Green Lantern vol. 2 #151

First off, I must acknowledge a significant omission from last week’s Before Watchmen post. I had forgotten about the agreement under which the rights to Watchmen would revert to its creators if the collected edition were out of print for over one year. Accordingly, I characterized Watchmen as work-for-hire. Because DC has never let Watchmen go out of print, as a practical matter I would argue that it’s been treated like a work-for-hire project. Nevertheless, the existence of that agreement adds another layer to the book’s history, and especially to Moore’s relationship with DC. While I don’t think it changes much of what I said, I still regret the omission.

Now then….

I have mentioned previously my odd relationship with Amazing Spider-Man. I have been reading it in single issues for a while now, and as a serialized superhero comic I like it pretty well. I will probably stop reading the singles at some point, most likely after Dan Slott leaves, because I don’t feel any particular need to follow it regularly (like I do with many DC titles).

However, I am pretty dedicated to catching up on the earlier issues through Marvel Masterworks. This is an expensive way to go, I know, but the Lee/Ditko and Lee/Romita stuff was worth it, and I have always been curious about how the title made its way through the tumultuous late ‘60s and early ‘70s. I’m up to Volume 13 now — haven’t read it yet, but things aren’t looking good for Gwen — and therefore just about to start the next big phase of Spidey’s development. I anticipate adding at least another couple of Masterworks to my bookshelves.

Indeed, I could supplement the Masterworks with various Essential collections of Marvel Team-Up and Peter Parker, which would go a long way towards scratching my ‘70s Marvel itches; but I have a feeling that at some point I will stop getting any more “classic Spider-Man” collections. Whether that point is in the ‘70s or ‘80s, or even in the ‘90s, post-Michelinie/McFarlane, I don’t know; but it’s out there.*

Conversely, last summer I reached the dubious milestone of having read just about every Green Lantern story since the Silver Age. I have an unbroken run of Green Lantern single issues from the 1976 relaunch forward, with Archives, Showcase Presents, and the Green Lantern/Green Arrow reprints taking care of the rest. Back in April 2010 I tried to point out the highlights, and thinking about the series today I realized there are just some stretches which don’t necessarily need collecting.

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We’ll come back to Green Lantern specifically in a bit, but let’s first talk more generally about some of the collections coming in the fall. While I don’t like to encourage DC to market specifically to my demographic — fortyish fans who’ve been reading consistently for thirty-odd years — that list was pretty satisfying. Some eighteen months ago (although it doesn’t seem that long), I talked about a few arcs and/or series I’d like to see collected, maybe, someday; and darned if the new list doesn’t include a few.

In fact, eighteen months ago I was reconciled to enjoying Secret Society of Super-Villains only in single-issue form, and now I’m happy to have a more durable hardcover of the short-lived series’ first half. Similarly, Chase and Firestorm were both on the August 2010 list, and both are now represented by paperbacks. (Firestorm hasn’t yet gotten the complete-series Showcase Presents treatment I envisioned, but it is nice to have the first series and those Flash backups in one place.) Thanks to a revived reprint program, I’ve been catching up on Hitman through its paperbacks, and I’m eager to read what used to be the last Barry Allen story in Showcase Presents The Trial of the Flash.

Furthermore, DC now promises a few more items on my wish list:

– the “Twelve Trials Of Wonder Woman” (which got the Amazing Amazon back in the Justice League following her de-powered Mod phase);

– All Star Squadron (in Showcase Presents form);

– Amethyst, Princess Of Gemworld (also Showcase Presents); and

– Green Lantern: Sector 2814 Volume 1, reprinting the Len Wein/Dave Gibbons stories in which Hal Jordan quit the Corps and John Stewart became a full-time GL. I’m hoping that the follow-up I suggested — Steve Englehart and Joe Staton’s epic tale of Hal’s return, John’s ascendancy, and Guy Gardner’s revival — sees print in a Volume 2.

There’s also Legends of the Dark Knight: Alan Davis, reprinting the artist’s too-brief run with Mike Barr (and quintessential inker Paul Neary) on Detective Comics or the Adventures of Superman: Gil Kane hardcover, which looks like the start of a similar series for classic Superman artists.

Naturally, some outstanding requests remain: Blackhawk by Martin Pasko and Rick Burchett; Steve Englehart’s Justice League of America work (and, for that matter, his and Marshall Rogers’ Mister Miracle); Jason Todd’s early-‘80s introduction from the Gerry Conway/Don Newton/Gene Colan days on Batman and ’Tec; and, as always, ’Mazing Man and the Tom Peyer/Rags Morales Hourman. So yes, here I start off saying please, DC, don’t listen to me, and 400-odd words in, I’m back to making demands.

Again, I am excited for the Wein/Gibbons and Englehart/Staton GLs to be collected because I like those stories, and I’d be happy to have them in a more durable form. However, at some point I feel compelled to ask whether every GL issue is collection-worthy. As far as current comics go, it seems like the vast majority of DC’s output for the past few years has been collected, even if certain titles are no longer in print. Moreover, many of these collections come out almost reflexively, regardless of fan reaction to the original issues. Here I am thinking of things like Bruce Jones’ widely-panned run on Nightwing, Superman: Godfall, Countdown: Arena, and … well, a lot of the Countdown-related stuff was pretty sketchy.

Now, from what I have learned of the comics business, there is no guarantee that anything will be collected. Specifically, I doubt that when Scott McDaniel agreed to draw Countdown: Arena, he knew for sure he could count on at least a trickle of income from paperback royalties. With an ongoing series, especially a decent-selling title like Nightwing, you start to expect collections, because DC knows it can make money selling Nightwing both in singles and in trades.

Problem is, though, what do you do with the runs which just don’t work? Presumably, those who wait for the trade can apply a certain degree of hindsight. In terms of Nightwing writers, folks liked Chuck Dixon, Devin Grayson maybe not so much, Bruce Jones not really at all, and Marv Wolfman and Peter Tomasi probably a little better. Still, was the Bruce Jones stuff really so bad that the Nightwing completist can feel comfortable ignoring it entirely?

Back to Green Lantern now, and specifically to the early ‘80s. In various forms, DC has reprinted all of the Silver Age GL from 1959 through the mid-‘70s. Green Lantern has been fortunate to have relatively-low writer turnover (albeit with a few short-timers) since 1959.** All of John Broome’s issues, and a good chunk of Denny O’Neil’s, have now been collected. It would probably take another couple of Showcase Presents to finish out O’Neil’s run, taking readers into the early ‘80s for a short stint under Marv Wolfman. Not only did Wolfman write one of my favorite GL three-parters (1980′s “Doctor Polaris Conquers the Universe,” issues #133-35), he and artist Joe Staton introduced the Omega Men and set up what was at the time a daring conflict between Hal Jordan’s Earthbound life and his sector-spanning responsibilities. Starting in issue #151, the Guardians exiled Hal into space for a year (comic-book time). The new regular creative team of Len Wein and Dave Gibbons brought him back in January 1984′s issue #172, which as you might have noticed is due to be reprinted in the upcoming Sector 2814 book.

All that is context for my assertion that the “exile” issues really aren’t that great. Because Mike Barr and Keith Pollard were the regular creative team, by and large the stories aren’t terrible; but they don’t take full advantage of the anywhere-but-Earth edict. In the aggregate they’re pretty generic, although I guess they make the point that Hal’s better off when he can go home regularly. From our perspective, perhaps the greater sin is that these stories in and of themselves aren’t critical to understanding the larger Green Lantern mythology. Obviously Denny O’Neil’s run stands as a contrast to John Broome’s work. Later on, Steve Englehart pulled Guy Gardner out of the coma O’Neil put him in, and Gerard Jones ran with the three-GL format Englehart created. Still, despite Barr’s place between Wolfman and Wein, I’d argue it’s sufficient merely to note that Hal was gone for a year, without having to know exactly what he was doing.

Accordingly, nothing especially fuels our need to have those issues collected; but does that mean they should just fade away? Here in the digital age, we can say no! with some confidence.

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Of course, I was planning this post for last week, before Before Watchmen intervened. Since then I’ve been trying to consider my comics-reading habits more carefully. I buy a lot of collections, and honestly sometimes I am more excited about them than I am the monthly issues. (This is especially true for the Marvel collections, since I buy comparatively few Marvel books.) However, I am also mindful of the sausage-making which produced the original comics. I am sure that much of my shelves are populated with the work of creators compensated unfairly, if at all, for their efforts’ continued exposure.

In this respect, Tom Brevoort’s recent assertions — “[t]here’s really not much that goes on in the world of comics that the readers really need to be aware of [and besides] we got along for decades without this level of faux-transparency” — lend the economics of corporate superhero comics an even more ominous cast.

Make no mistake, I am probably a tremendous hypocrite when it comes to balancing social concerns with marketplace realities. I use (and no doubt rely upon) any number of products whose production depends on unsavory or outright deplorable conditions. Those choices boil down to convenience: I do these things because they work for me, even if they don’t reflect my ideal worldview.

That’s especially true when it comes to superhero comics. Although I hate how DC and Marvel have treated any number of creators, chief among them Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, and Jack Kirby, I still buy Action Comics and Superman and Fantastic Four, and I’ll still see the Avengers movie. I simply can’t give up following these characters, because I learned to love them before I learned the rest. No doubt that makes me a hypocrite, but being hypocritical only undermines me as an advocate. It doesn’t mean I can’t argue for better conditions.

In fact, I’d argue more precisely if I knew just what the conditions were. As Mr. Brevoort said, we comics fans operate under “this level of faux-transparency,” piecing together behind-the-scenes pictures from what peeks through: the John Rozum/Scott McDaniel back-and-forth over Static Shock, Alan Moore’s description of the Watchmen contract, Dwayne McDuffie’s Justice League frustrations, etc. With regard to reprint collections, a retailer friend tells me that the amount of royalty payments depends on the nature of the reprint. Basically, if I understand correctly, black-and-white reprints pay less than color; so a Showcase Presents might be held up if one of the creators involved wants to hold out for a color version.

However, as DC gets more comfortable with the digital realm, that distinction goes away. In fact, since DC’s digital-storage costs are presumably much different from its printing costs, I imagine there is more room for all parties to work out mutually-acceptable financial arrangements. With fan outcry currently inflamed over Before Watchmen and various other lingering incidents, now strikes me as a particularly opportune time for real transparency.  Let us know how much of every reprint dollar goes to royalties, printing costs (or digital storage), marketing, etc.  That way, we can make informed decisions about where to spend our own dollars.

We fans will always want reprints. The comics marketplace gives us a tantalizing range of options. With digital sales, those options can expand exponentially. Before too long, it will be possible — if it isn’t already — for anyone with an e-reader to access any story DC has ever published, whether it’s Detective #27, Showcase #4, or the Barr/Pollard Green Lanterns. Therefore, those stories have a shelf life their original creators might not ever have imagined; and those creators (or their estates) deserve some share of the revenues those stories might generate, whether in print or electronically.

This is all probably a pipe dream, but it’s what’s fair, and it will go a long way towards making sure fans like me continue to buy DC’s reprints.

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* [Smart money’s probably on the Clone Saga.]

** [Let’s see how good the ol’ memory is: John Broome, Denny O’Neil, Marv Wolfman, Mike Barr, Len Wein, Steve Englehart, Jim Owsley (in Action Comics Weekly), Peter David (ACW), Priest (ACW), Gerard Jones, Ron Marz, Judd Winick, Ben Raab (forgot his last name), Marz again, and Geoff Johns.]

Look upon my Microsoft Paint work and despair

Before Wednesday morning’s big news, I was all ready to write about the wish-fulfillment aspects of DC’s reprint program. Maybe next week.

Now, though, we’ve got Before Watchmen*, seven miniseries and a one-shot in the Seven Soldiers mode, and no doubt collection-ready. Please pardon my cynicism, but with all due respect to the impressive roster of professionals involved, this could have easily been subtitled We’re Back For More Cash.

To be clear, I understand DC wanting to make money off its intellectual property.  A while ago I argued that one purpose of the current Shade miniseries is to fill another slot on bookshelves next to the rest of James Robinson’s Starman collections. Starman was one of the rare series where one writer introduced a character (Jack Knight) and took him through a series of adventures, until that character reached the natural endpoint of his life’s particular phase. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman preceded it, and Garth Ennis’ Hitman followed. (Working with writers David Goyer and Geoff Johns, Robinson tied Starman into the JSA revival as well.)

Robinson hasn’t returned to the character of Jack Knight since Starman ended, although he used a few Starman characters in his Justice League work (and I’m pretty sure one of the supporting cast showed up in the year-long Trinity miniseries, with which Robinson was not involved) — but more to the point, no new creative team has explored what Jack, or Sandman’s Morpheus, or Hitman’s Tommy Monaghan, has done since their various series ended. There is a firewall around these characters, if not their unique milieux, apparently reinforced only by friendly agreement. When there are cracks — when Morpheus’ successor Daniel showed up in Grant Morrison and Howard Porter’s JLA, or when Paul Cornell and Pete Woods had Sandman’s Death meet Lex Luthor in Action Comics — it’s a big deal. I’d even go so far as to say that the old Multiverse was an in-story manifestation of such firewalls: all those Golden Age stories shunted to Earth-Two pretty much as-is, with the same going for the Fawcett (i.e., Marvel Family) characters on Earth-S, and yes, the Charlton characters on Earth-Four.

Indeed, at the risk of being obvious, Watchmen exists in its present form because DC didn’t want to let Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons put the Charlton characters themselves through the wringer. Thus, over the past twenty-five years, Captain Atom, Blue Beetle, Nightshade, Peter Cannon, and the Question have each had their own ongoing series, and each has enjoyed various degrees of success in the context of the larger DC superhero line. Ironically, there’s a distinct Doctor Manhattan influence in both the Captain Adam of Final Crisis and the New-52′s Cap, and the Question’s appearances on “Justice League Unlimited” recast the character as more conspiracy-minded, a la Rorschach. Of course, the Question and Blue Beetle who came over from Charlton have since died, and the New-52 setup doesn’t seem to leave much room for either to return.

The larger issue, though, is the extent to which these characters can be allowed to rest. J. Michael Straczynski, who is writing the Doctor Manhattan and Nite-Owl miniseries, told CBR

[a] lot of folks feel that these characters shouldn’t be touched by anyone other than Alan, and while that’s absolutely understandable on an emotional level, it’s deeply flawed on a logical level. Based on durability and recognition, one could make the argument that Superman is the greatest comics character ever created. But neither Alan nor anyone else has ever suggested that no one other than Shuster and Siegel should ever be allowed to write Superman. Alan didn’t pass on being brought on to write Swamp Thing, a seminal comics character created by Len Wein, and he did a terrific job. He didn’t say “No, no, I can’t, that’s Len’s character.” Nor should he have.

Mr. Straczynski’s response goes to the heart of work-for-hire comics; namely, that DC Comics owns (part of) Superman, Swamp Thing, and Watchmen, and as a practical matter can dictate who writes and draws the comics featuring them. Put bluntly, Alan Moore knew what he was getting into when he took on Watchmen, because it was the same situation he entered into with Swamp Thing. In fact, on a conceptual level there is probably not much difference between Before Watchmen and the mileage Geoff Johns has gotten out of “Tygers,” Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s Green Lantern Corps short story.

The real difference lies in the nature of the stories themselves. Superman and Swamp Thing were created to be ongoing characters with no definite endpoint, but Watchmen, Robinson’s Starman, Ennis’ Hitman, and Gaiman’s Sandman were all finite series. We can argue about whether creative teams other than Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster or Len Wein and Berni Wrightson have “done right by” Superman or Swamp Thing, but when you have a singular vision determining virtually every aspect of a particular series from beginning to end, it becomes a lot harder to disassociate that vision from that series. For example, Straczynski himself is associated pretty strongly with “Babylon 5,” the TV series he created and produced, so much so that any subsequent “B5″ projects would no doubt seek his blessing, especially if the series were considered to have told a story complete unto itself.

To be sure, more “Babylon 5″ might well receive and/or deserve those blessings, just as the Before Watchmen books might be worthwhile on their own merits. Certainly none of the professionals involved sets out to make bad comics, and certainly none of them will want to bring anything less than their best. Still, they’re in an unenviable situation, trying to do work which honors the original while still being original enough to justify its own existence. This is nothing new for work-for-hire comics, but the degree of difficulty is much higher.

And the thing is, DC does not need more Watchmen in the same way that it needs to keep publishing Batman, Superman, and Swamp Thing comics. As long as there is a DC Comics, there will be more Batman and Superman books, with dozens more creative teams looking to recapture what they first loved about those characters. Making sure those characters endure is fundamental to DC’s business model, and if some good comics come out of it, that’s just gravy. Accordingly, DC has no interest in producing the last Superman story, whether it’s “Doomsday!” or “Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow?” As we saw last summer, DC doesn’t do endings, it does relaunches.

Accordingly, it’s helped nurture a culture where more of anything successful is implied, if not expected outright. As Tom Spurgeon tweeted, “the real takeaway here may be the sadness that [...] DC’s attempts to do Another Watchmen [are] now becoming doing More Watchmen.”

Now, I am not necessarily arguing against More. Personally, I’d love more of Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang’s Team 13, more Thriller by Robert Loren Fleming and Trevor von Eeden, and more ’Mazing Man from Bob Rozakis and Stephen DeStefano — but mainly because I think those creators could do more with those characters. Conversely, a creator’s triumphant return to a particular subject doesn’t always produce the same kind of work (see, e.g., Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again).

At its best, the world of corporate superhero comics allows tradition and ritual to exist alongside creativity and innovation. On Monday I was glad to hear about upcoming collections of Amethyst, Mike Barr and Alan Davis’ Detective Comics, and Len Wein and Dave Gibbons’ Green Lantern. I’m also looking forward to the Trials Of Wonder Woman and All-Star Squadron reprints. Maybe next week I will get to talk about these in more detail. They’re all entertaining segments of ongoing series** which, for various reasons, were highlights either of those particular series or of DC’s superhero line. Each played within the rules of that superhero line, and none set out to be multilayered examinations of the comic-book form and/or the superhero-comics genre.

Nevertheless, it should be an elementary observation, but it bears repeating here: not every superhero comic must follow Watchmen, nor must Watchmen be as exploitable as the average monthly comic. While DC is free to do what it wants with the intellectual property it owns, it should have the same respect for Watchmen that it does for Jack Knight and Morpheus.

Again, it all comes down to the nature of the original work. Not only did Watchmen tell a complete story, set in its own unique world, it was designed specifically to be self-contained. The clockwork motif of an insular system which has to deal with unpredictable elements is one of the work’s core elements. DC may want to honor Watchmen with these prequels, but the work really doesn’t require them; and despite Moore and Gibbons’ exploratory steps to the contrary, the story as it exists almost discourages them.

Look, I know I don’t have to read any of the Before Watchmen comics. I realize these could turn out to be some very well-done comics, and I am guilty of prejudging something of which I have not read one page. It’s the kind of maddening thing which dares one to read it just so one can have an informed opinion, and by that time DC already has one’s money. If this project put these creative teams on the Earth-4 versions of the original Charlton characters — even if DC said This is Watchmen 2 with the names changed — I’d be all for it. That would at least be a touch newer than filling in the gaps of a pretty seamless narrative. No matter how much effort is put into these prequels, no matter how pure the intentions, no matter how polished the product, for a lot of fans this will be a reminder that DC did something because it could, because it would be relatively easy, and because it knew it would attract a truckload of attention. In an artistic field where potential is only limited by imagination, for DC to make such a reflexively conservative choice is incredibly disappointing.

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* [In one respect the title was inevitable. Back when hype about the Watchmen movie was supercharging book sales, DC reprinted a number of single issues under the banner “After Watchmen.”]

** [Amethyst started out as a 12-issue miniseries, and at first it wasn’t part of the main superhero continuity.]

"You're not going out in *that*?!?"

Although they won’t be solicited for a few more weeks, DC has already been talking up the six new(ish) titles coming in May. G.I. Combat, Dial H, Ravagers, and Worlds’ Finest join the returning Batman Incorporated and the long-rumored Justice So– I mean, Earth 2 — as the replacements for most of the New-52′s lowest-selling books.

As with the original New-52 group, every new title except one is familiar to longtime DC fans; and as with the original New-52, that book spins out of an existing feature. (Then it was Batman Incorporated begetting Batwing; here it’s the Teen Titans/Superboy nexus spawning Ravagers.) However, where the New-52 tried noticeably to make many of its books accessible — or at least uprooted them from established DC lore — most of the new titles seem to require some prerequisite reading.

For me, this is not a problem, because I’ve been reading Batman Incorporated (and the rest of Grant Morrison’s Bat-work) since the beginning; and I grew up on the annual JLA/JSA multiple-Earth team-ups. However, I am not exactly the target audience for the New-52, and it’s curious to me why DC would head back towards the deep end of the continuity pool with at least half of its new offerings. In fairness, it is possible to boil hairsplitting topics like parallel Earths into easily-digestible packets of information. It’s not so much that there’s an alternate Earth, it’s that there’s an Earth which doesn’t tie into forty-odd other monthly comic books. Likewise, the new/old Huntress and Power Girl need not be throwbacks to comics from the ‘70s and ‘80s, just plausible takes on their extremely-familiar superheroic heritage. After all, “Batman and Catwoman’s daughter” was good enough to get that “Birds Of Prey” TV show on the air (even if what the “BOP” show did with it was something else….)

Ah, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s look at the newcomers in detail.

The New-52 books have already “reclaimed” a number of Vertigo characters, but with Dial H the line between the two imprints gets blurrier as uber-editor Karen Berger helps relaunch one of the Silver Age’s quirkier concepts. Let me repeat that: Dial “H” For HERO was quirky for the Silver Age because it invited readers to design their own superheroes, who would then be worked into the stories. These days, that kind of thing practically dares a publisher to craft some social-media reader-participation component, but it sounds like writer China Miéville has enough of his own ideas about where to take the series. Specifically, its protagonist looks to have a hard time adjusting to the endless cycle of random powers and/or identities which once were governed only by the whims of DC’s readership. To tell you the truth, that makes it sound like Daffy’s descent into madness in the classic “Duck Amuck” — where another capricious omnipotence kept changing the rules of Daffy’s reality — but I’m sure that is just a facile comparison.

A better one may be to the New-52′s Animal Man which, ‘way back when, made the transition from DCU to Vertigo and has come back working a good bit of that smart-and-cool Vertigo mojo. Dial H sounds like a good-enough-for-Vertigo superhero comic, and it certainly has the pedigree (the original Dial H even debuted in the old House Of Mystery, looong before that book was annexed by Neil Gaiman’s Sandman). Thus, my expectations are high, but with good reason.

G.I. Combat replaces Men Of War perhaps in name only, since on the face of it I’m not sure that much distinguishes the two military/paranormal mashups. MOW stars a new Sgt. Rock and had an anthological backup feature, while GIC will pair The War That Time Forgot with rotating backups like The Unknown Soldier and The Haunted Tank (the latter a staple of the original G.I. Combat). In fact, this version could easily have been called Weird War Tales (which eventually featured the original “War That Time Forgot”) for its more direct melding of the battlefield and the strange. Oh, heck; titles are irrelevant: the Unknown Soldier was the last regular feature of Star Spangled War Stories, “WTTF’s” original home.

All three of these features have been revived fairly recently — WTTF as a 12-issue DCU miniseries, Haunted Tank as a 5-issue Vertigo miniseries, and Unknown Soldier as a Vertigo ongoing series. As you might expect, the Vertigo versions made some changes, placing the Tank in Operation Iraqi Freedom and the “Soldier” in 2002 Uganda. Regardless, these features arguably have some residual name recognition (besides being perennial favorites and entertaining concepts), which may have contributed to their inclusion in the new G.I. Combat. In the end, I’m glad DC is sticking with a military-oriented book set in its main comics line, because it makes the line more diverse.

Not helping diversity as much is The Ravagers, which spins out of Teen Titans and Superboy. From what I can tell, DC is doing “edgy Teen Titans” in Teen Titans itself, so if Ravagers is “even edgier,” I don’t know if there’s much of an audience for that. Actually, the premise sounds more like Gen13, it includes at least one Gen13 alum, and “on the run from shadowy organization” is a decent starting point. Still, I have a bad feeling it will try too hard to be edgy and/or extreme, in keeping with its ‘90s roots. Much of this goes back to artist Ian Churchill, whose work on 2008′s Titans relaunch couldn’t quite overcome his tendencies to exaggerate and/or objectify. I do like Superboy’s Rose Wilson and Caitlin Fairchild — well, I don’t dislike them, and artist R.B. Silva draws ‘em in a nice, non-exploitative manner — so I will give this a chance. I’d like to think it will be better than Red Hood and the Outlaws, but that’s not exactly grounds for a commitment.

I have already committed to Batman Incorporated, so I’m glad it’s back on the schedule. There might not have been more to say, except for editor Mike Marts proclaiming that BatCorp Volume 2 is “the final, unbelievable act of a saga six years in the making.”  If you’ve been reading Morrison’s Batman for the past six years, that’s one thing. Otherwise, I’m sure DC would love to sell you a few collections (or at least the hefty Leviathan special) to bring you up to speed. That’s a lot of material, even digitized. It’s good stuff, don’t get me wrong; but again, there’s six years of it. In that context, the Earth-Two Huntress may be an easier sell, even having been out of circulation for most of the past twenty-five years; because that kind of break surely means that Worlds’ Finest will go out of its way to be accessible. Six years of Batman comics? You can get through that over a long weekend.

And that brings us back to the two parallel-world — excuse me, next-generation superhero — titles, Earth 2 from James Robinson and Nicola Scott and Worlds’ Finest from Paul Levitz, George Pérez, and Kevin Maguire. I will be getting both of these eagerly, mostly because of my stated affection for the old Multiverse. Again, though, I wonder how many of the New-52′s newer readers will be interested in a pair of books which (re)introduce another Earth’s worth of continuity? The old Earth-Two was basically the home of Golden Age DC stories, which had apparently occurred in real time (or in whatever faithful-to-the-originals order Roy Thomas arranged them) so that, starting in the early 1960s, DC’s writers and editors could distinguish Then from Now.

Soon enough, though, Earth-Two became its own ongoing concern — got its own Now, as it were — and Power Girl and the Huntress were very much a part of its unique identity. Like Supergirl, Power Girl was Superman’s first cousin; but she landed on Earth almost forty years after he did and was more like Clark and Lois’ adopted daughter. The Huntress was Helena Wayne, Batman and Catwoman’s actual daughter, who became the new Darknight Detective after her mom’s death drove her dad into retirement. These are not difficult concepts to grasp. Regardless, Earth-Two was full of just-different-enough characters, even if (from the Golden Age fan’s perspective) the new folks were the different ones. Green Lantern wasn’t a space-cop. The Atom didn’t shrink. The Flash wore a helmet. Hawkman … ugh, let’s not get started with Hawkman. Then there was Doctor Mid-Nite, Doctor Fate, Mister Terrific, Starman, and various others who hadn’t gotten Earth-One counterparts. When I first learned about the Justice Society and Earth-Two — when I was six, so it’s been a while — I wanted to know more. I recognize now that I could have also dropped that issue of Justice League like a hot rock and run for something less complicated.

With that in mind, I understand why DC didn’t advertise the current Huntress miniseries as a prelude to the Earth-2 series, since (SPOILER ALERT, maybe?) it features Helena Wayne posing as her not-related-to-Batman counterpart. That wouldn’t have been a bad hook for an old-school Huntress fan, but I wouldn’t have wanted to market a New-52 book to an old-school fan. Still, I didn’t pick up Huntress originally, because my interest couldn’t quite overcome budgetary concerns, and now I’m wishing I had. (Haven’t had time to download the issues yet, either.)

As discussed above, you’d think Earth 2 and Worlds’ Finest would make a special effort to be new-reader-friendly. I’m also interested in how old-reader-friendly they’ll be. If this is the Earth-2 glimpsed briefly during Geoff Johns’ run on JSA, it’s had a while (since the end of Crisis On Infinite Earths, in fact) to develop into something even more distinct. It shouldn’t be a replacement for the pre-Flashpoint DC-Earth, because it wouldn’t have had any Silver Age characters or their legacies — so no Green Lantern Corps, no Barry Allen, Wally West, or Bart Allen, no Jason Todd, Tim Drake, or Damien Wayne, etc. I wonder if there’ll even be the full complement of Starmen. Of course, the hypothetical new New-52 reader might not know what s/he’s missing, but I suspect us oldsters will make even more assumptions about what Earth-2 “should” be, well in advance of May’s first issues. It’s kind of like J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek, creating a new setting with enough of the old to seem familiar, but not enough to be a duplicate.

At the very least the two books should look great. Nicola Scott is an asset to any team book — she handled crowds pretty well when Birds Of Prey guest-starred the Secret Six — and I can’t wait to see Pérez and Maguire trade off on Worlds’ Finest.

Not surprisingly, I hope these books find a decent audience beyond the core of JSA/Power Girl readers. It’s not that the New 52 needs the stylistic alternative of an Earth-2 as a safe harbor from all those high collars and ‘90s callbacks. For a long time, being a DC fan meant buying into the Multiverse and/or the legacies, so it’s nice that some of that is coming back. How much of it, and for how long, are questions for another day.

I will not caption this cover "Pistol Packin' Mama"

The big news from April’s solicitations was revealed last week, as DC announced the cancellation of six of the original New-52 books (to be replaced with five new series plus the returning Batman Incorporated). While there’s more to say about this on its merits, I do like DC keeping a fixed number of ongoing series. Nerds love structure, right? (Besides, it’s kind of like programming a television schedule.)

Of course, just two weeks ago I predicted that all of the original New-52 books would get to their twelfth issues, in part so that DC could claim they each “told their stories.” That doesn’t seem to be the case here, at least not from the solicitation texts. Instead, the solicits for each final issue mostly advertise how the series are all going down swinging. We know now, too, that in some ways this isn’t really the end: Mister Terrific’s Karen Starr looks like the Power Girl of the upcoming Worlds’ Finest; Men Of War’s superhero/military mashup should transition smoothly to G.I. Combat; and I don’t think DC will kill off Hawk and Dove again.

Actually, if I were Captain Atom, I’d be a little nervous. According to ICV2′s December sales estimates, Hawk & Dove was the highest-selling New-52 book to be cancelled (18,014 copies at #114), but CA was right behind (17,917; #115).

Anyway, on to the solicits themselves….

* * *

LO, THERE SHALL BE … OH, YOU KNOW

Lots of finality in the April solicits, even beyond the obvious. Mister Terrific signs off with the Blackhawks and (more than likely) the return of Power Girl; and Men Of War guest-stars Frankenstein. Blackhawks and Hawk and Dove tease doom and gloom. Action Comics, Batman, Batwing, and Batman and Robin all wrap up their inaugural arcs (as does OMAC, but its first arc turned out to be its last), and the Justice League Dark/I, Vampire crossover concludes. Batman: Odyssey and THUNDER Agents finish their limited runs, and over at Vertigo, Northlanders ends with #50. Finally, Static Shock’s last issue looks more like an epilogue, hopefully indicating a decent role for the character beyond the end of his latest series.

CROSSOVER MADNESS

Possible groundwork for the next Pandora appearance: dark visions of the future show up in Captain Atom #8 and Teen Titans #8, while the Flash visits the Speed Force in Flash #8. If I wanted to connect it to the Daemonite plots over in Grifter, Voodoo, and Superman, I’d say that the Daemonites realize (somehow) that the former WildStorm Earth was probably a lot easier to conquer without the Justice League in the way, so they’re going after Superman to eliminate the biggest threat first. It’s all very “countdown to Infinite Crisis”-esque, you see.

Since I dropped Teen Titans after issue #1, it’s been surprisingly easy for me to ignore it and still read Superboy. However, I’m worried that might not continue as Superboy becomes more involved with both Titans and the upcoming Ravagers series. Then there’s Superboy’s crossover with Teen Titans and Legion Lost, which I should have seen coming back in September. Ordinarily, that would all be okay, but I have a bad feeling that Ravagers will get dragged into the whole thing, and the Gen13 kids will be there, and it’ll just turn into a whole big mulligan stew of teenaged super-people. Wow, now I really do feel old.

By contrast, the upcoming Resurrection Man/Suicide Squad crossover should be easier to take, just because it looks more isolated. Oh, and who else thinks the Squad’s traitor is involved with Skinny Amanda Waller? She’s got to be a fake, and the real deal will be about twice her size…. Regardless, the old Amanda shows up in Batman Beyond Unlimited #3, so that’ll be good.

ONE LEAGUE UNDER THE SEA

I am probably more excited than is necessary at the prospect of Green Arrow in Justice League. To be sure, I don’t know this version of Ollie that well, having dropped the current Green Arrow after issue #1 for being too bland. Maybe Ann Nocenti will light the proper fire under him, and maybe that will be reflected in his JL #8 characterization? After all, cross-promotion is one of the Justice League’s oldest and most subtle missions.

Meanwhile, it seems eminently appropriate for Batwing to join Justice League International — I’m guessing he’s not the “surprise team member” if he’s on the cover of #8 — but I kind of want him to take a page from his patron, and claim that he’s too busy with his own crusade.

And as long as we’re talking Leagues here, I agree with Scipio that Aquaman’s old team should turn out to have been the Sea Devils.

THIS AND THAT

There is a sort of backhanded precedent for Wonder Woman packing heat (issue #8′s“Pistols of Eros,” snicker). It comes from the end of Greg Rucka’s run, when the Amazons reverse the polarity of their Purple Healing Ray, build an industrial-sized version, and call it the Purple Death Ray. I trusted Rucka to do that, and I trust Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang to make the P’s. of E. work too.

I’ll never turn down George Pérez artwork, so it’s good to see his guest pencils on April’s Supergirl #8. It may also be a nice way to warm up for his work on another Girl of Steel in Worlds’ Finest.

COLLECTIONS

The Infinite Crisis Omnibus mentions “villains uniting,” but it doesn’t seem to collect Villains United. However, the miniseries and specials listed in the solicits only add up to about half of the Omnibus’ page count, so there seems to be room for VU and the Return of Donna Troy miniseries as well.

I have a feeling that the Batman: Prey paperback is meant to capitalize on Catwoman’s role in The Dark Knight Rises, even though “Prey” was primarily a Hugo Strange story. In fact, for my money, “Prey” is the second-most-influential Hugo Strange story, behind the seminal Engelhart/Rogers Detective Comics arc. “Prey” takes one iconic scene from Englehart/Rogers — Hugo as Batman, with a Bruce Wayne mask under the cowl — and extrapolates from that an entire psychosexual obsession with the Darknight Detective, also involving a second Batman impersonator in Hugo’s scheme to destroy our hero. All that and the post-“Year One” origin of the Batmobile too! It’s a good story, is what I’m saying.

I’m not sure about the causal relationship between the various reprint lines. The Archives came before the Showcase Presents books, so there were Challengers of the Unknown Archives and Sgt. Rock Archives before there were SP reprints. However, I bet the sales of the SP volumes supported the upcoming Challengers Omnibus and the latest Sgt. Rock Archives.  In any event, the hardcover market may be more eclectic than I thought.

The character — or at least this phase of his development — doesn’t seem to be remembered that fondly, but I’m looking forward to revisiting the “AzBats” Batman in the new Knightfall Volume 2. What’s funny is that two Batman artists from that period, Graham Nolan and Mike Manley, are now drawing the soap-opera strips Rex Morgan M.D. and Judge Parker. I wonder if their newspaper fans will want to see their superhero work.

I’ve already mentioned the Sea Devils, but I believe their Showcase Presents solicitation helps clarify certain recent events. Reading between the lines, it seems that DC has been working on a hush-hush follow-up to this series called Flame-Headed Watchman 2….

* * *

Well, that’s what jumped out at me this month. What looks good to you?

"First Season Episode Guide" -- so (sniff) optimistic--!

The Dark Knight Rises is on its way. Man of Steel is filming. The costume from that David E. Kelley Wonder Woman show will finally get some air time. I wouldn’t even bet against Green Lantern 2.

So today, I’m here to talk about adapting The Flash.

Apparently a Flash movie has been in development for several years, at least since Green Lantern went into production (and from a few of the same folks). I don’t know the basics — which by now may well have changed — but I suspect many of us fans would start from the same points: which Flash, which Rogue(s), etc. After so many superhero-comic adaptations, we can derive certain formulae from the things.

However, to me The Flash is different.

The idea of super-speed is ideal for the comics medium, because time basically slows down for everyone but the speedster, and comics excel at playing with the reader’s perception of time. Ironically, though, in a moving-picture setting, the real effect of super-speed is trickier to pull off. Sometimes it works to show everyone else slowing down, as in The Matrix’s “bullet time,” the bionic running of The Six Million Dollar Man, or the tray-catching scene of the first Spider-Man. (Naturally, the last always seemed to be an homage to Barry Allen discovering his powers in Showcase #4.)

To bring an audience along for a super-speed ride, though, you have to go all in. When Clark Kent couldn’t fly, Smallville gave him super-zips. These got the point across — now he’s here, now he’s not — and they were probably pretty literal illustrations of his power; but as a visual they left a lot to be desired. More than a decade prior, The Flash TV show of 1990-91 used a similar shortcut, but basically it was a guy in a costume standing in one place, a WHOOSH, and then the same guy in a costume standing in a different place. (My wife, who has unexpectedly become a huge Big Bang Theory fan, is fond of a particular episode featuring a related gag.) Obviously The Flash was limited by its budget, and when the character appeared in animated form on Super Friends and Justice League, he got a more comic-booky treatment. Still, when The Flash had money to spend, it was pretty impressive, including using multiple exposures to create after-images familiar to the comics’ readers.

Moreover, when you look at something like Wally almost getting lost in the Speed Force in “Justice League,” or Dash’s high-speed set piece in The Incredibles, you start to think that sure, a few more of those and there’s your movie. And that gets us back to the formulaic nature of superhero movies: origin, second-act complications, big effects-filled finish. Plug in the appropriate member(s) of the Rogues’ Gallery, maybe tie everything into the origin, and voila!

To be sure, there’s nothing wrong with well-done super-speed sequences. I’d expect nothing less from a hypothetical Flash flick. When the first issue of Flash: Rebirth arrived, I complained that there wasn’t enough super-speed in it.

Nevertheless, that’s not all there is to the Flash. At the risk of sounding Entitled, the cumulative (1956-2011) adventures of Barry Allen and Wally West now carry with them an air of inevitability only punctured by Flashpoint’s Gordian solution. As much as I kvetch about Wally’s ambiguous fate, rebooting Barry allowed the book to focus on certain elements (including the police-scientist job and the relationship with Iris) and not have to worry about the Flash Museum or what Wally’s parents might be up to. That’s great for the comics, which need to purge every now and then. DC won’t stop publishing Flash comics any time soon, and if someone has a great Dexter Myles story or wants to bring back Rudolph & Mary West, they can. When you only get one shot at a movie, though — and Superman Returns and Green Lantern both argue that not everything gets a sequel — you want to get in what you can.

Taking a more expansive view, MGK outlines a cinematic Flash trilogy, adapting a few comics storylines pretty directly in order to lead moviegoers from Barry to Wally. It plays up the Flash legacy, obviously, but MGK also makes the salient points that you can’t rely on super-speed and you can’t make Barry Allen into Batman. (I would add that The Flash TV series had too much of Tim Burton’s Batman, most notably in the areas of costumes, sets, and music.)

While I’m not here to argue with MGK, I will say it’s not necessarily the way I would go. After a while (certainly by the early ‘70s), The Flash feature had accumulated enough minutiae that it had become almost self-sustaining. Like the Earth-1 Superman or the Batman of the 1950s, readers knew how things were supposed to work, because the stories had explained those things. They knew how the Rogues related to each other and how Barry’s costume-ring worked. They knew Barry’s parents, Iris’ parents, and the Allens’ neighbors. (As it happens, Wally’s parents had to wait much longer to be fleshed out.) Central City might have had some questionable topography, but it became one of DC’s more familiar, even comfortable, environments. Accordingly, I would try to evoke that same sort of lived-in feeling on screen. To a certain extent that means creating a live-action Cary Bates/Irv Novick comic book, circa 1976, but I don’t think that’s a bad baseline. The first Superman is illustrative in this respect: it ditched a lot of the Bronze Age/Earth-One trappings, but it kept the feel of an Elliott S! Maggin/Curt Swan production.

Anyway, we’re getting a little off track. More than most superhero adaptations, a hypothetical Flash movie presents its adapters with a number of choices: Barry or Wally (and attendant supporting cast), the Rogues, the amount of Easter eggs/comics backstory. However, I would argue that, more than most, the aforementioned “air of inevitability” tends to dictate any adaptation’s treatment. Barry may be the once and future Flash, but after twenty-plus years of Wally in the role (not to mention his Justice League exposure), both are viable stars, and each could tell a credible story. Personally, Wally seems to be the more complex character, but much of that comes from his relationship to Barry. Therefore, I don’t think you can take Barry out of Wally’s story, because otherwise he might just as well be Barry; but if you really want Wally in the role, you have to start thinking about how Barry will die. MGK’s solution is appealing, although he spreads Wally’s story over three movies and I’m trying to do as much as possible in one.

With all that in mind, then, my one shot at a decent Flash movie would pick things up fairly deep into Flash lore, with Barry as the Flash and Wally a semi-retired (because of college) Kid Flash. The Rogues (Captain Cold, Mirror Master, Trickster, Heat Wave, Pied Piper) would be regular antagonists, but nothing the Flash couldn’t handle. Unfortunately, when a really apocalyptic threat comes along — let’s say some kind of super-scientific energy experiment goes out of control — Barry ends up sacrificing himself to save the world. Wally must then grow up quickly to deal with the burdens of being a big-time superhero — and when a heavy-hitter supervillain shows up (probably Professor Zoom, but Abra Kadabra and Grodd are both tempting), forcing him to revisit Barry’s death, Wally must rise to that challenge too.

It all sounds rather boilerplate, but I think a lighthearted, optimistic tone would be crucial, and would help distinguish The Flash. After all, whether it’s Barry or Wally, the Flash is a guy in a sleek, streamlined red-and-yellow suit, with the fairly elemental power of running really fast; and he got that power literally by being in the right place at the right time. For uninitiated moviegoers, it’s almost the same origin as Spider-Man (just substitute “lightning” for “spider” and “wall of chemicals” for “radiation”), but with diametrically opposite results. Instead of Peter Parker’s power-related complications, super-speed offers easy solutions to a variety of everyday problems. (And yes, that is one of the classic Marvel Vs. DC Differences.) MGK’s trilogy would be an eloquent meditation on man’s relationship to Heaven, but on a very basic level being The Flash would be flat-out fun.

So naturally Barry has to die, right?

That’s the great dilemma facing any longtime superhero fan: how to manage the implications of what eventually becomes a macro-story. For twenty-three years, Barry Allen was defined in no small part by his 1985 death; and to a certain extent, so was Wally. (Obviously, 1993′s “Return of Barry Allen” went a long way toward helping Wally make peace with his uncle’s memory.) It’s the kind of thing which makes fans like me ask whether Barry had died and come back in the post-Flashpoint timeline — because if not, we’ll wonder how much time he has left. As long as Barry was martyred, he could symbolize all the halcyon memories fans had of the Silver Age. Similarly, though, his return might be another sign that those Silver Age sensibilities were also coming back. That sort of update seemed to be the promise of Geoff Johns and Francis Manapul’s 2010-11 Flash series. If that status quo had continued (perhaps including the rumored Kid-Flash- and Wally-centered spinoffs), Johns could have built a new Flash mini-franchise on the foundations of decades-old continuity, just like he did with Green Lantern. That would have been easy, and it might have allowed Johns to rework the Flash organizational chart into something sensible.

However, I’m not sure it would have been as entertaining as Manapul and co-writer Steve Buccellato’s New-52 take. I am not shocked (shocked!) that superhero comics can be just as fun without the in-jokes and continuity porn, but I have been pleasantly surprised a) that DC has pared away so much of Barry’s old surroundings and b) that it has been so liberating. You get used to certain things in a Flash comic, and when they’re not there you’re concerned it won’t feel like a Flash comic. Although Captain Cold and the rest of the Rogues are on the horizon, this first arc of the New-52 run features a new villain, a heretofore-unknown old friend of Barry’s, and competing romantic interests. Most importantly, Manapul’s skills at storytelling and page design have reinvigorated the feature, taking excellent advantage of the possibilities of comics to offer a new perspective on Barry’s powers. Not that he couldn’t have done much the same thing drawing Johns’ scripts, but both the relaunch and his larger role seem to have let him loose.

This is why I am wary of any attempt to bring The Flash back to moving pictures. On film, there’s only so much you can do to portray super-speed in entertaining ways. A Flash movie would therefore need to rely equally on its non-super aspects. Comics, though, have the best of both worlds, and Manapul and Buccellato are in a great groove. I don’t need a Flash film, or the return of the old status quo, as long as the book is this good.

Red underwear makes a comeback in 2965

Before we jump into 2012, I have one last bit of business to take care of: toting up my 2011 predictions, and offering a set for the new year.

2011

1. The Green Lantern movie. Last year I predicted that GL would be “more lucrative than Captain America, not as much as Thor.  It ended up making $116 million domestically ($219 million worldwide), well behind Cap’s $176 million ($368M globally) and Thor’s $181 million ($449M globally). Also, it wasn’t as good. I liked it well enough (and from what I hear I may like the Blu-Ray version more), but apparently I was in the minority.

2. Superman and Wonder Woman after JMS. I just had questions for this entry: will Roberson and Barrows stay on Superman? (No.) Will Diana keep the jacket and pants? (No jacket, pants optional.) Finally, I asked “[w]ill sales improve once ‘Grounded’ ends?” Guess that depends on how you define “ends,” because “Grounded” closed out that Superman series; and the next issue of Superman was a New-52 No. 1 which sold almost 100,000 more copies than its predecessor. We may never know what might have happened to Superman without the New 52, but probably not that.

3. Batman: Earth One. I was looking forward to the next “Earth One” release in 2011, and I’m still looking.  [Edited to add:  Of course, DC picked this morning, well after I'd finished this post, to preview both Batman:  Earth One and Superman:  Earth One Volume 2.]

4. All Star Batman/Multiversity/Teen Titans: Games. Last year I had hoped to see all three of these long-delayed projects finally published. However, only Games, started in the late ‘80s and finished over 25 years later, made it across the finish line. Of the remaining two, I suppose we’re most likely to see Multiversity, although its Earth-4 installment may have to compete with an actual Watchmen follow-up.

5. The United Colors of Batman. I was “curious to see what [Batman Incorporated] look[ed] like at the end of 2011,” and now I know: a gigundo $7.99 special issue, a brief appearance from the Batman of Moscow in Batman and Robin, and the ongoing Batwing series. That’s actually not bad for a concept which grew out of Grant Morrison’s conceit that “every Batman story counts,” considering that all those Batman stories must now fit into an arbitrary-seeming five-year history.

6. End of the Archives? Last year I thought the Archives line was being phased out in favor of the hardcover Omnibii, paperback Chronicles, and black-and-white Showcase Presents reprints. Not so fast, my friend — there are more on the way.

7. Reprint floodgates. Were the Sugar & Spike Archives and the Flex Mentallo hardcover (coming in February) really “the first crack in the dam holding back collections of Suicide Squad, Captain Carrot, Secret Society of Super-Villains, and Jonah Hex?” Hmm — kind of. Suicide Squad got one paperback (although the second is at least in limbo) and Secret Society got a Volume 1 hardcover (with Vol. 2 coming in the spring), but still no Captain Carrot or Jonah Hex Volume 2. Still, among semi-obscure ‘70s and ‘80s fare, there was that Firestorm paperback; and collections of I … Vampire! and Night Force are apparently on the way. Good news for the 300 of us on the Internet who care about such things.

8. The changing shape of Events. Last January I thought Flashpoint and the Wonder Woman storyline “Odyssey” contained the seeds of a stealth crossover, and they’d eventually intersect in some kind of big-event way. That didn’t really happen, at least not how I pictured it.

9. The spirit of ‘86. Last year I wanted to see “a behind-the-scenes look at what went into that seminal year,” especially focusing on the revamps of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman supposedly called the “Metropolis Line.” That didn’t happen either, but we did get a whole slew of revamps.

10. DC on TV. I thought things looked good for “Human Target,” “Wonder Woman,” and the proposed “Raven” series. 0-for-3.

* * *

So, for 2012:

1. The Dark Knight Rises. Can it make a skillion dollars? Will it have Robin? Will it have subtitles?

2. The New 52, one year later. The more I think about it, the more I believe the New-52 books will each get at least twelve issues, regardless of sales. If any books are cancelled (and you have to think some of them will be), it’ll be in such a way that DC can claim they “told their stories,” not that readers grew tired of them.

3. The Next 52 (or however many). This is where I mention the promised-but-not-solicited Justice Society series and its Earth-2 setting. More to the point, here DC has a chance to expand the scope of its main line beyond that which made the New 52 a little too familiar. I got into this a little a few weeks back, but that was based on conventional wisdom and a little tea-leaf reading. Maybe a little more originality will work into the next batch of books.

4. Pandora’s playlist. Part of the reason I think the initial New-52 books will all get their twelve issues is this notion that they’re all building to some line-wide event involving the Hooded Woman from the No. 1 issues. DC says to call her Pandora, and she dresses like the Phantom Stranger’s aunt. From her I’m expecting some insight on the fate of the pre-relaunch timeline. Not that I care, of course.

5. More Watchmen. Really, what more is there to say? If the prequel rumors turn out to be true, whatever merits the stories themselves may have will surely be outweighed by the project’s inherent irrelevance. Also, the phrase “naked cash grab” won’t stop popping into my head. Still, there’s time for DC to repurpose the art which has been leaked thus far, and claim it’s all part of some commemorative portfolio. A big part of Watchmen deals with the nature of superhero comics themselves, so naturally it continually risks further exploitation. For characters reworked from their Charlton beginnings, so that DC could subsequently put out Blue Beetle, Captain Atom, The Question, et al., this is somehow ironic, sad, and inevitable, all at once.

6. More multimedia expansion. For various reasons, I haven’t owned a videogame system since my faithful Super Nintendo (almost twenty years ago — yikes!), and haven’t played a game-system kind of game regularly since X-Wing Alliance. Nevertheless, last year I heard nothing but accolades for Batman: Arkham City, which followed the similarly-praised Batman: Arkham Asylum, and which helped cement the Dark Knight’s insertion into another non-comics entertainment area. Although the DC Universe Online game doesn’t seem to have captured the gaming world’s collective heart, it’s still out there too, now free to play. Even if DCUO fades away, surely more Arkham-style games are in development. As for TV, “Batman: The Brave and the Bold” ended its Cartoon Network run, but “Young Justice” and “Green Lantern” will anchor CN’s DC Nation block of … well, a whole lot of different things, perhaps enough to warrant another new show just through the law of averages. Oh, and there have been announcements about new live-action TV series featuring Deadman and The Spectre. I got burned last year on DC’s TV prospects, so I’m not predicting anything about them. One thing’s for sure, though — DC is trying its darnedest to establish footholds in non-comics venues, even if that doesn’t translate into more comics sales.

7. Man of Steel and Green Lantern 2. Carla and I talked about these over the weekend, but I think we’ll learn a lot about the prospects of each by the end of 2012. Specifically, we should know more about whether either of those can replace the Batman (and/or Harry Potter) series as Warner Brothers’ go-to movie franchises. Now, this isn’t quite fair, because there will be another set of Batman movies after Christian Bale takes off his cape. Still, 2013′s Man of Steel is yet another chance for Warners to prove that Superman can be successful without either Christopher Reeve or the particular charms of “Smallville.” From what I have seen, I am hopeful but not optimistic. In fact, if the animated GL series does well enough, it could boost the chances of a live-action sequel, and it’s easier to replace a Green Lantern than it is a Superman.

8. Market share. December’s sales numbers show Marvel reclaiming the largest share of the Direct Market, after four months of coming in second to DC’s superhero titles. This doesn’t shock me, because Marvel just publishes more titles than DC does, and as the initial enthusiasm for the New-52 fades, the numbers tend not to be in DC’s favor. Still, now that DC has had a taste of the top spot, I wonder whether the publisher will start chasing it. Maybe it has started already.

9. Digital effects. Barring some unforeseen collapse, 2012 should provide a year’s worth of insight into DC’s day-and-date digital sales. Whether DC decides to share that with the public at large is another matter. If nothing else, though, digital sales help enforce a stricter shipping schedule for the print books. That could mean more changes in creative teams, whether temporary or permanent, but it could also help foster some every-Wednesday comics-shop habits in those coveted new readers. Of course, digital comics don’t need to conform to standard pamphlet lengths, and if DC decides to offer more digital-only (or at least digital-first) stories, it might open up new avenues for both readers and creators.

And that brings us to …

10. A return to storytelling. I have complained to various degrees about the problems the New-52 relaunch created for us longtime fans. I have also tried hard to be understanding, and to embrace the spirit of freedom and creativity a relaunch encourages. Accordingly, to the extent the New-52 books haven’t themselves embraced that spirit, I’ve been disappointed. If you have the chance to do what you want, you probably need to justify why you do the same old things. Here’s hoping that in 2012, the superhero line uses its still-new freedom wisely, as books like Animal Man, Wonder Woman, Swamp Thing, and Batwoman have, and that it cultivates an atmosphere of experimentation. If the DC of 2012 is built on solid fundamentals and good comics, that’ll be the best news I get all year.

Hulk Vs. Superman

[Previously on The Grumpy Color's 2011 roundup: Tom and Carla sat down to discuss DC and Marvel's corporate movements, how much cat-burglars love underwear, and how DC events progressed throughout the year to tumble right on into the New 52. Join us, won't you, as Tom has asked if, in light of the success of DC's reboot, Marvel will follow that lead with "Season One" and the Point-One projects, or perhaps something more... drastic?]

Carla: Oh Tom, you are adorable.

You see, Marvel did this thing, you might have heard of it: the Ultimate universe? It’s our having our reboot cake and eating our rich continuity other cake too. Two-fisted cake, sir! We can renovate and innovate to our heart’s content, rework the Avengers into the Ultimates, recostume everyone on the X-Men into a slicker, movie finish and draw readers in with a fresh setting and start. Meanwhile, business as usual can continue in our regularly scheduled books, and everyone should be fat and happy on delicious comics cake.

No matter what, the Ultimate line should give readers a definable training-wheels set of comics that will introduce ideas from yesteryear in a fresh modern setting. I do not hand Avengers books to people peeking inside for a glimpse at what the new movie is going to be like; I hand them the Ultimates (but only the first two). Once the basic idea is down, then they can move on to other Ultimate titles, try out some of the classic Avengers stories or pop in with a Bendis-penned issue of the current stuff. It’s the best of both worlds and, while it’s had some ups and downs, it’s worked out pretty well. And it’s why I hope that you’re right and that all this newness will generate a nostalgic miasma that repowers the old Earth-Whatever.

Season One is pretty much a response to Earth One and a fleshing out of the previous Origins or Mythos titles that come out from time to time. When someone asks, “Who’s Ghost Rider?”, I should be able to give that person a full explanation and a story that puts that explanation into entertainment. Point One is more for current comic readers who want to branch out into something new but haven’t read, say, Uncanny X-Force before. It gets good reviews, they want to give it a try, but starting from issue one seems expensive. The Point One issue should be a quick start into the regular line and a chapter marker for what is to come. These I will live with.

Tom: See, I didn’t think the Ultimate line was that drastic a move, mostly because it ran alongside the main Marvel U. At DC they called that Earth-One and Earth-Two and it worked out pretty well — at first….

Carla: It seems that way now, but back in the day, the Ultimate line was a fairly risky move that paid off in a unexpectedly brilliant way.

Tom: Actually, it did take me a while, but I am reading a couple of “rebooted” Marvel books, Amazing Spider-Man and Daredevil. Each made a big show of downplaying (if not outright rewriting) big chunks of continuity in favor of a new-reader-friendly tone, and the results have been pretty enjoyable.

Carla: See? Nice and easy. Marvel skins their knees on tone shifts and fresh new restarts all the time and bounces back at the best of times. At worst, we call it the Clone Saga and it becomes something of, err, legend. I hope for all of our sakes that the New 52 is the former.

Tom: I should have mentioned this back when we were talking about big events that didn’t seem to go anywhere, but nevertheless — Fear Itself was certainly a comic book published in 2011, right?

Carla: Hey now! I love Fear Itself like I love warm blankets, purring kittens and delicious chocolates. Fear Itself is a masterpiece of comfort food and compelling storytelling! This is the best Event book Marvel has put out in years and easily my favorite over Civil War. Tread carefully.

Tom: From what I understand it wreaked havoc on the Marvel U., which was then undone with a handful of decimal-point specials, and now there will be some spinoffs.

Carla: *sigh* It’s all amazingly simple and beautiful. Heroes fight Fear Itself personified. Fear comes in a bunch of different shapes and sizes, from mild to moderate to OMG WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE. Heroes take losses, get scared but overcome the terrible dangers and their own personal fears as well. Fear Itself #7 ends as the heroes win the day, the world saved but not without its price. All the heroes are shaken and need some time to work on what they just saw.

That’s where the epilogues begin. I’ll agree that the decimal label needs some… fine tuning and time to get into our heads as something more than an awkward gimmick, but the content in each issue was amazing. Fear Itself #7.1 couldn’t let Bucky just perish after all of Brubaker’s hard work, so Steve gets to go back to his job and Bucky gets to go back to covert ops. The best of both worlds once more. Fear Itself #7.2 reminds us all that this is fiction and no one really ‘dies’ in comics or in mythology or in storytelling. It’s a cycle, a story and it never really ends. A phenomenal issue that is pretty much my favorite comic of this entire year. Fear Itself #7.3 had Iron Man facing down the nasty, horrible part of this kind of war, the causalities, the senselessness of it all and how mortal man deals with things beyond his understanding. Tie-ins like Fear Itself: the Fearless are just making sure that the end of it all, the villains and concepts of Fear Itself don’t just disappear like so many Skrulls.

Tom: You know, I’m not sure whether I’ll read Winter Soldier, because as much as I want to, it somehow reminds me of that show Renegade.

Carla: Really now.

From Wikipedia: “The series stars Lorenzo Lamas as Reno Raines, a police officer who is framed for a murder he didn’t commit. Raines goes on the run and joins forces with Native American bounty hunter Bobby Sixkiller, played by Branscombe Richmond. The series was created and produced by Stephen J. Cannell, who also had a recurring role as main villain, crooked police officer Donald ‘Dutch’ Dixon.”

You are so just mad because Brightest Day turned up empty. If anything, Winter Soldier will be more like The Fugitive!

Tom: I didn’t say the Renegade thing was a fair comparison. It’s just that when I see a guy on a motorcycle with his soap-opera hair blowing in the breeze — which I swear I saw in regard to WS — it triggers a certain association.

Carla: James Buchanan Barnes’ hair is a mane of glory.

Tom: Moving on….

Since 2012′s big event will be Avengers Vs. X-Men, Marvel’s tradition of annual events continues — but despite my own prediction, DC might not put forth its own Crisis-style crossover. If Marvel has the only Big Event in town, does that automatically give it a leg up, or is the proverbial fatigue finally setting in?

Carla: You know, last year I would have said that we’d be fatigued to all get out and that this too would pass. Now? Nah. As long as people love trade paperbacks and as long as we are here to discuss the impact and record it for the history books, Event books aren’t going away. They might not be as pop culturally impactful as they once were, there might not be as much pomp and/or circumstance, they might be a bump in the road like so much Shadowland, but they will be. DC will find a way, even if it’s just a refurbish of an old classic storyline.

Tom: Well, to me a big DC event for next summer could go in a couple of different directions. Either it’s some mundane threat which legitimately affects the entire line, like a Daemonite invasion which spins out of Grifter and Voodoo or the vampire apocalypse of I, Vampire; or it’s the payoff to the Hooded Woman cameos and we find out whether the old-look DC has a place in the New 52.

We’ve been talking about the Ultimate line without mentioning its new headliner, Miles Morales. I know he represents the spirit of innovation and progress for which the Ultimate line was created — and I’m glad for that, don’t get me wrong — but how’s he working out as a going concern?

Carla: I can’t say the identity change has hurt the book, but I can’t say it’s made it fly off the shelves. Readers love NEW, and NEW in the digital age is difficult to keep a grasp on. People want to read the start, the inception, the moment someone becomes a hero rather than the long journey it takes to get to the more natural evolution of a character. Miles Morales is a genius move and I want readers to want him based on the quality of his character, not by his attention-grabbing headlines. I wish he got more press. I wish I knew what the new Ultimates’ M.O. was; but only time will tell. In the meantime, I have a whole other universe to keep me company while the newest newness can sort itself out.

Man, I hope they bring back the old continuity to DC for you, sir.

Tom: What about the overall state of both companies when it comes to diversity? I’d say DC has at least paid lip service to the idea, with Batwoman, Batwing, Mr. Terrific, Static, and Blue Beetle; but overall it looks like the same old faces producing the New 52. Marvel seems to be pruning its superhero line to make room for Avenging Spider-Man and other high-profile spinoffs. One in four New 52 books features some version of (or connection to) Batman, so it’s a popular strategy — but how sustainable is it?

Carla: We’ve been slapping a Deadpool, Wolverine or Spider-Man on random books for years. Popular guys are popular guys, and that’s what people want to buy. Now, when we had a glut of Deadpool books, we eventually had the market drop out on that and scaled back the ‘Pool to a point where we have some clearly defined stories for him to be in rather than everywhere all at once. But then you look at Wolverine, who writers reluctantly admit gets frequent flyer miles from being on the Avengers, X-Men and his own titles. So, it’s sustainable to a point? With a certain “Q Rating”? Who knows.

Creating new characters should be up to the old guard; bear with me on this one: guys like Mark Waid, Brian Michael Bendis, Ed Brubaker, etc. have an established readership. They write great Marvel stories and are some of the most well-versed writers on the subjects in their wheelhouse. Why not let them try out a new idea or two? They know the history well enough so that the new character won’t seem so jarring and, with some Wolverine guest-star training wheels, we as an audience will be more ready to accept them. Whether they get their own title is kind of up to management and financial anxiety, but if it works…

I know they’ve already sort of done this (Bendis’ Miles Morales, Brubaker’s version of Bucky might as well be a new character, X-23, etc) but we’re still missing some essential key that makes this a sustainable monthly book. This is a difficult industry, Tom. I am so glad we’re in the bleachers. =)

Tom: I’m not sure that asking a Mark Waid to create a new Marvel (or DC) character, which Marvel (or DC) is then free to exploit, would be the best way to go — especially since the more established creators are just as free to get a better deal from some other publisher.

Carla: But they have [created new characters]! I mean, Bucky is nothing like his original concept now, he’s practically a new character! It saves all the guesswork and if you really want to do something weird and removed from the official capes-and-tights world, well, Marvel has Icon, DC has Vertigo … try it out in some new ground. Eventually, Jessica Jones comes to meet Spider-Man, John Constantine stands next to Zatanna; there’s a way to do this.

Tom: I know what you’re saying about skittish readers needing that extra push to try something different, but maybe everyone would feel more comfortable with a big name on a lesser-known (or underachieving) title. Doesn’t that describe Waid’s Daredevil and, back when it relaunched, Brubaker’s Cap? (Wow, that sounds depressingly close to explaining why Marvel and DC don’t seem to create anything new….)

Carla: Yes! Yes yes yes. I would read the Towing section of the Yellow Pages if it was written by Matt Fraction and, despite better judgment, I’ll read whatever has the Hulk smashing about. It’s scary not to do the safe idea of matching big names to big characters for the biggest buck, but if DC’s 52 have told us anything, change is possible.

Don’t be depressed, Tom! It’s a brave new world! Yes we can, change is good! Let’s get some signs and a tent, we can make a difference! (for those keeping score at home, that was the obligatory Occupy movement gag)

Tom: So speaking of which, how much are you looking forward to selling Watchmen 2 to the apathetic and the downright hostile? I don’t know whether I’m more excited about Watchmen 2 or the 3D re-release of Phantom Menace.

Carla: Oh. Way to bring the room down there. Yeah, it’s a bad idea, not much more needs to be said. If they release it, people will rant and rail and buy it to complain even more. Such is the biz.

Tom: I was trying to think of some equally sacred Marvel story which no one wants sequelized, but Marvel may have done that already with JMS’ Osborn/Gwen hookup.

Carla: Oh! Oh uncalled for, ew! (and that was Quesada’s idea! JMS wanted them to be Peter and Gwen’s babies!) Yeah, we revised our bad ideas, it was called “One Moment in Time” and now we don’t talk about it. Yuck.

Tom: Okay, in order to burn that image out of my brain, I have looked at some Kate Beaton Wonder Woman comics. I’d love it if Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang’s work on WW were popular enough for a sequel to their classic “Architecture & Mortality,” but I doubt that’ll happen. Do you have some dream Marvel project you’d love to see in 2012?

Carla: Actually, I would buy the heck out of another Bizarro Comics volume, throwing in some Beaton and other indie guys to take some of the edge of all the 52-ness of it all. What dream project can I think of for 2012 from Marvel, though. Gosh. I guess it’d be some sort of Wasp revival; she’s a fantastic character and, in a beautiful world, I and Phil Noto would hammer out a mini-series about a fabulous, fun and fashionable gal who would go on exciting international crime-fighting adventures. Also, I’d get a pony and a rocketship.

Realistically, maybe they’ll find a big enough pile of money to bring Brian K. Vaughan back to the Runaways? I dunno. Maybe I’m too sated on Fraction being on Thor. That’s the gift that keeps on giving, sir.

Tom: Come to think of it, if you’re involved with any comics project, I hope it’s a guest-shot in IDW’s new Abramsverse Star Trek book. Surely by now your cadet character has become a senior officer on some high-profile starship! I’d be thrilled beyond words if the Enterprise met up with Captain Hoffman of the USS Defiant (or whichever…).

Carla: May you hang a star on my dreams, sir. =D

Tom: I think it’s about time to start wrapping up, but we can’t adjourn without some words about day-and-date digital comics. Everybody’s getting tablets these days — my mom got a Kindle Fire to go along with her plain-old Kindle, for goshsakes — so I’m hoping it opens up some new ways to explore comics. Not just the monthly books, either: maybe this’ll create new opportunities for those obscure characters and experimental stories I’m always yakking about. What effects do you see coming from digital? Anyone new at Metro who got turned on via their iPad and now wants to feel some slick paper every Wednesday?

Carla: True story: one of our regular customers comes into the store and notes Avenging Spider-Man #1 in its clear plastic baggie. We discuss polybags and their usefulness, and the code within the pages, and he asks me if I know anything about how this works. Does it download? Read from an online resource? What kind of reader does it use and is it Mac and PC compatible? How much trouble would it be to get this comic in digital form versus how much trouble it would be to come down to our store and take it in hand.

I didn’t have an answer. I mean, I know iPads are easy and handhold you all the way through the process with their super-slick technology, but if I was looking to make the transition on anything else, I was clueless. My brain is hardwired to follow ye olde fashioned logic of buying a newspaper when I want the news, buying a magazine off the rack at the grocery store and picking up comics in person from the friendly sales clerks at Metro Entertainment (cheap plug!). Did you know that if I go grab a cup o’ joe from Starbucks, I can read Marvel digital comics for free? And yet, here I was, dumbstruck when a customer knew if I could use the advanced option to a product in my own store.

I don’t understand the appeal of digital comics, but then again, I don’t understand the appeal of Twilight. Or wearing those big spacers in your ears. Times change and, no matter how much I would love a digital type to enter my store and ask for something fresh off the stands, it goes forward. I agree that that this brave new frontier is a great place to try out some of the fringey ideas, make shorts, “webisodes,” webcomics (oh dear Lord, if you have it in your heart, please give me a one page comic from Colleen Coover about the adventures of Marvel Girl and the Scarlet Witch in 2012!), maybe even a better stab at the motion comic that Heidenberg’d out on us, but day and date digital is only helping us in the paperback business as firming up some release dates. If people move on, they’ll move on.

And if that’s the way they go, we should be ready for it. No matter how nostalgia takes us, we can’t just pine for yesteryear like some Grumpy Old Fa-…. sorry.

Tom: Well, on that note, we’ll put 2011 to rest. Here’s hoping 2012 is good to us, and to all of you too!

Batman & Spider-Man

[Continuing their yearly tradition, Tom Bondurant and Carla Hoffman have joined forces to compare notes on the the relative fortunes of DC Comics and Marvel Comics.  Here is Part 1 of 2.]

Tom: Okay, old chum, if it’s late December it must be time to wrap up 2011 and usher in 2012. It’s the New 52 versus dozens of Avengers and Spider-Man titles! Christopher Nolan, David Goyer, and Christian Bale versus Joss Whedon, Andrew Garfield, and Earth’s Mightiest Heroes! High collars versus Point Ones! Judd Winick and Guillem March’s Catwoman versus … who, exactly?

Carla: I read Catwoman #1 and stopped there so this analogy is lost on me. Don’t go where I can’t follow, Frodo.

Tom: That was a dig at Marvel’s lack of female-lead titles….

Carla: Oh! I thought it was about our underwear-clad heroines. She-Hulk and Emma Frost have been flashing their bras at people since the 80′s! And don’t get me started on the Black Cat, how many female creative people we have, etc. etc. =D

Tom: Anyway, until September the Big Two were pretty much same-old, same-old. I suspect we’ll remember DC’s 2011 only for its 4th quarter, but in fairness we shouldn’t gloss over what led up to it. Therefore, I have to ask — from your retail perspective, how was DC doing in the before-time? Has the new stuff really made that much of a difference? And how do you, as a merry Marvelite, see the House of Ideas responding?

Carla: Say a couple gals go out for a night on the town and one of them dresses for attention. Hair done up, make up on a little thicker than normally, high heels, short skirt, the works. She’s out to catch herself a man and the other friend sort of looks her over in that “wow, laying it on a little thick there, eh?” way while wondering how she herself got so frumpy all of a sudden.

It’s a little like that.

As for the before-time, I gotta tell you: Green Lantern was selling WAY better. Blackest Night was a huge hit and that mythology was really pushing local reading buttons, so we sold it well. Off the top of my head, we also sold more Wonder Woman and Flash (when we got an issue), but less Justice League… it was kind of all over the place. No. 1s and the idea that one could be there at the very-first-something-or-other has pulled attention to the right books for market capitalization. But now that people have figured out our game of having to buy a comic once every month, the idea of following a title is starting to lose its luster for the novice collector. Now pulls are lowering, lists are sorting themselves out and aside from the tried and true Batman and Action Comics, numbers are receding like the tide. Are people buying more Action Comics at my store? Yes. Are they buying more of everything? Not really. So it’s great for the long term marketability, probably needs more time for other characters to get in on all the fame and fortune.

On a fun personal note, all the titles that I’m totally into are books I would have read pre-52 if they’d just released them: Batwing, Batwoman, Animal Man and The Shade could easily have been around without the big tarty reboot, so seriously, DC! Put on a sweater! You’re making Marvel look sensible.

As for how Marvel’s going to respond to the Big Reboot and freshening up on DC’s characters that got them major media coverage, a renewed interest in their franchise and a boost in sales unseen since Blackest Night? Oh, don’t worry: we’re going Hollywood. Marvel put out THREE MOVIES this year, all of which got an amazing 75% or above approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

So … Green Lantern. Yeah. How’s that working out for ya?

Tom: In fact, I have yet to watch Green Lantern on Blu-Ray, but I hear it’s much better with some made-for-home-video editing. Still, that’s the same kind of thing which got me more interested in Zack Snyder’s four-hour version of Watchmen. Now Warners have entrusted the Superman movies to Mr. Snyder, and even with Christopher Nolan looking over his shoulder, I have to say I’m a little concerned. That’s for 2013, though — next year I suppose Warners will have to settle for another billion-dollar Batman flick. Maybe they can put that money in a nice savings account and live off the interest while they look for the next ideal pairing of filmmaker and superhero.

I am seriously conflicted about Avengers’ prospects. Doesn’t it need to be hugely successful — like, three-movies-in-one successful — to justify itself? I am not seeing much middle ground in terms of quality, either. If it’s not tremendously entertaining, something in me keeps saying it’ll be a colossal 3-D trainwreck. These are purely irrational thoughts, but I simply cannot shake them.

Carla: Or could The Avengers be, at this point, too big to fail? Remember, Hollywood has been very very good to Marvel and even if Avengers turns out to be a Daredevil, there is so much involved in the production (big name actors, fan favorite director, a history of awesome movies catching the viewers up to the storyline) that it’s going to put butts in seats. It’s going to make people remember the names of the characters and if they want more, well, let me show you to the shelves! Here’s hoping.

Tom: Since we are talking nominally about comics, in what condition will I find the Avengers line come May? The last time I read an Avengers title regularly, Kurt Busiek and George Pérez were putting out the only one. If the Council of Cross-Time Toms plucked me from 1998 and dropped me into next summer, would I recognize any of the Avengers books?

Carla: Busiek and Pérez. Hee hee, you’re old. =)

No, sir, I can’t say you would recognize the Avengers anymore from the hey-days of yesteryear. Since Bendis disassembled the crew, Earth’s Mightiest Heroes are missing an intangible something from the era of the grand super-opera. The team has remained inert, a lot of their peril is personal rather than the saving-the-Earth variety and often times, there’s a lot of sitting around and talking. A lot. Then again, the new Bendis Avengers are popular. The snarky tone used for everything goes over well with chart topping sales and a steady following. When the Avengers movie hits, people won’t look back to the older eras of Avengers, they’ll look for Bendis’ work because Dear Lord he’s been on the book since 2006! That’s like… forever! It may not be my favorite stuff, but I will tip my hat to the man who really worked hard to put his own personal style into the public eye on the now highest profile book Marvel’s got.

And that’s the thing: sure we all love the printed page, but I am totally ready to cop to the fact that comics have to reach other media outlets in order to remain current. There is no way that I’d dump all my eggs in a Marvel Studios basket and leave my monthlies high and dry (I’d be out of a job!) but it does help keep Thor and Iron Man and Captain America and the Hulk and Ghost Rider in the public eye with big budget blockbusters.

If anything, DC should be thankful that Batman: Arkham City keeps us all well aware of Batman’s … Batmanitude. Credit where credit is due: those video games are HUGE. Not to mention the great work done in animation, with Young Justice and Batman: Brave and the Bold being fan potlucks of fun, and the upcoming DC Nation. Man, I wish we had thought of it first!

Tom: I wonder if post-Harry Potter, post-Nolan Batman, Warners considers either the GL movie or the upcoming Man of Steel to be too big to fail.

Carla: Probably. Superman is Superman is Superman and Returns wasn’t so much a mistake that people won’t turn up just to see what happens next (but that’s probably why we haven’t had a Daredevil movie). Superman is a wonderfully safe property to launch a film series with, but Hal Jordan? Well, he’s kind of the least interesting thing about the Green Lanterns. Maybe they thought the genre as a whole could invest into guys they’d never heard of automatically? Maybe they forgot that what made Blackest Night so popular and the Green Lantern books so huge was the vast operatic tale of planets and emotions and everyone united under their own beacons so that no evil would escape their sight … not Van Wilder in a Mo-Cap suit.

P.S.: he should have been Deadpool.

Ooh, here’s something I can ask: with The Dark Knight Rises officially billed as the Final Chapter of the saga that Mr. Nolan laid out for us, do you think a World’s Finest motion picture might be up next? Depending on how the combiner-mecha gestalt of Avengers does as far as big movies leading up to an even bigger movie, will we see the Justice League in our lifetime? And will Wonder Woman wear pants??!?!

Tom: It seems pretty definite that Christian Bale isn’t suiting up again, whether it’s for World’s Finest or JLA. Regardless, though, I don’t see either of those movies getting made. Remember, Warners tried ‘em both a few years back. Superman Vs. Batman got as far as a script (which is kind of dire and fanfic-y — Bruce gets married, but Superman ruins it somehow), and Justice League’s cast was full of young whippersnappers. Avengers would have to make the kind of money Scrooge McDuck swims in, and Man of Steel would have to be at least okay, in order for Justice League to even have a chance.

Carla: Ah, but that was then; this is now! Sure, Warner Brothers is going to have to find the happy median between dire and dark philosophical dramas and silly goofy guys in tights, but they could do it. Avengers could really make the McDuck cash that might force one of the largest motion picture making studios in Hollywood, an institution of classic films, to compete with … well, you know who.

Tom: And as you say, DC may have to be content with its regular Cartoon Network exposure.

Carla: Can I just take a minute and say how exciting that is? Sure, Marvel may have set their sights on Hollywood, but DC is kicking out the jams as far as the small screen animation. They’re unique, fun, surely everyone in production seems to love the characters and the history they came from. When I finally sat down to watch Batman: The Brave and the Bold and Young Justice, I found myself compelled to love them despite preconceived notions. I mean, if there’s not going to be a Justice League movie, we will still have the finest show of all time representing DC’s best and brightest in animated form.

Honesty time: was the majority of 2011 just a waste for DC? Did Brightest Day really matter? Why was Flashpoint? Like, at all? I want to ask about how Geoff Johns’ great space opera that started in Green Lantern: Rebirth and continued all the way through the Sinestro Corps War and Blackest Night and this year’s Brightest Day might have continuing momentum through the DC universe; or how seeing a different side to Aquaman and Wonder Woman in Flashpoint might affect their characters in the regular Earth-Whatever and play into future stories — but man. Brightest Day feels like it happened in another time, another place. An Age of Geoff-ocalypse, if you will.

Tom: Phrases like “Age of Geoff-ocalypse” are exactly the reason I look forward to our team-ups. Who says this isn’t the Marvel Age of clever inter-company wordplay?

Brightest Day seems to be the latest example that DC’s high sheriffs really don’t have much in the way of long-term plans for the superhero line. It’s like you’re driving southbound I-75 on the way to Disneyworld — you’ve been there a dozen times before and it’s always fun, but maybe it’s still getting a little old — and just after you get through Atlanta you decide to chuck the whole thing and go bar-crawling in New Orleans. If Blackest Night capped off a lot of big-event subplots (mostly involving untimely deaths), Brightest Day was a decent transitional series, helping fine-tune the status quo. Along with the JMS-driven Superman and Wonder Woman storylines, the Batman Incorporated makeover, the James Robinson JLA, Justice League: Generation Lost, and whatever Geoff Johns had planned for the Flash, it looked like DC was settling into a comfortable (if not entirely innovative) post-event atmosphere. I mean, when Flashpoint came along my whole take on it was “great, an event which can stand on its own and not have to worry about long-term continuity effects.” And sure, that makes me look like a chump — but really, I think I can be forgiven for supposing that, having spent at least the past year on the aforementioned tweaks and relaunches, DC wouldn’t want to restart its superhero books with a completely different basis.

Carla: It’s okay. Sometimes love makes us look like chumps. That’s why Peter Parker is single. Wait– what?

Tom: And yeah, Flashpoint itself now looks pretty irrelevant to the New-52 — except for the hooded woman from all the #1 issues who is probably the harbinger of next summer’s Big Event. I may be deep in denial over the loss of my precious pre-September continuity, but I still don’t think DC has let go of it either. Since you brought up “too big to fail,” that sure seems to apply to the New-52, especially since it has made such an initial splash.

Carla: Ehnnnnnnnn, maybe. All I can say is that from my side of the counter, there are books being put back. Customers are looking for a payoff and some of the issues drag on just a little too long and have sparse content from a world essentially having to detach itself from the years of foundation it had before. Four issues in and it seems like some books are concentrating far too hard to flesh out what should be a simple yellow text box at the start of every issue. The new 52 could fail, life happens, peoples’ tastes change, what is super-popular right now could be next week’s quarter bin. Remember the ‘90s and beware.

Tom: Duly noted, but I do think DC will try to leverage its current success into a new focus on the pre-September stuff. Make no mistake — while that might not be the smartest thing to do, I can totally see DC trying it, in part because they did pour so much into 2011′s pre-relaunch books.

Now, in light of the New 52, do I think the bulk of 2011 was a waste for DC? No, because it still yielded some fine comics, including the still-relevant GL and Batman books. Even Superman and Wonder Woman perked up once JMS left. (Just sayin’.) I like continuity and the joys of a coherent shared universe, but I can’t unread those pre-September stories, you know?

And speaking of line-wide relaunches, I’m skeptical that Marvel will pull a New-52 of its own, but I was spectacularly wrong about DC. Are these “Season One” and Point-One projects (along with the movies) enough to simplify things for new readers, or could Marvel actually feel the need to do something big and drastic?

[The answer -- tomorrow!]

Green Lantern vol. 3 #19

Last week’s post discussed a couple of interrelated topics which I thought deserved a little more attention. One comes out of the idea that there can be a “Superman done right,” and the other deals with the development of a concept over time. Both of these are central to any fan of modern corporately-owned superhero comics, and in fact they inform much of our debates. However, they raise some thorny questions.

First off, the notion of “[character] done right” necessarily implies that the character can be “done wrong.” This is nothing new. Many fans might even say that the “wrong” examples far outnumber the “right” ones. For me, though, the problem comes when the “right” examples vary from the original conception of the character.

We can find examples of this in the various Green Lanterns. Writer John Broome, artist Gil Kane, and editor Julius Schwartz revitalized GL by making him an honest, fearless test pilot; but after a decade of straightforward adventures, Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams turned that on its ear. O’Neil and Adams also created Hal’s new deputy, John Stewart, a passionate architect dedicated to social justice. Nevertheless, for his role on the “Justice League” animated series, John became a hard-edged ex-Marine. This portrayal found its way into the comics, where it superseded John’s original (and somewhat lower-key) background.

Hal’s first backup, Guy Gardner, may have gotten the biggest makeover. Created by Broome and Kane for 1968′s Green Lantern #59, Guy was the one-off star of a story which revealed that he could easily have been top dog in Sector 2814. As you probably know, O’Neil and Adams introduced John after putting Guy out of commission a few pages earlier. Several years later, after a brief stint with a power ring, Guy was left comatose, until writer Steve Englehart and artist Joe Staton revived him in time for Crisis On Infinite Earths. That cataclysm gave Englehart and Staton the opening to make Guy something of a renegade — not quite as bad as Sinestro, but not the most friendly to Hal, John, or their peers. Furthermore, once Guy joined the Justice League, writers Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis amped up his boorish qualities. Today, all of that has been swirled around and blended into a fairly nuanced personality, but it’s hard to say whether any of it goes back specifically to the brief glimpse readers got in 1968.

Indeed, all three Lanterns trace their roots back to the Golden Age’s Alan Scott, created by Bill Finger and Martin Nodell. Alan literally looks nothing like his descendants: blond with a red, green, and purple costume and a magic ring and battery which didn’t come from the planet Oa. (Well, not directly, and not at first.) So do we judge how faithful Hal, John, and Guy are to Alan? Can we?

It depends on how we view the character of “Green Lantern,” and it brings me to the second prong of today’s post. Although none of us superhero fans are getting any younger, I suspect there are few of us who remember Alan as the only GL. Heck, I wonder how many of us remember a time before Guy or John. It’s not a stretch to suppose that the vast majority of superhero-comics readers see “Green Lantern” as one of DC’s legacies, albeit one which allows (if not encourages) multiple Lanterns to coexist. Put another way, “Green Lantern” isn’t a single character, it’s an idea — hero with magic ring — which runs through decades’ worth of stories and several individual characters. Accordingly, we judge how faithful those characters are to the abstract idea, not necessarily the creators’ intent. Again, we do this in large part because that’s what we know. That’s all we have known. We can try to put ourselves in the place of a reader from the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s, whenever, but by and large that’s not our true perspective.

I was reminded of this over the weekend when talking about Star Wars, and specifically how to introduce various younger family members to the Galaxy Far, Far Away. To me, it came down to a couple of factors: the “padawan’s” age, and whether she was interested in the films as one coherent story. Basically, I figured that if a kid didn’t know about a certain big spoiler, she might as well start with Episode I and go all the way through to VI. However, I know that won’t apply in most cases; so generally, I’d start with the 1977 original (as amended, unless one doesn’t mind VHS) before going back to The Phantom Menace. Sure, you have to watch Episode IV twice, but what’s wrong with that?

The larger point, though, is that Star Wars has developed from a single game-changing blockbuster to a familiar, almost constant presence in pop culture. Like many of you, I can remember a world without Star Wars, and therefore I can remember what it was like in the beginning. When I was 8, the only way to see Star Wars was in the theater, and we had to wait a year (uphill, both ways, in the snow) for the first toys. By contrast, today’s adolescents can watch the movies (or the “Clone Wars” cartoons) on the DVD players in their parents’ cars while on their way to Target for the latest action figures and weaponry.

Wow, that sure sounds like Grandpa Simpson, huh? (Speaking of constant presences in pop culture….) I can flip it around just as easily, because those Green Lantern Archives and Showcase Presents are full of stories from before I was born. Fandom has a certain “unearned” quality which is almost unavoidable in such cases, for the simple fact that these longstanding works have become ubiquitous. It was a big deal in 1991 when Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire and Tom Veitch and Cam Kennedy’s Dark Empire came out, because Return of the Jedi was eight years in the past and Marvel’s SW comic had been gone for five. Still, what does it matter in the greater scheme of things if Zahn’s novel or the Dark Horse comic were a new fan’s first glimpse at the GFFA? What if today’s fans got hooked first by Phantom Menace or this season’s “Clone Wars?” Without new converts, fandom dies, and the best the old-timers can hope for is that the newbies at least appreciate their roots.

Even so, sometimes those roots are hopelessly tangled. We can’t ignore the shoddy treatment many creators have endured after being cut out of their characters’ successes — but at the same time, we tend only to know these characters in their current forms, in some cases far removed from their first appearances. As a kid, I recognized Superman as drawn by Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson, and Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s stories were artifacts of the distant past. Today, I buy Superman comics because of my enduring affection for the character, although that affection comes from having discovered a version of him decades in the making. Regardless, I remain grateful to Siegel and Shuster for their creation, and I want their legacies treated properly.

Thus, I am still trying to work out how to balance my fannish desires with those moral imperatives. Some things, like the Siegel and Shuster estates’ legal rights, aren’t for me to determine. I can control my comics-buying habits, but for various reasons (including this column) I don’t see me boycotting DC anytime soon. Instead, I try to give credit where it’s due while never losing sight of my pastimes’ beginnings. Whether I was there at the start or came in late, I’m one of their historians, and that’s what comes with the job.

The Season's Finest

… [T]here were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.

And the angel said unto them, “Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.”

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”

– Luke 2: 8-14 (King James Version)

If you are inexorably compelled to top off that passage with “And that’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown,” join the club. As well, if you’re wondering how this relates to DC Comics’ superheroes, fear not — we’ll get there. (And if you don’t celebrate Christmas, don’t worry — I’ll try not to prosletyze.)

* * *

Each of us, as we age, edits our tastes; revising and, inevitably, revisiting them. For me, it came down to “I liked this before — why shouldn’t I like it again?” Over the years I have been through this process with pretty much everything which entertained me as a youngster: comics, music, D&D, even the big things like Star Trek and Star Wars. (While my Star Wars sabbatical only lasted from 1984-87, it still felt like an eternity.)

Naturally, when I decided I was going to get serious (relatively speaking) about religion, I took a second look at how I’d been celebrating Christmas. Along the way I winnowed down the number of Christmas specials I watched — not quite in an ideological-purity way, but by and large that’s how it turned out. The cuts were pretty brutal, especially on the animated side, because most of them dealt with the more secular aspects of the holiday: Santa, reindeer, snowmen, and a non-denominational “attitude of gratitude.” Nothing wrong with any of that on its own, of course; but to me it didn’t seem particularly Christmas-y. In fact, for a number of years only “A Charlie Brown Christmas” made the must-watch list, mostly for Linus’ recitation from the Gospel of Luke. Again, I wasn’t condemning Rudolph and Frosty to the fiery pit — I just didn’t feel like I was missing out on any lessons about Jesus’ birth if I failed to watch ‘em each year.

Accordingly, since then I have tried hard to set aside twenty or so minutes for the simple, affecting tale of an alienated boy struggling to find his place in the confusion of the Christmas season (and not, I should mention, seeking solace in a Red Ryder BB gun). Not only does it point the way to a key Scriptural lesson, it also reminds me of Charles Schulz’ singular view of the world, and how he was able to communicate that vision so skillfully for almost the last fifty years of his life. Of course he did it through the modest medium of comics; and of course his work both elevated and transcended that medium. When I watch “A Charlie Brown Christmas” (which I realize isn’t comics, but close enough for our purposes), I see the genius that was Peanuts; and it warms my heart almost as much as the holiday sentiment does.

* * *

Lately, though, part of me wants to see a more baroque, retro-gonzo, Morrison/Quitely-esque Nativity account. Page One: a handful of silent, dark panels show shepherds keeping watch. Open up pages 2 and 3 for an eruption of radiance, as the angel makes ‘em sore afraid for three-quarters of the splash and calms ‘em down in inset panels running along the right side. Pages 4 and 5 up the ante even more with another two-page spread: the Heavenly Host exploding with light and fanfare over the dark desert, praising God and singing the most beautifully unearthly music any human had ever heard. I know the music is a tall order for print, but sometimes you just want to go all-out.

Sometimes, too, you want to make your pastimes fit where they might not ordinarily go. Hearing Luke’s account, it’s hard for me not to be reminded of the Kents finding baby Kal-El on the bleak Kansas plains. In John Byrne’s 1986 revision, the Kryptonian pod landed just before a Snowstorm of the Century conveniently trapped much of Small County in their homes, and gave Martha time to explain why no one saw her pregnant. Moreover, the ‘86 origin included an outer-space battle between the Green Lantern Corps and the Manhunters, the latter trying to claim Kal-El for their own. I like to think they fought close enough to the Earth that the green Oan energy could be seen from the ground, not unlike the angels’ display over Bethlehem.

That’s probably wishful thinking on my part, though. In terms of Biblical parallels, the Superman legend tracks closer to Moses than Jesus, and it’s only superficially similar at best. Superman may come “from above,” but his mission is based squarely on terrestrial ethics. In fact, Wonder Woman is more of a messianic figure, since it’s pretty much her job to bring Amazonian values to Patriarch’s World. Her classic origin is both mythic and poignant, but if one is looking for Christian parallels, the New-52 revisions are certainly helpful (besides being “in character” for the Greek gods, of course). The Christian Nativity is its own thing, just as Superman’s and Wonder Woman’s origins are largely their own, regardless of the connections we readers try to make.

Nevertheless, we make these connections, because we want our pastimes to be meaningful beyond their escapist thrills. When Superman died and returned, it wasn’t to save DC-Earth from its sins. (Instead, it helped propagate the sins of ‘90s excess.) However, those storylines helped reinforce those easy, familiar parallels. What, then, does that make the New-52 Supes? Is he “Buddy Christ,” the user-friendly Jesus for the 21st Century?

Actually, if we’re talking about periodic revisions, Superman is closer to Santa Claus. Snopes.com describes the latter as

a hybrid, a character descended from a religious figure (St. Nicholas) whose physical appearance and backstory were created and shaped by many different hands over the course of years until he finally coalesced into the now familiar (secular) character of a jolly, rotund, red-and-white garbed father figure who oversees a North Pole workshop manned by elves and travels in a sleigh pulled by eight reindeer to deliver toys to children all around the world every Christmas Eve.

Thus, one was inspired by a real person — a wealthy orphan, as it happens, whose fortune helped him do good — and one sprung from the imaginations of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, but the intervention of “many hands” shaped both irrevocably. While the illustrator Haddon Sundblom drew iconic images of Santa for the Coca-Cola Company, and pencillers like Wayne Boring and Curt Swan set the style for Superman for decades, the looks of both characters had already been fairly well-established. We don’t see too many revisions to Santa’s look these days, and I suspect that before too long, the New-52 Superman will revert to a more classic appearance as well.

* * *

In a way, this is what puzzles me about people who say they don’t “get” Superman and Wonder Woman. I understand that it’s easier to grasp the ideas behind Batman, Green Lantern, and the Flash. Under their abilities and gear, they’re just guys, driven by relatively mundane mindsets. Superman and Wonder Woman are allegedly more obtuse because they represent higher ideals. Well, what about Santa? His mission of omniscient compassion and annual rewards (coupled these days with a dollop of economic stimulus) is just as lofty, but no one looks to relaunch him every few years.

Now, you may say that Santa is hardly as complex as either the Last Son of Krypton or the Amazing Amazon, and there is some truth to that. However, with Superman and Wonder Woman, it’s possible as well to go overboard on complexity — to bend over backwards to make them “relevant” or “realistic” at the expense of what made them appealing initially. And this, too, is part of the reason no one looks to relaunch Santa — because Santa’s audience is self-renewing, and never really goes away.

Similarly, there will always be an audience for Superman, and that audience will know, deep in its collective heart, when Superman is done right. When that happens, whether it comes from Siegel & Shuster or Morrison & Quitely or Christopher Reeve, it’s one of the most special things on Earth. Superman is one of those rare creations of fiction which, like Charlie Brown and Santa Claus, has transcended its original state to become an icon of something pure and true. After that point, tweaking tends to yield diminishing returns. We “know” Superman like we know the others, because he speaks to the best parts of ourselves.

Accordingly, this time of the year it doesn’t take much to trigger my sentimental impulses. For me, the best trappings of Christmas are the most primal, the most elementary: the dark desert, the angels, the shepherds, and of course the Child. The primal Superman elements do the same: the costume, the transformation, the powers. Adding too much else threatens to obscure them.

Introducing his ultimate Superman story, Alan Moore referred to “a perfect man who came from the sky and did only good.” Whoever that is for you, I hope this season inspires you to do the same. After all, that’s what Christmas is all about.

OMAC #7

Since the March solicitations kick off the back half of the New 52′s first year, it’s probably worth noting that the whole line remains unchanged: no “midseason replacements” like Justice Society, but no cancellations either. If I hear relieved sighs from OMAC and Men of War, certainly Dan DiDio and Jim Lee have to be pleased generally that they’ve gotten this far with the 52 intact.

Well, pleased or stubborn, I suppose. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.

Ahem.  Away we go…!

HISTORY LESSONS

One of my pet peeves about the New-52 is the sense that it lacks a meaningful “history.” For at least the last few decades, a reader might not have known exactly what had happened or when, but s/he could tell that these characters hadn’t just fallen off the turnip truck. I say this because the solicits for Justice League #7 and Flash #7 both allude to their books’ untold backstories. With Justice League, we’ll learn about membership turnover and other details of the five years between the League’s debut and today. (To be sure, some of that has already been alluded to in the League’s previous present-day appearances, like JL Dark #1.)

Similarly, Flash features the return of Captain Cold and probably some other members of the Rogues’ Gallery, so I presume we’ll hear about their various dealings with the Scarlet Speedster. Now, I don’t expect either of these books to make explicit references to particular Silver Age stories, because I think DC still wants to avoid alienating new readers with (what may be to them) arcane Easter eggs. Regardless, it’s comforting to know that these characters are getting at least some of their history back. (I would like to see an organizational chart explaining the jurisdictions of the main League, the JLI, and JL Dark, though….)

THIS AND THAT

Between OMAC and the Challengers of the Unknown’s Ace turning into a giant monster, I hope Dan DiDio isn’t thinking that’s his new sweet spot. (That and Jack Kirby references, of course — OMAC #7 gives us the new Evil Factory.)

It may be the longtime fan in me, but it’s hard not to think DC has some line-wide crossover planned for the New-52′s first anniversary. (The cynic in me thinks that’s why nothing has been cancelled yet.) While I’m on the fence about such a move’s artistic merits, I applaud the crossovers between I, Vampire and Justice League Dark. Given the former’s setup, it makes perfect sense that the latter would be involved. It’d also be nice to see more acknowledgment that various insidious events are threatening the larger DC universe — the vampire war, the stealthy alien invasions of Grifter and Voodoo, and the hinted connections among Frankenstein and OMAC and Superboy, Teen Titans, and Legion Lost.

I’ve liked Chip Kidd’s design work, including his showcases of Batman memorabilia, so I’m curious to see how that translates into writing Batman: Death By Design. With his clean, uncomplicated approach, Dave Taylor is a good match for this project, because he’s versatile enough to handle what I expect will be a wide range of styles. He also did one of the World’s Finest miniseries about ten years ago, and he drew a pretty good Batman in that.

COMINGS AND GOINGS

New creative teams abound: Joe Harris comes in for Gail Simone as Firestorm’s co-writer, while co-writer Ethan Van Sciver draws issue #7 in place of Yildray Cinar. Ann Nocenti and Harvey Tolibao are your new Green Arrow writer and artist.  James Bonny joins Tony Daniel as Hawkman’s co-writer. Keith Giffen and Dan Jurgens write, and Jurgens pencils, Superman. After Sterling Gates’ departure, Rob Liefeld flies solo on Hawk & Dove. Paul Jenkins takes over writing Stormwatch from Paul Cornell (who then becomes free to write his own Saucer Country series, which looks quite good); Marc Bernardin takes over writing Static Shock; and Tom DeFalco is the new Legion Lost writer.

Also, Gene Ha fills in for Jim Lee on Justice League #7.  Fine by me!

MINISERIES

DC Universe Online Legends wraps up in March with issue #26, and as late as it may be for me, I am somewhat tempted to check it out. Essentially it’s an alternate take on the pre-New-52 status quo, which makes me feel oddly nostalgic. (Also concluding in March are October’s trio of 6-issue miniseries, Huntress, My Greatest Adventure, and Legion: Secret Origin.)

A couple of weeks back I wondered if there weren’t a new Night Force in the works, and what do you know? March brings another Night Force miniseries, courtesy of co-creator Marv Wolfman and appropriately-moody artist Tom Mandrake. I’m a little surprised that the solicitation just assumes everyone knows about Wolfman and the late Gene Colan’s team of supernaturally-oriented investigators.

Okay, I like THUNDER Agents pretty well, and I’m planning on getting all of the new miniseries — but why start a two-part backup story featuring one of the more obscure Agents in the next-to-last issue of what may be your final miniseries?

COLLECTIONS

The first four New-52 collections are solicited here, although they come out in May. While I know it’s not unusual to have a small gap between the last issue collected and the current issue on the stands, I like that readers who want to jump aboard with the monthly issues need only find (at most) three single issues to get caught up.

Alternatively, it’s entirely possible to see the New-52 collections as cousins to the superhero line’s original graphic novels (e.g., Luthor, Joker, and the “Earth One” books), with these first four kicking off an every-six-months schedule. If I were completely new to the superhero line, or otherwise didn’t want to commit to the weekly grind, that could be a fairly reasonable schedule.

Having “lived through” the “No Man’s Land” storyline back in 1999, I’ve not been that eager to revisit it. Therefore, the timing of these new paperback editions must be right. “NML” may even read better in big collections; because as effective as it was to watch Gotham abandoned and rebuilt in real time over the course of a calendar year, the experience surely becomes more attractive if it goes by more quickly.

I’m also glad that DC will be reprinting all of the “Knightfall/KnightQuest/KnightsEnd” saga in hefty paperback form. Like “NML” (which obviously took its format from the earlier events), these stories were serialized a week or two at a time, and played out over about eighteen months. In light of Bane’s upcoming star turn, it’s much easier to understand why DC is reprinting “Knightfall” again, but these remain some pretty entertaining comics regardless. Similarly, the “Venom” arc from Legends of the Dark Knight laid the groundwork for Batman’s eventual nemesis, but it stood on its own for at least a couple of years as well.

Although I seem to be saying this a lot more than I expected to, thanks DC for continuing the Archives line, this time with a new Green Lantern Archives volume. I was glad to get the first six, and I’ll be glad to see no. 7. Similarly, I’m glad to see the second volume of Secret Society Of Super-Villains solicited. The uneven tale of miscreants (and Captain Comet) operating on the margins of the Multiverse remains, with all its flaws, a fine example of DC’s superhero books in the 1970s. Plus, if my chronology is correct, it wraps up with the JLA arc which helped inspire Identity Crisis.

Speaking of the Multiverse, don’t get me wrong — it’s great that DC is collecting All-Star Squadron, the ‘80s series featuring Earth-Two’s Golden Agers fighting the Axis and other wartime bad guys. However, I do wish it was coming out in color, like those ‘70s Justice Society paperbacks from a few years back. Regardless, if the solicitation is accurate as to the issues collected, SPASS vol. 1 should include the five-part JLA/JSA crossover which bounces from the ‘80s to World War II to the Cuban Missile Crisis and involves three parallel Earths. Never could keep that one straight….

Finally, my stat-nerd heart is warmed by the thought of a Secrets of the Fortress of Solitude collection, and I bet yours is too.

* * *

Well, that’s what jumped out at me this month. What looks good to you?

Justice League America #61

Don’t ask me how I remember this, but it was just about twenty years ago that the first previews of Dan Jurgens’ Justice League began appearing. After five years, the “bwah-ha-ha” era was winding down, and Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis were leaving Justice League America. Giffen was also stepping away from plots and breakdowns for Justice League Europe, with JLE’s scripter Gerard Jones taking over as the book’s only writer; and Brian Augustyn replaced Andy Helfer as both books’ editor.

With a number of the New 52 titles changing creative teams before they’re even a year old, it’s too early to start talking about any long-lived, let alone definitive, runs on a particular book. Still, DC clearly hopes these books will be around for a while, even without the folks who launched ‘em. It got me thinking about past changes of the guard, and how they have followed some well-established interpretations.

* * *

Let’s begin with the Jurgens League, which was a big part of a wider effort to establish the Justice League as a mini-franchise. In the spring of 1992, the League family included JLA and JLE, as well as the oversized anthology Justice League Quarterly. “Breakdowns,” an epic crossover between the two monthly books, left the two teams pretty much disbanded, only to reunite (with some newer, higher-profile members) in the one-shot Justice League Spectacular. Although the overall effect made JLA and JLE less wacky, the changes also tried to give the books more of a high-adventure feel, deliberately trying to evoke the Silver Age team. The covers of JLA #61 and JLE #37 each paid homage to early Justice League of America moments, with JLA’s copying Justice League of America #1 and JLE’s parodying the original team’s origin (from JLofA #9).

Justice League Europe #37

In hindsight, it was part of a cycle which should be familiar to longtime Justice League fans. As a response to the “Detroit League’s” lineup of lesser-knowns, Giffen, DeMatteis, and penciller Kevin Maguire had built Justice League International around veterans from the original team (Batman, Black Canary, Martian Manhunter), familiar characters with no previous League affiliation (Mr. Miracle, Dr. Fate, Captain Marvel), and those newer to the spotlight (Blue Beetle, Booster Gold, Captain Atom, Guy Gardner, Dr. Light). For years the JLI was successful without the likes of Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, or Hal Jordan, mostly because it poked fun at the kind of omnipotent super-team to which they would belong. However, when Jurgens and Jones (and JLE’s new artist Ron Randall) took over, the two Leagues expanded to accommodate exactly those characters. Superman joined Beetle, Booster, Guy, Fire, and Ice in Justice League America, while Power Girl, Flash, Crimson Fox, and Elongated Man welcomed Hal, Aquaman, (eventually) Wonder Woman, and (for the first arc) Batman into Justice League Europe.

Strange as it may sound, this was a big deal at the time. After a few years of post-Crisis On Infinite Earths creative renovations, DC was starting to rediscover the Silver Age. Jurgens’ first villain was Xotar the Weapons Master, not seen since 1960′s Brave and the Bold #29, and his last big storyline involved Doctor Destiny and a twisted version of the Satellite League. Intervening was 1992′s “Death Of Superman” storyline, and since Superman was part of the League, Doomsday got to sideline Booster and put Beetle in a coma. There’s some metatextual hay to be made out of a Silver Age pastiche featuring self-referential post-Crisis characters being decimated by an early-‘90s stunt-plot built around killing one of the world’s most recognizable pop-culture figures, but in the end it was just a big mess. Jurgens’ JLA ended up with Wonder Woman, Guy Gardner, Maxima, the Ray, Black Condor, Agent Liberty, and Bloodwynd, and Jurgens left soon thereafter. When the JL books were reshuffled a year or so later, Gerard Jones was the new writer, and the cycle began anew.

Teen Titans vol. 2 #1

As it happened, Jurgens also ended up taking over the Teen Titans from longtime writer Marv Wolfman. Of course, Wolfman’s association with the Titans went back to the late ‘60s, but he’d really made his mark in 1980, in collaboration with artist George Pérez. Wolfman stayed on New (Teen) Titans for some fifteen years, and by the time Nightwing put the book to bed with issue #130, there didn’t seem to be much more to do with those characters. Accordingly, Jurgens started fresh in Teen Titans #1 (October 1996), with a group of super-powered youngsters sharing a common origin. Leading the group was the Atom, stuck in the body of a 16-year-old following a temporal accident, and helping to mentor them was Mr. Jupiter, a figure from one of the original Titans’ other relaunches. Jurgens’ Titans lasted two years, although issue #12 featured the originals in the start of a four-part storyline and Captain Marvel Jr. joined around issue #17. The book ended with issue #24, but the original Titans reunited in 1998′s JLA/Titans miniseries, and one of Jurgens’ characters (Argent) joined the subsequent Titans title. Argent even appeared in the seminal JLA storyline “Rock Of Ages,” albeit as one of the last superheroes standing after Darkseid’s global conquest. With the Titans’ New-52 history uncertain, who knows when they might pop up; but for the most part, they made it through the past few crossovers relatively unscathed. However, DC hasn’t tried a completely-new Titans book since then (not counting the recent all-villains Titans, that is), and I would say the feature is subject to the same ebb and flow of big-name characters as Justice League is.

Speaking of ex-Titans, The Flash vol. 2 was lucky enough to have only a handful of writers during its twenty-year run. Mark Waid spent some six-and-a-half years writing (or co-writing with Brian Augustyn) Wally West’s adventures, most notably letting Wally come to grips with his place in the Flash legacy. Waid also gave Wally a distinctive, matter-of-fact voice appropriate to a character who’d spent most of his life with super-speed. Accordingly, when Geoff Johns took over Flash, he inherited a well-adjusted protagonist and didn’t try to fix what wasn’t broken. Instead, Johns focused on Wally’s surroundings: breathing life into the blue-collar, hockey-loving Keystone City; offering new perspectives via detectives Chyre and Morillo; and famously focusing on the Flash’s Rogues’ Gallery. Johns stayed on Flash for five years, effectively wrapping it up in time for an Infinite Crisis-related relaunch.

So, can we draw some conclusions from these three disparate examples? I doubt there are any hard-and-fast rules, but I do have some observations. First, despite writing and drawing both, Dan Jurgens was asked to do two different things on Justice League America and Teen Titans. Essentially, JLA picked up where Giffen and DeMatteis left it, except that a) Jurgens tried to fold it into the Superman titles and b) Jurgens wasn’t nearly as funny. (His recent Booster Gold work was a lot better by comparison.) Conversely, Teen Titans was supposed to be something new (if grounded in the familiar DC universe) and turned into something pretty familiar when the new stuff failed to catch on. By contrast, the new stuff in Johns’ Flash was mostly new perspectives on familiar elements, like Keystone City and the Rogues.

We tend to forget it because Gail Simone was associated with the characters for so long, but Chuck Dixon was the original Birds Of Prey writer, guiding Black Canary and Oracle through various one-shots and miniseries before writing the first forty-six issues of the original ongoing series. (Terry Moore and Gilbert Hernandez each wrote a few issues in between Dixon and Simone.) Dixon’s BOP was a distaff version of his other DC work, which at the time included Nightwing, Robin, and Green Arrow. It was hard-nosed, no-nonsense storytelling; and although there were some relationship issues, the series was more action-oriented. Today, naturally, we remember Simone’s BOP for its characters: Babs, Dinah, Helena, Zinda, Charlie, et al. Again, like Johns, Simone took what Dixon left and gave it her own perspective. (I try not to sound like Paula Abdul, but there it is.) Simone ended up writing more issues of Birds Of Prey than Dixon did, and now she surely comes to mind more readily than he does. Still, the fundamentals of the feature didn’t change all that much.

Doctor Fate #25

Of course, other titles underwent more radical changes. When J.M. DeMatteis and Shawn McManus left Dr. Fate after two years, writer William Messner-Loebs and artists Vince Giaranno and Peter Gross changed casts almost completely. Stay with me, because this can get complicated: Dr. Fate was originally Kent Nelson, bearer of a mystic helmet which housed Nabu, an omnipotent Lord of Order. By the time DeMatteis and McManus launched their series, Nelson had died and Nabu was inhabiting his body, and Fate was a guy named Eric Strauss (magically aged to adulthood) and occasionally also Eric’s stepmother Linda. However, thanks to a series of events much too complicated to be summarized, the protagonists for Moore and Gross’s run were Inza Nelson (Kent’s wife) and Kent himself, back from limbo (or someplace effectively similar), with Kent’s original body now the home to a Lord of Chaos named Shat-Ru. Thus, different faces on comparable roles. Both DeMatteis and Messner-Loebs used Dr. Fate to explore broad philosophical questions, although each writer went in a different direction. Where DeMatteis was more concerned with larger issues of creation, destruction, and significance, Messner-Loebs had Inza transform her neighborhood for the better, literally removing evil impulses from her neighbors and behaving like a benevolent deity. It was an engaging run, although it only lasted a little over a year before the book was cancelled.

J.M. DeMatteis got another crack at a nigh-omnipotent superhero when he wrote Hal Jordan as The Spectre. Previous writer John Ostrander cast the Spectre as the embodiment of God’s wrath, but DeMatteis gave him a mission of redemption. DeMatteis’ Spectre series (drawn first by Ryan Sook and then by Norm Breyfogle) lasted a little over two years, and with Hal’s subsequent return as Green Lantern, may end up merely as a forgotten footnote to his backstory.

And speaking of footnotes, I felt compelled to hunt down every issue of Who’s Who in the Legion of Super-Heroes just to understand the references in early issues of the “Five-Years Later” version. Following Paul Levitz’s departure, writers Tom and Mary Bierbaum and artist/plotter Keith Giffen relaunched Legion of Super-Heroes in the fall of 1989, but set it in a universe five years removed from the glittering utopia Legion readers had come to love. (Not being a regular Legion reader, I thought this would be a good jumping-on point, but I ended up jumping into a fast-moving stream without a float.) Ironically, while this version of the Legion was grounded firmly in existing continuity, a big chunk of that continuity had been rewritten to accommodate post-Crisis changes to Superman. Even so, the 5YL Legion survived for five years (appropriately enough), until Zero Hour provided the opportunity for a more complete housecleaning.

Firestorm #56, John Ostrander's first issue

Finally, there’s Firestorm, co-created by Gerry Conway in the mid-‘70s and guided largely by Conway for the next ten years. Firestorm, the fusion of student Ronnie Raymond and scientist Martin Stein, first had his own book, which lasted five issues before being cancelled. Because Conway also wrote Justice League of America, he soon brought Firestorm into the League and wrote the character’s contemporaneous backup series in Flash. Not surprisingly, when the ongoing Fury Of Firestorm debuted in 1982, Conway wrote its first fifty-three issues. Essentially, Firestorm was Conway’s baby until John Ostrander came along — and one of the first things Ostrander did was give Martin Stein cancer. That kicked off a whole slew of twists and turns and brought in a raft of new characters. It took both Ronnie and the Professor out of the picture for long stretches, leaving behind an affectless Firestorm who struggled to find his proper function. In fact, the Ostrander run delved deep into the mechanics of the character, laying the groundwork for how he’s perceived today. Ostrander’s Firestorm (drawn by Joe Brozowski, then Tom Grindberg, then Tom Mandrake) was a sweeping saga of hope, survival, and ultimately, transcendence, which took the character from relatively-mundane superheroics to Swamp Thing-style levels of cosmic responsibility. Firestorm was cancelled with issue #100, so Ostrander was on the book a little less than four years, but that was more than enough time to alter the character irrevocably. (It also made the character somewhat unrecognizable, but subsequent appearances got around that.) The Jason Rusch Firestorm revamp built on many of these ideas, and the current Fury Of Firestorms seems to be playing with them as well.

* * *

Naturally, all of these examples would be more appropriate if we were still playing by all the old rules. (It feels more than a little strange to talk about “the old days” and mean “August,” but that’s about where the New-52 has left us.) There aren’t too many New-52 books with long-established creative teams. Geoff Johns has been writing Green Lantern for about seven years now, Paul Levitz has been back with the Legion for a while, and despite the book’s considerable hiatus I guess you could say there’s only been one set of writers on Resurrection Man. For all intents and purposes, we’re probably in the post-Grant Morrison era of Bat-books as well.

Otherwise, though, I don’t feel comfortable pointing to any given New-52 book and predicting a lengthy tenure for its current creative team. That said, I don’t think any of the Bat-writers are going anywhere, Morrison probably has a good bit to say about Superman in Action Comics, and Scott Snyder and Jeff Lemire seem settled-in for the long haul on Swamp Thing and Animal Man. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the New-52 titles got a good couple of years out of their current creative teams — but I wouldn’t be surprised either if the superhero line looked significantly different two years from now. Maybe it’s because we’re only on the first week of Month 4, but the whole thing has a weird sense of impermanence, like it’s just a more normal version of Flashpoint’s altered reality.

Maybe that’s by design: for good or ill, these folks are telling the stories they want to tell, and when they’re done, they’re done — whether that takes six months, one year, or five years. That’s not a bad way to go. It’s basically what happened with Sandman, Hitman, and Starman, each of which is remembered for its singular vision.

However, not every book has that luxury. I wouldn’t want to be the writer following Geoff Johns on Green Lantern. I suppose the examples above are meant for that person, and I guess one of the big takeaways has to do with a book’s fundamentals. If those fundamentals are maintained, and you can offer readers some new insights into familiar elements, you’re probably set for a decent run. That sounds pretty basic, but these days, there’s more freedom to redefine those fundamentals and/or play with readers’ expectations — and that’s assuming the reader has some expectations. In that respect, Dan Jurgens had it easy on JLA: just add Superman to Giffen and DeMatteis’ comedic cast, and let the reactions write themselves.

Today, though, DC is presenting the New 52 largely on its own merits. Readers may have expectations about Justice League, Superman, or Batman, but they’re not necessarily comparing Duane Swierczynski’s work on Birds Of Prey to Gail Simone’s. Indeed, the New-52 isn’t old enough to encourage such comparisons. Rather, if I’m being charitable, the superhero line is still finding itself in these early months, and DC is figuring out what kinds of readers its New-52 books are attracting. We’ll see in a few years whether they’ve settled down with particular creative teams, and then we can apply these examples more accurately.

The Shade invites you to Starman #6 (April 1995)

Writer James Robinson tweets that low sales might cut short his twelve-issue Shade miniseries. That would be a shame, because the first two issues of The Shade are tremendously entertaining, great-looking superhero comics. Robinson has returned to the character he revitalized, bringing with him the artistic talents of Cully Hamner and a bevy of high-profile guests like Darwyn Cooke, Frazer Irving, Javier Pulido, and Jill Thompson. The Beat’s Todd Allen has written a supportive post, noting along the way that certain New-52 titles which are selling below The Shade #1′s level (30,648 issues estimated sold to retailers) might also face the axe.

I’m somewhat skeptical of this rumor, despite Robinson’s insider knowledge, for reasons having to do with the 2009-10 miniseries The Great Ten.

Created by Grant Morrison and introduced in 2006 as part of the weekly 52 miniseries, The Great Ten is the official superhero team of the Chinese government. The Great Ten miniseries, from writer Tony Bedard and artist Scott McDaniel, ran for nine issues (cover dates December 2009-July 2010), with a planned tenth issue cancelled due to low sales. Specifically (per ICV2.com and Marc-Olivier Frisch), The Great Ten #1 sold 13,159 copies to retailers, issue #2 sold 8,760, and by the time issue #9 came out sales were down to 5,782. Since each issue included a vignette about a particular member of the ten-person team, the cancellation also screwed up the series’ format, adding a bit of insult to injury. To be sure, low sales might have been expected, inasmuch as the Ten weren’t especially critical to 52’s plot, Morrison wasn’t involved in the miniseries, and it came out over two years after 52 ended. (In the meantime, the Ten had appeared in a few issues of Checkmate.)

Thus, while DC did pare an issue off The Great Ten, that miniseries started off with considerably fewer sales, suffered a 33% drop between issues #1 and #2, and still only lost the one issue. In fact, for whatever it’s worth, the Ten’s August General In Iron is now part of the New-52′s Justice League International.

By contrast, The Shade follows one of the more popular characters from Robinson’s fondly-remembered Starman series. For those who came in late, Starman was one of DC’s 1990s successes, thanks both to the hero Robinson and artist Tony Harris introduced (along with a city full of other new characters) and for the ways in which it examined characters and legacies from all of DC’s superhero eras. It’s been collected in a 6-volume hardcover series, so clearly DC thought there was still an audience for those stories. In that context, a seventh volume with twelve issues’ worth of The Shade isn’t hard to imagine. (Admittedly, perhaps it is a little easier to imagine a slimmer hardcover; but again, I don’t think it will come to that.)

* * *

Naturally, this Shade rumor carries with it a couple of startling implications about DC’s cancellation policies. Put simply, DC may now believe that, after two months of chart-busting New 52 titles, it can afford to hold its superhero line to higher standards. Regardless, just as the Shade rumor is hard for me to believe, so is this notion that DC has suddenly become more draconian.

In April — the last full month of comics sales before DC announced the New 52, and therefore the last full month before the entire line got Senioritis — the charts looked a bit different. As it happens, the superhero line published 52 issues’ worth of ongoing series, miniseries, and specials, led by the 75,780 copies retailers bought of Green Lantern #65. However, most of the rest of those issues sold fewer than 31,000 copies each, including the following ongoing series:

Superboy #6 (30,490)
Birds of Prey #11 (30,270)
Superman/Batman #83 (28,403)
Batman Beyond #4 (26,722)
Teen Titans #94 (25,187)
Gotham City Sirens #22 (24,438)
Batgirl #20 (24,310)
Legion of Super-Heroes #12 (23,419)
Adventure Comics #525 (22,946)
Supergirl #63 (21,598)
Titans #34 (20,590)
Secret Six #32 (19,714)
Zatanna #12 (18,432)
Power Girl #23 (17,071)
JSA All-Stars #17 (16,706)
Booster Gold #43 (16,018)
Outsiders #38 (13,092)
Jonah Hex #66 (10,335)
REBELS #27 (10,014)
THUNDER Agents #6 (9,680)
Doom Patrol #21 (9,435)
Freedom Fighters #8 (8,601)
Xombi #2 (8,345)
Doc Savage #13 (7,426)
Spirit #13 (7,041)

Even then, a number of those were dead books walking. JSA All-Stars, Outsiders, REBELS, Doom Patrol, and Freedom Fighters had already been cancelled, with their final issues coming out in May. In fact, in light of the relaunch, we can lop off just about everything from Titans on down; because except for Jonah Hex and THUNDER Agents, none of it has survived recognizably to the New 52.

And that’s another point in The Shade’s favor: the THUNDER Agents ongoing series was selling fewer than 10,000 copies per issue six months ago, and it’s about to be relaunched as a six-issue miniseries. Perhaps THUNDER Agents is a special case for which the math works out pretty well, albeit in some arcane fashion: in addition to the 10-issue ongoing and the 6-issue miniseries, DC has reprinted all of the back issues in hardcover Archives and is about to start paperback Chronicles reprints. However, it could mean simply that the feature has staying power, and it’s reasonable to contend that Starman and its spinoffs are similar. By the same token, I suppose that if the new THUNDER Agents miniseries tanks, it doesn’t look good for The Shade.

Anyway, at the very least it looked like DC in April had accepted a good bit of its line selling at or below the 30,000 mark. However, in October DC had jumped to an average issue selling (by my calculations) 56,851 copies, up almost 89% from April’s 30,148. As Todd noted, if The Shade’s 30K puts it in danger, then October’s bottom four New-52 ongoings (OMAC at 29,434; Static Shock at 29,124; Blackhawks at 28,534; and Men Of War at 28,301) should be a little nervous too.

For now, though, I’m more concerned with October’s other new miniseries. Legion: Secret Origin and Huntress debuted with sales of 38,248 and 36,099 respectively; and Penguin and My Greatest Adventure charted below Shade with numbers of 26,380 and 17,222 respectively. I note that while neither of the latter is a 12-issue miniseries, no one is talking about them ending early.

There’s also Neal Adams’ Batman: Odyssey vol. 2 #1, which charted just below The Shade #1 with 30,410 copies. No one seems especially worried about its future either, but it picks up about where Volume 1 left off in terms of sales. Plus, you know, Adams is apparently indulging every gonzo impulse he’s ever had. Again, though, the fact that Odyssey seems safe, selling about what Shade #1 did, argues against a stricter sales standard.

Somewhat counterintuitively, so does the news of Marvel’s recent cancellations. CBR’s Kiel Phegley summarized the grim details:

[R]egular series Daken: Dark Wolverine, Ghost Rider, X-23 and Iron Man 2.0 have all been cancelled. Miniseries Destroyers and Victor Von Doom were scuttled before their first issues even saw print, while All-Winners Squad was cancelled before the completion of its life as a limited series. Alpha Flight was downgraded from an ongoing to a miniseries after being upgraded from mini to ongoing earlier in the summer. And monthly series PunisherMAX and Black Panther: The Most Dangerous Man Alive will cease publication once their current, long-gestating storylines wrap in February.

[* * *]

For the most part, titles that remain untouched are those built off of properties and franchises that have proven to have long runs in the market, be they spin-offs of popular titles or series that have lasted for hundreds of issues, even through market fluctuations and creative changes. Even the lowest selling comics that remain, such as X-Factor, have shown a level of sales consistency from month-to-month, pointing toward a dependable place in the market. It is logical to assume Marvel is relying on steady, stable performers first and foremost rather than banking on newer, unproven titles bucking their downwards sales trends and building an audience over the long run.

Among the titles listed above, X-23 sold the most copies of its October issue (24,043). With that number as a guide, it’s not surprising that these books were cancelled; but at the same time, it’s hard not to think that if The Shade were a Marvel book, it’d be pretty safe. For the past several years, Marvel has dominated the sales charts both through popular titles and sheer volume, so its standards are going to be a little different from DC’s. Still, if DC aspires to those kinds of numbers, Marvel has just established its own cancellation threshold, which the vast majority of DC’s October superhero titles would be well above. Moreover, thanks to its Starman pedigree, The Shade arguably has that “dependable place in the market” Kiel mentioned. While DC may want better monthly numbers, it would probably be just as happy with consistent sales on the inevitable collection.

* * *

Naturally, for this kind of title, trying to arrive at an appropriate sales “sweet spot” is tough. Starman was a great series, but it’s been over for ten years. Not all of its collections are in print, and as nice as the Omnibus hardcovers are, they’re pricey too. Besides Starman’s eighty-plus issues, The Shade picks up a little from Robinson’s run writing Justice League of America, so depending on the amount of minutiae involved, it may not be too new-reader-friendly. In short, it can be a hard sell — and yet, DC solicited twelve issues of the stuff, of which two elegantly-written, exquisitely-drawn installments have been published so far. Additionally, DC ordered those twelve issues knowing they would run alongside the New-52′s almost-completely-different continuity. DC may be expecting more from its New 52 titles, but I’m not sure it’s fair to measure The Shade’s success the same way.

Having said all of that, certainly The Shade could use more readers. It’s a nimble, great-looking spotlight on a character who started out a Golden Age villain and ended up a peculiar sort of antihero, and it offers another glimpse into the unique world of Robinson’s Starman. If you haven’t read issues #1 or #2, they have my official endorsement (as does Starman, but that pretty much goes without saying). Heck, Gene Ha is the guest artist for issue #12, and he’s stoked about drawing it, so the book needs to be supported for that reason alone.

On one level I’m not overly worried about The Shade making its full allotment of issues. DC is still a fairly conservative company and I have to think it went into The Shade knowing the New 52 books would make market factors behave a little differently. However, the fact that a book’s writer is concerned about its fate this early is unusual enough to warrant some attention. Save The Shade, I say; and enjoy some great comics while you’re at it.

The Brave And The Bold #1, all-new for 1955

Since the end of 2011 is right around the corner, it’s as good a time as any to look forward to what DC may bring us in the next year. The fun part is, the (relatively) eclectic New-52 relaunch has made these sorts of predictions a little less accurate. Nevertheless, I think DC remains a fairly conservative publisher overall, at least in terms of the kinds of comics in its superhero-centric main line, so we can make some educated guesses. The fact that all but one of the New 52 featured well-established characters (and the 52nd was Batwing, buoyed by Batman Incorporated) doesn’t exactly hurt either.

* * *

Accordingly, we start with two of DC’s most prolific titles which haven’t yet been reintroduced in the New-52 context: Adventure Comics and World’s Finest Comics (or, as you might know it, Superman/Batman).  Both were on the pre-relaunch roster, but neither appears likely to make a comeback. Pre-relaunch, Adventure had become the second Legion of Super-Heroes title, following a brief run of Geoff Johns/Francis Manapul Superboy stories. The New 52 has since filled both roles, both with Legion Lost and the Legion: Secret Origins miniseries, and with the revamped Superboy. Adventure could come back as an anthology, but the New 52 already has the ongoing DC Universe Presents and the miniseries My Greatest Adventure for spotlights and new-character tryouts. As for Superman/Batman, changes to the Man of Steel’s overall outlook may include this relationship. Put simply, I don’t see the New-52 Superman teaming up with the (same old?) Batman on a regular monthly basis — at least, not right now.

It does raise the issue of how similar the New 52 will be (and/or should be) to the pre-relaunch lineup.  After all, the relaunch torpedoed a number of books which, to put it bluntly, seem to have gotten in the way — books like Booster Gold, Power Girl, Secret Six, Red Robin, and Zatanna. Many of those characters have migrated into the new lineup, but in significantly altered forms. Thus, the Booster Gold of Justice League International doesn’t appear to have the same timestream-protecting mission, the Karen Starr of Mr. Terrific may or may not be Power Girl, etc. Bringing any of these series back would therefore depend on the relative success of their New-52 incarnations (barring something more extraordinary like a Booster Gold TV show).

However, DC is pretty reliable when it comes to reviving the titles themselves. Before Adventure Comics made its comeback, DC threw a decent amount of talent at team-up stalwart The Brave and the Bold. Starting strong with Mark Waid and George Pérez, it featured rotating creative teams for a year or so, and then petered out after several issues from writer J. Michael Straczynski. Basically it went on hiatus and never returned, and I don’t remember it even being officially cancelled. Perfect setup for a blockbuster relaunch, right?

Well, it’s not the worst time. Although its series finale just aired, the animated “Batman: The Brave and the Bold” brought both the title and the concept to a larger audience. DC still publishes the tie-in comic, but it ran alongside the “actual” B&B for a while, so you’d think there wouldn’t be much confusion. In fact, it’s almost the opposite of the Superman/Batman situation: because New-52 Batman hasn’t changed much (if at all), he may be an ideal vehicle for introducing all those not-so-hypothetical new readers to various DC denizens. That said, one significant argument against a new Brave and the Bold would be the relative ease of simply writing Batman into whatever series needed promoting. Also, there’s no shortage of Bat-content in the New 52 (including All-Star Western’s Gotham City setting), so there’s that risk of overexposure. Still, maybe DC figures “what’s one more?”, especially with another movie on the way.

There may be room for more Batman, but the fact is that a number of long-running (albeit cancelled) DC titles might be seen by readers as different names for the same thing. If the New 52 has Men Of War (starring a new Sgt. Rock), why does it need a new version of G.I. Combat, Our Army At War, or even Weird War Tales? Same goes for Weird Western Tales and All-Star Western, DCU Presents and Showcase, Deathstroke and Vigilante, etc. Even a (grown-up) Titans revival might have to distinguish itself pretty clearly from Red Hood and the Outlaws.

Still, one area conspicuously absent from the New 52 has been the “space-hero” sub-genre, with Adam Strange as its poster child, last seen in the pages of R.E.B.E.L.S. While I’d expect to see an Adam Strange title ahead of anything else, other potential revivals include the aforementioned R.E.B.E.L.S., its predecessor L.E.G.I.O.N. (perhaps spinning out of Legion Lost), Lobo, the Omega Men, and Tommy Tomorrow. However, Adam has a leg up, thanks to his appearances on “Brave and the Bold” and in Wednesday Comics.

Speaking of Wednesday Comics, at one point I was considering it a potential indicator of DC’s baseline publishing strategy. Mostly this was because through it, DC (yet again) tried (however tentatively) to reach out beyond the direct-market crowd by running WC’s Superman strip in USA Today. In hindsight, though, WC seems more squarely aimed at the direct-market consumer who likes the idea of retro-styled formats and alternative storytelling approaches. (Here I raise my hand.) Anyway, most of WC’s fifteen features are currently represented in the New 52: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Supergirl, Catwoman (with the Demon), the Teen Titans, Deadman, Hawkman, and Sgt. Rock. Besides Adam Strange, that leaves Kamandi, the Metal Men, and Metamorpho, and I really don’t see a Metamorpho series anytime soon.

Ironically, the pre-relaunch setting was probably more friendly to a new Kamandi series, since Countdown and Final Crisis went to such great lengths to place just about all of Jack Kirby’s DC creations on Earth-51. Absent the hook of a Kirby-Earth, I’m not sure there’s a great clamor for post-apocalyptic adventure where animals are intelligent and humans are hunted. Regardless, DC just published the first Kamandi Omnibus, so maybe there’s a chance. The Metal Men had a couple of well-received books a few years back, one a proper miniseries by Duncan Rouleau and the other a Keith Giffen/J.M. DeMatteis/Kevin Maguire co-feature in Doom Patrol. The latter has been collected in 100-page form, so again, perhaps those waters are being tested too. I still wouldn’t expect the Metal Men to carry much beyond an arc in DCU Presents, though.

Of course, one of DC’s next big outreach efforts will be Cartoon Network’s “DC Nation” block, putting the ongoing Green Lantern and Young Justice shows alongside various short features. I’d be very surprised if DC didn’t launch some sort of anthologized tie-in, featuring the Doom Patrol, Amethyst, Tiny Titans Go!, and whatever other subjects the shorts include. Whether this leads to more revivals in the main line is unclear, because the tie-ins don’t always affect the inspirations — but I do think we’re closer to a nice Amethyst paperback….

Conversely, as discussed above, sometimes I think the reprint schedule offers clues to the monthly books. There’s a paperback reprint of Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan’s Night Force coming next summer, and last week there was that Black Orchid collection. To be sure, the reprints probably owe a good bit to the creative teams — Tomb Of Dracula gave Wolfman and Colan a solid reputation for horror, and Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean are always popular — but I wonder if at least a Night Force series isn’t at least in the early stages. Sometimes a reprint just feels so random that it must be part of a bigger plan, you know?

Sometimes, too, those bigger plans are interrupted, and one wonders whether they’ll be picked up again. Seems like the latest Spectre and Question had barely gotten settled in their costumed roles when the big relaunch put ‘em in limbo. Both characters’ predecessors have had respectable runs, and I don’t think that in their short tenures either Crispus Allen or Reneé Montoya have “harmed their brand.” I can see someone at DC wanting to bring either or both back, because s/he is (not unreasonably) passionate about their storytelling possibilities — but I can also see the people in charge getting tired of trying to sell Crispus and/or Reneé, and giving them both a little rest. However, it would be kind of cool to have the Spectre (regardless of host) show up in the Justice Society relaunch, acknowledge that he’s got power over the entire Multiverse, and give him a reason to favor Earth-2….

The last two features I’ll discuss aren’t connected by anything beyond persistence and (most recently) low sales. We all know The Warlord, right? Created by Mike Grell in 1976, Travis Morgan was an Air Force pilot stranded in the hollow-Earth fantasyland of Skartaris, where he grew a Green Arrow beard and fought dinosaurs and evil wizards. Warlord was a staple of DC’s lineup until 1988, and enjoyed a few brief revivals thereafter. Most recently it ran for 16 issues in 2009-10, written and occasionally drawn by Grell and (SPOILERS!) wrapping up with Morgan’s son taking over following his dad’s death. You’d think this would preclude a New-52 revival, and you’re probably right — but Warlord is just the kind of series I’d expect as a “midseason replacement.” It gives the New 52 a little more genre diversity (although it’s very likely another hypermasculine series), it appeals to lapsed fans who might remember it from their more attentive days, and it’s not the hardest concept to explain to new readers.

Finally, there’s Manhunter, a Golden Age title revived several times in legacy form. Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson brought original-version Paul Kirk back memorably in their ultra-stylish early-‘70s Detective Comics backup series. Since then, public defender Mark Shaw, musician Chase Lawler, clone Kirk DePaul, and attorney Kate Spencer have each been Manhunter. There’s little chance DC would bring back the Goodwin/Simonson version, but Kate Spencer’s recent series went on hiatus twice (check the cover dates) before being cancelled with issue #38. Also, she was briefly part of the Birds of Prey, had a brief co-feature in Batman: Streets Of Gotham, and probably still has a decent fan following. A New-52 Manhunter would help the superhero line’s gender balance, and Kate’s federal-criminal-law practice could facilitate crossovers or guest-shots in just about any other title. Since Kate’s backstory tied into a few obscure areas of DC lore, it could go with a new Manhunter as well.

* * *

I should note that none of this is meant as a commentary on recent Marvel cancellations. To the contrary, I think DC’s roster gravitates towards the familiar more often than not. I’d love it if the second wave of New-52-style books were all original concepts, produced by creative teams given the freedom to do exactly the kinds of comics they wanted. However, I also know we’re getting that new Justice Society book (which should be pretty good, don’t get me wrong) and those Captain Marvel backups in Justice League, along with new versions of The Ray and the Challengers of the Unknown. That Robotman feature in My Greatest Adventure could lead easily into another Doom Patrol book, too. Whichever way DC goes, it seems to be still expanding; and it may even be cautioned by Marvel’s situation.

Additionally, this isn’t meant as another “DC should publish only the things I like” manifesto. Although there are some diversity-enhancing suggestions, I’ve tried only to identify some perennial favorites and some more obscure features which may be on the horizon. In fact, seeing Amethyst in the DC Nation promo, and ‘Mazing Man on “Batman: The Brave And The Bold,” indicates that DC may well be digging deeper into its library for characters with previously-untapped appeal. That sounds rather mercenary, but I consider it encouraging. You take exposure where you can get it, and hopefully you use it to grow constructively.

Because a Crisis On Infinite Earths homage would have been too predictable

At first I wasn’t especially excited about too much in DC’s February solicitations. However, the more I looked around, the more optimistic I became. Six months into the New 52, some connections are starting to gel, and their interactions (well, as far as what you can glean from the ad copy) seem more organic. As always, there were a few pleasant surprises in the collected editions, and some details from which to spin hopeful speculation.

But enough with the purple prose — let’s hit the books!

TO UNLIMITED AND BEYOND

The gee-whizziest news of the February solicitations has to be the digital-first format of Batman Beyond Unlimited. I have not been the quickest to adapt to digitally-conveyed comics, mostly because my personal technology level hasn’t caught up. However, I do read a number of webcomics, as well as newspaper strips online, and if the price were right, I’d gladly sample BBU’s features on my computer before picking up the print version. Having Dustin Nguyen and (yay!) Norm Breyfogle involved doesn’t hurt either.

FAMILY AFFAIRS

I like the Legion pretty well, but surely I am not the only one who gets hives reading about the “suspiciously different versions” coming soon to Action Comics. Weren’t we past that…?

Nevertheless, there is a nice sense of connectivity in February’s Super-family titles. Although I am not tired of Springsteen Supes by any means, the thought of Krypto-Armor Superman trying to save his younger self from the Anti-Superman Army (again, with the Legions’ help) is a pleasingly retro idea, even if it does echo that one issue of All Star Superman. Likewise, Supergirl showing up in Superman and Superboy, and the Maid of Might having to cope with the effects of blue-sun radiation, all help bring our favorite Kryptonians together. In particular, I thought this week’s Supergirl used Superman effectively to explain not only his mission, but her relationship to it.

Similarly, February’s issues of Voodoo, Stormwatch, and Grifter will try to (re-)establish a little WildStorm corner of DC’s superhero line — which then, I presume, can reach out to more recognizably-DC books like Suicide Squad. I’m actually reading Stormwatch and Grifter, and I liked Sami Basri’s work on Voodoo, but I’m still not sure this will get me to pick up the latter regularly. The first issue didn’t do much for me, and subsequent solicits haven’t changed that.

THE DEEP BENCH

Bleeding Cool had a good rundown of creative-team changes in the February solicitations, so I will note only a few of them. I’ll miss Aaron Lopresti and Matt Ryan on Justice League International, but I’m eager to see Nicola Scott and Trevor Scott finishing George Pérez’s Superman breakdowns, and Chris Sprouse and Karl Story should be good as always on Legion of Super-Heroes. Also, it’s not really a creative-team shift, but February’s Batwoman #6 marks the debut of Amy Reeder and Richard Friend in the rotation as regular art team; and Sam Kieth draws a sequence in THUNDER Agents #4.

CALLBACKS

Under different circumstances, I’d hope that the invitation to “[l]earn the origins of Central and Keystone City” in The Flash #6 would be a reference to “Flash Of Two Worlds.” However, with (apparently) no superheroic Golden Age in the New-52′s history, there would be no Golden Age Flash to reintroduce. Otherwise, I’m not sure the Flash especially needs a “character-in-its-own-right” setting like Gotham or Metropolis. Central City is nice, I’m sure, but as long as its topography is conducive to super-speed action, it doesn’t have to do much more.

Almost a year ago, posting about The Atlantis Chronicles, I wondered if Geoff Johns’ Aquaman work would compel DC to reprint Peter David and Esteban Maroto’s excellent 1990 miniseries. Since the solicit for Aquaman #6 now links the continent’s sinking to Mera’s past, I am less confident about such a reprint.

The mention of Pozhar, in the solicit for Firestorm #6, gives me hope that DC will reprint much of John Ostrander’s late-‘80s run on the book’s predecessor. Ostrander introduced Pozhar (and other assorted Soviet-era characters), but they then faded into deep obscurity. It’d be nice to have a Showcase Presents John Ostrander’s Russian Firestorm to get re-acquainted.

I’m not so sure the giant bat of All-Star Western #6 is the same giant bat which figured so prominently in Bruce Wayne’s return to the Bat-books last year. Jonah Hex isn’t a pushover, but I doubt he could permanently put down a nigh-immortal critter created by Darkseid. Still, I suppose this is why we have All-Star Western and not a relaunched Jonah Hex — to give Jonah the flexibility to wrassle with fantastic monsters.

CHECKING IN

While I have not read any issues of Captain Atom past the first, I remain a bit curious about its place in the New 52. Accordingly, I’m guessing — based on nothing concrete beyond the solicitation — that the “strangely similar” threat and the “ending you’ll never see coming” have something to do with his counterpart(s) across DC’s Multiverse.

I have also not returned to Deathstroke after issue #1, but it looks like the solicit for #6 will touch on Slade’s ex-wife and late son, whose stories were told in the pages of the Wolfman/Pérez Teen Titans. Adeline should be pretty much the same: an Army officer assigned to shepherd young Slade through his training, the two fell in love, even without watching the Captain America movie. However, it’ll be instructive to see how the inevitable revisions to Grant’s Ravager origin affect Slade’s motivations. Grant first appeared in November 1980′s New Teen Titans #1, as a selfish creep whose life was ruined (collaterally, of course) by the embryonic team’s fight with Gordanian slavers. Accordingly, in #2, when Deathstroke turned down The HIVE’s contract to kill the Titans, the HIVE turned to Grant. They made him a super-soldier, but at the cost of his remaining youth: he literally burned himself out trying to kill the Titans. Raven gave him a final moment of peace by showing him the illusion that he’d succeeded, but Deathstroke swore vengeance upon the Titans for his son’s death, and accepted the contract the Ravager didn’t complete. Thus, without a Teen Titans to destroy, I’m wondering how the new origin will play out.

POTPOURRI

Did I miss something a year ago? Wasn’t DC Universe Online Legends just an extra-long miniseries? The solicits for February’s issues make it sound like things are about to wrap up, but there’s no indication the series is about to end. I haven’t been reading it, so I have no feelings one way or the other. Still, if it’s an ongoing, it’s kind of nice to think that DC has another “classic-style” title. Ironic, too, that the classic style may be limited to tie-in books like DCUOL, Batman: B&B, and Young Justice.

Not to be unreasonably pedantic about the solicit for Green Arrow #6, but if the touch of “monstrous half-man” Midas “can melt anything,” wouldn’t that necessarily include Green Arrow?

Last month I had a chance to get a little ahead on my posting, so I speculated about the possible fates of Krypto and Wally West before realizing I had to write about the January solicits. That post got bumped back a week, but just about the time it went live there were big stories about both. And that might have been okay, but two weeks ago I mused about a Challengers of the Unknown revival, and here they are in February’s DC Universe Presents #6. Time to buy a lottery ticket, I guess — although I feel more like Gardner Fox dreaming of Earth-Two….

READ ‘EM UNDER A BLUE MOON

I almost forgot to mention the handful of DC titles shipping on one of the rarest direct-market events, the February Fifth Week.  This quirk of the retail calendar can only happen on February 29, and with the New-52′s strict four-week schedule it won’t spill over into week 5.  Thus, 2/29/12 will offer a more eclectic lineup:  DC Universe Online Legends #24, Batman:  Odyssey vol. 2 #5, Batman Beyond Unlimited #1, The Shade #5, THUNDER Agents #4, Legion:  Secret Origin #5, Tiny Titans #49, Looney Tunes #205, Gears Of War #22, Uncharted #4, Spaceman #4, Scalped #56, and Unwritten #34.5.

COLLECTIONS

Probably a lot more people have read Batman: Son of the Demon since it was reissued recently, but I think this is the first time in a long time that its follow-ups have been reprinted. I liked SOTD well enough, although it wears its ‘80s influences proudly. Bride of the Demon doesn’t stand out as much, probably because it doesn’t have the hook of Batman and Talia’s child, and otherwise it’s another Bond-influenced Rā’s al Ghūl story. However, Birth of the Demon focuses squarely on the Demon’s Head, telling his origin in detail. Plus, the present-day framing sequence is pretty rough on Batman, and it’s all depicted in spectacular fashion by Norm Breyfogle. Therefore, I endorse the Bride of the Demon omnibus collection. Like a wise man once said, two out of three ain’t bad.

Speaking of spectacular depictions, the Legends of the Dark Knight hardcover series is turning into something routinely recommendable. April’s Jim Aparo volume seems like an especially good value, reprinting twenty-two issues of early-‘70s The Brave and the Bold in full color for $50.00. If DC sticks with the Aparo series and finishes out B&B (which ended with #200), it’d probably only take another couple of volumes, and you’d be left with a very nice run of team-ups.

I have to admit, I was surprised that the second New Teen Titans Omnibus got as far as “The Judas Contract.” (I thought that would come in Volume 3.)  However, as I keep saying, it’s best to read the Wolfman/Pérez run as a cohesive whole, not a series of discrete arcs. You can’t really appreciate the four issues of “Judas Contract” without the rest as context, blah blah blah, you’ve heard this before. Anyway, for just $75.00 retail, here’s your chance. I do hope DC has a Volume 3 waiting, because that would take us through Wonder Girl’s wedding in #50 and Raven’s transfiguration in the second series’ #5.

Glad to see another Flash Archives on the horizon, mostly because it helps justify my buying the previous five. However, it also includes “Doorway to the Unknown” from issue #148 (November 1968), a spooky little tale (atypical for the series) reprinted a couple of times, which I remember fondly from one of the big 1970s “Best of DC” tabloids.

Finally, this month’s surprise reprint is Black Orchid, a 3-issue Prestige Format miniseries from (as the solicit says) the pre-Sandman Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. According to his contemporaneous Amazing Heroes interview, at the time Black Orchid was a character so obscure that when he pitched the miniseries to editor Karen Berger, she thought he was saying “Blackhawk Kid.” Batman and Lex Luthor appear briefly, but McKean’s art is the real draw (as it were), taking readers from gloomy, monochromatic streets to the lush, colorful rainforest. This miniseries led to an ongoing series, and (I think) to the character even appearing in Ostrander’s Suicide Squad. She’s popped up here and there recently, so it’s not like there has been a great clamor for her return, and this may just be DC’s latest attempt to squeeze more money from Neil Gaiman fans. Regardless, it’s not a bad try.

* * *

Well, that’s what jumped out at me this month. What looks good to you?

Closing time at Wayne Manor: 1969's Batman #217

Last week I asked why the Silver Age is so pervasive in DC lore. Even though that’s something of a rhetorical question, I felt like it was left largely unanswered. The short answer is that the Silver Age represents the modern DC Universe’s origin story, so you’re never going to get rid of it entirely, regardless of reboots, relaunches, and/or legacy characters. However, in terms of style and tone, things are naturally more complicated.

It’s hard for me to talk about the Silver Age without relating it to the subsequent Bronze Age, mostly because I grew up with the comics of the mid-1970s. I see the Silver Age as an era of wild ideas, told in standalone stories which were light on consequences, whereas the Bronze took those stories and ideas and extrapolated a more “realistic” status quo from them. This is not to say that the Bronze Age was some vast improvement, since realism in superhero comics is a tricky prospect at best.

However, to me that point of compartmentalization, at which a previous creative team’s run goes from an ongoing concern to a finished body of work, is highly significant. That’s when the rules governing a feature are established (or amended), and therefore that’s when the people in charge of that feature decide how (and how much) it can grow. The same applies in the aggregate to the universe those features share.

* * *

For the sake of discussion, let’s say the Silver Age started in 1956 with its version of the Flash, and ended in 1969, following such developments as the Doom Patrol’s deaths (1968) and a Robin-less Batman’s move out of Wayne Manor (Batman #217). We might also make a strong case for the end coming with Green Lantern #75 (March 1970), the last issue before Neal Adams joined Denny O’Neil for the landmark #76.

This lets us classify the Silver Age generally in terms of the aforementioned wild, standalone, consequence-free stories. Any changes or continuing subplots were short-lived and/or insignificant: Alfred’s “death,” Hal Jordan’s job-hopping, weddings in Flash and Doom Patrol, etc. By contrast, the characters “grew up” (sometimes literally) during the Bronze Age. The other Teen Titans graduated from high school, if not their original codenames. Clark Kent moved to broadcast journalism. Barry Allen grew out his crewcut, and both he and Jimmy Olsen gave up their bowties. And, of course, Green Lantern and Green Arrow questioned the very purpose of their superhero careers as they journeyed across America.

Here’s where it starts to get tricky. In a practical sense, you don’t get to the Bronze Age without going through the Silver. The great Green Arrow soliloquy from GL #76, which basically asks “what are we doing chasing bad guys when the real world is falling apart around us,” loses much of its impact if the reader isn’t at least aware that these guys have had long, colorful, and (allegedly) frivolous adventures. The specifics of those adventures are less relevant than their mere existence, because cumulatively those stories have established a certain familiar style — if not an outright formula — which in the Bronze Age can then be manipulated. It’s enough to note that the Flash was once turned into a puppet, or had a giant head, because those can serve later as nostalgic and/or ironic callbacks.

Accordingly, back in the day, I wasn’t overly invested in the specifics of the Silver Age. (Note: I didn’t read much of the Legion of Super-Heroes, which might have made a difference.) For a while Justice League of America had a two-page feature called “100 Issues Ago,” which was just what it sounds like. Along with the tabloid-sized reprints, it was my introduction to the Gardner Fox/Mike Sekowsky days, and I have to say, those stories seemed kind of weird to my grade-school eyes. In JLA #44 (May 1966), a villain called the Unimaginable (who had been trying to join the League, and was spurned) caused a handful of Leaguers to double in size, with further tragedy surely to follow. I don’t remember the exact plot, but the picture of an oversized Batman and Green Lantern freaked-out in tattered uniforms remains striking, and a little disturbing. Likewise, “Deadly Dreams Of Doctor Destiny!” (JLA #34, March 1965) features Wonder Woman forced to fight crime under an expressionless porcelain mask (alongside teammates saddled with similarly-debilitating gear); and while its plot has stuck with me more, the images are indelible. Maybe it was just Sekowsky — who, incidentally, drew Hawkman’s mask with these huge, dead, ever-staring eyes — but it was a far cry from the more naturalistic style of his successor Dick Dillin, who pencilled JLA from the late ‘60s until his death in 1980.

So to me the Silver Age was just different. Other creative changes, especially on the artistic side, reinforced these differences. Carmine Infantino was long gone, and Irv Novick was the regular penciller, by the time I started reading The Flash; and Mike Grell had a lot more in common with Neal Adams than with Gil Kane on Green Lantern. Although the difference isn’t really style over substance, the Silver Age’s distinctive style appears to be more enduring than its specifics.  To a degree this is understandable, if one’s goal is to make sense of DC’s output during the period. We think of the Silver Age — not unreasonably — as dominated by Infantino, Fox, Sekowsky, Kane, Julius Schwartz, and John Broome. However, the Mort Weisinger-edited Superman titles were also going strong, as were (for a few years, at least) Jack Schiff’s Batman line, still in its sci-fi period. Trying to harmonize all those disparate influences, let alone shape them into a cohesive, functional shared universe, is more of an aspiration than a plan. (Not that there aren’t some impressive timelines out there.)

Naturally, not every Silver Age story could survive the transition into Bronze Age realism, so DC’s fictional history tends to get lost in misty watercolored memories the farther back you go. There’s no DC equivalent of Fantastic Four #1 to mark clearly where everything kicked off, leaving us only with discrete scenes — an exploding planet, a botched robbery, a queen’s answered prayer — to stitch together into an impression of the DCU’s early days. Compare the treatment of the Golden Age stories in the context of Earth-2, where the original Action Comics #1, Detective Comics #27, etc., could be inserted with minimal fuss into that universe’s timeline. Such fidelity makes that Earth separate and distinct enough that today, we can take it or leave it, like a box of old photos stored in the attic.

However — and here I will indulge in yet another erudite metaphor — the Silver Age has long since left its narrative form behind, transcending it to become a state of mind. Talking about Identity Crisis and his Justice League stint, Brad Meltzer said that

One of the clear goals of Identity Crisis was to pull all those Silver Age stories back into continuity, and to acknowledge the glorious past. That doesn’t mean every story has to come in with the (way overused term) “grim and gritty.” But we also shouldn’t let them all be brushed aside either.

In fact, Identity Crisis centered largely around a JLA three-parter from the Bronze Age late-‘70s (#s 166-68, May-July 1979), and featured a beloved supporting character introduced during the Silver Age, and murdered by another Silver Age stalwart. Without getting deeper into a Meltzer/IC critique, it’s enough to note that reinforcing the canonical nature of those old stories is, on one level, “acknowledging the glorious past.” Yes, Jimmy Olsen was turned into all manner of creatures; yes, there was a Bat-Hound. In that sense, the Silver Age was a clear influence on DC’s superhero line for some fifty-five years. I’m not sure how much of those references will crop up in the New 52, but I doubt they will ever go away completely.

Regardless, Identity Crisis was not a Silver Age story. Neither was “Snapper” Carr’s return as a reluctant villain in JLA vol. 1 #s 149-50 (December 1977-January 1978), nor the brief reintroduction of Guy Gardner (soon to fall into a coma) in mid-‘70s issues of Green Lantern, nor the search for the Doom Patrol’s killers in New Teen Titans #s 13-15. We may want to reclaim the anything-goes spirit of the Silver Age — and in the ‘90s, Gerard Jones, Pat Broderick, and Mark Bright’s Green Lantern, Mark Waid and company’s Flash, and Grant Morrison and Howard Porter’s JLA came very close — but it takes more than a fondness for Easter eggs and an earnest devotion to continuity.

As someone who discovered DC’s superheroes well into their new-for-the-‘70s forms, I remain eager to see what they were like before all that. Certainly DC is happy to sell all manner of reprints to fans like me, and just this week I got an unexpected thrill re-reading the first comic-book pairing of Superman and Batman in World’s Finest Archives vol. 1. I’ll always appreciate Easter eggs and continuity references, although I understand how they might alienate new readers.

Still, if a new reader can get past that alienation, or can find a story which avoids the issue entirely, a shared universe with a rich history can be a fertile field of exploration. This is part of why I’ve been glad to see the “Retro-Active” specials and the Games graphic novel, and part of why I lobbied for a classically-minded Challengers of the Unknown revival last week. Getting in on the ground floor is exciting enough, but getting into something so big it’ll constantly seem new can be even more rewarding. The fact that the Silver Age has become this idealized state of mind, and not just a collection of wacky stories, only adds to its appeal.

That’s why, regardless of its relevance to the New 52, I think the Silver Age will endure. Not only was it too important to DC’s superhero line for too long, it has morphed into a general spirit of optimistic experimentation which, these days, can be a nice contrast. If current sales are any indication, DC can get along pretty well without those old references and retro-style plots — but I think that sooner or later, it will choose not to.

The Challengers of the Unknown

Catching up on various episodes of “Batman: The Brave And The Bold,” I was pleasantly surprised that one teaser (YouTube — careful!) focused on the Challengers of the Unknown.

Not having read their Silver Age adventures, I wouldn’t consider myself a Challengers expert, but I do like the basic idea. They’re straight-up adventurers brought together largely by a shared experience of cheating death, and because they live “on borrowed time,” they have decided to spend that time saving the world. First appearing in 1957′s Showcase #6 (just two issues after the Silver Age Flash’s debut in #4), and springing at least in part from Jack Kirby’s fertile imagination, the Challs are often tied to a pre-superhero Silver Age either explicitly (as in Darwyn Cooke’s New Frontier and the recent Legacies miniseries) or as spiritual representatives of that time (as in Karl Kesel and Tom Grummett’s Superboy or Mark Waid, George Pérez, and Jerry Ordway’s run on The Brave and the Bold). Attempts to “update” the team, whether by aging the originals or creating new Challengers, haven’t gotten much traction, despite the best efforts of folks like Jeph Loeb, Tim Sale, Steven Grant, Len Kaminski, John Paul Leon, and Howard Chaykin.

That may explain why the Challs don’t have a New-52 makeover like the Blackhawks, another group associated with a particular era (World War II) without being wedded to it. An ill-advised “superhero phase” notwithstanding, Blackhawk started off as a Golden Age title which survived well into the Silver Age (1944-68, 235 issues), and was revived in the ‘70s (7 issues), early ‘80s (23 issues) and late ‘80s (22 issues, including a 3-issue Chaykin makeover). The characters have never really gone away, and until the New 52 relaunch came along, the original-recipe team survived in the person of a time-displaced Zinda “Lady Blackhawk” Blake.

However, Blackhawk appears to be the exception. The Challengers and their non-super cousins like Cave Carson or the Sea Devils are too evocative of the era in which they were conceived.

Moreover, I’m not really here today to argue for a new Challengers of the Unknown. Instead, the more I wondered why DC wouldn’t give the Challs another shot, the more the Challs looked like symbols of the Silver Age. As they go, so it goes — and why indeed is the Silver Age so persistent?

For one thing, there are Dan DiDio’s comments from a few years ago about DC’s need to reinforce the most “recognizable” and/or “definitive” versions of various characters in order to make its superhero line new-reader-friendly. Because the Silver Age laid the foundation for the next few decades’ worth of superhero books, DC apparently imagined that those characters would, by and large, get the nod.

I remain skeptical of this approach. It is inherently conservative, seeking to preserve an existing take rather than moving forward with a character’s development. Along those same lines, the “most recognizable” version of a character is not necessarily the most creatively satisfying. Furthermore, terms like “most recognizable” and “definitive” are more subjective than they might look — and they don’t always match up, either — allowing pros and fans alike to argue for what they want while claiming fidelity to some Platonic ideal. Naturally, one person’s ideal is another’s corruption, and with DC’s legacy-character model, there are plenty of “ideal” candidates.

Of course, there’s always fidelity to the original intent of a character’s creator(s), but that can be problematic. Grant Morrison and Rags Morales’ “Springsteen Superman,” currently seen in the New-52′s Action Comics, is meant to recall the less-powerful, socially-conscious hero of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s earliest adventures, but with its cobbled-together costume and younger Clark Kent, it’s not quite a re-creation. Indeed, Superman’s other New-52 appearances follow a more conventional interpretation, even substituting Kryptonian battle armor for red briefs and spandex.

This is to be expected: the Superman who could only leap an eighth of a mile, and whose resistance to damage was measured by a “bursting shell,” is now an artifact, occupying a niche. Likewise, the original Wonder Woman stories of creator William Moulton Marston and artist H.G. Peter are in their own niche, although apparently Morrison wants to return that certain “weird, libidinous element” to the Amazing Amazon, perhaps as soon as 2012.

Then there’s Batman, whose original conception as a grim, gothic avenger lasted just under a year before Robin arrived to lighten things up. Of DC’s Trinitarians, Batman’s current depiction is arguably the closest to the Golden Age originals, but it wasn’t always so. When Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams (and editor Julius Schwartz) reintroduced the “Darknight Detective” in late 1969, the character was about five years removed from the end of the “Sci-Fi” period, which had begun in the late 1940s/early ‘50s. Accordingly, although O’Neil and Adams sought deliberately to tell their versions of Kane/Finger stories, their interpretation was about as radical in the early ‘70s as Morrison and Morales’ Superman is today. Clearly it was not the most recognizable version, which at the time might well have been Dick Sprang’s or even Adam West’s. Regardless, O’Neil/Adams became the model for the Batman of the ‘70s and ‘80s, and (even if you think it’s been superseded by Frank Miller’s work) is still a powerful influence.

We can group another set of interpretations under a sort of hybrid approach, where original intent has become augmented by details accumulated from various sources. This is the “ideal aggregation” I described almost (yikes) four years ago, which holds that something like All Star Superman or the Christopher Reeve movies may be the most definitive versions of the character.  No doubt there are other ways of gauging interpretive validity. However, let’s shift gears.

While it’s not really accurate to apply those analyses generally to DC’s shared superhero universe, I believe the publisher does something similar for each feature, especially the New 52 and their follow-ups. Thus, you have original-intent books like Action Comics alongside “most-recognizable” titles (Batgirl, Aquaman), updates like Blackhawks, and outright reinventions (Fury Of Firestorm, OMAC). Although each title has significant roots in the company’s past, at least in broad strokes the line doesn’t look particularly like any previous era. Instead, it’s an aggregation (idealized or otherwise) of what somebody — creative personnel, editorial, marketing, whomever — thinks DC Comics should be publishing.

And that’s fine, for what it is. It’s not a wholesale Silver Age revival, which I suppose is ironic considering all the contortions DC went through to bring back Hal Jordan and Barry Allen. That’s fine too — it doesn’t have to be, especially if dense Silver Age history gets in the way of accessibility.

However, the New 52 risks being so new that it loses the appeal of maturity, and that’s (part of) what bothers me about it. It’s one thing to say that the superheroes have only been around for five years or so, but it’s another to use that timeline to limit the kinds of stories you can tell. If All Star Western could move Jonah Hex to Gotham City, Men of War and Blackhawks could easily have kept their WWII settings (although Sgt. Rock was more grounded in reality than the Blackhawks). It would help distinguish them from the superhero books; and for whatever it’s worth, they would be DC’s only New-52 titles set primarily in the 20th Century. New seems to be working out pretty well, but retro ought not to be dismissed entirely. In that context, a period-piece Challengers of the Unknown could be a nice complement, telling the kinds of Eisenhower-era stories readers might expect from a company which reinvented itself fairly significantly back then.

So yeah, a Challengers revival would be nice. Maybe there’s one in the pipeline already. I just hope it’s faithful to the feature’s origins, not modern for the sake of being modern — and I say that not because I think everything’s gone downhill since the Silver Age ended. (I don’t think that, by the way.)  The aggregation of qualities in DC’s main-line roster isn’t as ideal as it could be. It needs a little borrowed time.

A Flash family reunion

Three recent bits of DC news are running together in my mind. Cumulatively they may amount to nothing — housekeeping details and/or fallout from the New-52 relaunch — but individually they seem significant, because they may well speak to the proverbial “reset button” which DC claims does not exist. Put simply, I think that reset button exists, I think it affects all of the New-52 books, and I expect it to be revealed within the next year or two. Whether it gets pushed, and/or how much resetting occurs, is another matter.

While it may be overprotective to put a SPOILER WARNING so early in the post, I realize some of you may want to discover these things as they are actually published.

I don’t blame you — I was trying to avoid the Wonder Woman thing, but that’s what I get for reading convention coverage. (And yes, I have seen the recent news about a certain Flash character.)

Anyway, SPOILERS for potential DC milestones big and small….

4

3

2

1

Let us now consider

– the deletion of the “Crisis” events from DC history;

– the rumored fate of Krypto; and

– the advice to “keep reading” for the fate of Wally West.

We can think of these items as, respectively, a) events which didn’t happen, b) circumstances which ensure particular events won’t happen, and c) events which might still happen.

* * *

DIDN’T HAPPEN

The “Crisis” events were watersheds in DC history. For our purposes they started with 1985′s Crisis On Infinite Earths, although COIE drew its inspiration from the annual Justice League/Justice Society team-ups, most of which had “Crisis” in their titles. In fact, the follow-up to COIE was originally going to be titled Crisis Of The Soul (and perhaps Crisis On Captive Earth, a title I remember seeing in various 1986 editorials), but it became Legends, and except for 1994′s Zero Hour, subtitled Crisis In Time, subsequent DC events stayed away from the C-word. However, 2004′s Identity Crisis started a new “Crisis Cycle” — not to mention a constant “crossover churn” — which included 2005-06′s Infinite Crisis, and which lasted officially through the end of 2008-09′s Final Crisis. (I say “officially” because 2009-10′s Blackest Night wrapped up a handful of Crisis-Cycle subplots, including the deaths of Aquaman, Ronnie Raymond, Max Lord, and the Martian Manhunter. Nevertheless, there weren’t supposed to be any more “Crisis” events after, duh, Final Crisis.)

Anyway, on a macro level the whole thing eats itself. Barry “Flash” Allen, the avatar of the Silver Age, dies in COIE, and his name and costume are taken up by his protege, the former Kid Flash Wally West. Wally appears in Legends and practically every other DC event for the next twenty years, and his “death” is teased too, first in Zero Hour and later in Infinite Crisis. However, Wally is still the Flash as of Final Crisis, which brings Barry back to life. Two years later, in Flashpoint, Barry (for lack of a better term) destroys the familiar timeline,* remaking it into the current New-52 under the supervision of a mysterious hooded figure. In short, Barry’s death in COIE set up some twenty-odd years of cosmic rumbling, and shortly after he returned, he helped restart and/or reorder all of history, twice — and by the way, in so doing he may have erased totally the events which both killed him and brought him back. This is the superhero equivalent of the magician tying two ropes together and removing the knot, so that only one uncut rope remains. It’s a neat trick for streamlining continuity, but in this case there are a number of people who had either gotten used to having the knot, and might actually have preferred the knot to stay in place.

Accordingly, Dan DiDio tried to clarify:

With so many characters and histories restarting, major events like Crisis are harder to place when they work for some and not for others. (that was one of the problems coming out of the original Crisis). While we are starting [approximately] five years into our heroes’ lives, we are focused on the characters present and future, and past histories will be revealed as the stories dictate. Yes, there have been “crisis” in our characters lives, but they aren’t exactly the Crisis you read before, they can’t be.

This gives Barry/Flash some options. If COIE never happened, then odds are good he never died (which is good, because if Final Crisis never happened either, it removes one way to bring him back). Even if he had died in the New-52 timeline — and it seems like DC has said he hadn’t, but bear with me — obviously he’s back, so it’s a non-issue. The most likely scenario is that Barry never died and COIE as we know it never happened, so that takes care of one continuity knot. DC can use the Anti-Monitor in the New-52 context without having to explain how he’s around and nobody remembers Barry being dead.

Slightly tricker to finesse are Hal Jordan’s other careers. In 1994 Hal, as the evil Parallax, destroyed the Green Lantern Corps. In 1996 Hal/Parallax sacrificed his life to restart the Sun. In 1999 a Parallax-free Hal (still dead) became the human host of the Spectre, and in 2004 a series of fortuitous events resulted in Hal being brought back to life and reinstated into the also-revived Green Lantern Corps. Considering the restatement of Kyle Rayner’s origin in GL: New Guardians #1, the initial Parallax stuff probably still happened, and Hal may have subsequently sacrificed himself as he did in 1996′s Final Night. However, I’ll bet his Spectre career is no longer part of his permanent record. Heck, the Spectre itself may now be part of the new Earth-2.

You get the idea — like it or not, DC continuity is so interrelated that the effects on even a few characters ripple into the larger superhero line. We readers must now accept the fact that this is, for all intents and purposes, a complete reboot. Not that it’s necessarily bad, but it’s something DC might just as well embrace.

WON’T HAPPEN NOW

That brings me to the rumor that Krypto the Superdog no longer exists in his friendly, white-furred, red-caped incarnation. Instead, I take it we’ll only see Krypto on pre-disaster Krypton, since the rumor holds that Krypto didn’t made it to Earth alive. I found this announcement particularly disturbing, because it tells me that DC is willing to close off certain storytelling avenues entirely, even if — or perhaps especially if — they are as frivolous as a super-powered dog.

Now, I am not going to go off on another “DC hates fun” rant, mostly because I remember the 1986 edict that Superman was the last Kryptonian, period, with no loopholes for gender or species. While it took fifteen years for the proper Krypto to come back (a supporting character had a non-powered puppy with that name in the meantime) and another few years after that for Kara Zor-El to land on Earth (again), DC only waited two years to unveil a new Supergirl, whose 1996 ongoing series lasted a very respectable 81 issues.

Still, the Krypto-is-dead-already type of news is yet another sign that DC is Very Serious about some things, if only for the time being. If the high sheriffs think a Dex-Starr/Krypto throwdown may be at all marketable, the Dog of Steel will be back quicker than Hoppy the Marvel Bunny on a date. It may not even require that pretext. I cannot imagine a DC which refuses absolutely to give its main-line Superman his favorite pet.

COULD STILL HAPPEN

See, as much as it protests that its superhero comics have put away childish things, DC is even more reluctant to let those things simply pass into memory. The current Shade miniseries, which appears to take place in pre-September continuity, is just one example. Its parent series, Starman, relied heavily on a DC Universe where legacy heroes were as common as Kennedys and Bushes in government. As such, it was pretty deeply rooted in decades of DC lore, adapting and updating those old stories for its own explorations. With the New 52′s emphasis on the here and now, DC can say it doesn’t publish series like Starman anymore — except that it clearly thinks there’s an audience for a follow-up like The Shade.

Ironically, what makes me think Wally West will be coming back as the Flash is the fact that DC seems to have written him (as the Flash) out of the New 52. If Barry hasn’t died, there’s no opportunity for Wally to succeed him. In fact, if Barry’s not dating Wally’s aunt Iris, it’s much less likely that Wally has become Kid Flash in the first place. That said, it’s entirely possible that a more mischievous Wally West could have snuck into Barry’s lab on a particularly stormy night and been drenched in lightning-charged chemicals just as Barry was, and is now running around in a homemade costume as the Kid Flash of Teen Titans — but again, that version of Wally won’t be the Flash anytime soon.

And if DC brings (or has brought) back Wally in the New 52, it’s only a matter of time before Wally becomes the Flash. History argues too strongly for it to be otherwise. DC could have rolled back its Batman timeline so that Dick Grayson was once again the only Robin, but too many people know (and like) Dick as Nightwing. Furthermore, too many people like Tim Drake and Damian Wayne to remove them from the picture. Granted, during the year or so that Barry and Wally shared the name and costume, they might have seemed somewhat redundant in a way that Nightwing, Red Robin, and Robin would not. Still, for twenty-five years Wally West was The Flash, the Fastest Man Alive, and Barry Allen was just part of his backstory. I understand perfectly why DC would want to focus more on Barry in the New 52, but Wally is as emblematic of that post-Crisis era as Barry was of the Silver Age.

Accordingly, if and when DC reveals that reset button — perhaps in conjunction with revelations about the red-hooded woman — I suspect Wally/Flash will resurface, as the harbinger of a resurgent pre-relaunch DC Universe. Maybe this will happen next summer, when the New 52 is about a year old; maybe it’ll wait until 2013 and the 75th anniversary of Superman. Whenever it happens, I think it’ll be an excuse not really to roll back the New-52 changes, but to bring back some of the more successful characters and concepts which, for whatever reason, don’t fit any longer into the New-52 timeline. The Justice Society is getting its own Earth-2 again, so why shouldn’t the pre-September DC Universe have an Earth of its own? (Earth-August?) Each would be a more retro-styled alternative to the New-52 titles, allowing DC to examine its characters at different points in their careers, and probably having made different choices. After all, Dan DiDio did tell Facebook that the New 52 was about “infinite possibilities.”

* * *

To be clear, I am not ready to roll back the New 52 when it’s not even two months old. However, I do think that certain factors make conditions favorable for a reintroduction of the pre-September status quo. Using Earth-2 for the upcoming Justice Society relaunch sets a clear precedent for similar treatment of the pre-September timeline. Additionally, the fact that DC has apparently erased the original Teen Titans team — and with it some significant members of that team’s generation — strikes me as too radical a change to go unaddressed. Reworking Earth-August as a place where that generation came into its own would not only distinguish it pretty clearly, but a “successor Earth” would be a nice complement to Earth-2′s “predecessors.”

Besides, it would be another way to exploit DC’s massive reprint library. Will new or returning readers be so enamored of, say, Red Hood and the Outlaws’ Starfire that they spring for the New Teen Titans Omnibus? The reverse seems more likely. Reprinting Geoff Johns’ work on Wally West’s Flash arguably draws as much from Johns’ fans as it does Flash fans; but again, promoting Wally’s Flash doesn’t exactly cater to Barry’s current readers. While there’s room for both, DC can’t help reminding readers of the “out-of-date” stuff, because that’s basically all DC can reprint.

Accordingly, I expect Wally to resurface alongside the red-hooded woman, letting longtime readers know that Barry didn’t really destroy the old timeline. Maybe the split-in-three timeline wasn’t DC/Vertigo/WildStorm, but Earth-August/Earth-2/New-52. (Unlikely, perhaps, but the Hooded Woman’s mumbo-jumbo wasn’t exactly airtight either.) Whatever the cosmological justification, I believe that if there’s any opportunity for the New 52’s success to promote the old regime, DC will take it. Wally/Flash and Krypto may be superfluous in the New 52, but so were the retired Golden Age characters before “Flash of Two Worlds.”

Clearly, in the long term, setting up two alternate universes alongside the main New-52 Earth is begging for trouble, of the kind only another Crisis-style event could resolve. Still, I suspect that if it means DC will still be publishing superhero comics 25 years from now, it would take that kind of trouble — and when that time comes, DC might just have learned how to manage its latest multiverse.

Now, when the New 52 relaunch was announced, I said I “[didn’t] want the DC of 2012 to look like the DC of 2010.” Furthermore, I predicted that “[i]f this all turns out to be a … ‘Heroes Reborn’-style digression, and some future Big Event restores what Flashpoint changed, the New 52 will be seen as a crushing failure.”

Since then I’ve praised the Retro-Active ‘70s Superman special as a tribute to a period worth revisiting, I’ve gushed over a continuity-intensive New Titans graphic novel which evokes a similarly bygone age, and here I’ve outlined a strategy for reintroducing the pre-September status quo. Because these positions are not exactly consistent with a wholehearted embrace of the New 52, readers might well think I’d be happier if DC just went back to the ‘70s, the late ‘80s, or even this past spring.

It won’t, though; and it shouldn’t (at least not in big doses). Still, it’s frustrating to see the publisher limiting itself, whether arbitrarily or by design. By cutting a number of well-liked characters and concepts out of the relaunch, DC is practically daring readers to demand their return. Odds are that’ll happen, even as the New 52 moves forward.

++++++++++++

* [Personally, I am still not convinced that Barry himself was the butterfly whose desire to prevent his mom’s death caused the wide-ranging changes in either the Flashpoint or New-52 timelines. To me this is a discrepancy which should be answered in a future Big Event.]

"I throw him a growl I've brought all the way from Africa"

I was going to open with some snotty Wow, the holidays went by super-quickly! comment, but then I read the first issue of Justice League in seven weeks. Sometimes DC gets ahead of itself; sometimes it’s a little behind.  Happens to the best of us — sometimes you do two solicitation roundups in three weeks….

Anyway, with the January solicitations, the New-52 books each turn five issues old. Series wrapping up their first arcs this month include Blackhawks, Batwoman, Animal Man, and the Deadman feature in DC Universe Presents.  (Not to worry about the latter, because there is a lot of Deadman in these solicits.)  I’m not sure why five issues is such a wonky number for story arcs — there are five-issue miniseries all the time and they collect just fine. Still, I expected most of the New-52 books to take six issues for their introductory stories, and most of them may yet do that. Only a few books look to finish their first arcs after December’s issue #4s (Hawkman and Frankenstein, probably OMAC, maybe Batgirl), and those plus this month’s are barely an eighth of the relaunched line. It makes next month’s solicits more intriguing, I suppose.

Regardless, we live in the now (as it were…) so — onward to January!

JUSTICE LEAGUES

When I saw the solicit for Justice League #5, I thought it was another indication that Geoff Johns and Jim Lee were telling a more decompressed story, as issue #1 threatened. Accordingly, I imagined that Cyborg would be ready to go at the end of the issue, with the big Darkseid battle taking up an oversized issue #6. However, I was pleasantly surprised that issue #2 was such an improvement over #1. It moved more quickly, it brought together more of the future Leaguers, it kicked off Cyborg’s origin in earnest, and it teased another big Parademon fight. Plus it worked in a Gorilla Grodd reference, which I wouldn’t have expected so soon in the New-52 DCU. So now my mood has swung more to the manic side, and I am expecting the big fight to start in #5.

When a solicitation threatens that “[o]ne of these heroes will not make it out alive,” as Justice League Dark #5′s does, normally you think it’d be Mindwarp, the least familiar of the group. However, I then realized it could be a trick question, since that group includes Deadman — who’s not going into whatever-it-is alive….

CREATIVE TEAM SHUFFLING

I know that Tony Akins’ two-issue fill-in on Wonder Woman was planned, in order to give Cliff Chiang some flexibility, but the solicitation copy makes it sound like the issues come at least at the end (if not in the middle) of WW’s first arc. Maybe there’s some shift in the story’s tone which a different artist might help reinforce. By the same token, I can’t wait to see Darwyn Cooke and J. Bone’s guest-shot on The Shade #4.

Part of me is ready to give Green Arrow another shot, what with the three issues from Keith Giffen and Dan Jurgens and the upcoming Ann Nocenti Era, but part of me just thinks that this version of Ollie is almost too boring to fix. If anyone needed to lose his fortune, stop shaving, and go all #OccupyStarCity, it’s him.

Static Shock #5 is the first written entirely by Scott McDaniel, following the mysterious (but apparently amicable) departure of John Rozum. Walt Simonson pencils Legion of Super-Heroes #5, and contributes to THUNDER Agents #3.

THIS AND THAT

“Aquaman stranded in the desert” was actually a cliffhanger from 1985′s DC Challenge miniseries, and I want to say Aquaman killed a bird and drank its blood in order to get the liquid he needed to stay alive. Or maybe that was Watchmen; I always get those two confused. (They were both twelve issues….) Still, I bet the All-New, All-Hardcore Aquaman would totally rip out a bird’s throat with his teeth.

Considering he’s not part of the Doom Patrol, and his assistant is apparently a New-52 reworking of an old DP enemy, Robotman’s New-52 origin (as revealed in My Greatest Adventure #4) probably won’t feature the classic team. In fact, from what I saw of the New-52 Robotman in MGA #1, it looks like the Doom Patrol has gone the way of the original Teen Titans. Maybe the MGA feature is testing the waters for yet another Doom Patrol revival?

The “seduction of Damian” subplot described in the solicit for Batman And Robin #5 sounds good, although it seems like Grant Morrison covered similar ground when Damian faced his mother and the rest of the League of Assassins back around issue #12 of the previous series. Likewise, I look forward to Gail Simone’s Batgirl take on the old “female hero fights female villain who controls men’s minds” story, but I kinda want her to drop in a reference to Marsha, Queen of Diamonds.

SYNERGY

There have been plenty of guest appearances so far, but is the OMAC/Frankenstein intertitle crossover the first for the New 52? It may depend on how you categorize the connections between Superman and Stormwatch and/or Stormwatch and Demon Knights.

Speaking of which, only Hawkman can see “horrifying visions of the dead,” and so he “question[s] his own sanity?” Maybe he should talk to Grifter about that.

The solicitation for I, Vampire #5 — featuring a Batman appearance — makes me think I was right about the series’ vampires-vs.-superheroes aspect. That’s not a bad thing (apparently the original character met Batman in the pages of Brave and the Bold, as discussed below) but I wonder how much the series will go to that well.

I was surprised (synergy again!) to see Deadman figuring prominently into Hawk & Dove #5.  While they all were introduced in the late 1960s, I always associated Deadman and Hawk & Dove with different generations.  See, I keep forgetting that Hawk and the late Dove were teenagers back then, and adjunct members of the Teen Titans as well. And not to digress, but I have been thinking about the ways in which that generation of characters has been taken out of the New 52.  While I never put Hawk in that group (or the new Dove either, but I’m not sure how old she’s supposed to be), he should be there. Thus, DC hasn’t completely eliminated the Original-Titans generation from the New 52, because there’s Nightwing, Hawk, and Red Arrow. I should be satisfied with that, right?

(Again, not to digress.)

COLLECTIONS

Prior to the new I, Vampire series, the only exposure I had to this character was in the good-natured mockery of Tales of the Unexpected’s “Architecture & Mortality.” However, I have to say, I am totally ready for the omnibus I, Vampire paperback, reprinting the serial from House Of Mystery and Brave and the Bold vol. 1 #195. Ironically, while I am most interested in it as a rare example of main-line ‘80s DC doing a non-superhero story, I’m very curious to see the Batman team-up….

Hardly surprising considering the artist’s role in the New-52 relaunch, DC collects the original Karl & Barbara Kesel/Rob Liefeld Hawk & Dove miniseries (5 issues!). I didn’t read the miniseries when it came out (and still haven’t), but now I am curious to see what a strong inker like Karl Kesel did with a relatively-new penciller like Liefeld. I do remember thinking that regular-series penciller Greg Guler meshed with Kesel better.

For those who might have missed it the first time around, the Batman: Year One hardcover is well worth getting. Even if you have the original issues or an earlier collection, the hardcover (and maybe a 2007 paperback, but I’m not sure) features new coloring by Richmond Lewis which really makes David Mazzucchelli’s work pop even more. Plus, the hardcover is more durable, and you will want to look at this book a lot.

The Batman Vs. Bane paperback is a curious thing to me. The Bane of the Demon miniseries was better as a Bane story than as a Bruce-vs.-Bane rematch, mostly because it introduced Bane to Rā’s and Talia al-Ghūl, and (shall we say) gave them some non-Batman options. I don’t remember much about the Batman/Bane special except that it was a tie-in to the infamous Batman And Robin movie, and as such probably confused the heck out of anyone who might have known the character only from that. I understand that (as it happens) this paperback is meant to tie into The Dark Knight Rises, so DC is interested in the more villainous side of Bane, but it might also consider collecting “Tabula Rasa,” a nice little arc from Batman: Gotham Knights #s 33-36. Written by Scott Beatty and drawn by Mike Collins & Bill Sienkiewicz and Roger Robinson & John Floyd, it features Bane’s uneasy alliance with, and unexpected connection to, the Darknight Detective.

This month’s pleasant reprint surprise is Showcase Presents Young Love Volume 1 — more to come, I presume! — which I feel somewhat obligated to buy considering I have dinged DC previously for not reprinting its romance books. Still, I would probably have bought it anyway, just to see some non-superhero work from artists more closely identified with the caped crowd. No doubt some of the stories will be “so bad they’re good,” but on the whole it should be a fun read.

Here’s hoping that sales of the Xombi paperback — a bargain at $14.99, cheaper than the individual issues’ retail prices — are enough to make DC want more elegantly-crafted goodness from John Rozum and Frazer Irving. Xombi was just getting started when the New-52 came along, and I don’t want Rozum to have left Static Shock in vain.

AND FINALLY…

The “Batman: Black & White” line of statues has been pretty appealing so far, even if most of them are outside my price range. However, it’s going to be hard to turn down the Sergio Aragones one. What a great expression!

* * *

Well, that’s what jumped out at me this month. What looks good to you?

The New Titans in the "Perez 2" era

The New Teen Titans: Games is the latest in an ever-expanding series of projects I never thought I’d see — a list which includes 2001′s The Dark Knight Strikes Again, 2005′s Englehart/Rogers/Austin Dark Detective, the various Giffen/DeMatteis/Maguire Justice League International reunions, and of course George Pérez finally getting his bravura turn on JLA/Avengers.

In the waning years of the 1980s (so the stories go), New Teen Titans co-creator Marv Wolfman had an idea for a Titans graphic novel. Wolfman, Pérez, and editor Barbara Kesel conceived Games — basically a supervillain-caper story with an espionage/terrorism angle — as a one-shot spinoff of the wildly successful ongoing series. Pérez then drew some 70 pages before complications sent the project into the limbo of unfinished possibilities. However, as the years went by and the stars realigned, and that possibility of finishing Games turned into probability, Wolfman and Pérez were forced to rethink their approach to the material, both in terms of changed styles and changes in content.

Accordingly, the Games we have today isn’t quite an artifact or a re-creation. Although it is rooted significantly in Titans lore, it doesn’t seem inaccessible to new readers. It’s a continuation which, for various reasons, can’t be “official,” and it’s also a standalone story which offers another look at the pair’s signature work. It may well be their last word on these characters, but it’s hardly an ending. It’s what they would have done twenty-odd years ago, except that it works best when taken slightly out of that context.  Take it from someone who grew up in the land of strong bourbon — Games may be one of the most potent distillations of the Wolfman/Pérez experience.

Naturally, all that requires some explanation, so here we go….

MINOR SPOILERS FOLLOW

3

2

1

When fans discuss the “Wolfman/Pérez Titans,” odds are good they mean the five years and fifty-odd issues produced from 1980 through 1984. That seminal run ended with Pérez leaving not long after New Teen Titans had been split into two titles (Volume 2 retained the name and the original became Tales of the Teen Titans).  Fortunately, before Pérez left, he and Wolfman wrapped up the major characters’ subplots fairly satisfactorily. For example, Pérez’s last issue of Tales (#50) spotlighted Donna Troy’s perfectly ordinary wedding, and his last issue of NTT vol. 2 (#5) featured Raven’s transfiguration (and Trigon’s pretty-final-looking death).

Of course, it wasn’t the end of Wolfman and Pérez’s collaboration, since they moved on to 1985′s Crisis On Infinite Earths. Wolfman remained on NTT vol. 2, first with five issues from José Luis Garcia-Lopéz and then some three more years with regular artist Eduardo Barreto. During this time (in 1986, according to his foreword), Wolfman came up with the basic idea for Games. Pérez (who had gone on to relaunch Wonder Woman) then returned for 1988′s New Titans #50. He stayed for about a year as penciller and co-plotter, although Tom Grummett started finishing his layouts with #58 and became full penciller with #62.* After that, Pérez was credited as “co-plotter” of issues #66 and 67.

From what I can tell, the plot for Games was worked out between 1986 and 1988, during what became Pérez’s hiatus. Regardless, much of it reflects the status quo of Pérez’s second stint (“Pérez 2″).** Most significantly, Donna appears as Troia, the post-Wonder Girl identity she assumed upon learning of her true heritage from the Titans of (Greek) Myth in New Titans #s 50-55 . This storyline, which at the time was only the second revision of Donna’s origin — and the first to affect her superheroic identity in any meaningful way*** — took up about half of Pérez 2 (and most of the issues with Pérez’s full pencils). Thus, without getting too far into minutiae, it’s sufficient to say that Games fits loosely into the Titans timeline somewhere between the end of “A Lonely Place Of Dying” (circa #61) and #71′s wow-that’s-pretty-final end of the classic team roster.**** However, “loosely” is as good as continuity cops can get, because details like Danny Chase’s inclusion on the team (Dick fired him in the aforementioned #55) and Tim Drake’s brief appearances (he was originally meant to be Jason Todd) require some rationalization.

I mention all of this because despite being famous for particular stories (the Doom Patrol three-parter, “Who Is Donna Troy?”, “The Judas Contract,” etc.), New Teen Titans is best enjoyed as a four-year-plus whole, starting from the preview in DC Comics Presents #26 and going at least through Tales #50. Such a reading allows careful readers to see the characters’ subplots germinate and develop over the years, from Dick’s relationship to Batman to Donna’s search for her parents to Vic’s acceptance of his superheroic career. Even “The Judas Contract” doesn’t stand on its own, but is the payoff for some eighteen months’ worth of Terra/Terminator subplots. (Naturally, the Terminator’s subplot really began with his introduction, all the way back in 1980′s issue #2 — and neither Terminator nor Changeling got closure over Terra’s death until a year later, in Tales #55.)

Accordingly, while one’s first impulse is to see Games as a “lost chapter” of Titans history, ironically that’s not the case at all. Again, Games is a glimpse into the Pérez 2 which might have been. A number of ideas that Pérez described for the characters, including Changeling going back to school and Jericho’s polyamorous lifestyle, appear in the graphic novel.  However, while it may be easy to map the opening chapters onto one or two issues, the centerpiece of Games is a taut sequence of interlocking action scenes, showing the Titans squaring off against the Gamesmaster’s “playing pieces.” For this section of the book, Pérez uses brief flashbacks to show how Nightwing and the Titans have prepared for their foes. Combined with the customarily-efficient Pérez layouts, it’s a pretty effective technique. A red border distinguishes the flashback panels, but even that is almost unnecessary, because Pérez frames the action within the flashbacks so well that the reader recognizes the shift in perspective. To try and fit the whole thing into a twenty-odd-page single issue would rob it of its power — better instead to let the reader ease into it gradually, only realizing how far it’s escalated when it’s well underway.  Speaking of which, Games includes some pretty major changes to the Titans’ supporting cast, ones which appear difficult to reconcile with the events of the regular series, and which argue for putting Games in its own little corner of continuity.

As for its merits otherwise, Games is very good, but not perfect. Wolfman’s dialogue can still sound somewhat forced (and occasionally is marred with odd, affectless punctuation choices). Some of Pérez’s faces are actually unattractive when they shouldn’t be, his characters sometimes pose and/or emote a little too dramatically, and inkers Al Vey and Mike Perkins don’t always serve the pencils that well. (There’s some weird production value too — at times the book itself looks a little hazy, as if the lines have been slightly erased.) Regardless, it’s a well-constructed story, with some genuine shocks, which never loses sight of the characters’ personalities or their continued development. Games may not have the epic scope (with attendant character management) of Crisis On Infinite Earths or JLA/Avengers, but that doesn’t mean it’s just a rudimentary superhero story. When Wolfman and Pérez talk about the Titans as if they were real individuals, it’s not just because they have such familiarity with the characters, but because they recognize where the characters have been and where they need to go.

That’s the real appeal of Games — the sense of reuniting with these characters not as we remember them, but as they’ve “grown.” Of all the corporately-owned superhero-comics characters (touched by many hands) who I have followed over the years, very few are as closely identified with a particular creative team as the New Teen Titans. The Titans series launched by Devin Grayson and Phil Jiminez in the late ‘90s was pretty much a love letter to Wolfman/Pérez, and just about every Titans team since Wolfman left has paid its respects to their work.

Indeed, the emphasis is on “their” work, because Wolfman wrote over twice as many Titans issues without Pérez as he did with him, and Pérez has drawn the Titans a handful of times without Wolfman — but good as those separate efforts have been, the pair’s collaboration on these characters has a unique chemistry which feels ten times more right. Therefore, I don’t pretend that any other creative team, whether it’s Grayson and Jiminez, Geoff Johns and Mike McKone, or Judd Winick and his unsettled squad of artists, can ever replicate Wolfman/Pérez.

Nor should they try. Over the years, Wolfman and Pérez appear to have told the stories they wanted to tell with these characters. Dick was a frustrated senior sidekick who grew into a confident team leader. Wally West had actually retired as a sidekick (and his Titans adventures drove him back into retirement), but eventually he became the proud bearer of his uncle’s legacy.***** Raven and Joey made their own ways, apart from their villainous fathers, and Kory made her own way on the emotionally-primitive Earth. Donna found her old family and started a new one, Gar found a new maturity after dealing with his grief, and Vic found out he was a role model. Wolfman and Pérez developed the Titans into fully-formed characters, but in a way that spoiled readers for anything else.

For this reason, I think Games is both a good introduction to the Wolfman/Pérez Titans and a satisfying reunion for us lifers. It’s not the first time DC has traded on this kind of nostalgia, and it won’t be the last. However, the nature of Games, and for that matter of the Wolfman/Pérez Titans, allows the new graphic novel to be a window into what must now be seen as a bygone era.

So if you’re new to New Teen Titans, by all means read Games to see what the fuss was all about … and then read as many of the original stories as you can. Marv Wolfman and George Pérez changed the course of DC’s superhero line, but it didn’t happen overnight, and it deserves to be experienced issue by issue. Nominally a coda, Games is also an invitation, to get to know old friends all over again.

++++++++++++++

* [Issue #61, Pérez’s last issue as layout artist, was part 4 of “A Lonely Place Of Dying,” the five-part crossover with Batman which introduced Tim Drake as Robin.]

** [Thus, since the book’s title changed to New Titans with Pérez’s issue #50 return, the purist in me thinks that The New Teen Titans: Games should drop the “Teen” from its title. The rest of me is just happy to read the darn thing.]

*** [Yes, it’s all too typical that Donna’s origin gets a footnote -- but for the record, I don’t consider the leap from “artifact of Wonder Woman’s weird Silver Age imaginary stories” to “actual character with mysterious past” to have revised her origin. She just didn’t have an origin when she appeared with the Titans initially. Donna/Wonder Girl’s history was revealed in 1969's Teen Titans vol. 1 #23, with Wolfman and Pérez fleshing out her pre-Paradise Island background in 1983's “Who Is Donna Troy?” from vol. 1's #38. Thus, as shocking as it may sound, Donna’s superheroic origin stood pretty much inviolate for almost twenty years.]

**** [New Titans celebrated the group’s 10th anniversary in 1990 essentially by irrevocably altering the status quo. By the end of “Titan Hunt” in #84, Jericho, Raven, and Danny were dead, Cyborg was in a vegetative state, and Changeling and Troia had all but retired from superheroics. That left Nightwing and Starfire to form a new New Titans which included Red Star, Pantha, Baby Wildebeest, and Phantasm. Don’t worry if none of those names are especially familiar.]

***** [I know this happened in Crisis, but a) it was a Wolfman/Pérez comic, which counts for a lot; and b) I thought Wally got kind of a raw deal when he left the team.]