Wednesday I posted the final Stuff I Watched for the year and here's the final Comics I Read for the year! Probably not much since I don't read a lot of comics usually. Basically when I 'm bored and there's not much else to do in my games and I don't feel like writing. It strangely doesn't happen that often.
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At the start you think this is going to be like Mr. Miracle with the relationship of Adam and Aleena similar to Scott Free and Big Barda. But then things start to take turns and it sort of becomes like the early seasons of House of Cards where they're scheming and manipulating people to get what they want while trying to avoid getting caught, in this case by Mr. Terrific, who is given the task of looking into Adam's story of "saving" the planet Raan.
Ultimately like House of Cards while the male lead character was supposed to be the central focus, it's his wife who ends up taking center stage. Aleena is a strong woman, a princess who isn't afraid to get her hands dirty and mix things up. She schemes and does bad things to protect herself and her husband while not knowing all the things her husband has been up to.
In the end the question is: how far would Adam Strange go to save his family and his adopted home of Raan? Would he sacrifice his original home to do it? Would he sacrifice the love of his wife?
These are things that I'm not sure any other comic book writer would have done to tackle an Adam Strange story. It's a great story. Another triumph for King.
The art is mostly good, but a couple times I was looking at a panel and not exactly sure what I was looking at. In the last couple of issues they tended to draw Mr. Terrific looking kind of chubby, like he had a double chin. Kind of odd. (4/5)
Rorschach: Of course after I heap all that praise on King, then this. The title turns out to be a bait-and-switch. This does not really involve Rorschach as in the one in Watchmen. Or I don't think the one in the Geoff Johns sequel Doomsday Clock, though I have yet to read that.
This I guess is supposed to be in the same universe as the HBO limited series as it's 2020 and Robert Redford has been president for 20 years and running for another term. There is a mention of Oklahoma and cops in masks but that's it; none of the characters of that show appear in this. Redford's opponent Turley is nearly killed by an assassin dressed as a cowgirl and a guy dressed like Rorschach.
The format of the story is like Citizen Kane as the unnamed detective follows the clues to discover who did what. But there's a twist at the end that was pretty good.
Still, at the end of the day this is just a political thriller vaguely set in the Watchmen universe that just throws in some Rorschach branding to justify the title so DC fanboys will buy it. It doesn't feature the real Rorschach or offer any insights into his character. There is a mention that the assassin guy's fingerprints match the original Rorschach but that's just a red herring; original Rorschach is dead and stays dead. It's too bad because Tom King could probably have written a really interesting story on the actual Rorschach instead of this cheap branding stunt.
Not that it's a bad book, but it's not King's best work. The art is fine. Pretty typical stuff that I guess wasn't a lot different from the original Dave Gibbons art in Watchmen. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact: Comic book writer Frank Miller appears as himself, only in this world he wrote a pirate comic called The Dark Fife Returns. Heh.)
The Sandman Mystery Theatre Vol 1: I guess because of the Sandman Netflix series they put this on Prime Reading, but it's not really connected to the Neil Gaiman reboot of Sandman in the 80s. This 90s series was actually an update of the Golden Age (ie, 1930s-40s) original version of the Sandman, where he was a rich guy named Wesley Dodds who has a gas mask and gas gun that he uses to knock people out. And there's a spunky daughter of the DA named Dian who frequently visits Wesley, though she doesn't know his secret and they don't screw or anything like that. The structure is pretty true to Golden Age comics/pulp heroes but they updated it for the 90s with cursing, blood, sex, and rape. I could have done without the child rape (the act is not depicted, just the aftermath) but that's just me. The art is not great with various fairly crude styles that differ between the 4 separate 4-issue stories and sometimes even between issues of those stories. But at least they didn't draw the Chinese characters the way they would have been drawn in the 30s-40s. Mostly I enjoyed the stories as they are pretty good old-fashioned Golden Age-type stories despite the R-rated content. (3/5) (Fun Fact: I had this in my library for 5 months before I finished it because I had some other stuff I read and sort of forgot about it for a while.)
The Sandman Volume 2: The Doll's House: This actually is the Sandman comic written by Neil Gaiman in the late 80s that is the basis for the Netflix series. I don't know if they used this particular volume as part of the plot, though it has a lot of the characters they used like The Corinthian and Johanna Constantine. The former has a bit more importance while the latter is just more of a cameo. The main story is about a girl who is a "dream vortex" which means she can basically merge all the dreams around her, which causes people to die. Before that can happen, Morpheus or Dream or whatever you want to call him has to stop her, which seemed pretty easy. It really didn't seem like it needed to be 7 issues but there was a lot of other stuff about her grandma and kidnapped brother, who is nearly killed by the Corinthian. And in the middle of it is an issue that didn't seem to advance the plot at all; it seemed like a standalone issue about Morpheus meeting up with some guy who refused to die every 100 years in a bar. Sometimes the guy was up and sometimes down. Sometimes he was a soldier or a merchant or a slave trader. While interesting it didn't seem to have much relevance. But otherwise it was good. (3.5/5) (Fun Fact: I had this one 2 months longer than the other Sandman one before I finally read it and returned it to Amazon Prime Reading.)
Superman & The Authority: There was some hubbub about this when author Grant Morrison took to Substack and said this was his last story for DC Comics, whom he first wrote for back in the late 80s with Arkham Asylum, Animal Man, and Doom Patrol before being one of their major writers in the late 90s-late 2000s on JLA, 52, and Batman. On the Substack he said some not very kind and probably very true things about DC and the comic book industry in general. That all being the case, I thought this would be a self-contained story. Especially since it starts with Superman talking to Jack Kennedy in 1963, just a couple days before he was killed. But then it turns out this is I guess a prelude to the whole "Future State" thing DC did that I haven't read. There were issues that went farther and farther into the future until the end of time basically. In the Superman ones, original Superman (ie Clark Kent or Kal-El) leaves Earth to free "Warworld" while his son Jon takes over being Superman. And I don't really know what all happened after that except I think Superman took over the Warworld and freed the slaves there.
When this story begins in whatever the present is supposed to be, Superman is older (basically looking like the Kingdom Come version) and his powers are weaker. So he starts recruiting a team, starting with Manchester Black, who's basically John Constantine with psychic powers instead of magic. Then they recruit Steel's daughter, Midniter & Apollo, and Enchantress. The latter is basically a whole issue to get her to reconnect her human half with her Enchantress half...and then she doesn't really do all that much. Brainiac and Ultra-Humanite are out to take over the world and the team stops them...I guess. After three issues of build-up it seemed like the bad guys were dealt with pretty easily. And they have to recruit "Lightray" who was born on Mars in another universe and has...some kind of powers. She doesn't really do anything in this, but maybe she did stuff in Future State? Or whatever. It was pretty disappointing that this was Morrison's "final" work--at least for now. A lot of it just seems like a cut-rate version of Morrison's far better All-Star Superman, which was a self-contained work and 12 issues to this book's 4 so it definitely felt like a complete story while this just felt like a teaser. The art was pretty typical for DC, which IMO is better than a lot of what Marvel uses these days. (2/5)
Superman: Birthright: This was written not long after Smallville began airing and so includes some Smallville elements like Luthor living in Smallville, only as a teenager, and being friends with Clark. And Lana was a cheerleader Clark had a crush on, but she was dating the quarterback. Also, Luthor found "meteors" aka Kryptonite that he uses later against Superman.
This is mostly another story about Clark's early days as Superman in Metropolis, which was done better than Man of Steel. It introduces the familiar characters like Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, and Perry White while updating it for the 2000s. In the end, Luthor uses a plan not much different than Ozymandias's in Watchmen, only for more selfish motivations. The end was nice as Superman gets to use a wormhole to communicate with his real parents. While it's not really an important or even memorable story, it's not bad either. (3/5)
Justice Society of America by Geoff Johns, Vol 1: I guess with the Black Adam movie coming out they put this on Amazon Prime Reading. This was essentially a soft reboot of the Justice Society in the late 90s. Years after "Zero Hour" had made most of the JSA old and/or killed them, they reform with some second-generation members as well as original Flash Jay Garrick, original Green Lantern Alan Scott (aka Sentinel), and original Wildcat. The first few issues have them find a baby who is the reborn Dr. Fate. A couple of issues have Black Adam fight the JSA and then the last arc they have to save the universe from Extant, the former Hawk, who is trying to alter all of time. It's OK though the problem with volumes like this is they throw a lot at you. Instead of 5-6 issue story arcs like most comics use these days to fit into one trade paperback, most of these are 2-3 issue arcs. Overall it was decent and while it probably doesn't factor that much into Black Adam, some of it did factor into the Stargirl TV show. (3/5) (Fun Facts: Ironically while it says "by Geoff Johns," Johns doesn't actually take over the writing until a few issues in. The first issue begins with Wesley Dodds, the original Sandman referenced above only now an old man, killing himself rather than letting a villain take important information from him. His kid sidekick, now grown up, becomes the leader of the JSA for a time.)
Halloween is a scary post that explains what is going to happen with the blog in November...
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