many Hands” which really tells me that there must have been some horrific deadlines and behind-the-scenes problems facing this series.

Miehm is another good, solid, underrated artist. I had been a fan of his art since a few years earlier when he penciled Justice Society of America and Legend of the Shield for DC Comics. He then worked on Ravage 2099 at Marvel, doing very nice work, as well as penciling a couple of fill-in issues of Quasar. Miehm’s previous fill-in work on Quasar, and on the third issue of Starblast, really convinces me that he should have been the artist for the entire miniseries. He draws all of the characters in his chapter really well and his storytelling is solid.

Starblast #3 written by Mark Gruenwald, penciled by Grant Miehm, inked by “Many Hands,” lettered by Michael Higgins and colored by Paul Becton, published by Marvel Comics in March 1994

Regrettably Miehm only drew the third issue. Starblast #4 has three pencilers, Brian Kong, Rich Buckler Jr & Nate Palant, and two inkers, Don Hudson & Ernie Chan, and so is a bit of a stylistic mess. Probably the strongest part is the first third of the issue which Kong penciled. I like his work, but I imagine that this must have been another deadline nightmare. Hudson and Chan are both good inkers, but they have such very different styles. All of this gives the impression that Rockwitz must have been forced to grab whoever was available just so he could get the issue finished.

All three issues of Quasar that are part of Starblast are penciled by John Heebink, with inks by Dan & David Day and Aaron McClellan. Their work isn’t flashy, but it gets the job done, and it’s consistent in quality.

The artwork was not the only problem with Starblast. Gruenwald’s story is overly ambitious, unfocused, and crowded. There are too many characters fighting for the spotlight. The second issue of Starblast literally wastes the entire chapter with Quasar, the Squadron Supreme & various random heroes fighting Gladiator & the Shi’ar Imperial Guard.

Quasar #54 written by Mark Gruenwald, penciled by John Heebink, inked by Dan & David Day, lettered by Janice Chiang and colored by Paul Becton, published by Marvel Comics in January 1994

Well, there is one interesting footnote to this: Gruenwald did finally have Marvel’s two main Superman expies, Hyperion and Gladiator, meet in Quasar #54. He obviously relished the idea of presenting such a metatextual battle.

The Starblasters are visually interesting, but again there’s just too many of them, and most of them are barely developed, with the majority just getting lost in the crowd. It’s odd that Gruenwald would dig up a bunch of obscure alien bad guys and then do almost nothing with them.

For example, one of the Starblasters is Threkker, and he’s either supposed to be the space vampire “The Captive” that Jack Kirby introduced in Captain America Annual #3 or another survivor of his nearly-extinct species the Epsiloni. (Threkker is the guy with the biiiig teeth.) Kirby wrote the character as this horrifying cosmic menace, but here he’s basically just some big generic thug working for Skeletron.

Starblast #4 really rushes along, ending very abruptly. So abruptly, in fact, that Quasar #57 is actually an unofficial epilogue that wraps up a lot of the Starblast plotlines. It does seem like Gruenwald was treating the Starblast miniseries as four extra issues of Quasar, rather than as a self-contained event, and as a result it’s something of a narrative jumble.

I feel it’s also worth pointing out that Starblast was simultaneously published at the exact same time as two other Marvel crossovers, “Siege of Darkness” in the Ghost Rider family of “supernatural superhero” books, and “Blood & Thunder” in the “cosmic” books written by Jim Starlin & Ron Marz. Almost comedically, there are scenes in both Quasar #54 and Secret Defenders #11 where Adam Warlock and Doctor Strange explain with some annoyance that they can’t help out against the Starblasters because they’re too busy with the events in “Blood & Thunder” and “Siege of Darkness” respectively. That demonstrates just how cluttered and glutted the Marvel line had become by the end of 1993. Something had to give… and it would very soon after.

Starblast #43 written by Mark Gruenwald, penciled by Brian Kong, inked by Ernie Chan & Don Hudson, lettered by Michael Higgins and colored by Paul Becton, published by Marvel Comics in April 1994

One of the reasons why I am so forgiving of Starblast is that, with the benefit of hindsight, I recognize it was produced at a time when the Marvel line had expanded to a completely unmanageable degree, and that it was released immediately before the start of the catastrophic market crash of the mid-1990s. Within a few months various titles would be canceled, including Quasar. Numerous creators and staff at Marvel would lose their jobs. In other words, it was a really dark time for the industry. People like Gruenwald and Rockwitz were just doing their best to get the books out on time and with as much of a level of professionalism as they could in an extremely difficult climate.

I’ve said before that while I love the medium of comic books, I often find the realities of the industry incredibly depressing. It can be a very difficult field to work in. And then, of course, someone like me comes along with his blog and says “Hey, remember that crazy stuff you worked on thirty years ago?”

In the near future I’m planning to look at another project that Mike Rockwitz edited, one that was much more successful. Stay tuned.

Strange Comic Books: Questprobe

Normally I blog about interesting or unusual comic books from the 1990s. Today’s entry actually concerns comics from the previous decade, the 1980s… but all of this will eventually lead to another “It Came from the 1990s” piece. So bear with me and enjoy the ride.

Back in the early 1980s Marvel Comics partnered with Scott Adams – no, not the cartoonist who eventually went full right-wing crazy, but the computer programmer & game designer – to create a series of text adventure computer games featuring Marvel characters. Adams, working with acclaimed writer & artist John Byrne, developed the concepts for the Questprobe series. In conjunction, Marvel Comics began publishing a Questprobe comic book series that was projected to run for approximately 12 issues, with a new issue coming out each time Adams released a new installment of the computer games.

Keep in mind that in the early 1980s personal computers were still very much in their infancy. The options available to programmers were extremely limited. I think this is very well illustrated by the letters column from Questprobe #3. Danny Bertinato of Gloucester, Ontario writes in to ask if the Questprobe games will be available for Commodore Vic-20. Adams responds with some bad news:

“QUESTPROBE requires a computer with a minimum of 16k of memory to run. The standard Vic-20 has only 5k of memory. Since very few people ever get the memory expansion to 16k for the Vic-20, I doubt we will ever put QUESTPROBE on the Vic-20. Sorry.”

Yeah, let that sink in. There used to be PCs with only 5 kilobytes of memory. And I make that observation while writing this on a brand-new laptop I purchased last month which has 8 gigabytes, a laptop that will, give it a decade or so, undoubtedly one day be just as much of an antiquated dinosaur as a Commodore Vic-20. It’s simultaneously amazing and frightening the lightning speed at which technology can develop.

Speaking of antiquated dinosaurs, my father’s first PC was an Apple 2E. Back in the mid 1980s I was 9 years old and just starting to get into comic books on a semi-regular basis. I saw the ads for the Questprobe games in Marvel books and I asked my father to buy it for me. I ran Questprobe featuring the Hulk on that Apple 2E… and I found it almost impossible to play. I just ended up going around in circles for hours, barely getting anywhere. It was definitely a frustrating experience.

I recently found a Walkthrough for Questprobe featuring the Hulk and looking at it there’s no possible way nine-year-old me would have been able to figure out the majority of this 38 years ago. Perhaps I was too young… but I also think the game was hampered by the sheer primitive nature of the PCs at the time.

UPDATE: There’s a website where you can play the text version of Questprobe featuring the Hulk online. I just spent half an hour going in circles. Almost four decades later this game is STILL impossible!

But enough about the computer games; I’m sure you came here for the comic books.

The Questprobe comic from Marvel only ran for three issues and was canceled when Adams’ company Adventure International went bankrupt in 1986. Each of the three issues corresponded to a released game, with the first issue featuring the Hulk, the second Spider-Man, and the third the Human Torch and the Thing. Adams was working on a fourth Questprobe game featuring the X-Men when Adventure folded; a corresponding fourth Questprobe comic book story starring the X-Men was completed and saw print in the anthology series Marvel Fanfare a year later.

The concept behind the Questprobe comics actually has a certain potential. In a far-distant region of the universe the mysterious alien Black Fleet is ravaging through space, destroying world after world. A utopian planet of scientists sees the Black Fleet inexorably approaching and wonders what, if anything, they can do. This civilization long ago abandoned violence, and most of its members have resigned themselves to destruction by the Black Fleet. But one of their number, Durgan the Philosopher, is determined to fight back, a stance that causes him to be labeled a mad heretic.

Undaunted, Durgan resolves to find a way to save his planet. Having studied the far-distant Earth, he has observed the numerous super-powered beings who populate the planet. Durgan creates the Chief Examiner, a dome-headed, cloaked construct that he dispatches to Earth to locate the most powerful super-beings, study them, and replicate their powers by getting them to pass through a black portal. (John Byrne apparently designed the Chief Examiner.)

There’s also some stuff going on with these mysterious, cosmic-powered “Bio-Gems” that are apparently parts of a larger entity, one that’s even more evil than the Black Fleet, but it’s fairly confusing how all of this was supposed to tie together. Perhaps if the games & comic books had lasted longer it would have become clearer.

The first issue of Questprobe, featuring the Hulk, was released with an August 1984 cover-date. It was written by Bill Mantlo, definitely an appropriate choice. Mantlo had previously done a stellar job taking licensed properties such as the Micronauts and Rom Spaceknight and developing them into highly intriguing ongoing comic book series for Marvel. He had also been writing The Incredible Hulk series since 1980, so was intimately familiar with the character.

Questprobe #1 has pencil layouts by Mark Gruenwald. Although he was much better known for his writing & editing at Marvel, Gruenwald did occasionally also draw, and he had a solid grasp of storytelling. The inking / finished artwork on issue #1 was by the legendary John Romita, who at this point was synonymous with the Marvel house style. Letters were by Joe Rosen and colors by George Roussos. The series editor was Bob Budiansky.

The first issue is a fairly basic story, one that is competently done and which establishes the premise in economical fashion. I’m sure that if I had bought it when it first came out in the Summer of 1984 it would have been perfectly geared to my eight-year-old sensibilities and I would have enjoyed it.

By the way, having seen on Wikipedia a photo of Adams taken in 1982, putting it side-by-side with Gruenwald & Romita’s art from this issue, it’s very obvious that Durgan’s appearance was modeled on the computer programmer.

And, yes, white guys really did used to wear their hair like that.

One last noteworthy item: The cover of the first issue features the blurb “by Bill Mantlo, Mark Gruenwald and John Romita” which was practically unheard of in mainstream comics at the time.

Moving on to Questprobe #2 (January 1985) featuring Spider-Man, this one is written & penciled by Al Milgrom. That’s another apt choice, as Milgrom was the writer & artist on the Spectacular Spider-Man series at this time. I’ve always found Milgrom to be a good, solid, underrated artist, and I think he did quality work on the Spider-Man character. Looking at some of his layouts & storytelling for Questprobe #2, some of it is reminiscent of Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko’s work.

Inking this issue was Jim Mooney, another talented artist who, among his numerous credits, had a lengthy association with Spider-Man during the Bronze Age. Milgrom & Mooney make a good art team. One of my all-time favorite letterers, Janice Chiang, worked on this issue, and George Roussos is back on colors.

Milgrom has always had a very offbeat sense of humor, which no doubt suited him to writing an irreverent character like Spider-Man. In this story he gets a lot of mileage out of the fact that the Chief Examiner has a remarkable resemblance to Spider-Man’s old enemy Mysterio. Hijinks ensue.

By the way, this story also gave me a newfound appreciation for Mysterio. I used to think he was a pretty stupid character, a special effects artist who wears a fishbowl on his head. But reading this issue Milgrom really sells the idea that Mysterio is highly intelligent and a master planner, and that he very effectively uses psychology & trickery to keep much more powerful adversaries like Spider-Man off-balance.

Questprobe #3 (November 1985) features the Human Torch and the Thing from the Fantastic Four. David Michelinie is perhaps an odd choice for the writer on this one, as he was already much more associated with Iron Man and the Avengers, and I don’t think he’s ever worked on a single issue of the Fantastic Four series. Nevertheless, Michelinie has always demonstrated himself to be a talented writer, and he ably steps in to handle the characters. He does a fair job, especially since he has to work around the inconvenient fact that the Torch and and the Thing never actually meet since at the time Ben Grimm had quit the FF and was hanging out on the Beyonder’s planet from the Secret Wars miniseries.

The artwork, on the other hand, is quintessential FF, with penciling by Ron Wilson, the regular artist on The Thing solo series, and inking by the legendary Joe Sinnot, the man who inked / embellished the Fantastic Four series for a decade and a half, from 1965 to 1981. I guess you could say that Sinnott as much as Romita helped define the look of Marvel Comics during the Bronze Age. Rick Parker lettered the issue and Julianna Ferriter did the coloring.

That brings us to the X-Men story that was originally intended for Questprobe #4 and which saw print in Marvel Fanfare #33 (July 1987). It’s written by longtime, groundbreaking X-Men writer Chris Claremont. “Shadows on the Soul” takes place during the time when the X-Men’s arch-nemesis Magneto was attempting to embrace Professor Xavier’s dream of peaceful coexistence between humans and mutants, and the master of magnetism was reluctantly tasked with leading his former foes, much to the X-Men’s understandable skepticism.

Pencils are by one of my favorite artists, Power Pack co-creator June Brigman, and inking is by Terry Austin, who famously embellished John Byrne’s now-classic run penciling X-Men. Brigman and Austin have worked together a few times over the years, and they’ve always made a superb art team. Letters are by Rick Parker and colors by Glynis Oliver.

I’m wondering how far along this story was when the Questprobe series was canceled. “Shadows on the Soul” runs a few pages longer than the typical Marvel comic, so it seems possible that Claremont, having learned that his story would now be appearing in the advertisement-free Marvel Fanfare, expanded it slightly. Certainly the gorgeous wraparound cover by Brigman & Austin must have been commissioned specifically for Fanfare.

At times Marvel Fanfare was dismissed as a dumping ground for inventory stories. Perhaps it was, but it did enable work that otherwise might never have been printed to see the light of day. Besides the fact that Fanfare editor Al Milgrom had previously written & penciled Questprobe #2, giving him a personal interest in seeing the fourth issue finally get completed, it would have been a no-brainer to run this story. Uncanny X-Men was an absolutely red-hot series in the late 1980s, so running an X-Men story, especially one written by Claremont, the writer who helped propel the character to super-stardom, must have been an obvious choice for Milgrom.

And “Shadows on the Soul” is really good, probably the best of the four Questprobe stories, so I’m glad Milgrom got it printed. Claremont does fantastic work with Magneto and the Chief Examiner. In the previous three stories it was pretty much taken for granted that Durgan is doing the right thing trying to save his world, and the rest of his race are fools for wanting to adhere to their pacifism. Magneto, however, has a tremendous amount of skepticism for Durgan’s actions.

Magneto points out that in attempting to save his world by stealing the powers of other beings Durgan is in danger of becoming just as evil as the Black Fleet, and that there is also a nobility to his people being willing to die for their beliefs. And it makes complete sense for Magneto to be saying this because he’s walked the exact same path as the Chief Examiner. Again and again Magneto has done the wrong thing for ostensibly the right reasons, and in the end was left pondering if he actually did make things any better for mutantkind.

The whole Questprobe storyline did eventually, and quite unexpectedly, get picked up again several years later. Mark Gruenwald always enjoyed utilizing obscure continuity, and he was the layout artist for Questprobe #1 so of course he would have been familiar with the series.

In 1992 Gruenwald brought back the Chief Examiner and the Black Fleet in the pages of his series Quasar. Gruenwald even names the Chief Examiner’s world “Scadam” after Scott Adams. It was perhaps a perfunctory wrap-up, one in which Quasar himself plays no direct role, with the girlfriend Kayla Ballentine, the unwitting recipient of the awesome cosmic power of the Star Brand, being the one to finally destroy the Black Fleet.

But that’s a story for another time.

Fight Comics Featuring Senorita Rio by Lily Renee

In May 2021 I posted about the 100th birthday of the remarkable Golden Age comic book artist Lily Renee. Born in Austria into an upper middle-class Jewish family, the teenage Lily Renee Willheim was forced to flee her homeland in the late 1930s after the Nazis seized power. Eventually arriving in New York City in the early 1940s as refugees, the Willheim family found themselves squeezed into a tenement apartment. Among the various odd jobs Renee took to put food on the table, she was an artist for comic book publisher Fiction House.

After slipping into obscurity for several decades, Renee was rediscovered by comic book historians at the end of the 20th century. The now elderly Renee met her newfound fame with a great deal of bemusement. For her, her comic book career had been merely a way to make ends meet during a difficult time in her life, and she was understandably perplexed that her work from sixty years earlier was now receiving such interest.

Renee passed away on August 24, 2022 at the age of 101. While she is no longer with us, much of her work for Fiction House is being brought back into print for the first time in decades. Among these are the stories featuring the character she is most identified with, Senorita Rio.

The adventures of Senorita Rio appeared in the adventure anthology Fight Comics beginning with issue #19 (cover-dated June 1942) and ran through issue #71 (Nov 1950). PS Artbooks, who have been publishing a series of handsome volumes reprinted a diverse selection of Golden and Silver Age comic book material, recently collected the Senorita Rio stories together in three volumes.

The majority of Renee’s Senorita Rio stories are collected in Fight Comics Featuring Senorita Rio Vol 2, which PS Artbooks released in June of last year. I finally had a chance to pick it up right before the holidays last month. Vol 2 contains the stories from Fight Comics #35 to #50.

Senorita Rio is Rita Farrar, a glamorous Hollywood actress & stuntwoman who, after her fiancé’s death at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, fakes her death so she could become a secret agent for the Allied Forces. Given her Latina heritage, her talents as an actress and her fluency in Spanish & Portuguese, Senorita Rio was sent on numerous undercover missions in Central and South America, pitting her against a succession of Nazi spies and fascist plotters. Following the end of World War II we see her tracking down Nazi war criminals who have fled to Latin America.

Rio stands out as one of the first strong female heroes of American comic books. She was tough, intelligent, beautiful, resourceful, and independent. Within the decade, as American mores became much more conservative and the Comics Code Authority was implemented, female characters regrettably became much more flighty, one-dimensional damsels in distress. So I look at the Senorita Rio stories as a valuable demonstration that prior to the mid-1950s there were some notable female protagonists.

The writer of the Senorita Rio stories is unknown, with most of them credited to the pen name of “Morgan Hawkins.” Truthfully, the plotting on these is fairly basic, and occasionally ridiculous, as was often the case with comic books in the 1940s. The stories are fun, just as long as you don’t hold the logic up to too much scrutiny.

No, the appeal here is definitely Renee’s artwork. Having received an extensive education in Europe, and regularly visiting the museums & art galleries of  Vienna in her childhood, Renee’s work is very much informed by a classical sensibility. Her layouts & storytelling are highly dynamic, inventive & unconventional, and her drawing is possessed of an ornate flair. Renee takes the rather boilerplate plots of “Morgan Hawkins” and transforms them into visual feasts.

To understand just how much Renee’s work would have stood out to the readers of the mid 1940s, I think it’s useful to compare it to her contemporaries. There are a pair of stories in this collection drawn by a young Bob Lubbers. While Lubbers would eventually establish himself as one of the best “good girl” artists in the industry, rendering beautiful, sexy women with aplomb, here he’s just starting out, and his art seems very rough & simplistic compared to Renee’s detailed, illustrative work.

Much of the original artwork from the Golden Age no longer survives. Fortunately several examples of Renee’s work on the Senorita Rio feature still exist, and a few of them are reprinted in this collection. It’s wonderful to be able to look at these, to see the fine details of Renee’s ink lines.

Fight Comics are among the public domain comic book series available to view on the website Comic Book Plus. Comparing the scans of the Senorita Rio stories on that site to this collected edition, it’s apparent that PS Artbooks did a quality job of maintaining the color tones of the original printings. So many older comic books that were published on newsprint, when reprinted on the slicker paper of collected editions, unfortunately end up being garishly recolored. So I appreciate that PS Artbooks made the effort to be as authentic to the original published appearance as possible.

Above is the Senorita Rio title page from Fight Comics #44 scanned from the original comic book on the Comic Book Plus website side by side with the reprint of the page from the PS Artbooks collection. As you can see, the colors on the reprint are very close to the original.

Now that PS Artbooks has finished collecting the Senorita Rio stories, I hope they will reprint some of the other features that Lily Renee worked on, such as “Jane Martin” in Wings Comics, “The Werewolf Hunter” from Rangers Comics and “The Lost World” from Planet Comics. As nice as it is to be able to read those stories on Comic Book Plus, nothing compares to having a physical copy in hand.

Star Trek reviews: Discovery season four

I spent the last three months watching the entire run of Star Trek: Discovery on Paramount Plus, finishing up last night. I thought the first season was good but uneven and padded out, the second and third seasons were great, and the fourth one was very good but again dragged in a few places. Here are some thoughts on the show in general and the fourth season specifically.

Discovery is a very character-driven series. One of the benefits of watching all the episodes to date in a relatively short period of time was that it enabled me to see just how much the various characters grew & developed. I feel the writers did a good job developing most of the cast.

From what I gather Michael Burnham played by Sonequa Martin-Green has proved to be a divisive character with some viewers. Her arc has certainly been highly unusual, to say the least. It was interesting to see Burnham at last become Captain of the Starship Discovery in the fourth season. I feel Martin-Green has done a solid job with the material given her, although at times she does perform her dialogue in what I can only describe as “a loud whisper” which comes across as odd to me. Still, she effectively carries the show most of the time.

Something I’ve noticed is that the writers aren’t at all shy about calling into question Burnham’s motives & actions and positioning other characters as adversarial counterpoints to her to push her to engage in some necessary self-evaluation.

Admiral Vance (Ohed Fehr) and President Rillak (Chelah Horsdal) are the two latest figures to do so. At first glance, given the parade of rogue Admirals and corrupt, self-serving politicians that have appeared in previous Star Trek series, one could be forgiven for thinking that Vance and/or Rillak were up to some nefarious purpose. But with both of them it eventually becomes clear that they are decent people attempting to do very difficult jobs under incredibly trying circumstances.

That’s a characteristic I’ve noticed about Disco. The challenge is often not some diabolical mastermind bend on galactic domination (although there have been a few of those); rather it is that you have different individuals who all want to achieve a greater good, but each of them disagrees, often drastically, as to the steps necessary to achieve that outcome, and everyone needs to work to find some sort of common ground within which to work together.

That’s certainly the case with Burnham and Booker (David Ajala) in season four. Both of them want to stop the mysterious Dark Matter Anomaly that is devastating the galaxy, but Burnham wants to try diplomacy, to reach out to the mysterious Species Ten-C to convince them to withdraw their creation, while Booker wants to attack it directly before it can cause any more harm. I found myself agreeing with Burnham’s approach, her desire to avoid escalating the crisis any further. But at the same time I have to admit, if I found myself in Booker’s shoes, with my home planet, my entire family, destroyed by the DMA, it’s quite likely I’d be making the drastic choices he did.

As much as I liked the first two seasons of Disco, I really feel like the show came into its own with season three. Yes, Enterprise and Strange New Worlds are both great shows. But Star Trek has always been at its best when it has looked forward, not backwards. For the first two seasons Disco was a prequel to the original series, and as strong as it was it felt too beholden to past incarnations of Star Trek. Having Discovery and its crew jump forward 900 years to the 32nd Century has allowed Star Trek to go in completely different directions.

I think that’s very well illustrated with the long sought-after reunification of the Vulcan and Romulan civilizations, which has finally been achieved in the 32nd century. It’s also demonstrated with the character of the half-Cardassian, half-human Laira Rillak. In The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine the Federation and the Cardassian Union were bitter foes; now a character who shares the dual heritages of those two once-implacable enemies is the President of the Federation itself.

I appreciated that Disco demonstrated that such change is possible, but also made it clear that it took a great deal of effort and a tremendous amount of time for those changes to be achieved, as well as showing that it is necessary to continually work to maintain that progress.

I also appreciated how Disco season four really leaned into the Star Trek mission statement “To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no one has gone before.” It’s rare that Star Trek has presented genuinely ALIEN lifeforms. That’s one of the reasons why I’ve always liked the original series: despite the limitations of the budget and the primitive special effects, it did attempt to present non-humanoid beings like the Horta, the brain parasites from “Operation – Annihilate,” Korob and Sylvia’s true forms in “Catspaw,” the Tribbles, the Melkotians from “Specter of the Gun” and so forth. Starting with The Next Generation the franchise became too dependent on bumpy-headed aliens.

It’s great to have Species Ten-C, a race that is SO alien that we never even find out their real name. The Ten-C are totally non-humanoid, and the Universal Translators used by the Federation are completely useless in communicating with these extra-galactic beings. It takes concerted efforts by both sides to cross that seemingly insurmountable gap, and when it is bridged, it feels genuinely rewarding.

That’s also why I like Saru the Kelpien, played by Doug Jones. At last we have a regular character serving in Starfleet who looks genuinely alien. Jones gives Saru an “otherness” through his performance & movements, and the make-up is stunning.

Looking at some of the other regulars on Disco, I really want to discuss Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp) and Hugh Culber (Wilson Cruz), the first same sex couple on a Star Trek series. That’s a development that was long overdue, one that both The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine were ultimately afraid to discuss. Stamets and Culber are both great characters. Like everyone else on the Starship Discovery, the two of them have some serious issues (this has got to be the most dysfunctional Star Trek crew since DS9) and both characters are really performed well by Rapp and Cruz.

I appreciated how the two were introduced back in the first season. When we first meet Stamets he’s an arrogant, impatient egotist. We then meet Dr. Culber, who’s shown to be a caring, empathic individual. And then suddenly there’s a scene where Stamets and Culber are in their pajamas brushing their teeth side-by-side in their shared quarters. My reaction was basically “Oh, wait, they’re a couple? That’s cool.”

I like that it’s underplayed and just treated as an everyday occurrence that Stamets and Culber are married. And the fact that they are in certain ways two very different people has enabled the writers to show all the work they’ve had to put into maintaining their relationship. Which, I suppose, goes back to that whole theme of working to find common ground that permeates Disco.

In any case, Stamets definitely went from being an annoying jerk to a warm, funny, nuanced character in fairly short time, and now he is one of my favorites.

Also great work in the writing and acting department with the character of Sylvia Tilly, played be Mary Wiseman. When we are first introduced to the babbling, insecure Tilly in season one it seems like she’s going to be the show’s comic relief. Instead she gradually grew to become one of the strongest characters on Disco, and by the end of season four she really had come into her own.

I’m looking forward to Disco season five next year because I really do enjoy the series. I’m glad to hear the episode count is reduced from 13 to 10. As I said before, season four had some pacing issues, so hopefully season five will have a leaner structure. I’m sure it’s possible to have a somewhat more streamlined season without sacrificing any of the excellent character work. I definitely want to see more development for the Discovery bridge crew, some of whom are still unfortunately underutilized.

By the way, as I alluded to before, I know there are some Star Trek fans who do not like Discovery. Some even seem to hate it with a red-hot passion! I understand; we all have different interests. I really don’t like Voyager, but I know there are Star Trek fans who do love it, and when they talk about that series, I hold my tongue because I don’t want to belittle anyone’s else’s entertainment choices. You can dislike something without attacking someone who disagrees with you. And I feel that right now there is so much Star Trek material out there that there’s something for everyone. It’s a great time to be a fan.