Superman - Kryptonite Nevermore [2009] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Superman - Kryptonite Nevermore [2009]

The "DC Comics Classics Library" was a short-lived line of hardcovers published by DC from 2009 to 2010, with only nine releases. It seemed pretty ill-conceived, and some of the choices of what to include were frankly inexplicable, but that's another discussion.

The most interesting book in the line was this, the first release (and the only book of the nine I picked up, and even that was on sale several years after the fact for far less than the US$40 list price), featuring a nine issue run of SUPERMAN from 1971, #233-238,240-242 (the missing issue being a reprint giant, which they did instead of Annuals at the time). This was a run by Dennis O'Neil, Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson (with one issue inked by Dick Giordano, and covers mostly by Neal Adams). #233 was also the first issue of Julius Schwartz's editorial run on the book, replacing long-time editor Mort Weisinger, which would last until 1986.

It's a fairly famous run which, except for the first chapter and a few 1980s digests, had mostly been unreprinted for almost 40 years.

This is also a rare example of a DC or Marvel reprint apparently sourced entirely from scans of published comics. Generally for comics of this vintage they seem to go back to the original art or copies of that art, recoloured in modern techniques with or without any attempt at fidelity to the original printed colours.  Even when they have to use printed comics as the source material in most cases they seem to isolate the black lines of the original art (by physical or digital means) to reconstruct an approximation of the original art and recolour that. Not the case with this book. DC used this kind of technique for some 1940s material (some Kirby&Simon material I know for sure, I recall hearing about some others), but not so much for material of this era. The only example I know for sure was the 1970s Kirby/Simon "reunion" on Sandman, which was scanned when reprinted with earlier 1940s Sandman material, and recoloured when reprinted with other 1970s Kirby material. 

I don't think it was the rule for this line of books, where most of the books included material already recently reprinted with the usual techniques. I guess it was experiment in this kind of reprint, and given how it's not used now probably a failed experiment. I have kind of mixed feelings. Part of me likes the esthetic of reprints that look as much like the original as possible, which you don't often get with reprints with shiny new colours on shiny paper. On the other hand, I don't think the technology was quite there in 2009 to do a great job with reprints sourced from aging newsprint, and they made a few specific choices in this particular reprint that I disagree with.  Also, for reprints of this era (where the original colouring was limited and largely anonymous) my interest is in getting the best possible view of the linework, so the closer the source material is to the original art, the better. There's a reason a huge mass of my collection is black and white reprints of colour comics (well, besides price, that was also a big factor).

(just checked, they did a new edition last year, with the usual recolouring they do for most comics of that era. And 25% cheaper, twelve years later)

It's also kind of odd that they go with "Krytonite Nevermore" as the title of this collection. That's the cover blurb from the first issue, and the plot of that issue has one of the innovations planned to mark the new Schwartz era, the elimination of kryptonite as Superman's weakness, being way too common a plot device in the later Weisinger era stories (it didn't take, kryptonite was back soon enough), but the absence of kryptonite is barely mentioned as more than a footnote after the first issue. The main thrust of the story was the duplicate "Sand Superman" created at the same time as the accidental elimination of kryptonite. This duplicate lurks in the background of most of the stories after that, stealing Superman's powers, until the big finale.

This depowering of Superman was one of the other innovations planned for the new Schwartz era, as Superman's powers has gradually increased in over 30 years of continuous publication to a ridiculous level, and the thought was that toning them down a bit might make for more interesting stories. This change also didn't take, Superman was as powerful as ever soon after, maybe even more powerful in some later Schwarz stories than he ever was under Weisinger. Anyway, before this book I mostly heard the stories called the "Sand Superman" stories, not "Kryptonite Nevermore", which describes them better.

Anyway, I'd read about half of these as back issues before getting this book, including the beginning and the end. Overall I'd have to say they're okay. Flawed in a lot of ways, but with some interesting ambitions, and an important step in the history of Superman.

The best part is the art. This is pretty much the middle of Curt Swan's reign as the principal Superman artist. He'd been drawing Superman related stuff among other work since 1950, but from about 1955 on Superman was his main job, and it was a rare Superman comic that didn't have a Swan story or cover.  And of course he continued as main Superman artist until the 1986 reboot, and still returned to the character on a regular basis until he passed away in 1996.

While he's always good and professional, from what I've seen some of the late 1960s work is a little bit less inspired, either because he was drawing essentially the same scene for the twelfth time or he had less compatible inkers.  For this run he was inked by Murphy Anderson, a great artist in his own right. Actually, he started inking Swan regularly on covers a year before this, and on stories a few months earlier, and continued on a regular basis for a few years, plus some later returns (including a great run of ACTION COMICS WEEKLY with a 2-page Superman serial formatted like a newspaper Sunday page). It's probably the best extended run of high quality and artistically compatible inking that Swan ever got.

It probably also helped that he was asked to draw a lot of things that he hadn't done before. In addition to the kryptonite being gone, so are Superman's regular villains, so no third battle this month with Luthor and Brainiac, we get some different situations. Sometimes ridiculous, but different.

And there we get to the problem. Now, I'm as big a fan of Dennis O'Neil as you're likely to encounter today. But even O'Neil will admit (as he does in the afterword to this book), that he was an ill-fit for Superman. At this time this run started, he was still on Green Lantern and a regular on the Batman books, both celebrated and oft-reprinted runs for editor Schwartz. On this though, he didn't quite seem to gel. He had some interesting ideas, but ultimately it seems that wasn't the direction for Superman, and he ends the story in a kind of abrupt way, involving the then-current jumpsuited Diana Prince and unfortunately named I-Ching from WONDER WOMAN. 

Ironically, it seems that a Weisinger carryover, Cary Bates, was the one who gave Schwartz what he wanted, and he was a mainstay on the books with Swan until the 1986 reboot, complete with a full-powered Superman and regular appearances of kryptonite and the classic Superman villains. So I think they misdiagnosed the patient when they tried to operate back in 1970...

So, a book with some merits and some demerits, not nearly worth full price, but worth what I paid for it.

This also includes an introduction by Paul Levitz, an afterword by Dennis O'Neil and  some house ads for the Superman revamp of the era (which including Jack Kirby's run on JIMMY OLSEN).

Epicurus The Sage [2003] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Epicurus The Sage [2003]

This is a compete collection of Epicurus The Sage stories by William Messner-Loebs and Sam Kieth, previously published as two books in 1989 and 1991, a short 1993 anthology story in FAST FORWARD #3 and a fourth story, new to this volume. The original books were published by Piranha Press, DC's short lived creator-owned imprint (1989 to, just barely, 1994, with only a handful of publications after 1992). This book is published by Cliffhanger, an imprint of Wildstorm, by this time an imprint of DC after it was an imprint of Image.

At the time of the first book Messner-Loebs was mostly working as a writer, in the middle of his run of FLASH, and just off a well-regarded run on JONNY QUEST, although a few years earlier he was best known as an artist, on his own book JOURNEY and also on Michael T. Gilbert's MR. MONSTER.  Kieth had just made a splash with the SANDMAN series he co-created with Mike Dringenberg and Neil Gaiman, leaving that after five issues. He'd soon be doing some popular things over at Marvel before he and Messner-Loebs would re-unite to considerable success over on Kieth's THE MAXX series.

But back to this book, it's the tale of the philosopher Epicurus, living in Athens and trying to establish himself among other better known philosophers like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle (yes, the dates don't match up). This ahistorical version of Ancient Greece winds up being meddled with by the Gods of Olympus, who appear to be even more foolish and, with their powers, dangerous than the mortals. Epicurus, his best friend Plato and young Alexander the Great (who they wind up taking care of) do their best to sort things out.

 

I was nineteen, just the right age to be a mark for the Piranha line, and had been reading SANDMAN from the start and enjoyed Kieth's work there, and liked some of Messner-Loebs work (can't recall offhand what I read before this and what after), so the first book ("Visiting Hades") was a surprisingly easy buy for me, even at $10 at a time when many comics I bought were still $1. Didn't regret it for a minute, loved that first book from the first page, read it over and over. And a year later I took a philosophy course and actually understood even more of the jokes.

Happy to report that it still holds up, though to be honest it's only been a year or so since I last read it, and it's never been more than three years between readings.

The second book ("The Many Loves Of Zeus"), well, after that almost sure to be a let-down, and it was, but still enjoyable.  Kieth's art is starting to get really out there, into a style which served him well, and the story has a bit less focus, but I still liked it.

I didn't get FAST FORWARD when it came out (don't recall even seeing it, but I got it since), so that story  ("Riding The Sun") was  new to me. It's in black and white, and looks great. It stretches the anachronisms even further, if possible, with our heroes meeting Homer. Really liked this one, Kieth's art is a bit more like the first book, and it's a solid story.

The final story ("Helen's Boys") is new to this book, over a decade later (though I'm not clear on when it was done, feels like it might have at least been started closer to the first two books, maybe abandoned and finished later, but that's just speculation). It's a bit of a muddle, re-telling bits of the story of the Trojan War through a Messner-Loebs/Kieth lens before dealing with the aftermath while Epicurus, Plato and Alexander flee Athens after Socrates is killed.  Yeah, the timeline is well and truly busted by now. If there's ever a fifth story I'm sure they'll meet Immanuel Kant...

I liked bits, I can see the bones of a good story, at least as good as the second book, in here, but it doesn't come together in the end. If it was an abandoned third book it's nine pages shorter than the first two, which might have helped flesh it out.

Anyway, on balance, the first and third stories are really great, and the other two have their moments, even if they suffer by comparison to the company they keep.

TV - The Nevers (2021)

THE NEVERS is a theoretically on-going series created by Joss Whedon, although thanks to revelations about his behaviour on previous projects his name is used as little as contractually possible in publicity for the show.  It aired a short six episode series in 2021, a second series (produced without Whedon's active involvement) is allegedly in production but unscheduled.  Whether it continues beyond that is unknown at this time.

I generally think Whedon's work is... okay. Maybe not a fair way to state it. I think most of his work has some very good points, and can rise to excellence, but is always flawed in many ways, and I'm not sure he's ever hit a home run. Which makes him on balance... okay.

That's pretty much where THE NEVERS lands so far, as well. The series is set in 1899 London, three years after a mysterious event gave a variety of people in the London area (mostly, but not exclusively, women) random super-powers, called their "Turns", while those with powers are called "Touched". One group of these people have been gathered together in an orphanage, financed by a wheelchair bound matriarch and led by brassy young Touched named Amalia True, whose Turn involves glimpses of the future and clearly knows a lot more than she's telling.

A lot of this is really just X-Men meets Buffy in Victorian England, remixing old bits while adding just enough new things to make it not as stale. Amidst mostly bog-standard super-powers they manage to come up with a few clever "Turns" for the characters that I haven't seen before (but then I don't really keep up with the current comics, much less the dozens of TV shows now on).  The first few episodes are really promising, those that are written or directed by either Whedon or his frequent collaborator Jane Espenson. Seemed like a solid show at that point, if a bit too blatantly reveling in being free of the restrictions of Whedon's previous network/syndicated TV shows, with some nudity and swearing that seem more like an HBO mandate than organic.

Falls off a bit after that, parts of the middle of the season feel like a parody of old Buffy episodes.  Whedon's tricks are old but still effective, and have become part of the culture but are still very easy to mess up. Improves a bit in the penultimate episode, which has some of the best bits of the series.

Then the finale in the big turn, where everything you know is wrong, secrets are revealed and all that usual noise. I didn't care for that. It probably comes a bit too early in the run of the show, it needed a bit more to establish where we are before upending everything, and at this point I think it makes it a less interesting show.

I'm about 50/50 on whether I'll watch the next series of episodes if/when they're ever available.  There's enough stuff to like in the concept, but it did seem to need Whedon's direct hand, which will be absent. Well, I'll cross that bridge if I ever come to it.

Usagi Yojimbo - Yokai [2009] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Usagi Yojimbo - Yokai [2009]

This was an original hardcover painted colour comic created by Stan Sakai to celebrate the 25th anniversary of his rabbit samurai character Miyamoto Usagi (now rapidly closing in on his 40th anniversary). Up to this point Usagi had mostly appeared in black and white comics, with some forays into colour, but usually standard comic colouring (mostly by Tom Luth). Sakai had painted a few covers and short stories, but nothing this extensive before, a full 56-page painted story.

Pretty much classic Sakai, one of the most dependable comics being published for almost four decades now. This is one of the Usagi stories with a supernatural element ("yokai" being translated as "haunts"), as he winds up in a dark forest and encounters various demonic creatures of either Japanese myth or Sakain imagination attempting to complete a once-a-century ritual to enable them to conquer the world of the living. Fortunately he encounters an ally from earlier in his years of wandering.

Sakai is always masterful, but it's a special treat to see him flex some other muscles like he does in this story. Not just the colouring, which is suitably gloomy when it needs to be, and also well suits the variety of strange creatures he brings in, but this also has a more open storytelling format than the standard Usagi story, with fewer panels per page, a greater use of splash pages and double page spreads and a generally quicker pace. 

This includes a short interview with Sakai, along with an example of the creative process of the book, with eight steps in the process to create one panel.

The story was reprinted in the USAGI YOJIMBO SAGA LEGENDS collection in 2017.

Patty Cake Vol. 1 Sugar & Spice... Mostly Spice [2001] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Patty Cake Vol. 1 Sugar & Spice... Mostly Spice [2001]

This is a collection of some of the earliest of Scott Roberts’ long-running PATTY CAKE series, taken from the first three (of nine) issues self-published by Roberts (as Permanent Press) in 1994-1995. By the time of this book it was on the fourth series, being published by Slave Labor imprint Amaze Ink, eventually seeing at least 44 issues by 2005, many of them double sized, with as many as 52 pages of content from cover to cover.

This is pretty good stuff. I first read this material a few years after it was done, after I'd already some of Roberts' later work. I think he improved very quickly and is much more confident and polished within a year, but there's a lot of heart and potential in this rough earlier material. Roberts is heavily inspired by classic humour comics, most notably Harvey Kurtzman, with a frantic energy and an anything-for-the-gag ethos. Even early on he varies the contents from longer stories to single page strips, pin-ups, phony ads and activity pages. He also introduces a few of the cast of family and friends that join young Patricia Bakerman in her journey to discover how the world works, a cast which would grow much more in later issues.

I think my favourite story in this collection is "Surprise Twist", a 16-page epic about Patty Cake's father taking her on a shopping trip. To the surprise of no one who's taken a kid shopping, it doesn't go well.  It's a real emotional roller coaster, and Roberts cartooning is really excellent in catching every single feeling Patty Cake goes through.  A nice glimpse of the kind of stuff Roberts would be doing more often in years to come.

Strip AIDS U.S.A. [1988] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Strip AIDS U.S.A. [1988]

This is an anthology edited by Trina Robbins, Robert Triptow and Bill Sienkiewicz, published by Last Gasp and inspired by the STRIP AIDS anthology published the previous year in the UK. It was designed to raise funds for an AIDS charity and awareness about the disease.

Most of the pieces were newly created for this book. The notable exception are five pages of syndicated newspaper comics addressing the issue scattered throughout the book, led by Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury.

Obviously this is an artefact of its time, almost always well meaning, so hard to criticize, often strident in a way that's understandable in the context of the time, but sometimes awkward now.

For me the highlight was "Mourning Son", a story set in the world of TALES FROM THE HEART by Cindy Goff, Rafael Nieves and Seitu Hayden, a series based on Goff's experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa in the early 1980s. Great little story looking at the issues from a different angle from the other stories.  Man, that series really was one of the great unfinished symphonies of 1980s comics...

Too many other things to talk about, and sometimes hard to find them with the lack of a table of contents (this listing is therefore invaluable). A few other highlights were by Howard Cruse, William Messner-Loebs, Alison Bechdel, Gilbert Hernandez and Jaime Hernandez.

State of the weblog address, 2022

Hm, I've actually posted quite a bit in the last few weeks, and not just obituary posts. That had to come as a surprise to my regular reader(s?).

So, what's up with that?  Well, I pass this "beautiful, gory layout" a few dozen times a day (and there's another bookcase, plus some stuff in boxes). 

This is almost every comic publication I have not in standard US comic book format, over 1800 individual items. But sometimes it seems I keep re-reading the same five books (slight exaggerations). Most of these I've read, although some not in decades (and my memory's not so good these days). A good number I started but never got around to finishing. Some of them I never got around to reading, either because I got them with a pile of other things I was more eager to read or wasn't in the mood for at the time and they just got lost in the shuffle. So I've decided to take a stab at (re)-reading all of it over the next few years. I figure at one book I day I can manage that in five years. So I grabbed two dozen of the books at a whim, pretty much one from each shelf, and every day I try to read at least a bit of each. I make up complicated rules on how much I can read a day (which I freely ignore if I get caught up in a section).  Been working pretty good so far, finished about 20 books in the last two weeks (replacing each in the reading pile with another from the same shelf).

This coincided with me having the urge to write some more on this weblog, so as you might have seen, lots of unusual activity lately. For some reason my instinct right now is to write too much, I feel an odd need to run down the history of the characters, the creators, the publisher and my personal history with the book. Trust me, the posts you see are nothing compared to the first drafts that make the screen, much less the zeroth drafts in my head.  I'll probably settle down a bit after a while, to just a quick comment on each book. Longer than a tweet, but not by much.

Also been trying to catch up a bit on some TV shows and movies. For a little while I've been mostly resorting to comfort watching, stuff I've been multiple times before that requires minimal attention. Got a huge backlog of available stuff to watch, as you might have seen on recent posts about THE PRISONER and BELGRAVIA. Expect more of those, but not exclusively British. Although I am almost done with TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY, and have some DOCTOR WHO to watch. And could catch up on TASKMASTER. And have heard good things about THE IN-BETWEENERS. Okay, maybe exclusively British...