Time travel is part of the Sorcerer Supreme’s day job. It sounds interesting; it mostly isn’t. (I mean, from a certain point of view, time travel to the past is seeing stuff that already happened anyway and time travel to the future is like fast-forwarding through the good parts of the movie.) Two or three times a year, somebody invents time travel and they almost always travel to the past, which means Dr. Strange has to put on his time-travel pants, follow them back, do everything necessary to stop their stomping-on-butterflies (or whatever) from creating causality paradoxes, then remove the knowledge of time travel from their minds permanently. Really, it’s just kind of a slog.

(Every so often, somebody gets the bright idea of going back in time and murdering Strange’s parents before he was born, or Strange as a baby, or what have you. The same thing always happens: they commit their nefarious crime only to find out their targets are completely protected from their attack and don’t even notice the assault/explosion/whatever. Then they turn around, where Doc stands there, arms crossed, looking rather irritated.)

But this time around it’s different, because Colin Finn hasn’t invented time travel. He’s not even a theoretical physicist or mystic-in-training. He’s a deliveryman for a courier company. Drives one of those vans, wears a dorky uniform. Has a girlfriend who dumped him six months ago because his life was going nowhere. Plays XBox with his buddies, likes books with swords and knights in them. He’s an average dude.

Except that whenever he gets stressed or nervous he restarts the flow of time; rewinds the entire day instantly to when he got out of bed. He’s been doing it for a long time now; the universe has been stuck on July 7th over and over again. Sometimes he gets a few weeks out, sometimes a month or two, sometimes only a few days, but inevitably reality goes zzzzzzzwoooooop and he’s back in bed. He can’t control it, can’t stop it, and you’d better believe nobody notices it. He’s tried killing himself a couple of times and that just auto-rewinds everything for him. He’s really very depressed about the whole thing.

Well, except for Dr. Strange. Deja vu eventually becomes more than just deja vu, after all, when you’ve got the top job, and after a few thousand repetitions any Sorcerer Supreme worth his salt would start the day realizing he’d already started the day previously. After a few attempts to divine what’s going on fail (“By the million eyes of Ashtur, I beseech thee, reveal the-” zzzzzzzwoooooop “Oh, damn it!”) eventually Strange does what he probably should have done in the first place if he didn’t keep waking up the night after he’d only gotten three hours of not-very-satisfactory sleep: he goes outside the universe.

And that’s how he finds out that things are actually much worse than he thought. Because Finn isn’t just rewinding time. He’s using chronal energy, and that energy has to come from somewhere – and it’s coming from the past and the future. The past is steadily being eaten away as Finn rewinds, again and again and again, and the future will never be. And every time, the great rewind stores more and more chronal energy – Finn is literally becoming a timebomb, but in the far more literal sense as well as the one we’re all familiar with.

You can’t kill him – even if you could manage it, what would happen to that release of time? (Answer: a lot of things, most of it bad.) So Stephen Strange has to somehow cure the strange affliction which presents itself to him. But how do you do that? This isn’t a cute movie starring Bill Murray; it’s not about Finn, the rewind doesn’t care about him becoming a better person. This is something that was done to the guy. And Stephen has less and less time – literally – to figure out what.

As requested (well, someone requested it…) here’s a list of my recommendations for the ten “gotta have it” series/volumes (as before, I cheated a little by suggesting some series that have multiple volumes) that DC has produced as part of its Showcase Presents line of oversized, cheap, black and white trade paperbacks. As before, I’ll start with the caveat that I don’t think there are really any bad choices; DC has gone in for variety instead of depth, producing a staggering array of different series from their Silver Age. Only a few have gotten more than one volume (ironically, two of those are what I’d consider the most skippable, the staggeringly dull Flash and Green Lantern…yes, I went there, Geoff Johns…) and so there’s a lot of material to choose from. Best of all, they’ve been very good about representing their non-superhero material. DC was sometimes at its best when doing war, horror, or western comics, and they’ve put some of their best stuff out. (Cutting Enemy Ace from this list was the hardest thing I’ve had to do in a long while.) (I lead a sheltered life.)

10. Ambush Bug. To be honest, I’d actually have left this off the list, except for my lingering fear of a miniature jihad being declared upon me in the comments list by rabid Ambush Bug fans. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some very funny, very iconic material here. But it took Giffen a while to figure out what was funny with the character, and fan demand forced him to keep going back to the well long after his best material was used up. So what you’ve got is a volume with a very funny middle, and a tremendously uneven beginning and end. Still worth reading for the middle, though.

9. Hawkman. I seem to be all alone in feeling this way (or, at least, I didn’t get the chance to impose my fanboy opinions on DC continuity for a generation like some comics writers I’ve already mentioned…) but I’m of the opinion that the Silver Age Hawkman was the most fun incarnation of the character. Sure, he’s a little goofy; he’s a space cop with a medieval weaponry collection who’s come to Earth to learn our law-enforcement techniques. But the backstory they cobble together actually makes it all work, and Katar and Shiera are a fun couple with good romantic chemistry. And there’s just something fundamentally awesome about seeing a superhero swoop down and beat the crap out of a guy with a mace.

8. Adam Strange. Of course, now we know that he’s part of the DC universe and is an honorary Justice Leaguer and is probably Doctor Strange’s sixth cousin once removed or something, but back in the day, this was a great stand-alone science fiction comic. Adam was a fun character, Rann was a fun setting in the Flash Gordon mold, and the (literally) star-crossed romance between Adam and Alanna is sweet and touching in a way that you don’t traditionally get in “boy’s comics”. (I’m not saying they’re only for boys; only that DC aimed them at a predominantly male audience at the time.) The series suffers a little once the JLA gets involved–too many space-traveling characters makes his plight a little harder to sustain–but there’s still a lot of good material here.

7. Superman. Yes, yes, yes. We all know that Superman is square and lame and uncool and overpowered and bland and…except that he’s not. Back in the Silver Age, Superman was a snarky wiseass who almost appeared as a Trickster figure in most stories (not the Barry Allen Flash bad guy, the archetypal Trickster of myth who provides moral guidance to the hero in the form of cryptic riddles, jests, and pranks.) There are issues where he acts as a “genie” to a criminal he inadvertently wronged, making amends with “wishes” that he deliberately gets wrong; issues where he turns the tables on Mr. Mxyzptlk by going to the 5th dimension and playing pranks on him; there’s even an issue where Superman contends with the IRS. The Silver Age has a reputation for goofiness, but most of the comedy was intentional, and it holds up pretty well even today.

6. Legion of Super-Heroes. The problem that the LoSH has in attracting new readers is that it has a large cast and a long, tangled, sometimes impenetrable mythos (which has been confused even further by multiple reboots.) The solution? Start at the beginning, and read it in big chunks. You get many of the classic Legion storylines here, before the retcons and the reboots and the re-reboots and the un-retcons and the time-jumps and the clones and the time-jumped clone retcon reboots clutter it all up. Plus, Lightning Lad gets space madness and hunts down a giant space whale. Hooray for Gooba!

5. Metamorpho. This is the absolute apex of comics as Pop Art. It effortlessly straddles the line between inadvertent camp and expert satire of camp until you’re never quite sure whether it’s taking itself seriously or not. It has the best set-up of any comic book ever; Metamorpho is working for the only guy who can cure him of his freakish super-powers, only the man in question is an amoral crackpot who wants to kill Metamorpho for dating his daughter. Only, of course, he can’t, because he needs Metamorpho to keep resolving all the crises he keeps getting himself into. Add in the actual freaking reanimated Neanderthal butler, and you have a recipe for brilliant insanity. If I could pick a single title to revive, I would go back and revive Metamorpho and I would shamelessly hammer things back into the shape they were in the Sixties, because it is fucking awesome.

4. Jonah Hex. Things get just a little tricky here, because I picked the best horror, war and western comics for 4, 3, and 2, but my placement of them is slightly arbitrary. If you prefer westerns to horror, or war to westerns, rejigger these three accordingly. Because really, there’s nothing concrete in my head that puts Jonah Hex behind the next two on the list. It’s a sharp, nasty, wickedly grimly funny comic about a heartless drifter who desperately tries to conceal the fact that he’s not quite as heartless as he pretends to be…but who’s still a lot more heartless than the bad guys he comes across. It’s a wonderfully prescient take on the genre that feels oddly modern despite being almost forty years old.

3. Sergeant Rock. This is where Enemy Ace almost went, but really, it’s so hard not to recommend Sergeant Rock. This is Joe Kubert at his finest (yes, so was Enemy Ace) but it’s also one of the most iconic heroes of the genre. Rock is the archetypal sergeant, and even the most fervent pacifist will feel their blood stirring as he guns down Ratzi troops with the help of Easy Company. Really, once you’ve read these, you won’t need to read any other WWII comic.

2. House of Mystery. What’s to say? This is Joe Orlando taking the horror comic back to its roots after years of blandness and boredom, skirting the edges of the Comic Code and relying on the snarky, self-aware humor of Cain to glide over the bumps. It’s got some wonderful Sergio Aragones gag pages, some excellent twist endings, and beautiful art that looks great in black and white. And you’ll probably understand a lot more Sandman references afterwards, too.

1. The Elongated Man. Yes, really. The Elongated Man is the single best volume of Showcase Presents, a non-stop joy from beginning to end. It’s like reading an Agatha Christie collection, except that Tommy Beresford has stretching powers. Every single one of the strips presents an instant grabber of a mystery, and Ralph and Sue solve them all with grace, style, and panache. (Perhaps it’s more like The Thin Man, with a super-stretchy William Powell…) And the art…the art will make you understand exactly why Carmine Infantino was a motherfucking legend of the Silver Age. His pencils are dynamic, powerful, and his use of Ralph’s powers in the fight scenes is absolutely inspired. You’ll actually believe that a guy who stretches is a major ass-kicker, and you’ll also believe that he’s a brilliant detective and a devoted husband and an awesome character that deserves to have his own A-list series. (Warning: Side effects may include wanting to cockpunch Brad Meltzer.)

There you go, my recommendations for the top ten. You may present your alternate takes in the comment section. (I’ll probably agree with them, too. I had to make some hard choices to get this down to ten: Batgirl, Batman and the Outsiders, Booster Gold, The Doom Patrol, Supergirl, The Unknown Soldier…)

“Hey, we need to create another character for the “Justice Society 2″ project.”
“Okay… so we got two kids Green Lantern had, Hawkman’s son, Wonder Woman’s daughter, and the Atom’s grand-nephew or something like that. Who else can we throw in?”
“Maybe the Flash has a kid?”
“Nah, I don’t like it. Dr. Mid-Nite?”
“Blindness isn’t heriditary. Doesn’t make sense. Hourman?”
“What, a kid who takes the same pill? We want superheroes here. We’ll save that idea for if we ever get desperate.”
“Well, that knocks out a lot of them. I mean, the JSA were a lot of guys who barely had powers if at all, right?”
“Yeah. Maybe Hawkman could have another kid?”
“What, another one? We already did the Egyptian thing with the first one.”
“Yeah, but he doesn’t have wings. How about we give him a kid with wings?”
“Why would one kid have wings and the other kid doesn’t have wings? Come on.”
“Okay, okay, I get your point, but I think a winged superhero has the look to round out the team.”
“I don’t disagree, but how does he have wings? Hawkman’s wings aren’t hereditary either.”
“…maybe he’s not Hawkman’s son.”
“But that’s the whole point of this series. It’s the next generation of Earth-2 superheroes.”
“Maybe he’s… his… godson?”
“I’d say that’s weak, but we already got the Atom’s grand-nephew in this, and really he’s only an honorary grand-nephew at that.”
“Okay, godson then. But how does he get wings?”
“He takes a pair of Hawkman’s old wings. It’s not rocket science.”
“Come on, we can do better than that. I’m thinking that he’s actually a bird-man.”
“What?”
“A bird-man.”
“Like Koko B. Ware?”
“No, I mean a bird-man hybrid. A man-bird, if you prefer.”
“So, like, a guy with a bird-head and wings and talons.”
“No, that’s a little too freaky. I’m thinking just the wings. Maybe he can have some feathers in place of hair or something.”
“And this is Hawkman’s godson.”
“Yeah. Uh… a friend of his married a bird-woman.”
“A bird-woman.”
“From a race of bird-people.”
“This is one sexual deviant we are talking about here.”
“No, they mostly look human. But they’re evolved from birds, like we evolved from apes.”
“So he’s only slightly kinky.”
“Shut up.”
“Does he call her Beaky?”
“The point is that they had a kid.”
“And he’s from the race of bird-people. Which live where?”
“…a hidden secret city?”
“I can work with that. Where’s it hidden?”
“How about the Arctic?”
“You know what I think of when I think of the Arctic? Birds.”
“Well, that’s exactly why they’re hiding there, wiseass. Because nobody would think to look for bird-people in the Arctic.”
“I guess they probably had a hidden city in temperate zones first, but people kept coming up to it and saying “gosh, a hidden city of bird-people! It was right where I expected it would be!””
“Anyway. So we’re good on the origin, then?”
“Yeah, why not. Does he have any powers other than flying?”
“Does he need any?”
“Well, you’ve got one person who flies and can shoot energy blasts, and one person who flies and is basically a living Green Lantern ring. Doesn’t that make Kid Bird-Man kind of redundant?”
“This is a superhero team. There’s always room for a person who only flies and nothing else.”
“Fair enough. But I bet someday that somebody’s gonna take this guy and go full-on freaky-looking bird-man with him.”
“Might as well guess that he’ll get turned into a zombie or something.”
“That’ll be the day.”

Is it okay that I am kinda skeeved out by this?

I mean I been busy the last few weeks because I was in America and all and I’m totally gonna talk about that later when I’m not busy being me, but… ewwwwww, Kevin Church! Ewwwwww!

So in catching up on my comics reading after weeks of being too busy, I finally got to read Brightest Day #0 and yeah, it’s a pretty bad comic. Whenever a character refers to the title of the comic unironically, you know you’re in severe hit-or-miss territory, and between Captain Boomerang explaining The Shawshank Redemption to the Flash in a scene that just feels like treading water for a page or this whole “Deadman as Life-Man!” thing or the truly inexplicable return of Hawk (and everybody just forgetting that whole “hey, remember when he tried to conquer the universe and kill us all?” bit) or Hal Jordan being, well, Captain Needs A Dick-Punch again (seriously, there is no comics character I hate as much as Hal Jordan, with the possible exception of Beast Boy. Fuck Beast Boy), it’s pretty much mostly a miss all the way.

Don’t get me wrong: there are some good ideas in there. I know a lot of people hate the Max Lord revamp, but my thinking is if you’re going to have Max Lord be a baddie, then go full-out with it, and the idea of Max Lord making the whole world forget he ever existed (except for the old JLI, of course) is kind of appealing. And although Cry For Justice was dogshit in numerous ways and the worst possible way to get to the end result of “now there is a giant star-shaped forest in Star City and that is where Green Arrow will hang out,” that end result is not half bad.

But mostly it’s just bleh. I mean, you know what I’m sick of? Other comics characters constantly referencing the fact that J’onn J’onzz likes Oreos.1 I mean, here he is, your buddy back from the dead, so what do you do? You bring him cookies. Because he likes cookies. Granted, it’s at least nice to have comics characters making a thoughtful gesture, but you’ve got to figure at some point J’onn is going to be all “…you know, I do like other things that aren’t cookies. You could have brought me a book. I like to read. Or maybe some nice incense for when I meditate. Or something I’ve never seen before, to express the wonder that is Life that I may once again enjoy. That sort of thing.”

I mean, J’onn can just go to a supermarket if he wants some cookies. Bringing him cookies is like buying your loved one a birthday present at the gas station because nothing else was open – it actually manages to be almost worse than a gift certificate. Can you imagine anybody doing this sort of thing in real life? “Hey, dad! I know you like barbecue, so for your birthday I brought you five pounds of raw pork shoulder!” It just makes J’onn’s friends seem like assholes who don’t care about him enough to know him better than “he likes cookies”; it rings false.

The other thing that really bugged the shit out of me was the treatment of Aquaman.2 This is not because Aquaman was brooding, because Aquaman should brood. Really, I know there’s a large contingent of people who think Aquaman is just a less interesting version of Namor, but they are wrong: Aquaman is a more relatable version of Namor, who is, let’s be honest, kind of an unlikable dickhead. And it’s not like Arthur doesn’t have interesting narratives: he’s the King of the Sea, for crissake. You can do political narrative with Aquaman all day long and, unlike other characters, it doesn’t come across as forced or uninteresting: court intrigue as superheroics is something nobody else (other than Namor) can really pull off. And on top of that, he’s got an archenemy who killed his son. Like, not a son analogue a la Joker killing Jason Todd – his actual honest to god son. I have yet to see a writer really convey the sheer amount of hatred Aquaman must have for Black Manta; I’m not expecting to see it anytime soon, especially considering the three pages he got in Brightest Day.

I’ve seen other people describe this comic as being the worst comic of the year. It’s not. It’s mostly just weak, tepid sauce, the same weak tepid sauce that is ninety percent of DC’s output these days. If DC Comics was fast food, it would be Taco Bell to Marvel’s higher-end burger shack (nothing surprising, but better than average level of quality across the board).

1. Oh, sorry, “Chocos.” [↩]
2. WHO STILL DOES NOT HAVE HIS BEARD. Rectify this, DC! OR FACE MY FURY. [↩]

See, all the hype lately is about how Grant Morrison is going to write a story where Batman travels through time and is Batman in different eras. But Batman is totally stealing this schtick. Who beat him to it?

Obviously, Batman draws his inspiration from Rex the motherfucking Wonder Dog, as is right and proper.

I make no secret of it; I adore the Marvel Essentials line of trade paperbacks. My own blog, Fraggmented, has dozens of posts devoted to these insane 500+ page black-and-white chunks of classic comics, each one giving you twenty or more issues of a title for an almost sickeningly reasonable cost. (Some of the collections of late 80s and early 90s comics, like X-Men and Wolverine, actually give you the comics for less than the original cover price.) There’s something so wonderful about being able to sit down with a comic and see the long-term plotlines unfolding in front of your eyes, taking in years of development in just a few volumes. I’ve been buying these for years now, picking up classic runs of Fantastic Four and Avengers for a song and taking a chance on comics like Man-Thing and Killraven that I probably wouldn’t have bought if not for the cheapness of the format. I won’t say that this is the last word on the subject–heck, I could probably do a whole other post on the similar Showcase Presents line at DC–but here are my top ten Essentials for those of you interested in dipping in.

10. Captain America, Volume 1-4. There’s a Volume Five coming out soon, and I’ll probably buy that when finances permit as well. For all that Captain America is seen nowadays as a stodgy, stuffy agent of the status quo, he was originally a counter-culture firebrand and a lens through which a variety of excellent writers looked at the changing face of America. And for all that Ed Brubaker tries to inject some “edginess” into Cap, he’s still light-years away from the smack-talking rebel Stan Lee once wrote, and you’ll be amazed at how interesting Steve Rogers was as a person before Mark Gruenwald bowdlerized him in the 80s. (Don’t get me wrong, I like a lot of what Gruenwald did, but he seriously blanded down Steve Rogers’ personality.) The series is a little inconsistent, but there are long stretches of good stuff in every volume. Highlights include Cap fighting it out with Nixon on the White House lawn, and delivering a humiliating smack-down to a villain that was so thorough the character never appeared again.

9. Defenders, Volumes 1-3. Actually, you could probably stick to the first two books and come away happy–Steve Gerber’s magnum opus that closed out his run on Defenders hasn’t entirely aged well, and comes off a little pretentious now that the 70s culture that nurtured it has faded away. But this is still a classic Defenders run, and the reason the series is fondly remembered long after the multitude of failed relaunches and reunions. (Tip for prospective Defenders relaunchers: If you go back and read these books, the Silver Surfer and Namor left the team after about five issues. For the most part, the stable Defenders team was Doc, Hulk, Hellcat, Valkyrie and Nighthawk.)

8. Power Man, Volume 1. It’s interesting to see the way that Luke Cage has been almost a cultural mirror of African-Americans over the course of his appearances in the Marvel Universe; he went from being a raw, hard-edged underdog who refused to let his oppression at the hands of a racist prison system break his spirit, to a walking comedy jive stereotype, to a street hustler and borderline thug, and finally to a cynical, worldly-wise veteran of the revolutionary 70s. But he was never better than in his first few appearances, when his character was treated with total sincerity by writer Archie Goodwin, and it’s worth picking up the book to read those old stories. (The later volumes are good too, as is the Iron Fist solo series, but I’m sticking with the best stuff for purposes of this list.)

7. Silver Surfer, Volume 2. Volume 1 is fairly readable, more notable for its lovely Buscema art than its stories, but Volume 2 is where the story really begins. Steve Englehart finally figures out how to make the Surfer work in a way that no previous writer ever had, simply by freeing him from his imprisonment on Earth and putting him in space, his natural millieu. You’ll need to have a tolerance for certain Englehart-isms (oh, look! It’s Mantis again! And she’s even more bad-ass!) but the series is space opera at its epic best. Definitely deserving of a third volume.

6. X-Men, Volumes 1-4. Yes, it’s probably blasphemy to put the Claremont/Byrne era of the X-Men this low on the list, but trust me–when you actually go back and read them, you find that all of Claremont’s annoying little tics as a writer (his over-narration and purple prose, his borderline creepy obsession with his female characters, his habit of having everyone reiterate their major personality traits for the reader every few pages) didn’t start when he returned to the series in the 21st century. Even so, this was a collaboration that was more than the sum of its parts, and the work they did here has let every subsequent writer coast on their efforts, so it’s worth picking up just to get the backstory.

5. Spectacular Spider-Man, Volumes 1-2. Bronze Age Spider-Man was always a treat–in the wake of the death of Gwen Stacy, there was always a feeling of uncertainty and adventurousness about the title. Just like in the early days, there were no sacred cows…or at least, it seemed like it…and this is some particularly fine Bronze Age Spider-Man. You’ll find Gerry Conway, Roger Stern and Marv Wolfman all writing the title in these two volumes, and those guys are master craftsmen of a sort that the medium just doesn’t turn out anymore. (OK, I tell a lie. Jeff Parker and Fred van Lente have shown huge chops in that regard as well. But Roger Stern still shows everyone How It Is Freaking Done.)

4. Super-Villain Team-Up, Volume 1. Despite my complaints about “decompression” and “event comics” on my own blog, this was a big epic crossover before there were big, epic crossovers, and I love it. Doctor Doom and Namor team up to crush the surface world, only to wind up opposing each other in a gigantic saga of double-crosses, clashing egos, and duels of sheer will between two of Marvel’s best bad guys. There are a few other stories that close out the book (the “Red Skull vs. Hitler” one is a classic, as well) but you’re buying this one for the big Doom/Namor war, and it’s worth it.

3. Doctor Strange, Volume 1. Speaking of collaborations that are more than the sum of their parts, this is Ditko and Lee at their finest. Doctor Strange’s origin story has the elegant wonder of a child’s fairy tale, and the stories that follow introduce an entire epic mythos of cosmic strangeness that has probably never been equaled in the comic-book medium. (Perhaps by Lovecraft in the pulps, but nobody did weird tales in comics the way Ditko and Lee did it.) Later volumes are alright as well, but they’re definitely all trying to imitate the effortless grace of these awesome early stories.

2. Tomb of Dracula, Volumes 1-4. A bold, experimental, almost unprecedented comic, this Marv Wolfman/Gene Colan collaboration (they worked together on almost the entire run of the series) puts the focus on Dracula not as a mere monster, but as a tortured soul in the vein of Milton’s Satan. He is constantly the prisoner of his own pride as much as anything else, denied the delights of a living existence and yet unwilling to surrender to death. As drawn by Colan’s gorgeous, evocative, moody pencils (this is one book I’d recommend in black and white over color), it’s a helluva ride, especially given that Wolfman also gives us a great group of sympathetic vampire hunters to root for. (Yes, this is where Blade first shows up. He’s not even the coolest of the bunch.)

1. Spider-Man, Volume 1. And this is Lee and Ditko at even finer than their finest. It’s a collaboration that finally burned them out on each other, but what the hell, the Beatles didn’t last forever either. And this…every single Spider-Man writer since then, including Stan Lee himself, has been trying to recapture the singular alchemy of these 22 issues. Everything from Spider-Man’s origin to his battles with the Chameleon, the Lizard, the Vulture, Doctor Octopus, Kraven the Hunter, the Enforcer, the Green Goblin, Electro, the Sinister Six and the Scorpion has damn near been carved into stone as the Way Spider-Man Should Be, and here Lee and Ditko seem to bring it off almost casually. Much has been made of the question of “Who deserves the credit for these?”, but that misses the point; Lee needed Ditko’s imagination and unflinching moral sensibility, and Ditko needed Lee’s humanizing touch and deft dialogue. If you’re someone who thinks that Stan Lee is a tired old hack who had more of a knack for self-promotion than for writing, read this comic. It still holds up, even after all these years.

I don’t think a lot of people still read Al Capp’s Li’l Abner; Capp’s extreme misanthropy, combined with his shift to the hard right late in his career, can make the strip a bit of a slog at times. But at its best, it was comics genius. And it was never better than in the story where Capp finally, after years of almost making it happen, forced the title character to marry Daisy Mae, the beautiful girl who pined for him in vain (because Li’l Abner was too stupid to have any concept of sexual attraction to anyone, he just considered her a nuisance). I found the story in an old book, and thought I’d share it here, because after almost 60 years, it still puts most comics to shame when it comes to handling an “event” story.

The full story can be found a this link. But one thing you need to know to understand the story, or at least how it looked at the time, is that Capp had constantly made it look like Abner would have to get married, and then found some twist to get him out of it. That’s what comics creators do: they toy with us. By the time this story ran, no one really believed that Abner would marry. Everyone was on to Capp’s tricks. So what does he build the story around? The fact that everyone is in on his tricks. The whole story is like a huge meta-game with his huge audience, starting as soon as Abner’s “Uncle Future” predicts that he will get married:

The biggest stroke of brilliance, though, was the device Capp used to marry Abner off. For years, one of Capp’s most popular recurring ideas was “Sadie Hawkins’ Day,” where boys are forced to marry the girls who catch them. Every year, someone would catch Abner and there would be some crazy reason why he stayed a bachelor. So by 1952, anyone who had ever read the strip assumed that if Abner got married (unlikely) it would be because of Sadie Hawkins’ Day. So Capp doesn’t even bring that into the story at all. Instead, he uses Fearless Fosdick, the Dick Tracy-style strip-within-a-strip that produced many of his best stories (Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad was so influenced by Fosdick, with its gruesome cartoony violence and take-that attitude to the comics, that it bordered on copycatism at times). Because Abner was a devoted reader of Fearless Fosdick, he would sometimes echo Capp’s own thoughts on comic strips and comics readers. But here, he takes a vow: from now on he’ll do exactly what Fosdick does, all the time. This will keep him safe from marriage because Fosdick is the most famous lifelong bachelor in all of comics.

So having set up this meta situation, Capp takes it up a notch by having Daisy Mae meet “Lester Gooch,” creator of Fearless Fosdick, and tell him some of the same things that Capp himself had probably heard: by portraying an anti-marriage hero, he’s setting a bad example. I doubt Capp actually decided to do the marriage for this reason, but he is, as we now say, putting it out there. He’s added an extra layer of irony, as we try to figure out whether Lester Gooch is speaking for Capp, or just standing in for the way people saw Capp’s reasons for doing this storyline.

So Gooch creates a storyline where circumstances push Fosdick closer to marriage, and because Abner has promised to do whatever his comics hero does, Abner is going to have to undergo a “real” marriage the very day one happens in the comics. Here’s where it gets really byzantine, because Abner starts speaking for his own readers, the ones who were hep to all Capp’s tricks and knew (or thought they knew) that Capp would put in some twist to get his hero out of it, as usual. Abner points out that gullible comics readers belive that these gimmicks — like marriage — are real, while the savvy comics reader knows that Fosdick (and therefore Abner) will just go back to the status quo in the end.

But Fosdick gets married, in what is undoubtedly the biggest event in the comics-within-comics world, with Abner — standing in for his own readers — expressing shock and appallment (appallitude?) over this.

And the day after Fosdick’s strip-within-a-strip wedding comes a similar “event” wedding in the strip itself. Once again speaking for the readers, Li’l Abner wonders how this could happen after all the times he’s gotten out of it. While his parents, more or less breaking the thin fourth wall that this story had up to now, sort of acknowledge that this (heavily-publicized) comics story is being read by millions, even “billyuns,” around the world.

But of course that doesn’t end things, because we know that even when the big event happens, it doesn’t “really” happen. This is the comics, after all. Abner keeps clinging to the idea that a “miracle” will happen to restore the status quo, even as he and Daisy Mae set off on their honeymoon. One possibility Capp keeps referring to, with his typical gruesomeness, is that Daisy might just get killed off; a couple of strips end with it looking like she might be about to die, or even shot dead.

But most readers had one explanation in mind. People who read the 1952 equivalent of TVTropes could tell you what a comics creator would do after marrying his bachelor hero off. And sure enough, it happens — but not in Li’l Abner, in Fearless Fosdick.

Yes, in the final game between Capp and the reader, he’s used the last-ditch trick, the one cartoonists always use, the “imaginary story” gambit we were all expecting — but not in the world of the strip. Instead he uses it as a way of showing that this is absolutely final for Abner: there’s no miracle to save him, and it’s not a dream. (Capp is also distancing himself from other comics: the “it was all a dream” trick is something they use, not him.) As Mammy explains to him, and us, things will never be the same in this comic again. Abner was wrong in thinking that this was all going to blow over, and so were we: Capp has put one over on all of us who thought we knew all the tropes.

There are differences of opinion as to whether this marriage was even a good idea. Some people think it hurt the strip; others think it had a natural rate of decline that was going to happen whether Abner was married or unmarried. But one thing’s for sure: no one had ever turned a comics marriage into a gigantic exploration of the whole process of reading comics, the relationship between reader and artist, and the audience’s ability to anticipate comics clichés. Well, it beats the hell out of another “Superman marries Lois Lane” cover.

Reading old Code-approved humour comics frequently raises the question “was that intended to mean what we now think it means?” So, here’s a question, in lieu of actual content: do you think the innuendo in these comics panels is a) intended by the writer or b) not?

1. From Marvel/Timely/Atlas’s Millie the Model # 92 (more about this title later, hopefully), drawn by Dan DeCarlo and written by Stan Lee, Millie is offered a sham engagement to a Hollywood hunk named “Tab Hudson,” and I always wondered if there was a definite meaning to his line in the second panel, or if I’m just being sophomoric. Of course the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

2. From She’s Josie # 15 (another title that probably deserves more comment) drawn by Dan DeCarlo and written by Frank Doyle, Pepper (who is awesome) asks for help:

So I briefly considered doing an April Fools Who’s Who post where Batman would be, like, 2 percent Rex the Wonder Dog, but rejected it because after thirty seconds I was all “there’s no way this is actually going to be particularly funny, it’ll just be a series of all those shitty ‘jokes’ people already make about Batman anyway.” So in lieu of an April Fools post, here is a serious (sorta) post about Blackest Night.

Short short version: I didn’t like it.
With caveat: But I didn’t hate it either.
With second caveat: Because it was just kind of there.

Lately I’ve been less impressed with Geoff Johns’ work. When I say “lately,” I really mean “for years now,” but I digress. Johns is kind of interesting in that he’s actually pretty good at writing an ongoing title; I still consider his run on Flash to be a particularly strong one, and Flash is a series where the likes of Grant Morrison have stumbled, so you know that’s a book not everybody can write really well.

But I’ve never liked his event books. A Geoff Johns event book, to me, always reads like the literal translation of an algorithm designed to create A Good Event Storyline. Like, if you put together a trend line, and the Y-axis was “How Well The Heroes Are Doing,” you’d get a squiggly line in most books: the line starts out at about the midpoint or slightly below (IE, “normal”), then dips down sharply when the baddies start kicking hero ass, then pops up a bit as the heroes get their second wind, then goes down deeper when the villain turns out to have a serious master plan for which they weren’t ready, and then climb to the finish. Whenever I read a Geoff Johns event comic, I feel like he looked at that line in advance and then wrote his storyline to hit those beats exactly, regardless of whatever story he wrote.

You can see it when you start going back through the story and realizing that a lot of the surprises and big moments were totally pointless. For example: why did they need to “deputize” Barry Allen and Lex Luthor and Ganthet and Mera into the various-coloured lantern corps? Answer: they didn’t. At no point during the main story do these deputized Lanterns matter because they’re now Lanterns. It was just a cool aside, if you think sticking a power ring on a character suddenly makes them cooler. A lot of people do.1 Granted, the Lantern Deputies actually mattered within their own Blackest Night miniseries, but as comic fans, we all know the optional extras don’t count for assessing the main story unless they end up in the collected edition, and Blackest Night: The Flash ain’t gonna be in the main book.2

What about Dove? What was the point of all that? Apparently Dove I couldn’t be raised by Nekron because he was “at peace” (apparently every other dead superhero ever was emotionally troubled when they died, I guess). And then Dove II, for reasons that were never actually explained (that I saw – maybe there was a Blackest Night: Dove one shot or something), is a living anti-zombie ray and can blow up zombies. Why can Dove do that? Because… something. Possibly to do with the Life Entity that makes the White Lantern Corps.

And why was Mera a Red Lantern again? Seriously, I don’t know anybody who even pretends to understand that shit.

Or how about the ending? The key to beating Nekron is by resurrecting Black Hand – okay, that’s not a bad idea. As villains’ Achilles’ heels go, perfectly serviceable. So, how do the heroes figure this out? Well, Deadman shows up in the last issue and tells them.

…

No, really. That’s what happens. If you want to hammer home the point that Hal Jordan – who’s the pointman for this entire saga – is a fucking idiot and shitty superhero, I can’t think of a better way to do it than double-underlining the fact that he basically charged into a fight with an evil god of death with one plan that somebody else told him would work that didn’t work, and then stuck around when that didn’t work, only to get saved when somebody else comes up with a plan for him to do something. “Space cop” really doesn’t do Hal justice. Most cops I’ve met can come up with their own plans.

Of course, that’s not what bothers me about the ending: what bothers me about the ending is that everybody called this a year ago. “Hal Jordan becomes the White Lantern and blows up Nekron.” You knew this was coming. You wanted to think it would be more complex than that, that maybe Geoff Johns’ forever-hardon for Hal Jordan (a comic-book woodie so immense it makes Brian Michael Bendis’ stiffy for Luke Cage look like half a pack of Rockets) might bow to the urge to not be predictable. And, when I saw the last page of issue seven, with Sinestro being the White Lantern, I momentarily doffed my metaphorical cap to Johns out of respect. Then I read issue eight and realized that it was all just a last-minute swerve, because of course Sinestro can’t be the White Lantern, he’s not good enough to be the White Lantern, it’s got to be Hal Jordan leading the White Lantern Corps of everybody who died.

And in the end, isn’t the ending just “hit the bad guy harder”? Sinestro tears out Nekron’s heart, but that’s not enough – so blast Nekron’s secret weakness with more White Lanterns. Isn’t this becoming a pattern with Johns? Like, people keep asking me what I think of Legion of Three Worlds and here it is: the ending of that story is “our tiny band of Legionnaires isn’t enough to beat the Time Trapper? Then we’ll hit him with all the Legionnaires ever.”3 What was Infinite Crisis except more and more people hitting Superboy-Prime in the face again and again harder and harder, and then somebody hitting Alexander Luthor’s vibra-dimensional-tower thing that was powered by The Breach?

I hate to go to the Crisis On Infinite Earths well again for comparing Johns’ work unfavourably, but – look at how that book’s climax pans out. The heroes attack the Anti-Monitor4 directly while Dr. Light and Alex Luthor start draining his power both indirectly and directly, and then the Negative Woman (of all people) starts frying him to soften him up for a mega-super-blast from Dr. Light. But that’s not enough, and the Anti-Monitor takes back his shadow-demons for a fresh burst of power – except, whoops, the heroes thought of that beforehand and poisoned them with magic and stuff. All of that planning (okay, and Darkseid getting involved) softens up the Anti-Monitor enough for Superman to punch him to death, but that doesn’t feel like “just hit him harder” – it feels like they’ve both gone twenty rounds.5 It feels earned in a way that Johns’ event climaxes never do, because it doesn’t come out of left field.

And yes, I get that Johns is trying to say something about teamwork and tenacity and heroism. I get that because whenever he tries to say something about teamwork and tenacity and heroism, one of his characters makes it clear. Usually in a fairly direct way. With a speech about teamwork and tenacity and heroism in a way that nobody ever really talks. (You know what Superman says when the Anti-Monitor comes back for that one last time in Crisis? He fucking loses his shit, he’s so angry now, and screams “I HAVE HAD ENOUGH” when he punches the Anti-Monitor to death. It’s pretty awesome.)

But, after all of that, I didn’t really hate it. People might think that I hated it so much I want to cockpunch Geoff Johns, and I don’t.6 I could rant on about the resurrections everybody saw coming (and Maxwell Lord, which I don’t think anybody saw coming)7 or how a promise of “death is death, from now on” in comics has a shelf-life of “until it’s convenient,” or how the series can’t just end on a high note but there have to be teases of the next DC mega-event (why didn’t Ralph and Sue come back to life? Ooooh the white lantern is gonna get taken by somebody! Et cetera), but I really don’t care that much: DC’s output is just kind of joyless and tedious these days, not in a particularly vicious or cruel way but just kind of there, and everybody knows it, and “Brightest Day” isn’t going to be a turnaround to “more innocent and fun stories” because comics companies have learned that they can spike their sales for a few months every time they promise that and then it’s back to the emo snuff porn that the hardcores want.

But, on the bright side, they got rid of J’onn’s ugly-ass new costume, and that’s not nothing. Now, if they give Aquaman the beard back, we can talk about progress.

1. For me, it kind of reminds me of back during the late 90s when the New World Order was breaking up in WCW, and suddenly there was Hollywood Hogan’s faction of nWo Hollywood and Kevin Nash’s faction of nWo Wolfpac, and heel turns and face turns were signified with literally nothing more than a change of T-shirt. But that’s me. I’m sure some people are totally blown away by the idea that the Scarecrow inflicts great fear and could use a fear-ring. [↩]
2. Actually, that’s probably for the best, because that one is the one Johns wrote, where the second Captain Boomerang, for reasons that make no sense, believes that his zombified father is telling the truth so he murders women and children because his father begs for human hearts. You know, Captain Boomerang II has been around for a number of years now; I must have missed the issue where it was revealed he was actually a goddamned retard. [↩]
3. “And then we will steal a villain demise from ‘Timecop’ starring Jean-Claude Van Damme.” [↩]
4. Oh, yes, and why did the Anti-Monitor need to come back from the dead exactly? [↩]
5. Not least because that was the end of an event series where people actually died and then didn’t get resurrected right at the end. [↩]
6. Not any more than I generally want to cockpunch the average guy on the street, which: more than a little bit, because really, punching guys in the cock is funny. [↩]
7. Also, who the fuck thought resurrecting Eobard Thawne was a good idea? Seriously now. [↩]

Hey, you read World War Hulk, right? Wasn’t it cool when the Hulk called out Iron Man and Mr. Fantastic and Dr. Strange?

But here’s the thing. Tony Stark is an international celebrity and Important Person in the eyes of the public. Mr. Fantastic is similarly one of the most famous people in the world and also Very Important. Neither of them can go anywhere as themselves without being mobbed by onlookers who want an autograph or a lay or occasionally to kill them. In the Marvel Universe, Thor and Captain Marvel are both the centrepieces of cultish sects that worship them. And then there’s Dr. Strange, who has awesome magical power that at times has actually been divinely inspired for reals.

But Dr. Strange doesn’t have his own cult. He doesn’t make the cover of Time or People or even The National Enquirer. His name’s not unknown – heck, he was a famous surgeon once, now he’s mostly retired, does consulting work on surgical techniques and their integration with Eastern medicine – but he’s not famous. He walks around downtown New York all the time. Unbothered. He actually runs errands sometimes. (Mostly Wong does it, but Stephen likes to get out for a walk every now and then.)

How does he do that, when he participates in Big Superhero Shit every so often? How is it that, after being called out by the Hulk on worldwide television, nobody afterwards said or thought “huh, maybe this Dr. Strange guy is somebody I should pay attention to?” How does he keep going back to obscurity?

The answer’s pretty simple: it’s because the Doc wants it that way. Magic’s good for a lot of things, after all, and one of them is hiding. Not even “hiding in plain sight” hiding: no stage magic for Stephen Strange (who, if we’re being honest, can never remember which is the turn and which is the pledge and which is the prestige, and still doesn’t quite understand how the linking rings work). This was one of the first bargains Strange made during his magical career (he figured out how badly he needed it in the first two weeks after the followers started camping outside his door). Ikonn, the master of illusion and disguise, was more than willing to give it to him for a favour.

Strange paid that favour (he doesn’t talk about it nowadays) and has had the power ever since. It just makes him forgettable. You’d just gloss over him, or mentions of him. When the Hulk was screaming on national television, people were so goggled by him screaming for the heads of Iron Man and Mr. Fantastic that they just didn’t realize he also said “and Dr. Strange.”

It’s not universal. People who are determined to know of him can get around it easily enough, but Strange doesn’t worry about them. (At least two-thirds of them are people he should meet anyway, he figures.) People who are used to a weirder life than average – like much of the super-community – tend to ignore the effect of it as well, and although that has drawbacks, for the most part it tends to be a bit of a bonus.

(It used to be that supervillains drinking at the Bar With No Name would convince one of the newbie supervillains to attack the Sanctum Sanctorum so they could have a bit of a laugh at the noob’s expense. This happened a few times until the Doc figured out what was going on, and then he paid an entirely polite and well-mannered visit to the Bar. It doesn’t happen any more.)

Until one day, when something Stephen is reading about recombinant DNA therapy piques his intellectual curiosity, and hasn’t it been a while since Hank came over for tea? So he phones up Hank McCoy…

…and Hank has no idea who he is at first. It takes three minutes of conversation (Hank’s gregarious, after all, and has been known to talk the ear off of people who dialed the wrong number) for Strange to remind Hank that they have been friends for years.

It starts getting worse from there. After a little while, the Avengers are looking at him funny when he comes over. Then they start acting like he’s a civilian. Then Nick Fury – an obsessive secret keeper if ever there was one – doesn’t know who he is any more. Night Nurse starts hedging on his name from time to time. Wong, thankfully, can fall back on “Master,” although it’s clear in his tone that he’s not quite sure all the time why he’s using the honorific.

Something’s gone wrong. But what? And how does he fix it? Because when Stephen Strange looks in the mirror, now, he’s starting to wonder if he recognizes the man staring back at him…

Many heroes would have trouble, were they attacked by a giant vicious attack rabbit.

However, Rex the motherfucking Wonder Dog has a plan for moments exactly such as these. This is the beginning of plan #3,851. The ending of this plan has been censored by the appropriate authorities.

I’m still not entirely sold on Michael Cera as Scott Pilgrim, but this instills me with more confidence. Oh, Edgar Wright, how could I doubt you?

Amos Fortune is a relic of a bygone age. It’s why people still have affection for the character. It’s also why he sucks.

The reason people still like Amos Fortune is because he’s got a very Silver-Agey quality to him. He’s an evil scientist obsessed with luck: there you go, Silver Age smacked up all over him. His evil robes can look quite distinctive when handled by the proper artist, and just because he’s not Lex Luthor doesn’t mean there isn’t room for him as a lesser scientist villain; there will always be room for the Mad Thinkers and IQs of the comics world, and so is there room for Amos Fortune.

This is not why Amos Fortune sucks. Amos Fortune sucks because rather than sticking with him being a master of evil luck-themed science, comic writers of the time used him in the other way emblematic of the Silver Age: as a catchall excuse for whatever mad science plot they felt like writing in any given issue. This is why Amos Fortune, the mad scientist obsessed with luck, invented a “de-memorizer” that could wipe out people’s memories: because. This is why Amos Fortune invented a “fortutron” which made people obsessed with gambling so they would lose all their money to him: because. And let’s not get started on the “Luck League,” wherein seven born-lucky people were given facsimiles of JLA members’ powers because… um… luck? This was just one of many stories where “luck” was a throwaway explanation for whatever the writer (usually Gardner Fox) felt like doing that month.

On top of that, Amos Fortune invented the Royal Flush Gang, who, like it or not, have staying power as a concept in the DC Universe. This effectively makes Amos Fortune the Pete Best of the DCU, except of course that the Royal Flush Gang aren’t exactly the Beatles of the DCU, so you need to find someone a little less impressive than Pete Best to analogize to Amos Fortune. Music nerds can do bit that for me. I’m sure you can find somebody appropriate who walked out on a third-tier band before they had a few hit records. Who was the guy who created, say, Boston and then quit before they hit it big? Amos Fortune is that guy.

Amos Fortune still makes the occasional appearance in modern DC comics, usually because Len Wein (who loves the character for reasons I’m sure I couldn’t explain if I tried) wants to use him in a story. In these comics, he’s always a behind-the-scenes mastermind, which also doesn’t work because Amos Fortune, while ideally suited to being a behind-the-scenes mastermind, has never been that guy. You don’t get fancy luck-themed robes if you want to be the guy working the levers on the Great and Powerful Oz.

Now, there’s certainly potential in Amos Fortune, even now. Probability is an interesting, amazing thing, and you can do really clever things with it as a villain if your writer is more ambitious than writing third-rate Black Cat stories. I’d really like to see somebody write those stories someday. But until then, Amos Fortune will always suck, because he’s just another megalomaniacal dude in some robes who makes shit, and that makes him kind of boring.