Comic book reviews: Dark Crisis: The Dark Army / War Zone / Big Bang

I didn’t get the recent Dark Crisis miniseries from DC Comics because, seriously, ANOTHER cosmic mega-crossover with the fate of all existence at stake? However, I did end up picking up a few of the specials that tied in with Dark Crisis because I liked several of the creators who worked on them.

Dark Crisis: The Dark Army is written by Mark Waid, Delilah S. Dawson & Dennis Culver, drawn by Freddie E. Williams II & Jack Herbert, colored by Adriano Lucas, lettered by Troy Peteri and edited by Chris Rosa. I got the variant cover by Werther Dell’Edera.

A massive battle is taking place between Earth’s heroes and the supervillain army under the domination of Pariah. Damian Wayne / Robin devises a desperate plan to sever Pariah’s control of the Dark Army. Unfortunately he can only afford to take a few heroes away from the battle, choosing Sideways, Power Girl and Dr. Light, with newcomer Red Canary tagging along, much to Robin’s annoyance. The quintet begin a jaunt across the multiverse via Sideways’ dimensional portals.

I thought The Dark Army did a fair job with the characters. Robin is arrogant, bossy, headstrong & condescending, just like his father Batman, but we get glimpses that Damian does admire the other heroes for their convictions, and that he does genuinely value his friendship with Jon Kent / Superboy. Probably the highlight of The Dark Army is the back & forth snark between Robin and the equally headstrong, much more experienced Power Girl, who you just know is not going to have much patience for Damian’s know-it-all attitude.

It was also cool to have Dr. Light play a significant role in the story’s resolution. I’ve always though she was an underutilized character. And given that she was first introduced in Crisis on Infinite Earths, it makes sense to have her as a central figure in a story with several callbacks to that classic miniseries.

During the grand tour of the multiverse, it was nice to see, however briefly, versions of Captain Carrot and Mary Marvel… or Mary Shazam, or whatever DC is calling her nowadays. I appreciated that Mary was wearing the white uniform Jerry Ordway gave her in The Power of Shazam, since I feel that always helped give her an identity somewhat distinct from her brother.

I’m not too enthusiastic about DC continuing to use Dino-Cop, though. The character is obviously intended as a cute nod to Erik Larsen’s Savage Dragon, but I feel he’s just too similar to Larsen’s creation to be showing up on a regular basis.

Freddie E. Williams II and Jack Herbert both do very solid work on The Dark Army. I’m a fan of Williams, so it’s always good to see his work. He draws a few really dynamic double-page spreads for this story. I’m unfamiliar with Herbert, but he has both a nice, slick polish to his work and a sort of atmospheric inking reminiscent of Mike Deodato.

The two artists have extremely different styles, but it’s not especially jarring going from Williams to Herbert and then back to Williams. The only exception to that is Herbert draws Robin as much taller & older-looking than Williams, to the point where Williams’ Damian almost feels like a different character from Herbert’s version.

The next special was Dark Crisis: War Zone. As with The Dark Army, it was a very character-driven issue, featuring several short vignettes spotlighting different heroes amidst the ginormous battle with Pariah’s army. Rafael Sarmento turns in a very striking cover.

“On Time” co-stars Iris West and Linda Park, and it was definitely a stroke of genius by Jeremy Adams to team up the wives of the second and third Flashes. The artwork by penciler Fernando Pasarin and inker Matt Ryan was solid. I would have enjoyed this one a lot more if it was longer than eight pages, though.

And that’s the weakness in all the segments in War Zone: none of them are really long enough to really give more than a cursory glimpse of the characters. There are five stories in this special, each of them eight pages, and I feel it would have benefited the book greatly to have cut out one of them and given two extra pages to each of the other four features.

The Green Lantern Corps story written by Matthew Rosenberg was another highlight. The interaction between gruff Corps veteran Guy Gardner and newcomer Sojourner “Jo” Mullein was well done. Rosenberg writes one of the better versions of Guy Gardner I’ve ever seen. Yeah, Guy is a gruff, arrogant hothead, but he also has the guts & conviction to back up his attitude, and when he sees that Jo can pull her own weight in a crisis he acknowledges that she has what it takes. Oh, yeah… leave it to Guy to use his ring to conjure up a chainsaw!

The offbeat artwork by George Kambadais and colors by Matt Herms was enjoyable. And I especially liked the distinctive, organic lettering by Troy Peteri.

“Birds of a Feather” follows on from Red Canary’s appearance in The Dark Army. Returning to the massive super-brawl on Earth, Red Canary meets her inspiration, Dinah Lance aka Black Canary. Delilah S. Dawson’s script gets some mileage out of the ever-revolving door of life & death in superhero comic books. Red Canary adopted her identity as a tribute to Black Canary after the later died… and here’s Dinah returned to life already, offering the following pithy explanation:

“Superhero stuff. Long story. But I can assure you it’s me, I’m not an evil twin, and I’m not secretly a zombie.”

Tom Derenick illustrates this meeting of the Canaries. I really enjoy Derenick’s work; he was the primary reason why I bought War Zone. He definitely does a good job on this story. I believe Derenick’s most recent ongoing assignment was the recently-cancelled Teen Titans Academy, and I hope DC gives him another series to draw soon. “Birds of a Feather” was another story that I really wish had been longer.

Rounding out my Dark Crisis purchases is Big Bang, which was far and away my favorite of the three specials. Big Bang is the epilogue to the whole event, establishing that the multiverse has at long last been restored to an infinite number of alternate realities for the first time since the first Crisis series back in 1986.

Well, honestly, I thought the whole “Hypertime” thing already did that in the late 199s, but that never seemed to stick, and for the last decade or so DC’s had the whole “52 alternate Earths” going. So it’s nice for them to (again) remove that limit and give us a literally unlimited number of parallel Earths. Let’s just hope this time they keep it that way and don’t flush it down the toilet again two or three crossovers down the road!

Anyway, Big Bang opens with Barry Allen, the Flash of the Silver Age, declaring “I’m looking for the man who murdered me.” With the multiverse restored, Barry is concerned that the cosmic menace known as the Anti-Monitor, the entity who caused his death back during Crisis on Infinite Earths, is out there, somewhere amidst the myriad alternate realities. Accompanied by Wallace West, the new Kid Flash, Barry begins exploring the multiverse, searching for any sign of the Anti-Monitor.

I got into DC Comics in the early 1990s, so for me Wally West is MY Flash. I didn’t see the point of bringing back Barry because writers such as Mark Waid did a fantastic job establishing Wally as a worthy hero who at long last stepped out from his predecessor’s shadow. Having said that, I feel Waid did a good job on Big Bang writing Barry. I guess no matter who the Flash happens to be, Waid has a really affinity for writing the Fastest Man Alive.

I got Big Bang because it was penciled by Dan Jurgens, whose work I have really enjoyed since he was one of the primary creative forces on the Superman books in the early 1990s. Waid’s story, with Flash and Kid Flash exploring the multiverse, provides Jurgens with the opportunity to draw numerous alternate Earths and their superpowered occupants. That includes Earth-27, with its dinosaur Jurassic League.

Barry and Wallace eventually do locate the Anti-Monitor, who unfortunately attacks them before they can retreat. Barry is left in a desperate struggle to keep off-balance the awesomely-powered being who once took his life. Wallace uses the opportunity to recruit some of the multiverse’s greatest heroes against the Anti-Monitor. Of course Jurgens does a fantastic job illustrating this epic struggle.

It was cool to see the Victorian-era Wonder Woman from the Elseworlds graphic novel Amazonia and the future Superman from the Batman Beyond reality among this gathering of heroes. And even though I’m not especially thrilled with DC continuing the America’s Best Comics characters without Alan Moore, I still liked the cameo by Tesla Strong.

What I really liked about Big Bang is that it demonstrated you can have this sort of monumental cosmic conflict without padding it out across innumerable issues. Waid’s story is one-and-done and is therefore much the stronger for it.

Jurgens is inked on Big Bang by Norm Rapmund. I would have preferred Brett Breeding, Jurgens’ old inking partner from Superman, but Rapmund still does a fair job. (At least we got to see Jurgens and Breeding reunited on the recent The Death of Superman 30th Anniversary Special.) Coloring is by Federico Blee, lettering by Troy Peteri, and editing is by Paul Kaminski, Brittany Holzherr & Dave Wielgosz.

Big Bang ends with a two-page text listing of many of the Earths in the restored multiverse. Waid is an absolute master of continuity, so if anyone was going to be able to put this one together it would be him. I had a fun time perusing it, and I was glad to see the Atomic Knights returned to continuity on Earth-17.

The one thing that I did not like about Dark Crisis: Big Bang was the cover. As with every DC release nowadays, Big Bang had several covers. The main one is by Mikel Janín showing Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman from Earth-118 getting smooshed together, or something. You have a story featuring the multiverse’s greatest heroes in an epic battle against the Anti-Monitor and THAT is the cover you come up with? Three editors on this book and none of them thought to have Jurgens, or any artist who specializes in big superhero action scenes, draw the story’s big set piece for the cover?

I feel that’s one of the drawbacks of EVERY issue having variant covers. There’s such a focus on coming up with all the different covers that there isn’t that effort to create that one single dramatic image that’s going to sell the book.

I ended up instead getting the Big Bang variant cover by Ariel Colon. It’s still not all that dramatic, but with the characters from various different realities being featured on it at least it brings across the whole “restored multiverse” theme of the story. Plus it has Dinosaur batman on it. How can you say “no” to Dinosaur Batman?

There was at least another Dark Crisis tie-in, The Deadly Green, that I missed, which I’ll probably try to find, since it features some Justice Society related characters.

For the most part I enjoyed these three specials. Yes, there was room for improvement on each of them, but for tie-ins to a big, overblown crossover they were certainly enjoyable. I just hope that some of the new heroes and alternate realities seen in them get the spotlight in the future.

New York Comic Con 2022 Artists Alley spotlight

New York Comic Con 2022 was held on October 6th to 9th at the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan. It was an exhausting but fun experience. One of my favorite parts of the convention was once again Artists Alley, which featured a large, diverse selection of comic book creators.

Here are some of my favorite creators who I met at New York Comic Con this year. I have included links to their work, so you can check them out for yourself.

One of the great things about NYCC is it gives you the opportunity to meet creators who are visiting from outside of United States. I’ve been enjoying the work of Italian artists Marco Santucci and Maria Laura Sanapo over the past few years for DC Comics and other publishers. I’ve been interacting with them on social media, so it was definitely nice to actually get to meet them.

In my mind Dan Jurgens is one of the definitive, all-time great Superman artists. I loved his work on the character in the late 1980s thru the mid 1990s. He also did very good work on Captain America for Marvel Comics and the Image Comics series Common Grounds. It was a pleasure to finally meet him and be able to let him know how much I have enjoyed his work.

It was good to see The Hero Business creator Bill Walko at NYCC again. He’s got a really fun art style. The Hero Business is such an enjoyable series. If you haven’t read it yet then I highly recommend ordering the upcoming The Hero Business Compendium to be published by New Friday Comics, the creator-owned division of Lev Gleason Publishing.  The Compendium will be a 472 page book in oversized graphic novel format collecting the complete ten year The Hero Business saga and is scheduled for release next month.

It’s also always good to see artist Russ Braun at comic cons. He’s a genuinely good guy and a talented artist, having drawn the classic Batman storyline “Venom,” War of the Gods and Fables for DC Comics, as well as regularly collaborating with writer Garth Ennis on a number of projects, among them Battlefields, The Boys and Jimmy’s Bastards.

Not to sound like a broken record, but it was also great to see Andrew Pepoy again at NYCC, back for the first time since before the pandemic. He’s an amazing artist and a good person. Andrew has a few advanced copies of this long-awaited new The Adventures of Simone & Ajax book Lemmings and Tigers and Bears! Oh, My! at the show. I’m looking forward to receiving my copy in the mail soon.

Alex Saviuk and Keith Williams were the art team on Web of Spider-Man from Marvel Comics when I was in high school in the early 1990s. I really enjoyed their work on the series. I don’t know if it was coincidence or design, but they ended up sitting next to each other in Artists Alley, so I wanted to get a photo of the two of them together.

Lynne Yoshii has a beautiful art style. I first discovered her work on the great Gotham City Garage series. She since drawn stories for several DC Comics anthology specials. I’m looking forward to reading the recently released Nuclear Power graphic novel from Fan Base Press that she illustrated.

Bought a copy of Empty Graves: 31 Horror Portraits by Dave Fox which contains some incredible, creepy artwork. Dave Fox has been working on a series of horror portraits over the past few years, and it’s nice to have them all collected together. He really knocked these out of the park, capturing the spooky, eerie essence of some of horror cinema’s most iconic villains & monsters.

These were just a few of the talented creators at New York Comic Con. It was an enjoyable show, and I’m grateful I had the opportunity to attend it.

The Hopefully Almost Daily Comic Book Coffee, Part One

On the Facebook group Comic Book Historians, moderator Jim Thompson issued a “Call to Arms” to occupy and cheer up those of us who are working from home or unemployed due to the coronavirus pandemic.  The challenge: Pick a subject and find a different artist every day for that subject until May 1st (if not longer).

Jim had already been posting his 1000 Horses series for the past three years, each day showcasing artwork featuring a horse drawn by a different artist.  Group member Mitchell Brown has done several shorter themes, most recently “My Enemy, Myself” featuring “evil twin” stories.

Mitchell sometimes collects together some of these FB posts on his entertaining & informative blog, the appropriately named A Dispensable List of Comic Book Lists.  That inspired me to do the same with my blog.  Here is the first installment in the Hopefully Almost Daily Comic Book Coffee.  From the work of how many different artists can I find examples of people drinking coffee?  I guess we will just have to see.

1) Shannon Wheeler

Let’s start off with the obvious choice: Too Much Coffee Man by Shannon Wheeler.  Too Much Coffee Man first appeared as a self-published mini comic in 1991.  In a 2011 interview with The New Yorker, Wheeler explained the origins of the series:

“In 1991, I drew an autobiographical cartoon for The Daily Texan with themes of alienation and loneliness. When I described it, people’s eyes glazed over. As a cheap gag, I started “Too Much Coffee Man.” I still address the same themes, except now there’s coffee. People like coffee.”

That’s certainly true.  I’m drinking coffee at this very moment, right as I’m typing this sentence.

From such humble beginnings, Too Much Coffee Man has been in near-continuous publication for almost three decades.  The series has enabled Wheeler to humorously explore existential angst, the lunacy of American society, and the dangers of overindulging in caffeine.

Here is Too Much Coffee Man living up to his name on page two of the story “TMCM vs. TM©M” which sees a ruthless corporate executive shamelessly steal our protagonist’s name & imagery, and then hit him with a cease & desist order.  In the battle of indy original versus big business rip-off, who will win? (Hey, maybe Mitchell Brown can do a “My Enemy, Myself” entry about this story!)

“TMCM vs. TM©M” first appeared in Too Much Coffee Man #1 published by Adhesive Press in July 1993.  I read the story in the Too Much Coffee Man’s Parade of Tirade trade paperback released by Dark Horse in November 1999, which reprinted the first eight issues of the Adhesive Press run.  The story, and a whole bunch of other caffeinated goodness, can also be found in the Too Much Coffee Man Omnibus published by Dark Horse in 2011, with an expanded edition in 2017.

2) Dan Jurgens & Al Vey

This artwork is from Common Grounds #5 from Image Comics, cover-dated June 2004. Script is by Troy Hickman, pencils by Dan Jurgens, inks by Al Vey, letters by the Dreamer’s Design team, and colors by Guy Major.  I’m going to quote from my own previous blog post about Common Grounds…

Published by the Top Cow imprint of Image Comics in 2004, Common Grounds was a six issue miniseries written by Troy Hickman, with contributions from a number of extremely talented artists.  It initially began life as a mini comic titled Holey Crullers that Hickman had worked on with Jerry Smith a few years before.  Common Grounds was set around a nationwide chain of coffee shops that were frequented by costumed heroes & villains, a sort of Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts for super-humans.  The various Common Grounds stores serve as “neutral territory” where both crime-fighters and criminals can gather peaceably to enjoy a cup of joe and some doughnuts.

Hickman and his artistic collaborators introduce a cast who, on the surface, are expies for famous DC and Marvel characters.  Hickman utilizes these to both pay homage to and deconstruct various storytelling structures and devices of the superhero genre.  What I like about how Hickman goes about this is that he does so with a surprising lack of sarcasm or mockery.  All of his jibes are of the good-natured sort, and he takes equal aim at the implausible silliness of the early Silver Age and the grim & gritty trappings of more recent decades.  Common Grounds is simultaneously extremely funny and very poignant & serious.

I’m fairly confident I’ll be featuring work from some of the other Common Grounds art teams in future installments! It’s definitely due for another re-read.

3) Jack Kirby & Joe Sinnott

If you’re going to talk comic books, sooner or later (probably sooner) you’re going to have to discuss Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.  Whatever the specific division of labor was (and all these decades it’s almost impossible to determine that precisely) the two of them working together in the 1960s created the majority of the Marvel Universe.

It all started in August 1961 with the Fantastic Four, a group who right from the start were characterized as much by their all-too-human disagreements as their super-powers.  And no one was more dysfunctional than the gruff Ben Grimm, aka the Thing, who had been transformed by cosmic radiation into a monster.

Early on Ben Grimm very much straddled the line between hero and villain, and in those first few issues the rest of the FF found themselves wondering if the Thing, consumed by anger & self-loathing, might violently turn on them.  However, the Thing gradually evolved into a character who was both gruff & comedic.  We see one of the first hints of that here, in this scene from Fantastic Four #5, cover-dated July 1962.  Ben is attempting to enjoy a cup of coffee, only to get razzed by literal hothead the Human Torch.

This is one of those pages that really makes me appreciate Kirby.  I love the panel with the Thing holding the cup of coffee.  This was when he still looked like orange oatmeal, very much a horribly disfigured individual, before he evolved into the almost cartoony orange brick form we are all familiar with. There’s this simultaneous humor and tragedy in that panel, as Ben Grimm, now this huge, grotesque figure, is almost daintily holding that coffee cup & saucer, a very human gesture, and a reminder of what he once was, and longs to be again.

Inks are by Joe Sinnott, his first time working on FF.  Lee wanted Sinnott to become the regular inker, but soon after Sinnott received the assignment of drawing the biography of Pope John XXIII for Treasure Chest.  Sinnott had inked about half a page of Kirby’s pencils for the next issue when he got the Treasure Chest job, and so had to mail the art back to Lee, who then assigned it to Dick Ayers.  Sinnott fortunately got another opportunity work on the series in 1965, commencing with issue #44, and for the rest of the 1960s did a superb job inking Kirby.  Sinnott remained on FF for the 15 years, inking / embellishing over several pencilers.

In a case of Early Installment Weirdness, we see the Torch reading an issue of The Incredible Hulk #1, which in the real world had come out two months earlier.  It seems at this point in time Lee & Kirby had not quite decided if the Hulk occupied the same fictional universe as the FF.

4) Werner Roth & John Tartaglione

X-Men #31, cover-dated April 1967, was penciled by Werner Roth and inked by John Tartaglione. “We Must Destroy… the Cobalt Man!” was written by Roy Thomas.

X-Men in the 1960s was a title of, um, variable quality.  Series creators Lee & Kirby both left fairly early on, and newcomer Roy Thomas sometimes struggled to find a successful direction for the book.  Thomas was paired with penciler Werner Roth, who did good, solid work… but regrettably did not possess a certain dynamic quality necessary for Marvel-style superheroes.  Also, I’m not sure if Tartaglione’s inks were an especially good fit for Roth’s pencils.

Roth was, however very well-suited to drawing romance, war and Westerns comic books.  He certainly was adept at rendering lovely ladies, as seen in his exquisite art on Lorna the Jungle Queen in the 1950s, which he inked himself.  So it’s not surprising that some of Roth’s best work on X-Men was when the main cast was in their civilian identities, and the soap-operatic melodrama was flying fast & furious.  Witness the following…

Here we have two different coffee-drinking scenes on one page.  At the top, Scott Summers, Warren Worthington and Jean Grey are hanging out with Ted Roberts and his older brother Ralph at a greasy spoon known as the Never-Say-Diner… really, Roy?!?  Ted was a short-lived rival to Scott for Jean’s affections, and Ralph was (spoilers!) a short-lived villain named the Cobalt Man.  Elsewhere, Hank McCoy and Bobby Drake have taken their dates Vera and Zelda to their semi-regular Greenwich Village hangout, Coffee A Go-Go, where Bernard the Poet is, ahem, “reciting his latest masterpiece.”  The scene closes with Bobby creating the world’s first iced espresso.

5) Joe Staton

This entry is drawn by one of my all-time favorite artists, the amazing Joe Staton.  “Vamfire” is a short story featuring E-Man and Nova Kane, the awesome characters created by Nicola “Nick” Cuti & Joe Staton at Charlton Comics in 1973.  This story was originally planned for Charlton Bullseye in 1976.  It did not see print until a decade later, in The Original E-Man and Michael Mauser #7 (April 1986) published by First Comics, who had the E-Man rights in the 1980s.

I’ve blogged at length about E-Man on several occasions.  Suffice it to say, it’s an amazing series, with brilliantly humorous & heartfelt writing by Cuti and wonderfully imaginative artwork by Staton.  This six page story introduces E-Man’s negative energy sister Vamfire, a sort of proto bad girl anti-hero who would reappear in later stories.  “Vamfire” also introduces Nick and Joe’s Café, and Staton draws himself and Cuti as the proprietors.  Nick and Joe’s Café would also return in later stories, with the running gag that their coffee was always terrible.  Nevertheless they somehow managed to stay in business, no doubt due to being strategically located near Xanadu Universe in Manhattan, where innumerable sleep-deprived college & graduate students were desperate for a caffeine fix to keep them awake during the school’s interminable lectures.

“Vamfire” was later reprinted in 2011 in the excellent trade paperback E-Man: The Early Years, which collected the entirety of the E-Man stories from the 1970s under one cover.  It is apparently still available through the publisher. I highly recommend it.

Thanks for stopping by to sample our fine four-colored espresso.  I hope you will come back again soon when we will have five more examples of Comic Book Coffee from throughout the decades.

 

Caffeine and Capes: revisiting Top Cow’s Common Grounds

I finally managed to get rid of a whole bunch of the comic books that were cluttering up the apartment.  While I was digging through my long boxes, figuring out what to sell and what to keep, I came across a number of things that I liked which I hadn’t read in a while.  Time to revisit some old favorites, I thought.  And among these was Common Grounds.

Published by the Top Cow imprint of Image Comics in 2004, Common Grounds was a six issue miniseries written by Troy Hickman, with contributions from a number of extremely talented artists.  It initially began life as a mini comic titled Holey Crullers that Hickman had worked on with Jerry Smith a few years before.  Common Grounds was set around a nationwide chain of coffee shops that were frequented by costumed heroes & villains, a sort of Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts for super-humans.  The various Common Grounds stores serve as “neutral territory” where both crime-fighters and criminals can gather peaceably to enjoy a cup of joe and some doughnuts.

Hickman and his artistic collaborators introduce a cast who, on the surface, are expies for famous DC and Marvel characters.  Hickman utilizes these to both pay homage to and deconstruct various storytelling structures and devices of the superhero genre.  What I like about how Hickman goes about this is that he does so with a surprising lack of sarcasm or mockery.  All of his jibes are of the good-natured sort, and he takes equal aim at the implausible silliness of the early Silver Age and the grim & gritty trappings of more recent decades.  Common Grounds is simultaneously extremely funny and very poignant & serious.

In the past, it has sometimes been observed that superhero stories are really not effective vehicles for addressing legitimate social or political concerns, because in the end the demands of the genre require some sort of antagonist that the hero can punch out.  In reality, though, violence is not an ideal, long-term solution to resolving governmental corruption, poverty, racism, or pollution.  And this ties in precisely with the themes of Hickman’s stories.

As we find out, the whole chain of Common Grounds stores were established by Michael O’Brien, aka Big Money, a retired superhero-turned-billionaire.  His son, who sought to follow in his footsteps, ended up accidentally getting killed in a fight with another costumed vigilante that was caused by a misunderstanding.  O’Brien felt that if he could create a place where people with superpowers could safely sit down and talk things over, maybe those sorts of tragedies would occur less often, and more constructive resolutions to disagreements might emerge.

Indeed, that is the theme throughout the vignettes presented in these six issues.  Various superhumans, be they long-time allies, arch-enemies, or complete strangers, end up learning a great deal about each other, what it is that drives them, and just how similar they actually are.  Hickman does superb work introducing & fleshing out these individuals within a few short pages.  At the end of each story, I really wanted to see more of these characters.

By the way, one of my favorite moments from Common Grounds was when Hickman did a play on the famous genre trope Cut Lex Luthor a Check which notes that the pre-Crisis mad scientist Luthor, if he had really been smart about getting rich, instead of building all sorts of crazy giant robots or death rays to rob banks, should have just sold them to the military or some big corporation for a fortune.

(Of course, post-Crisis Luthor is a billionaire industrialist who made most of his money legitimately, and he was more evil & twisted than his old incarnation.  Just goes to show that someone with an anti-social or sociopathic personality isn’t likely to play by society’s rules even if it is the most logical thing to do, simply because they find it too enjoyable to screw up other people’s lives & defy authority.)

Hickman reveals in issue #6 that Big Money once saved the entire universe simply by paying Baron Existence a whopping twenty-seven million dollars not to detonate his reality-destroying Anti-Matter Bomb.  In an ironic twist, though, the Baron then spent the next two decades being harassed by the IRS.

I mentioned that Common Grounds had an impressive array of artists.  Each issue has a story penciled by Dan Jurgens and inked by Al Vey.  I’ve been a fan of Jurgens’ work since he was writing & penciling Booster Gold and Superman at DC.  He does good, solid work, and Vey’s inks are a good fit.  Among the other illustrators whose work appeared in this miniseries are George Perez & Mike Perkins, Michael Avon Oeming, Chris Bachalo, Sam Kieth, and Carlos Pacheco.

Illustrating the cover for Common Grounds #1 is J. Scott Campbell.  I’m not the biggest fan of his work, but I definitely agree it is a really nice piece.  The other five issues are topped by beautiful covers by Argentine artist Rodolfo Migliari.  This is some of his earliest professional work, and since then he’s done quite a bit at Image, Dark Horse, DC, and Marvel.  One of his pieces for this series, the cover to #4, is a homage to the famous Edward Hopper painting “Nighthawks.”

I initially picked up Common Grounds back in 2004 because, well, I drink a lot of coffee, probably much too much.  I like to take my comic books to the coffee shop and read them there.  For instance, I re-read Common Grounds yesterday at Norma’s Café in Queens.  Good place.  Y’know, if I lived in a fictional superhero universe, I’d probably end up being exposed to radioactive coffee beans and turning into Captain Caffeine, or some such nonsense.  Anyway, my copious coffee consumption has caused me to pick up quite a few pages of original comic book artwork that feature characters drinking caffeinated beverages.  So, when Common Grounds originally came out, I decided it was required reading.  And, yes, I did eventually acquire artwork from the series, specifically a Jurgens & Vey page from issue #5 that I purchased from The Artist’s Choice.

It’s been nearly a decade since Common Grounds was released.  It was a great read with superb art.  I definitely hope that one of these days Troy Hickman has the opportunity to write another series.  And, y’know, the folks at Top Cow could always throw in some background appearances by the Common Grounds stores in their other books.  It’d be the perfect place for Sara Pezzini to pick up her morning java.

Joe Jusko draws Tomb Raider

When I was in high school, I was a big fan of artist Joe Jusko.  He would create these superb painted covers for such titles as Punisher and Savage Sword of Conan.  And then in 1992 the Marvel Masterpieces trading card set came out, composed entirely of Jusko’s painted renditions of Marvel’s most popular heroes & villains.  That was really amazing.

At the time, though, I often wondered why Jusko never did any interior artwork, never drew any full-length stories.  Obviously back then I was a bit too young to realize that it is a very time-consuming process to paint an entire 22 page comic book.  But since then, I’ve always kept an eye out for those rare occasions when Jusko did illustrate an entire book.

It really came as a surprise to me, then, when I recently found out that Jusko had worked on just such a project, and it had completely slipped under my radar.  That book was Tomb Raider: The Greatest Treasure of All, which was published back in 2005 by Top Cow / Image Comics.  However, I was hardly the only one to miss out on it, though.  On his Facebook page, Jusko referred to it as “Probably the best work of my career overall and also the biggest disappointment since almost no one saw it.”  He went on to explain that he had worked on the book for several years, and had put a tremendous amount of effort & energy into it.  But once it came out, somehow it had disappeared almost without a trace, and many people were not even aware that it had actually been published.

Looking through Jusko’s scans of the original painted artwork that he’d posted on Facebook, I thought to myself, “This looks fantastic!”  I immediately decided that I’d try and find a copy of the book.  I was pleasantly surprised when I checked Ebay, because several different comic book dealers had copies of the issue for sale at cover price.  So, yeah, once you know to look for it, it is out there.

Tomb Raider: The Greatest Treasure of All is written by long-time Superman creator Dan Jurgens.  I’m a fan of his work, as well, so it was a nice surprise to see he had plotted & scripted this story.  Jurgens turns in an exciting, suspenseful, humorous tale that features Lara Croft and her associate Chase attempting to liberate a mysterious treasure from an ancient Mayan temple, all the while dodging trigger-happy guerillas.  And, yes, Jurgens does explain why there is a lion in the jungles of Central America!

I don’t really play video games, so I don’t own a single one of the Tomb Raider games.  And I’ve never before picked up any of the various comic books featuring Lara Croft that Image Comics has published over the years.  Nevertheless, I really enjoyed The Greatest Treasure of All.  Jurgens did a nice job writing a fun, entertaining story.

As for the artwork, wow, Jusko definitely outdid himself!  This book really showcases his talents, not only as an amazing painter, but as a storyteller.  The thing about comic books, I now fully understand, is that it is not merely a matter of drawing pretty pictures.  It is also being able to illustrate the flow of action & events from one panel to the next.  There are many extremely talented artists out there who are simply not suited to draw comic books, simply because they do not have that crucial skill for sequential illustration.  With Tomb Raider: The Greatest Treasure of All, Jusko demonstrates that not only can he create amazing covers, pin-ups, and posters, but he can also illustrate a multi-page story in a very dramatic fashion.

What I especially liked about Jusko’s work on The Greatest Treasure of All was his depiction of Lara Croft.  He gives her a very lithe physique.  To be perfectly honest, from what I have seen of some other Tomb Raider comics published by Top Cow, many artists drew Lara as having this exaggerated porn star-type body, with huge breasts & a narrow waist.  Jusko, in contrast, renders Lara as an athletic figure.  She still looks drop-dead gorgeous, but in a realistic, believable manner.  A major part of this was undoubtedly due to the fact that Jusko uses models.  For Lara, he had Hollywood stunt woman Jasi Cotton Lanier pose for him.

There are ten pages of “behind the scenes” items at the back of the book.  On display are some pages from Jurgens’ plot, Jusko’s initial pencils & sketches, photos he took of his models in various different poses, and painted pages in progress.  It is a nice look at the creative process.

It is definitely unfortunate that Tomb Raider: The Greatest Treasure of All went pretty much unnoticed when it was initially published.  It features some really amazing art by Joe Jusko.  If you are a fan of his work, I highly recommend tracking down a copy of the book.

I also recommend heading on over to Joe Jusko’s gallery at Comic Art Fans where he has posted high quality images of the art from The Greatest Treasure of All.  His paintings looks even more beautiful when scanned from the originals.

Comic books I’m reading, part one: DC and Marvel

Back when I was a teenager and in my twenties, I read a lot of books published by DC and Marvel Comics.  I was very much into the mainstream superhero titles.  Over the last several years, though, my tastes have gradually changed.  Additionally, comic books have become more and more expensive, now costing around $2.99 to $3.99.  I don’t have as much disposable income as I used to, so I cannot afford to buy as many books.  Additionally, a lot of titles have become very decompressed and long form in their story arcs.  That means it takes more issues to tell a story while, conversely, much less time to read each actual issue.  I don’t see the point in spending three to four bucks for a ten minute read.

So, what ongoing series am I picking up?  From DC, I’ve been following Justice League International, Wonder Woman, and Blackhawks, and the last of those three was just canceled.  That leaves just two.

JLI is a pretty decent book.  I decided to give it a try because I liked the creative team of Dan Jurgens & Aaron Lopresti.  Also, the cast of the book contained Booster Gold, Fire, Ice, and various other so-called “second-stringers” who do not have their own solo titles, enabling Jurgens to engage in character development.  I also enjoy the interaction between Booster and Batman, which is almost of a student/mentor relationship.  So far, it’s been pretty entertaining.  The main ongoing subplot concerns a group of superhuman anarchists.  I’ll be sticking with JLI for the immediate future, to see what happens.  Lopresti’s art is very nicely done.  I just wish that he was also drawing the covers, but I guess David Finch is a hotter creator.

Justice League International #8

(I am somewhat curious about the main Justice League title, but seeing as it’s penciled by Jim Lee it is inevitably going to end up collected in trade paperbacks, so I can always check it out later.)

On Wonder Woman, the major draw, so to speak, has been Cliff Chiang’s stunning artwork.  It really is beautiful.  I am not nearly as much sold by Brian Azzarello’s writing.  Something about it doesn’t quite click with me.  He is one of those writers who play a very long game, so the plotlines he’s set up could take years to resolve.  I’m not sure I want to stick around that long to see it all pan out.  The major distinction for the Wonder Woman revamp has been Azzarello & Chiang re-imagining the Greek gods.  Instead of a bunch of people in white togas standing around spouting pseudo-Shakespearean dialogue, they are a dysfunctional group of freaks with murky motivations.  They really feel like mysterious, dangerous deities who could do some serious damage with their manipulations.

For me, the two best books DC has released lately have been miniseries.  I absolutely loved The Ray, which I initially picked up for Jamal Igle’s artwork.  Igle is an incredibly talented creator, and his artwork on this four issue miniseries is stunning.  What made The Ray such a great book was that the writing by Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti was of an equally high standard.  If you haven’t already, I highly recommend tracking down back issues of this series.  I don’t know if there is going to be a TPB collection of this, but if DC has any sense, they will collect it.

The Ray #1

The other miniseries I enjoyed was Legion: Secret Origin written by Paul Levitz.  He does an excellent job setting down the post-Flashpoint origin of the Legion of Super-Heroes.  Levitz introduces the characters and the world of the 31st Century in a manner that will please long-time Legion fans such as myself, yet is accommodating to newer readers.  Legion: Secret Origin is also an excellent example of how to set up a miniseries in such a way that it is self-contained and stands on its own, but at the same time plants the seeds for future storylines elsewhere.  Also, the series boosts superb artwork by Chris Batista & Marc Deering.

Over at Marvel, well, there’s not much I’m picking up, either.  I used to be such a HUGE fan of both Captain America and the Avengers.  Nowadays, they are hotter than they have ever been but, ironically, I’m just not as interested.  Brian Michael Bendis’ run on Avengers just never did much for me, so it has been several years since I followed any of the titles regularly.  (I did really enjoy Mighty Avengers when Dan Slott was writing it.)  As for Captain America, well, Ed Brubaker has been doing excellent work but, like Azzarello, he sets up storylines that take a long time to pan out, plus his writing style is definitely decompressed.  When the Captain America: The First Avenger movie came out last year, Marvel re-started the book with a new issue #1.  I was sort of underwhelmed by the first five issue arc, “American Dreamers.”  I’ve bought the next five issues, the “Powerless” arc, and read the first two chapters, but just haven’t gotten around to finishing it, despite some gorgeous artwork by Alan Davis & Mark Farmer.  The thing is, I’ve religiously bought every issue of Captain America since 1989, but now I’m actually wondering if I want to continue with it.

I’ve been somewhat more entertained by the original Captain America volume one, which continued the original series numbering, but was re-titled Captain America & Bucky for nine issues, before switching over the second spot to a rotating co-star.  Right now it’s Hawkeye sharing the spotlight with the Sentinel of Liberty.  The two Bucky-related stories were both very good. Part of that had to do with them being self-contained.  I wish Brubaker would write more stories of that nature.  A new creative team came on-board with Hawkeye.  So far, I’m not especially impressed, but I will wait to see how the entire story plays out.  But again, I am uncertain if I will stick around after that.

After a very long time away, I have started picking up Avengers, at least for a few issues.  The legendary Walter Simonson is penciling a six issue arc that ties in with the Avengers vs. X-Men crossover.  I am a huge fan of Simonson, and I have long wanted to see him draw Avengers.  He is doing an absolutely stunning job.  I was blown away by the first two issues out, #s 25 & 26.  In the later, we see Thor in combat with the Phoenix Force out in space.  It is just beautiful work.

Avengers #26 page 17: Thor vs the Phoenix Force!

Mention definitely has to be made of Scott Hanna’s contribution.  He is one of the absolute best inkers in the comic book biz today.  I often think he does not receive anywhere near the credit that is due him.  This is his first time inking Simonson, and the results look fantastic.  I also have to point out the vibrant coloring by Jason Keith, which really stood out in that sequence with the Phoenix.

The writing by Bendis is pretty good, but he could do a bit of a better job making this portion stand on its own.  I realize this is part of a huge crossover, but in the middle of #26, there’s a sudden jump forward in the action, with the explanatory caption “For details, see Secret Avengers #26-28 on sale now!”  That was jarring.

Anyway, despite this, Bendis does have a nice scene earlier between the Protector (not familiar with the character, but I think he’s a Kree agent and a new Avengers recruit) and his cute punk rock girlfriend.  Bendis is usually better at penning more personal character moments like this than monumental superhero spectacles, so it plays to his strengths.  That said, if you are going to do big & cosmic, Walter Simonson is your go-to guy, and Bendis gives him plenty to play with in the issue’s second half.  I would complain that it only took ten minutes each to read Avengers #s 25 & 26, but they both look so amazing thanks to Simonson & Hanna.  So I’m on-board for the next four issues, which they are also illustrating.

Other than that, the only Marvel book I’m following right now is the five issue limited series Hulk Smash Avengers.  It takes place during different eras of the team’s history, and examines their contentious relationship with the Hulk.  Topped off by beautiful covers from Lee Weeks, each issue has a different creative team.

The main reason why I decided to get this miniseries is because the first issue is by Tom DeFalco, Ron Frenz & Sal Buscema.  I have really enjoyed DeFalco & Frenz’s work on Amazing Spider-Man, Thor, Thunderstrike, A-Next, and Spider-Girl.  Buscema is one of my all time favorite comic book artists.  Nowadays mostly retired, he still breaks out the old pen & brush to ink Frenz on various projects.  They go together extremely well.

Their issue is an homage to the early Avengers stories by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Don Heck, and Dick Ayers.  In it, the Masters of Evil join forces with the Hulk against the original Avengers team.  DeFalco is very much going for a Silver Age vibe with his scripting, which makes it a bit goofy, but a lot of fun.  It was fun seeing DeFalco & Frenz do a story with Thor once again.  And, yay, it actually took longer than ten minutes to read this issue!  DeFalco, like Paul Levitz, really knows how to script a story full of substance.

Hulk Smash Avengers #1 page 3

I haven’t had an opportunity to read the next two issues of Hulk Smash Avengers yet, but they’re written by Joe Casey and Roger Stern, so I have high expectations.  And I’ll be buying the final two installments when they come out.

That’s really about it.  Aside from picking up an occasional issue of a title here or there, right now I’m not really committed to any other specific series from either DC or Marvel.  My interest has been shifting more and more over to releases from “independent” companies such as Image, IDW, Dark Horse, Fantagraphics, and others.  I will be discussing those in an upcoming post on this blog.  Keep an eye out for it.