BOUGHT:
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Reborn Vol. 8—Damage Done (IDW Publishing) This volume opens with a somewhat incongruous done-in-one chapter, by guest writer Michael Walsh and artists Vlad Legostaev, Santtos and Walsh. In it, the four brother turtles are hanging out alone in their lair together when they receive an unexpected visitor from the future, a middle-aged mutant ninja turtle who is apparently one of them. He's there specifically to warn Donatello not to do something he's thinking about doing, something that will visit great ruin on them in the future and, indeed, imperil the whole world.Wednesday, March 06, 2024
A Month of Wednesdays: February 2024
Tuesday, February 06, 2024
A Month of Wednesdays: January 2024
BOUGHT:
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Usagi Yojimbo: WhereWhen (IDW Publishing) In 2018, Dark Horse Books published Usagi Yojimbo/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Complete Collection, which included every single one of the comic book crossovers of Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's TMNT and Stan Sakai's samurai rabbit, from the 1987 Sakai-drawn six-page short "Turtle Soup and Rabbit Stew" to the 2017 Sakai-created "Namazu or the Big Fish Story," a 40-page IDW-published one-shot.Monday, January 22, 2024
Hey, Robert Ableman listens to Cub!
Early in the book, Robert Ableman, the father of the book's heroes Abby and Aaron Ableman, is shown going through his record collection. When Aaron interrupts him, Robert clutches the album he's holding to his chest defensively and holds it there for several panels. As you can see above, it's a Cub album, specifically their second album, 1995's Come Out Come Out.
For those of you who don't know, which I assume is most of you, or at least most of Mayor Good Boy's young readers, Cub was a Vancouver-based all-girl band in the 1990s, their sound defined by simple, lullaby-like pop punk rock tunes with sing-songy lyrics that could be either extremely charming or somewhat cloying, depending on your level of cynicism. They self-branded their style as "cuddlecore." As a teenager, I loved them unconditionally, my favorite song being "My Chinchilla" from their debut album Betti-Cola, which was either a cute and innocent love song...or an ode to an actual pet chinchilla. I interpreted it as the former.
In an earlier panel, we see Aaron holding two other albums, They Might Be Giants' 1988 Lincoln and The Cure's 1989 Disintegration, so perhaps Robert came to Cub through They Might Be Giants, who covered "New York City" from Come Out Come Out on their 1996 album Factory Showroom. At any rate, we can agree that Robert has pretty good taste in music, and a worthy record collection.
This isn't the only Cub comics connection, or the only reason they might be mentioned on a comics blog. The cover art for Betti-Cola was from legendary cartoonist Dan DeCarlo.
Now the only question is who on the Mayor Good Boy team is the Cub fan, Schedit or Harmon? Or both?
Monday, January 01, 2024
A Month of Wednesdays: December 2023
BOUGHT:
This turns out to be the sole contribution of writers Alan Grant and John Wagner, while the rest of the scripts in the collection come courtesy of Chuck Dixon. In the annual, featuring a nicely crazed cover by Sam Kieth featuring Batman and The Joker and great, spooky interior art by Tom Mandrake, Grant regulars Scarface and The Ventriloquist have a new scheme: A legitimate night club for a clientele of gangsters, complete with ventriloquist act by themselves, in which they have bugged all the tables, allowing them to get all the dirt on their rival gang bosses. This is how they hear of a $25 million job The Joker once pulled off, where in the Clown Prince of Crime was the only one who knew where the money got stashed before he was picked up by the police.
So they break The Joker out of Arkham—this turns out to be the first meeting between the two characters—and try to force him to reveal the location of the loot. What does that have to do with Eclipso? Nothing. The old JLA villain turned DCU annual event Big Bad comes into play when Batman encounters a couple of his black diamonds on an ancient head piece that was part of a museum job. Doctor Bruce Gordon comes to town warning of the diamonds and the danger of Eclipso, but he's too late; it turns out this night was the anniversary of Barbara Gordon's shooting by The Joker, and her dad Commissioner Gordon is feeling extra vengeful. He has thoughts of vengeance in his heart when he touches the diamonds, and thus releases a 20-foot monster, an aspect of Eclipso, that won't rest until it takes vengeance on The Joker. This leads to a climactic battle between Batman and the monster, way out of his normal weight class, in an old, abandoned toy factory.
Mandrake handles the drawing of all the characters masterfully, and he's especially adept at depicting a semi-scary Batman as creature of the night and, of course, excels at the monster. I was rather disappointed when I got to the final panel and saw the tags saying "To Be Continued in Robin Annual #1" and "Plus--For More of Eclipso, Don't Miss Superman Annual #4". I read the Robin Annual, of course (also by Grant and Wagner, with art by Tom Lyle and another great Kieth cover), but never did read the Superman one. As with the Armageddon 2001 tie-in last volume (and, um, this volume too), I found myself wishing DC would collect the event. I know annual events are notoriously difficult to collect due to their sheer page count—Eclipso ran through two bookending specials and 18 different annuals—but I think a coupla trades could do it (and do it better than a massive omnibus, of which I'm not a fan of).
The rest of the collection, as previously stated, is Dixon's, and the stories within find him working with one of two of his more fruitful collaborators: Tom Lyle and Graham Nolan.
With Lyle (doing breakdowns, while Scott Hanna handles finishes), Dixon has a pair of three-parters. The first of these is "Electric City", featuring great covers by Michael Golden, has Batman and Robin trying to stop an electricty-powered killer who survived the electric chair and now wants to electrocute all those who showed up to watch his botched execution (Plus vigilante The Electrocutioner). The second is a rather big one in terms of modern Batman history, as it re-introduces footnote Batman villain The Cluemaster and his daughter-turned-vigilante, Spoiler Stephanie Brown (this one's got great covers by Matt Wagner, two of which grace the front and back covers of the collection).
Rounding out the collection are the Nolan contributions, "The Dragon", in which Batman's hunchbacked fix-it guy Harold discovers that the Batcave cave complex connects to Gotham's underground rail system (while Robin saves a faux Geraldo Rivers from a booby-trapped safe during a television special); "A Bullet For Bullock," in which Batman and the rumpled police detective team-up (this one features what I believe is the very first Kelley Jones Batman cover; someone please correct me if I'm wrong); and a two-part story introducing The Huntress as an active presence in Gotham City.
The repeat inclusion of the 1991 annual aside, it's a great collection from a high-point in Batman comics, and not to be missed by anyone whose never read these stories before (or who, like me, only read some of them).It's all around great stuff, and by far my favorite modern Batman comic.
Tuesday, December 12, 2023
A Month of Wednesdays: November 2023
BORROWED:
Mabuhay! (Scholastic) Teenage JJ Bulan wants nothing more than to fit in and be popular at school, but instead he always feels like he's on the outside looking in, a fact he blames in part on his family and their Filipino heritage. It probably doesn't help that his parents fully embrace that heritage in their business, the food truck The Beautiful Pig, which JJ and his little sister Althea are guilt-forced to work; she giving away free samples, he wearing a pig mascot costume and dancing around with a sign.As self-conscious as JJ is about all of the things that mark him as different from his peers, the siblings are about to learn that their family is far stranger than they ever suspected: It turns out their mom was raised by witches in the Philippines and can wield rather powerful magic herself...magic that they seem to have inherited.
On top of their regular, everyday teen problems—and, it should be said, these are compelling enough that the advent of the witches plot almost seems superfluous to the drama of the graphic novel—the kids are now being menaced by an ogre and witches at school, and find themselves allied with the characters from Filipino folklore stories that their mom had previously introduced them to in preachy, lesson-stories.
Will they learn to embrace their heritage, and all that makes them unique, in time to save their family and the world from an ancient, folkloric evil? That's the crux of cartoonist Zacharay Sterling's winning Mabuhay!, which is a Filipino expression used as a greeting or to express well wishes, translating to something like "Long live!"
It's one of the many terms that appear in footnotes throughout the book, and a glossary in the back, explaining the pronunciation and definition of the many Filipino terms and expressions that are sprinkled throughout Sterling's book. There's even a two-page, illustrated recipe in comics form, for one of the Bulans' signature Filipino dishes, chicken adobo.
In the author's note that follows the completion of the story, Sterling explains that though this isn't quite an autobiography, it is very much his story, and that, like JJ, he grew up devouring all sorts of media, but rarely finding himself or his family represented in any of it, that "when you grow up noticing how little you or your family fits the mold of anything you see on a screen or a page, you can't help but feel left out."
With Mabuhay!, he corrects that lack of representation of Filipino kids and families in comics and media...well, he certainly doesn't solve the problem forever or anything, but he does make a great stride in the right direction, giving people like his family and his people a great work that reflects who they are.
Which isn't to say that this is a comic strictly for Filipinos; the story is one that should resonate with anyone who struggles growing up in the world with an immigrant our outsider identity, or even just doubts about themselves and their family and how or if they fit into the rest of the world. Don't miss it.
When drawing the Marvel superheroes, as he does throughout the book, McDonnell, one of the most accomplished cartoonists whose work you're likely to still see in a newspaper comic strip, works in a style that differs sharply from that one may be familiar with from his work on Mutts and his several children's picture books. It looks like the work of a rather accomplished child-artist, someone who doesn't live and breathe post-Kirby action-adventure narratives trying his hand at capturing the style (In fact, McDonnell shares some of his own fan art from 1966 or so and it's remarkable the degree to which his new Marvel art echoes that of his childhood.
His book opens with a biographical note, with a prologue set in Edison, New Jersey in 1966. In panels drawn in his normal style, McDonnell tells of he and his siblings' early experiences with Marvel Comics: "Reading those early Marvel comic books by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko was life-altering...I was transformed-- --AND TRANSPORTED. I WATCHED AND I MARVELED." These words of narration accompany images drawings by Kirby and Ditko, as the McDonnell-drawn McDonnell moves through a portal and seems absorbed into the world of classic Marvel comics, seemingly replaced by that cosmic reader stand-in, The Watcher.
From there, a mini-Marvel saga begins, with panels from classic Marvel comics repurposed, with occasional bridges drawn by McDonnell, to introduce The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Iron Man, and The Hulk, each wrestling with negative thoughts, the sort of self-doubt and melodrama that differentiated the highly-emotional Marvel heroes from their stoic and staid DC rivals in the early and mid-sixties.
Recontextualized and repurposed, it is clear that there's some sort of threat to the heroes and their world afoot, a threat perpetuated by one of comics' most iconic villains: Doctor Doom. In a McDonnel-created panel, inset against a Kirby image with Lee-written narration, Doom boasts: "I've harnessed the power of the Negative Zone and started spreading its negativity across the land, crushing the human spirit."
Eventually, the world turns on its heroes, and the heroes on each other, commencing a giant brawl that will involve them all (including late arrival, The Black Panther). It's up to Mr. Fantastic Reed Richards and The Watcher to try to figure out what's going on and counter it, even as the ante is upped by the imminent arrival of Galactus. After a brief detour into "The Romance Zone", where Reed finds Doom gradually appearing on the covers of titles like Teen-Age Romance and My Own Romance and realizes his archenemy is behind the mess.
What can counter such negativity? What else but love, a superpower suggested in a quote by Kirby, and when the quote and koan-spouting Watcher and Reed manage to harness it and activate it, all is set right, but did it cost Reed his life?
He finds himself lying in the darkness, asking "What happened?", just as a dying soldier once asked Kirby in a war story he told.
The story complete, an epilogue set in the present honors Kirby, Lee and Ditko...on a page alongside McDonnell's own parents, and updates us on the state of the settings of the prologue. It's an appropriate enough climax, "mushy", to use McDonnell—or was it Lee's, originally?—word, but, like every other page of the book, generated by the men who made Marvel, the men who are the true super heroes being lionized and glorified in the book more so than the big, strong men (and a couple of women) who make up the roster of tights-clad super-people in the drama.
The book includes a pin-up of Reed, a letters column (in which letter hacks ask questions about the work a reader is likely to have, making the exercise a bit like a mini-interview with McDonnell about the work), an exhaustive sourcing of all of the images by Kirby, Ditko, Don Heck, Vince Colletta, Joe Sinnot and others that were used in the book, and a long list of all the quotes that are used during the book, some from Kirby and Lee, others from the likes of Eckhart Tolle, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Carl Jung, Marianne Williamson and the like.
A love letter to the foundation of Marvel, and to the escapist power of comic books in general, it's an amazing work.
REVIEWED:
The Accidental Warriors This self-published fantasy adventure from writer Karl Fields and artist David Velasquez finds two little kid friends on their way to martial arts class when they take a major detour—through a portal to another world, in an attempt to save their teacher's daughter from a reptillian monster man. There the pair soon becomes separated, and we follow Jalen as he tries to find his lost friend Ram, rescue their teacher's daughter and find a way back home. Along the way he meets all kinds of characters, including a riddle-telling anthropomorphic rabbit, a version of Norse god Loki and the leader of a tribe of young magic-users, and he must face such challenges as a hell modeled on a school where the bullies run things. Jalen and Ram are interesting characters to throw into your typical kids-in-another-world narrative, and Velasquez's art, brilliantly colored by Gio Wolf, is appealing.
Sunday, November 05, 2023
A Month of Wednesdays: October 2023
BOUGHT:
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Reborn, Vol. 7—Isolation (IDW Publishing) The tag on the cover says "The Armageddon Game", and the seven issues included in this collection are apparently those that were published in the pages of the main TMNT comic while the TMNT: Armageddon Game miniseries was unfolding. As such, it's clear that quite a bit of other stuff featuring the stars of the series is going on somewhere else, stuff that only occasionally intersects with the plotting of the stories collected in this trade. Still, it's surprisingly readable, with only two or three of the issues noticeably impacted by that other stuff.The first five issues or so are relatively straightforward, focusing on the two ninja turtles still in Mutant Town, Donatello and Jennika, while the other three are off doing other things. Donatello is working a monitor array and trying to keep tabs on everything happening in town, while simultaneously protecting Triceraton regent, Seri. Jennika, meanwhile, is filling in as town constable, while Raphael is off participating in the event series.
Mayor Baxter Stockman gives a state of the city address and he is attacked on camera by four white-masked mutant turtles with familiar-looking weapons (these seem to be the turtles Campbell drew in TMNT FCBD 2022: The Armageddon Game, which was collected in TMNT: Reborn, Vol. 6). This sets off riots in Mutant Town, as differing factions of the populace react violently in different directions. Meanwhile, the Utrom's from Burnow Island send an assassination squad to take out Seri, and Donatello experiments with a magic crystal that recalled the events of 1986's Donatello "micro-series" to an extent.
Things get weird part-way through the fifth issue, wherein a bunch of other characters presumably from the pages of Armageddon Game join a fight scene, one which grows between issues to include more out-of-left-field participants, including the IDW version of Cudley from the old Archie Comics. I realize I'm reading this in the "wrong" way, and that the ideal way to read it is in the individual issues as they're published serially; presumably, this stuff would make more sense that way.
From there, the reunited five ninja turtles are whisked away to learn a new, tenth secret move from The Shredder and Kitsune, and, in the cliffhanger ending, face the Rat King, the prime mover behind the Armageddon Game.
Sophie Campbell continues to write the series, while Fero Pe provides all of the art. I, as always, would have preferred Campbell at least penciling the art to anyone else, but Pe is good, and the style is well within the range of Campbell's. My favorite bits of the collection, however, are the cover collaborations between Campbell and Kevin Eastman, of which there are seven. This is, in my mind, the ideal TMNT art team, and do hope IDW eventually has them draw a prestige graphic novel together, perhaps one that Campbell writes as well.
BORROWED:
Batman & The Joker: The Deadly Duo: The Deluxe Edition (DC Comics) Superstar artist, Image co-founder and Top Cow founder Marc Silvestri gets a special showcase series on DC's mature readers Black Label imprint, playing with two of the most popular toys in the publisher's toybox.
Originally a seven-issue miniseries, Batman & The Joker: The Deadly Duo features the rather unlikely—and quite unequal—"team-up" between the two archenemies, written as well as drawn by Silvestri (Colorist Arif Prianto provides the color art).
This is forced by the mysterious new villain, who spends much of the series hidden under a purple-ish hood and cloak (that's the villain on the cover, under Batman's right wing). By kidnapping Commissioner Gordon and Harley Quinn, the villain forces the pair to work together, giving them a series of impossible-seeming, almost Saw-like tasks involving deciding who should live and who should die.
Meanwhile, a series of gruesome beheadings is being carried out by monstrously strong and tough creatures that physically resemble The Joker. The victims all seem related to a single incident, a botched armored car robbery-turned-hostage situation at a high society wedding, for which the father of the bride, who just so happens to be involved in cutting-edge genetic research, blames Batman, The Joker and the Gotham City Police Department in equal measure for its tragic, high body count ending.
He would seem to be the obvious suspect, then, and, while it's not a mystery story, Silvestri does manage to throw a convincing curveball. So too is there some misdirection regarding The Joker's motivations for playing along. He's not really trying to save Harley Quinn, but get his greatest desire fulfilled by the villain, who has the means to deliver it. As to what that is, well, it's worth reading to find out, isn't it?
The story is engaging enough, and Silvestri does a fine job writing the various players, which include Batman mainstays Harvey Bullock, Alfred, Nightwing, Catwoman and Batgirl Barbara Gordon. The set-up, bringing The Joker and Batman together as a sort of team, works, especially considering what a heavy story-telling lift that is, and the various riffs on the nature of Batman, The Joker and their relationship to one another are satisfying.
Given Silvestri's reputation as an artist, I was honestly surprised by how good the writing was. It's hardly a revelatory or revolutionary comic, of course, but it is not bad at all.
The real point of the endeavor is, of course, to show off Silvestri's artwork, and, specifically, apply it to Batman. This shouldn't disappoint any of the artist's fans, or, I would think, many Batman fans. While the storytelling isn't the greatest, and the images don't always flow together in a compelling fashion, the individual images are all generally strong, highlighting Silvestri's figurework and his particularly strong Batman.
I read the story in the "Deluxe Edition" hardcover format, which means that, in addition to 38 pages of variant covers in thte back, there's a similar amount of space devoted to Silvestri's original pencils, as well as an aftterword by Silvestri.
As for the variants, they are by particularly high-caliber artists, and, chances are, your favorite Batman artist drew one of them. Among the EDILW-favorite artists to draw variants include Kelley Jones, Mike Mignola, Kyle Hotz, John McCrea, Simon Bisley and Guillem March, any of whom I would have turned a cartwheel if I heard they were drawing a 150-ish page Batman/Joker story for DC, although Deadly Duo would have been very, very different if any of them did; this is, after all, a Silvestri story through and through.
Tuesday, October 31, 2023
Some Kickstarter campaigns of note
I feel weird about Kickstarter, the crowd-funding site that some comics folks use to bring their projects to life, instead of going the traditional route of securing a publisher.
I've backed a couple projects there before (some Jim Lawson comics, Mystery Science Theater 3000*) and been pleased with the results, so I'm not, like, opposed to it or anything, I just think it's weird when certain creators or certain projects show up there, given the fact that they seem like they should be the exact sorts of comics that publishers should be fighting one another to publish, rather than something that the creators have to turn to crowd-funding to produce. (That said, I suppose it just might be a weird prejudice of mine against crowd-funding as a publication model; perhaps there are reasons Kickstarter is more appealing to a creator than working with a publisher, I don't know. I didn't ask any of these creators.)
Case in point? Jeff Smith, the Eisner and Harvey-winning cartoonist extraordinaire whose resume includes Bone, RASL, Tuki: Save the Humans, Shazam! The Monster Society of Evil and Little Mouse Gets Ready, an artist who was on the pointy end of the spear of getting comic books in libraries and re-popularizing comics for kids again, is seeking to publish his early, pre-Bone (proto-Bone, in his words) college comic strip, Thorn, which used to run in the Ohio State University school paper The Lantern when Smith was a student there. (I've seen some of these in the 2008 book Before Bone, published in conjunction with his Wexner Center for the Arts show Jeff Smith: Bone and Beyond, and they're pretty fascinating to read in the context of the Bone that later saw print).
One would think an artist of Smith's stature would have his pick of publishers, but Thorn: The Complete Proto-Bone Comic Strips 1982-1986 and Other Early Drawings is on Kickstarter. Again, maybe this is Smith's first choice, and he didn't even consider going with a publisher, but it strikes me as...wrong that a major publisher wouldn't want involved with the project, as relatively niche as it might be.
As of this writing, there are 16 days left to go on the campaign. For $30, you can get a trade paperback version of the book, for $75 you can get a hardcover.
If you've been a regular reader of EDILW for a long time now, you probably know my love of Kelley Jones' art knows no bounds, and little has excited me more than getting a new Kelley Jones comic, especially a new Kelley Jones Batman comic. In fact, I'm so fond of Kelley Jones that if Kelley Jones walked up to me on the street and asked me for, say, $50, I'd gladly give it to him. So obviously I was onboard with a Jones-related Kickstarter.
And this one looks like a doozy, as it also involves Dracula and cartoonist Matt Wagner (best known his Mage and Grendel, but, like Jones, he has plenty of great Batman comics to his name as well). Dracula Vol. 1—The Impaler is written by Wagner, drawn by Jones and will be the first in a series of graphic novels telling the life story of one of fiction's most famous characters.
It seems like a perfect project for Dark Horse Comics or DC Comics, both of which have worked extensively with the creators in the past, or even Dynamite, where Wagner has been writing the adventures of other famous pop culture icons, like Zorro, The Shadow, The Spirit and the Green Hornet. Whatever though. Like I said, I would be happy to hand Jones money if he asked for it; if I got a Dracula comic by Jones and Wagner in exchange, well, who could ask for more?
As of this writing, there are 16 days left on the campaign. For $45 you get a hardcover version of the book, with either a Jones or a Wagner cover (I chose the Wagner cover, since I'd be getting all that Jones are on the inside).
Finally, there's something that's only kinda sorta comics that is nevertheless near and dear to my heart, and was a big part in my falling in love with comic books in the first place: The old Palladium role-playing game based on Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's original, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness.
I and a friend of mine had played a little Dungeons & Dragons around the time we discovered these books, which featured black-and-white illustrations by Mirage Studios artists Eastman and Jim Lawson (in addition to being based on the early, Mirage issues of TMNT, they also included some short comics from Eastman and Laird, all of which I believe have since been collected repeatedly, including by IDW).
Palladium quickly overtook D&D in our affections, and between us we had all five of the TMNT sourcebooks, plus a few of the related After The Bomb books, which also involved mutant animal characters. We were playing these as I was buying my first TMNT comics, which brought me into a comic shop and well, here we are thirty-some years later.
I'm delighted to see that Palladium is bringing the books back in a pair of collections, even though I have some reservations about the way they're doing it; mainly, there will be new covers and everything will be color-ized, which, in addition to never looking quite right to my eyes (I didn't care for the colorized versions of some Mirage comics that IDW has published over the years), means the Turtles will be wearing their cartoon colors, rather than all wearing red, as in the original color covers of the original black and white covers.
Luckily, they seem to have thought of the exact sort of snob that I am, as in addition to the new, colorized versions, they're also publishing black, white and red editions: "For those who want to enjoy a blast to the past version of the books more akin to the originals, this is for you." Neat! I backed at the level that would get me those versions of the two collections, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness and TMNT Transdimensional Adventures.
As of this writing, there are 28 days left in this campaign, and there's a huge swathe of options of what you can get, from $50 for the Other Strangeness Collection all the way up to special dice and miniature figures.
This is the end of this blog post, so you can now leave EDILW and head over to Kickstarter where you can support any or all of these worthwhile projects. I hope you will; I'd like to see them all reach all their stretch goals.
*They're currently trying to raise funds for a fourteenth season, by the way, and they're doing it here, rather than through Kickstarter this time.
Wednesday, October 04, 2023
A Month of Wednesdays: September 2023
BOUGHT:
G'nort's Swimsuit Edition #1 (DC Comics) Fare like this from my favorite superhero publisher doesn't exactly make me regret not visiting the comic shop every Wednesday any more. Originally solicited as G'Nort's Illustrated Swimsuit Edition (you can still see the original cover at comics.org, which I've posted below), DC apparently backed off too closely echoing Sports Illustrated, changing the title and its font before publication.
They are all mostly okay, and they do feature the work of some of my favorite comics artists, including Mike Allred, Nicola Scott and Babs Tarr, among plenty of other DC regulars. The images are all mostly stately and tasteful, often to the point of sterility, with few really provocative images, with the possible exceptions of the contributions by Frank Cho, Tarr and maybe Scott (who approaches brokeback in her posing of Dick Grayson).
More problematic are the pair of new comics included within. These are, to put it as blandly as possible, not very good.
The first is entitled "Baewatch" (get it?) and is the work of writers Julie Benson and Shawna Benson and artist Meghan Hetrick. It features a rather random assortment of supeheroines—Black Canary, Vixen, Poison Ivy, Batgirl Barbara Gordon and a Huntress—enjoying a day at Gotham City Beach, which the city made from land reclaimed from The Penguin. No sooner does someone remark that The Penguin is likely to retaliate somehow then the heroines note the presence of a nearby oil pipeline, and scouting reveals a bunch of SCUBA goons under the direction of the villain, wearing a one-piece swimsuit and floating in a bubble.
They save the day, make some jokes at the Penguin's expense, and return to enjoying a day at the beach. What's problematic about that? Well, if you've read a comic book featuring Vixen since, say, the turn of the century, you'll be aware that artists generally depict her power—which is to mimic the abilities of animals—by drawing an image of the animal she's channeling in the background. It saves the writer having to have her explain in dialogue that she's flying using the abilities of an eagle every time she takes flight.
The problem is that the Bensons, Hetrick and apparently even editor Katie Kubert have been misreading her powers, and thinking that, rather than artistic flourishes that appear in panels featuring Vixen using her powers, those flourishes are her powers, and that she creates images of the animals she's channeling, which she then can control, kind of like a Green Lantern manipulating light constructs. How else to explain the fact that, when Vixen uses the powers of a shark to investigate the pipeline, she's surrounded by a glowing yellow shark shape, a shape that she later uses to "bite"—again, she's not using the power of a shark's bite to let her bite like a shark, but the shark-shape does the biting—and, later still, Black Canary rides on the shark shape.
It's weird.
And sure, this story is just an eight-page lark and yes, perhaps I am being the stereotypical nerd reader nit-picking a trivial aspect of it, but, on the other hand, knowing a superhero's super-powers is pretty much the most basic aspect of making a superhero comic, and it's unusual to see one of the biggest superhero publishers in the world dropping this particular ball in such an embarrassing fashion.
The second story reads so much like an inventory story, that I wonder if it was actually commissioned for this special, or if it was cut from one of the previous summer or Pride specials and just got used here. It's by writer Steve Orlando and artists Paul Pelletier and Norm Rapmund and entitled "Out There."
The Authority's Midnighter and Apollo are enjoying a day at the Coast City beach in one another's arms—a sign in the background of one panel says its Coast City Pride—when Midnighter picks something up on the military bands. They don their super-suits over their bathing suits and head into action. It seems the ship the USS Incredulous is being attacked by a great ape.
Apparently, the entire ship is one big prison for Doom Patrol villain The Brain, and his long-time ally Monsieur Mallah is trying to free him, making a point of telling the "World's Finest Couple" that Mallah and The Brain are a couple themselves—somewhere along the line, Grant Morrison's old Doom Patrol joke got taken seriously enough that the pair became a romantic coupling, so desperate for gay representation was the publisher once upon a time.
Our heroes solve the villains' problem, but not in the way Mallah initially envisioned. And that's it. Orlando doesn't do anything particularly funny with the set-up—remember, there's a French-speaking gorilla in its eight pages—are anything particularly clever with the characters' super-powers. It's mainly notable as a superhero power couple vs. a supervillain power couple. Nice art by Pelletier and Rapmund, though.
Also included in the collection is a prose piece that's supposed to be a journalist's interview with G'nort and the team at the magazine talking about his centerfold, followed by some magazine-like stats on G'nort and a repeat of the cover image, featuring G'nort in what appears to be a Justice League locker room. There's also a fold-out image which I guess is the real centerfold, but it's Poison Ivy by Jen Bartel, not G'nort.
The whole affair is a great deal cheaper than the usual $9.99 that the seasonal special generally cost, but still, this was not $5.99 well-spent.
BORROWED:
Superman Vs. Meshi Vol. 1 (DC) Daily Planet reporter Clark Kent gets an hour for his lunch break, but given that he can go anywhere on Earth almost instantaneously thanks to flying at super-speed in his guise as Superman, he can have lunch anywhere in the world he wanted to. And lately he’s been really into Japanese food, flying to Japan–a three-second trip from Metropolis–to dine at chain restaurants there. That is the entire premise of Superman Vs. Meshi (that’s "Superman Vs. Food"), a delightfully weird new manga featuring the culinary adventures of the Man of Steel.
Clark Kent is in the middle of being scolded by boss Perry White when they’re interrupted by Clark’s grumbling stomach. He's dismissed to go get lunch, and he asks office crush Lois Lane to join him. She declines, and while he would normally be heart-broken, he's actually kind of happy. See, there's an all-you-can-eat yakitori lunch special at Torikazoku in Japan, and while it would be crazy for Clark Kent to fly there in an airplane to eat, it's no big deal for Superman.
"One Superman for lunch," he says, striding confidently into the restaurant, where they treat like any other customer ("They’re very welcoming here, even to someone who's clad in tights from the neck down," Superman thinks. "Maybe it's because cosplay culture has become prevalent in Japan, too.") As he waits for his order, the thinks of the first time he tried Japanese food, being gifted with some yakitori during a super-battle in Japan, and the flavor was so good it set-off his heat-vision. Since then, he's been coming to Japan for lunch as often as he can.
Each chapter of Superman Vs. Meshi, subtitled Superman Vs. Something-or-Other, finds Superman indulging in a new Japanese meal, spending most of the time talking to himself about how good the food is, how the components of the meal come together and work on his palette and so on. There's some traditional superhero action and Superman mythos maintenance in the set-ups, but the meat of each story is Superman's meal.
And so after an early-morning, rather boring meeting with the Justice League–the version here apparently inspired by that of the feature film–Superman flies to Japan for an "all-star tempura bowl," the "Justice League of tempura bowls," in which various ingredients are compared to each of the superheroes.
In perhaps the most unusual World's Finest team-up ever, Superman whisks Batman from the high-end Gotham City traditional Japanese restaurant Bruce Wayne rented out so they could talk about justice (seriously) to Japan, where Superman orders for him. ("You're the Dark Knight… …so the black-vinegar-sauce chicken and vegetable set meal is obviously the only choice.")
When he arrives for lunch one day to find all the restaurants closed, he settles for a Japanese convenience store, only to discover they are nothing like those in Metropolis ("I thought I just stepped into an amusement park!").
And, in maybe the weirdest story of the batch, he goes to a sushi restaurant, only to find Aquaman loudly carrying on talking to the sushi; apparently fish can still speak to him after they've been cut up and prepared with seaweed and rice into lunch ("It’s a little hard to explain," Aquaman tells him. "It's like the ocean tells me everything. So I can hear the voices of the fish.")
One may not be all that interested in Japanese cuisine–that’s certainly not why I picked the book up–but chances are Superman's enthusiasm for the subject, and the slightly surreal juxtaposition of the world's most famous superhero acting as a point-of-view character introducing his unexpected new obsession, will win one over. It's a comic book unlike any that Superman has ever appeared in, and given the character’s 80+ years of comics adventures–not to mention television and movies–that in itself is something of a feat.
Sure, it's occasionally pretty silly–as when Superman tries his movie trick of reversing time to stop his crunchy noodles from getting soggy–but in the context of a standalone manga like this, it works perfectly well.
The artwork, by Kai Kitago, is a nice compromise between traditional Western style superheroes and manga, the story-telling following the rhythms and patterns of the latter; his Superman and Clark look like they are rather heavily influenced by Christopher Reeve. Whether one is already an experienced manga fan–and this does read right-to-left–or used to American Superman comics, this should prove a pleasant amusement. (Note: I had planned on reviewing this for Good Comics For Kids, but Johanna beat me to it; she seems to have liked it as much as I did, so there's two recommendations for you).
Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead Vol. 11 (Viz Media) If you were worried the book was becoming a little too religious during the "Pilgrimage of the Dead" story arc, which started last volume and wraps up with two more chapters in this volume, writer Haro Aso and artist Kotaro Takata course-correct rather quickly with "Cruise Ship of the Dead," a two-part arc that finishes out this volume. In fact, the shift from the spiritual to the carnal is so sharp that a reader might be forgiven for experiencing a bit of whip-lash.
In the concluding chapters of "Pilgrimage," our heroes continue on their walk to visit 88 temples, running into trouble midway through when some escaped convicts discover that they are "rich" with canned goods and seek to rob them—and take Bea captive. Though they intend to rape her, they first interrogate her about the source of their wealth, which puts her in a bind, as she's not supposed to lie at all during the pilgrimage. Don't worry, everything works out okay for our heroes...and even one of the villains, who is visited by a kindness he doesn't seem to deserve, and may have restored his faith in humanity (gradually lost after a life-time of being taken advantage of).
And then, that arc, done, our heroes visit Onomichi City, where they take in the calm inland sea, half expecting to see a luxury liner cruising by...and then they do. A fancy yacht filled with scantily-clad hedonist invites them aboard ("Our only rule is that you like to party!"), an invitation Kencho is quick to accept, and the others more reluctantly do, since the boat's apparent captain mentions some researchers on an island, the object of our heroes' quest (when they're not ticking items off their bucket list, of course).
They're mostly all terribly out of place on the yacht's ongoing bacchanal, until a fairy tale-like twist introduces zombies into the previously zombie-free safe space of the boat (Oh, and apparently the water is no escape from zombies...not if they are close enough to you when they hit the water, anyway). There's some advancement of the barely simmering romance between Akira and Shizuka, and a cliffhanger that should force them to deal with their feelings for one another, as they wash up on a seemingly deserted island together, separated from the rest of the group.
I've seen what I assume are more than enough zombie apocalypses to last me a life-time, in manga and in other media alike, but I've yet to tire from Akira and company's adventures through this one.