Comics Small & Big

First off, for a few months Tony Laplume has been doing his own DC-inspired comics series:  Crisis Weekly.  The concept is sort of like in the mid-2000s when DC did the weekly series 52 that focused on a year without the Big Three:  Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.

In this case each week Tony has a new 8-page(ish) script posted on one of his blogs.  The story involves Man-Bats (lots of Man-Bats) and White Martians and of course Batman because he’s everywhere.  While there is eventually Batman most of it focuses on lesser known characters like Bloodwynd, Firehawk, and El Dorado, whom you might remember from Superfriends when they added some diversity to the lineup with El Dorado, Samurai, and Black Vulcan.  Better known characters like Martian Manhunter, Guy Gardner, and did I mention Batman(?) also show up.  And there are some new characters too.  And Man-Bats.  Lots of Man-Bats.

Most of what I liked is the focus on those lesser characters.  It reminded me of why I liked the Transformers More Than Meets the Eye/Lost Light series in that it gave a chance for forgotten or seemingly insignificant characters to shine.

Speaking of, I enjoy reading Arion’s blog that largely focuses on comics, though other times movies too.  Sometimes I feel a little embarrassed because he reads and talks about all these indie series while I mostly stick to the mainstream titles.

There were a lot of sales at the end/beginning of the year so I decided to get a couple of the indie comics Arion recommended to broaden my horizons a little.

Highest House:  In a fantasy kingdom I guess based on the 16th Century Balkans from what Goodreads says, a boy named Moth is sold into slavery by his mom.  She tries to sell his sister but she's going blind so they won't buy her.  

Moth is taken to "Highest House" the colossal palace of one of the major houses in the kingdom.  It's kind of like King's Landing in Game of Thrones.  Moth is chosen to help a woman work on the many roofs of the place.  But soon in his dreams he starts hearing the voice of a mysterious being known as Obsidian that wants to make a bargain with Moth:  it'll give him whatever he wants if he helps to free it.  Eventually Moth agrees on the condition that Obsidian give him knowledge, heal his sister's eyes, and free the slaves.  But Obsidian can't do all of that directly.

Moth eventually meets the daughter of the lord of the house and instantly gets a crush on her.  When he saves her life, he's offered freedom, but refuses it because then he'd have to leave Obsidian before he could get what he wants.  The daughter has a secret that when Moth discovers it, she agrees to help him learn to read so he won't spill the beans.

The end of the first six issues has Moth going back to his home as the lord wants his help as a guide.  They seek out someone making something unheard of:  paper money!  The paper money could take away the lord's power with his control of steel that's used as currency so he wants to get rid of it, but Moth convinces him that controlling the paper money would be more useful.

Writer Mike Carey creates a fascinating world that has its own history and rules.  While most of it is medieval like GOT there is also magic, though not many people know how to use it anymore.  Moth is a really well-developed character.  He's not a flawless hero; he does save the lord's daughter and later the whole household, but he's not above making the bargain with Obsidian to get what he wants, even after he knows Obsidian is probably not a benevolent entity.  He gains freedom for the roofer but only because he wants to stay so Obsidian can fulfill the bargain.

Obsidian is often sarcastic and funny so it's kind of easy to forget that he's probably a monster.  Most of the other main characters all have flaws and quirks to keep them from being cliches or archetypes.  Whenever Part 2 comes out I'll have to read it to find out what's next for Moth and Obsidian.

Young Protectors:  This was one of those Kickstarter success stories where they wanted $13,000 to make a collected volume of the webcomic and wound up getting 10 times the amount asked for!  Mainstream comics have in the last 15 years or so ushered in a few homosexual characters like Batwoman, Earth 2 Green Lantern, and the X-Men’s Iceman, but it’s still not something widespread.  Even then it’s just kind of a side thing while they’re fighting supervillains and space monsters or whatever.

The main driving force of Young Protectors is the homosexual relationship between a young hero (Red Hot) and a supervillain (Annihilator).  Red Hot in his secret identity ventures into a gay bar only to come out and find Annihilator there to blackmail him into a kiss.  Red Hot finds he likes this kiss and so he and Annihilator see each other again, going on a date in Hong Kong that’s broken up by some vigilantes.  So there’s still some comic book action but the relationship is the main thing as I said.

There are a couple of side issues that were mostly included thanks to the Kickstarter.  One is a good illustration of Rule 34:  if it’s on the Internet there’s porn for it.  Red Hot and his teammates are on the web when they find a bunch of gay porn starring them!  There’s also the secret origin for the mysterious Spooky Jones and Commander, the team’s leader.

For an indie Kickstartered thing the artwork is actually really good.  Probably because it’s drawn by someone who also did work for Marvel and DC on some of their bigger titles.  So you’re not really seeing a drop in quality from the big boys.

While I was searching for indie titles I noticed one written by Bill Corbett called Super Powered Revenge Christmas.  I wondered:  is that the same Bill Corbett who was on Mystery Science Theater 3000 and does the Rifftrax movies I watch obsessively on Pluto TV?

And yes, it is.  This comic was actually adapted from a stage play, though I think this format works better because it’s about a comic.  The framing device is that it’s Christmas Eve and a comics writer and his wife who draws his comics go into a bar and challenge the patrons to decide how their book should end.

The book is like if the story of Christmas were a superhero comic.  All of the characters come from popular culture only with a superhero twist.  The Red Avenger is a warrior from another planet who’s been sent to Earth to find a protect a Chosen One.  He wears red fur and startles enemies with his fearsome battlecry:  Ho, Ho, Ho!  He finds a mutant bipedal deer that shoots lasers from his nose.  More nebulous is a woman with the power to control ice and snow who’s loosely based on Frosty the Snowman.  They meet a superpowered couple named Joe and Mary who are about to have a special baby.  Opposing them are the evil Mr. S(crooge), Mr. P(otter), and Mr. G(rinch).  (Joe, Mary, and Potter are all based loosely on characters from It’s A Wonderful Life, though Joe’s name in that movie was George and he didn’t have superpowers--Obviously.)

Eventually we get to the writer’s ending, which is grim and gritty in the tradition of more recent comics.  Whereas his wife’s ending is far happier.  Guess which one people prefer?

It was a really fun comic to read even in January and there were good messages about comics and creating stories in general.  Basically not everything needs to be “edgy.”  Like Christmas stories.  But isn’t this practicing what it preaches against then?  Error, Error, Paradox, Does Not Compute…

I don’t know if Dynamite is a small enough publisher to include on this part of the list, but what the hell.

Many years ago Robert Kirkman of Walking Dead fame wrote the series Marvel Zombies.  Wow, what a stretch, right?  It spawned some sequels and such but the Marvel/Dynamite spinoff Marvel Zombies vs Army of Darkness pits the zombie superheroes against their greatest foe:  Bruce Campbell!  Ash from the Evil Dead/Army of Darkness movies is somehow summoned into the Marvel Zombie universe as the infection is spreading.  He teams with little known heroine Dazzler and they escape zombies to get to Dr. Doom in Latveria, where he has a book that might help.  A lot of mayhem ensues.  It’s a fun miniseries that while it has different writers than either original series manages to capture their essence.

Another Dynamite spinoff crossover thing was Darkman vs Army of Darkness.  I’m a huge fan of the Darkman movies so I wanted to read this for a while.  Darkman was a scientist who after being assaulted by gangsters in his lab was badly burned but also lost the ability to feel pain and gained greater physical strength.  He can create masks of people with fake skin that lasts for exactly 99 minutes in the daylight before it melts.

Darkman’s former girlfriend Julie and a colleague find a mysterious book and it possesses Julie and starts creating an army of the dead, including Darkman’s arch-nemesis Robert G Durant.  Julie’s colleague and Darkman inadvertently read a page from the book and it summons Ash.  He teams with Darkman so they can whoop on the zombies while trying not to kill Julie.

Another fun series that I wished was longer than 4 issues.  The art is decent, managing to capture the look of the characters, though Durant maybe doesn’t quite look like Larry Drake.  As a Fun Fact, in the original Darkman movie the “final shemp” or the disguise Darkman wears to escape from Julie into a crowd, was played by Bruce Campbell.  So he technically was both Darkman and Ash.

Neither of these Dynamite series were on Comixology or Kindle so I had to buy them in paper.  The Marvel Zombies one I got in a really nice hardcover while the Darkman one was in paperback.  The seller claimed it was new but the cover of paperback came unglued from the spine before I started reading!  Kind of lame.

Of course I also read plenty of mainstream comics because I’m not some fancy comics connoisseur—I don’t even know how to spell it.

Comixology, where I read most online comics, recently added DC comics to their Unlimited Netflix-ish program.  Some of these comics were also added to Amazon Prime Reading so if you have a Prime account you can read them free.  They were mostly the first volume of Rebirth titles.  I already read the Batman one but there were others.

Superman Rebirth, Vol 1:  There’s a new old Superman in town.  After the New 52 Superman dies, the Superman from the 90s shows up along with his wife Lois and their son Jon.  Their son is starting to get powers and so Superman helps him learn how to use them.  A relatively straightforward training mission to rescue a submarine gets more complicated when they run into the Eradicator (one of the Reign of the Supermen Supermen) who wants to kill Jon to “purify” the Kryptonian bloodline.  Mayhem ensues! (3/5)

Justice League Rebirth, Vol 1:  Yeah, I have no idea what the hell was going on.  A lot of weird monsters from space gathering to sing a song that would destroy existence (or something) and bombs of some sort buried inside the Earth’s mantle that the new old Superman has to destroy.  It made as much sense as Scott Snyder’s idiotic Dark Nights Metal and probably his recent run on the Justice League title. Besides new old Superman, Green Lanterns Simon Baz and Jessica Cruz join the team to replace Hal Jordan’s Green Lantern. (1/5)

Aquaman Rebirth, Vol 1:  Aquaman and Mera are trying to create an Atlantean embassy on land to end hostilities between Atlantis and the surface world, but Black Manta of course messes that up.  Aquaman allows himself to be arrested but when his people come to rescue him, he has to break out to stop them.  Meanwhile Black Manta is broken out by a terrorist group and quickly takes it over.  It was good but it's one of those that in the long run probably got overridden. (3/5)

Teen Titans Rebirth, Vol 1:  Damian Wayne (son of the Batman) recruits Starfire, Raven, Beast Boy, and Kid Flash (black Wally West, not white Wally West) to fight his cousin and some teenaged assassins trained by Ra’s al Guhl.  Damian has to learn to play nice and the others have to learn to be a team…until the lineup was changed yet again. (2/5)

Doom Patrol, Vol 1:  Crawling From the Wreckage:  Though they call it a Volume 1 it’s really issues 19-24, the start of Grant Morrison’s run on the title in the late 80s.  A new team of weird heroes is formed to fight some weird villains like “Scissormen” who come from an imaginary world to destroy reality and “God” who previously visited Earth as Jack the Ripper.  It’s a good setup for what gets a lot weirder in future volumes I’m sure.  They probably put this on Amazon Prime because the new TV series is airing on DC Universe.  Anyway, it was interesting that the Scissormen thing was sort of retooled by Morrison in his series The Multiversity in that something fictional was creating havoc and threatening to destroy reality. (2.5/5)

Speaking of…

The Multiversity:  Some evil force is destroying some of the worlds of the Multiverse and so heroes are gathered from the various worlds to stop it.  Or something.  There were a bunch of spin-offs involving some of these worlds.  Pax Americana was sort of if Morrison had written Watchmen.  The Mastermen was about a world where Superman was raised by the Nazis so it’s sort of a Man in the High Castle thing.  Thunderworld Adventures focuses on Shazam (Captain Marvel) and company.  Another one focused on children of superheroes in a world where all crime had been eliminated by Kryptonian technology so mostly the “heroes” are reality TV stars or gather to reminisce about the good old days.  Some of these didn’t seem to matter that much to the end.  But then this whole series didn’t wind up mattering that much in general. (2/5)

Batman, Rebirth, Vol 8:  This was the first volume after the non-wedding between Batman and Catwoman.  Bruce Wayne bribes his way onto a jury deliberating a case involving Mr. Freeze because he thinks that Freeze was set up, someone planting evidence for Batman to find to make it look like Freeze did it.  Later KGBeast targets Nightwing and Batman tracks him down in Siberia.  It was ironic in the first arc Bruce was worried Batman was going too far and losing control and then…he loses control and goes too far against KGBeast.  Lesson learned! (2.5/5)  (It occurred to me recently that what King is doing is pretty much what Grant Morrison did on his run culminating with Batman RIP and to maybe a lesser extent what Scott Snyder did in Batman Eternal:  a bad guy is destroying Batman and Bruce Wayne to break him mentally.  In Morrison's run Bruce was set up with Jezebel Jett, who broke his heart similarly to what Catwoman did in King's run.  I'm just saying.)

Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe…Again [sigh]:  In the original DKMU, it was pretty straightforward:  Deadpool snapped and killed everyone.  This time around writer Cullen Bunn provides a little more depth to the story.  Like in Old Man Logan where we learn Wolverine killed the X-Men because Mysterio made him think they were bad guys, Deadpool thinks he’s killing bad guys when really he’s killing good guys.  And then he’s turned against the bad guys controlling him:  Red Skull, Dr. Doom, Magneto, etc.  The art has a wide range of styles as what Deadpool thinks he sees is rendered in a variety of different ways, sometimes overly cartoony or in one case it mimics the 80s Hostess ads in Marvel books.  It’s definitely better than the original DKMU, though the problem is there are so many heroes that you can’t really do elaborate kills for most of them in 5 issues or so.  It’s still fun but not as fun as my favorite where Deadpool went around killing all the great characters of literature.

Hawkeye vs Deadpool:  The title is a misnomer as they don't fight each other except for a few pages near the end when Hawkeye is mind-controlled.  It's a fun story where Deadpool, Hawkeye, and Lady Hawkeye (Kate Bishop) team up to stop Black Cat and a rogue scientist from brainwashing people and uncovering SHIELD agents' real identities. (3/5)

JSA Vol 11:  The Signal:  I bought this in paperback at Ollie's pretty much at random, which turned out to be a problem because I had no idea what was happening.  Hal Jordan's cousin Airwave starts going crazy and so they fly off into space and...that was it for that.  Most of it was about a war in the Fifth Dimension which made little sense to me.  The best part was a side issue about Stargirl who this summer will have her own show on DC Universe.  The story is about her relationship with her father and stepfather.  But the art was nice, especially the Alex Ross-ish covers. (2/5)