Random Comics Theatre
This is a collection of the 8-issue weekly series by Steve Englehart, Joe Staton and Ian Gibson for DC comics, their big crossover event of 1987, with over three dozen labelled crossover issues over two months. Englehart and Staton were the regular team on GREEN LANTERN / GREEN LANTERN CORPS for over two years leading up to this (and Gibson did a short fill-in run in the months leading up to MILLENNIUM), so as you'd expect the concept of the book spills out of Green Lantern concepts, namely that a member of the Guardians of Oa and a member of their female counterpart group the Zamarons arrive on Earth to guide the next stage in human evolution through a small group of their Chosen. Their plan is opposed by the Manhunters, a group of robots that rebelled against the Guardians billions of years ago (as apparently established in some 1970s JLA issues by Englehart which had never been reprinted until recently), so they recruit various super-heroes to help them.
I got back into buying comics a few months after this ended, somehow wound up with the first and last issues of the crossover at some point. The first seemed promising, the last seemed confusing. A number of books that I ended up getting back issues of were involved in the crossover (WONDER WOMAN, JLI, SUICIDE SQUAD, LEGION, SECRET ORIGINS, OUTSIDERS, plus a few other single issues), so I have about half the crossovers, where I usually had to mentally gloss over the Millennium aspects when getting to those issues. Never felt motivated to get those middle six issues, until I saw this book on sale a few years ago, and then it's taken me a few years to get around to reading it.
Overall I'd say it's a mess. I run hot and cold on Englehart, but not usually this much in the same book. A handful of things I really liked, but he can never get any momentum going in here, where various scenes throw to an (unreprinted) crossover issue, and then the characters pop back in here an issue or two later without any good explanation of what happened to them. And on one hand I can admire his desire to create a genuinely diverse group for his Chosen, especially back in the 1980s, but his execution was... something else. If you haven't seen Steve Englehart trying to write a Jamaican accent, you haven't seen Shakespeare the way it was meant to be done. Maybe I'll try again in a few years with all the crossovers available to me (if I ever get DC's "Infinite" reading service I think most of the books I don't already have are available there), but I doubt it'll improve it much.
The art is also a bit odd. Not sure where the Staton/Gibson combo comes from, don't think I've seen Gibson inking another artist otherwise. It's uneven, better as it goes, then the ending looks kind of rushed. But with a weekly book with a single art team that's not surprising. A shame, I think Staton with the right inker and the time to do it would be perfect for this kind of crossover.
Can't really recommend this. It all ended up being a footnote in DC history, with Englehart leaving GREEN LANTERN CORPS within months of this series, and the Englehart/Staton spinoff book NEW GUARDIANS lost Englehart halfway through #2 and was cancelled after a year.
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