DC Super Stars (1976) #3

Jim Shooter (script, layouts)

Curt Swan (pencils)

George Klein (inks)

Milt Snapinn (letters)

Mort Weisinger (original editor)

E. Nelson Bridwell (editor)

This issue of Super Stars reprints an eight-year-old Adventure Comics two-parter about Superman visiting the Legion a little further in the future, so they’re all adults. The script is one of those infamous teenage Jim Shooter scripts, and, you know, it’s not bad. I mean, it’s heavy on exposition, but the story’s mostly a tour of the future for Superman.

Eventually, after the rest of the Legion assembles, we find out someone is wrecking Legion property, and Brainiac-5 can’t figure out how it could be happening. Thank goodness Superman’s there to remember a factoid to reveal the whole story, something Brainiac-5 presumably should’ve known.

Superman’s tour is all quite genial and pleasant. The art from Curt Swan and George Klein is charming and energetic. Swan’s always at least solid, with some fantastic panels on occasion.

The second part of the story reveals the returning villains who engineered all the drama the first time around. Superman, however, doesn’t get to participate. Instead, various adult Legionnaires go to remote destinations to fight supervillains in order to free a fellow Legionnaire. Shooter does all the math on the hero and villain’s superpowers, somehow canceling one another, or maybe something in the environment. It’s thoughtful and thorough without being particularly entertaining or creative.

But there’s also the Swan artwork to keep things moving smoothly. Shooter doesn’t have a single bump in the issue. Not even the bewildering finish, which features the adult Legionnaires needing help and getting it from an unlikely pair of guest stars. Presumably, there’s a story behind the cameos.

Overall, it’s an entertaining read. It gets a little long at times—even if you’re curious about adult Legionnaires, they’re rarely in it for more than a panel or two. Those cameos never add up; at least in the second half, the story’s got some urgency. Despite part one’s villain being more dangerous than anyone in the second half, the future tour sets a relaxed pace. Superman solving the mystery is very relaxed, too. Shooter keeps multiple details from the reader in these stories, just to surprise in a couple of pages. It’s lazy, but… Swan mostly covers it. And at least those abbreviated scenes move a little faster.

The stories are decent enough Silver Age DC Comics. Not Swan’s best work (and I’ll never know on Shooter’s) but it’s a successful enough, engaging enough two-parter.

Announcing The Comix Section, a Stop Button zine

Today, a full month later than I’d hoped but a couple weeks before I feared, I’m dropping The Comix Section #1, an e-zine of comic book criticism. If you have a good color printer, lots of ink, legal-sized paper, and a powerful stapler, it can also be a paper zine. It was meant to be a paper zine and flipped when read, with one side containing a readthrough of the DC Comics Will Eisner’s The Spirit Archives and the other a wide variety of floppies starting in the mid-1970s.

There’s a story to the variety, but I’m approximately twenty-four hours behind when I actually thought I’d be making this post, and even last night, I didn’t have it in me.

I don’t even have a full listing of the contents in me at this point, but you can see the table of contents below.

There are a bevy of download versions, which took up much of the additional prep time and is hopefully something I can automate next time.

The issue is available as a PDF or a CBZ, both full quality–oh, forgot: The Comix Section is fully “illustrated” (photos of the issues and, more significantly, the Spirit)–and compressed. The compressed should be fine. Again, lots of versions if it’s not. Or you want to try printing it out.

Download PDF 142.6 MB

Download CBZ 142.6 MB

Download CBZ (full quality) 438.3 MB

Thirty-one Spirit stories reviewed, a full-page from each of them. Eighteen DC seventies books (maybe eighteen; I actually won’t get this posted if I stop and count): Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes and All-Star Comics Starring the Justice Society of America Featuring the Super Squad. Spoiler: the first year, Spirit is better, but even with the frequent, complicated, but unequivocal yikes of Ebony in Spirit, it’s often less creepy than the DC stuff.

I’ve got a fancy dedication planned for some point (at this rate, the project will take eleven years). Lanark took thirty, but it was fiction, so I feel like I’m solid. But for now, I want to shout out Vernon (who’s reading this) and Katie (who isn’t but will read the collected CS someday, all 500k words of it–again, extrapolating from this single issue). Invaluable assistance through the process, with Vernon actually making it possible. My thanks.

I hope you’ll check it out, though if you’re here for the movies or TV, I don’t think it’ll be for you unless you’re intellectually curious about comic books. Even if you’re into comics—well, the Venn diagram of Will Eisner and Jim Shooter—honestly, comics is the only reality where they can overlap so much.

Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes (1977) #238

Slsh238

This issue reprints a couple Adventure Comics from 1967, written by a sixteen-year-old Jim Shooter, proving he was better at writing comics in his teens than in his thirties. Though I’m sure there’s an abundance of evidence on that one.

Shooter also does the layouts, with Curt Swan penciling and George Klein inking. The art looks pretty much like every other competently produced Silver Age comic. The story’s about the new president of Earth declaring the Legion of Super-Heroes a youth gang and banning them; the Legion only finds out about it when they get back to Earth from missions in space, saving countless lives.

Some Legionnaires get arrested quickly; others go on the run and become fugitives as they try to discover what’s gone wrong with their world in just a few days.

The plot’s amusingly similar to a recent one where time travel changed the future, and no one believed Superboy when he told them they were all acting differently. Maybe they should’ve remembered they’d had this similar adventure.

Though Superboy’s barely in this issue, and Supergirl makes far more of an impact. The sixties Legion didn’t have the scantily clad superhero wear (for boys or girls), but they also didn’t even pretend to count the female Legionnaires as regular members. It’s a boys club and feels very much like a teenage boy wrote it.

Because one did.

It’s a little belabored (this one double-sized issue collects two old issues), and the reveals aren’t surprising–except when Shooter apparently creates the “meddling kids” reveal from “Scooby-Doo” two years before the first cartoon aired—but it’s not terrible. On the contrary, it’s precisely what you’d expect from a Silver Age comic book.

Swan and Klein don’t do a lot with the future setting, but it looks enough like Flash Gordon (the 1930s serials but with the limitless comic budget) to amuse.

It’s also interesting to see how Shooter worked out solutions based on powers but without the thoughtfulness of current series writer Paul Levitz.

Not quite interesting enough to make me glad I read the issue instead of skipping ahead, but I also don’t regret it.

Batgirl: The Bronze Age Omnibus Vol. 1 (1975-77)

Batgirl Omnibus 1

I was waiting for Bronze Age to get to the Batman Family reprints, assuming since DC moved Batgirl from backups to an anthology—and even a feature or two—the stories must be better. Surely Elliot S. Maggin and Bob Rozakis had to be better at writing her comics than Frank Robbins. Silly me.

Most of the Batman Family stories have Batgirl teaming up with Robin. There’s one where she teams up with the Golden Age Batwoman, which features some of the worst Rozakis exposition. At least until his last story, which is the last story in the collection, where Rozakis calls the readers dummies for not understanding how his very bad plot line works. Usually he’s just being oddly sexist to Batgirl (and alter ego Barbara Gordon) in a way Maggin never hits. Maggin’s got his issues—Batgirl kisses Robin to show him he can’t tell her she’s a girl and can’t do crimefighting—not to mention his very weird take on Robin:

If Spider-Man’s superpower came from being bitten by a radioactive spider, Robin’s special power is having the agile body of a boy and the intellect of man. He’s a man-boy or a boy-man. Definitely makes Robin seem like a better superhero name.

When the Dynamite Duo—Batgirl and Robin—first team up, they still don’t know each others secret identities. They quickly figure it out—off panel because Maggin’s not into any character development whatsoever—but that discovery even further stalls their character development. There’s maybe some implications—like Dick’s girlfriends being jealous of his friendship with Babs—but he tells Batman at one point he’s not interested in older women. Bruce Wayne doesn’t agree (oddly, Barbara never figures out Bruce Wayne is Batman despite Grayson being his ward); meanwhile, Barbara thinks Dick’s too young for her and when you subtract seven from her twenty-five (I’m fairly sure they’ve de-aged her and also taken away at least one advanced degree) he’s just outside jailbait. Guess she’s not impressed with the boy body, especially since Robin’s usually just using the man intellect to tell Batgirl she’s too much a girl to be a good superhero.

All of the stories are silly or bad. The first one has the Devil bringing Benedict Arnold back to life to take over the United States, which is actually a low point until Maggin brings in the Huntress and the Sportsmaster (doesn’t matter, don’t ask) who trick Robin and Batgirl into doing an elaborate heist in South America. But then Rozakis comes on and, while the stories are less patently absurd, they’re also intentionally confusing so Rozakis can turn around and be condescending to the reader on the last page or whatever.

Also disappointing is the art. Unless you want to see when Mike Grell didn’t know people had knees or Pablo Marcos drew everyone at 6’6”. Not even the José Luis García-López entry pays off. Curt Swan’s entries are also rather disappointing. Irv Novick’s is maybe the best. It’s a very low bar.

There are some decent DC extreme long shot action panels, which usually involve Batgirl doing a flip out of danger. Those panels at least show some good composition work.

The Batman Family reprints are a tepid finish to the already tepid collection. Every story, you see the artists credits and assume it’ll at least look good and then it never even looks good.

I’m a few years too young for the late seventies Batman Family but am now really glad I never bought a bunch of back issues of it because, if Maggin and Rozakis’s writing is any indication, they’re probably pretty stinky overall.

Batgirl: The Bronze Age Omnibus Vol. 1 sure doesn’t motivate to read Vol. 2.

Swamp Thing 165 (April 1996)

16135 The wonderful Chester Williams issue. I remember it from reading it years ago–though I forgot Curt Swan pencilled it.

It’s a joke issue, with Millar turning Chester into a neo-con cop who’s fed up with all the dirty hippy stuff going on around him. It actually follows the character’s history pretty close–though Chester was always so stoned he really didn’t have a personality–and it ends, as it should, with Chester confronting Swamp Thing.

Swan’s pencils are good, but the kicker is the hippy version of Swamp Thing (who looks a lot like the Scot Eaton Swamp Thing from later issues).

It’s a political issue–Millar did it in time for the 1996 presidential election–and it wouldn’t work without Chester. Having him spout generic Republican catchphrases when people are actually talking to him is a fine gag.

The issue’s memorable and decent, but it’s obviously filler.

CREDITS

Chester Williams: American Cop; writer, Mark Millar; pencillers, Curt Swan and Phil Hester; inker, Kim DeMulder; colorist, Tatjana Wood; letterer, Richard Starkings; editor, Stuart Moore; publisher, Vertigo.

Showcase 5 (November-December 1956)

This issue, concentrating on fantastical police investigations, is quite good. Even the third and final story, which gets off to a rocky start, is good.

The first story, written by Jack Miller and illustrated by Mort Meskin, is the best. A police inspector discovers he doesn’t just have insight into a bewildering case, he’s also–indirectly–the cause. Miller only has a minor surprise but his inventiveness more than makes up for it. The realistic Meskin art is a fine touch.

For the second story, Miller looks at a male model turned F.B.I. operative. The story’s silly but passable. Curt Swan does a nice job on the pencils, inked by Sy Barry.

The final story is sort of silly, sort of not. An Interpol agent is after a bad guy, chasing him across the globe. Bill Ely’s seems lacking at the start, but quickly becomes essential.

Awesome issue.

Batman (1940) #358

Bm358

It’s a strange use of Curt Swan. Something about his Killer Croc just doesn’t work. The scales, the figure… he like a Gold Key Star Trek alien. Otherwise, the art is fantastic. Swan does something with Batman’s cowl I’ve never seen before and it’s just great.

The story isn’t bad. It’s Batman hunting Killer Croc while Croc is proving himself to the Gotham underworld. Lots of action, not much character stuff. There’s a scene with Dick and Bruce where Bruce internally laments Dick being hopeful. It’s kind of funny but not really… Conway is trying to make Bruce more serious, but then has him run foolishly into fight after fight this issue–while reminding the reader he just got beat up last issue for similar behavior.

It’s a somewhat indistinct issue, while Croc coming off more like a Spider-Man villain than a Batman one (but then, Croc’s lasted, hasn’t he?).

Batman 358 (April 1983)

It’s a somewhat indistinct issue, while Croc coming off more like a Spider-Man villain than a Batman one (but then, Croc’s lasted, hasn’t he?).

CREDITS

Don’t Mess with Killer Croc!; writer, Gerry Conway; penciller, Curt Swan; inker, Rodin Rodriguez; colorist, Adrienne Roy; letterer, Ben Oda; editors, Nicola Cuti and Len Wein; publisher, DC Comics.

Superman (1939) #242

S242

The Pseudo-Superman story comes to its close with Superman choosing to be de-powered. It’s a strange move, since he’s still really, really powerful. Maybe not Silver Age powerful, but he hadn’t really been doing those feats during the rest of the issues… it’s a little confusing. It’s an effective scene, but it doesn’t hold up under much scrutiny.

Similarly, Superman’s decision to fight Pseudo-Superman to the death… again, shouldn’t he have tried to work something out with him.

It’s a good close though. O’Neil fits tons of story in–most of the issue focuses on these two bums slash crooks who “kidnap” an inter-dimensional being and use it to beat up Superman and terrorize the world in general. Some great art on those pages.

The beating up Superman scene is particularly rough to read, since it’s all so vicious.

The final scene’s a little anticlimactic though.

Superman (1939) #241

S241

I guess Wonder Woman wasn’t much of a draw back in the early 1970s because her guest appearance is a surprise (there’s no mention on the cover) and she’s practically in the issue more than Superman.

Following up on Superman’s epiphany from the previous issue (he’d prefer to live a normal life), Wonder Woman’s Indian sidekick convinces him otherwise. It’s only a couple pages, but it’s effective, maybe because O’Neil’s dialogue for Superman is so desperate.

But then there’s the subsequent problem (where Wonder Woman takes over). Superman has super-brain damage and is acting like a (well-intentioned) goofball. It’s almost like they have him do Silver Age things, then deal with the “real world” consequences.

The sand double gets a solid explanation here, along with a goofy name: Pseudo-Superman.

The reprint back-ups are cute, but out of place for the serious–if humorously handled–feature story.