This week I read 119 comics. Year to date my total is 3268.
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Welp, been a bit. There were a few things I read and forgot to note, but mostly I just didn’t read a lot of comics in June or July. Still, here’s what I got now.
Star Wars: X-Wing – Rogue Squadron: 4 issues from 1996
Writers: Michael A. Stackpole (plot), Jan Strnad (script)
Review
After Strnad’s arc of the Star Wars title from a couple years later was such a mess, I didn’t have high hopes for this one, but it actually was probably the best arc so far.
And I’ll say… I like the novels so far (I’ve read Rogue Squadron and Wedge’s Gamble, since those are the ones that have gotten unabridged audiobooks; The Krytos Trap is scheduled to release this month, though). I do. The plot is interesting. It just feels like for every chapter of plot, there are two chapters of Corran not making up his mind whether he wants to bang Erisi. That’s hyperbole, but there’s a lot of wordcount on really aggressively uninteresting relationship drama. And… I don’t dislike Corran, he’s kinda cool, but the way he’s always the center of attention for heroes and villains alike, regardless of whether he’s doing anything distinctly more interesting than the other pilots, begins to wear at a certain point.
So… in that way, it’s sort of a plus that the comics are clear of some of the narrative issues surrounding Corran, in favor of focusing on Wedge and Tycho, who are the most interesting characters anyway. Though, the tradeoff is missing the novels’ better-developed supporting cast of pilots like Nawara and Ooryl.
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Star Wars: Dark Empire: 6 issues from 1991
Writer: Tom Veitch
Review
“Hey, remember when the Original Trilogy happened? And remember how things happened in it? What if we just sort of undid all those things, so we can do them again, but worse?”
…
…
…
God, the Sequel Trilogy really is an adaptation of Dark Empire, isn’t it? Though to the Sequel Trilogy’s credit, it does at least realize that any given scene is in fact allowed to have more than one color in it.
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Star Wars: Republic: 38 issues from 2002-2006
Writer: John Ostrander (27 issues), Haden Blackman (8 issues, story in #50), Scott Allie (story in #50), Randy Stradley (1 issue), Welles Hartley (2 issues)
Review
I broke the pre-subtitle stretch of this book by arc, but it gets a bit looser here, with a lot more one-off issues, so I’ll just go by writer.
Ostrander’s stuff is, for the most part, excellent here. I particularly need to shout out #59 with Anakin and A’Sharad Hett. That one’s incredible. It’s a good thing they changed the color of A’Sharad’s lightsabers from red to green, though; someone might’ve mistaken him for a Sith Lord!
The Quinlan Vos plot is very good as well for the most part, enough that you almost won’t notice the seams where Ostrander clearly had to rewrite a bunch of things because Lucas kept kind of clumsily messing with the characters. It’s the weirdest thing.
All that said, I still cannot take Anzati seriously.
Also, this is only a cameo, but wow did it take Gillad Pellaeon a long time to get a promotion. Dude was apparently a captain for more than thirty years.
Blackman’s stuff (trading off with Ostrander a few times in the early part of the book before disappearing, and at that point being the one to focus more directly on the movies’ main characters) is… eh. I want to like some of the ideas, but mostly it’s either large groups of new characters being introduced only to all immediately die, or ones who are just edgy jerks. Like, I was hopeful for Durge and ARC Troopers because of the Clone Wars microseries, but Durge talks now and mostly uses that ability to gloat, while the only ARC who’s used significantly is this Alpha guy, who’s just kind of a dick.
Stradley’s one issue was nothing to write home about. There’s another arc that the covers and wiki attribute to Ostrander (and indeed focuses mostly on characters Ostrander created) but the credit boxes say Stradley wrote. I’m guessing that was Ostrander based on context and writing style, but if it was Stradley, um, good imitation, I guess?
Hartley’s couple issues towards the end, which I guess must’ve been setting up the Dark Times series, were also good.
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Blue Beetle: 4 issues from 2009
Writer: Lillah Sturges
Well, this… ended.
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Justice League of America: 12 issues from 1981
Writer: Gerry Conway
Welp, we have achieved lobster hat.
Also, yessssssss, Starro, and now with actual interesting powers instead of Silver Age “lol, he can do whatever” nonsense. That arc is a real highlight.
And oh, gee, what happened to #191.
The Red Tornado arc does seem to bring a general improvement in general pacing and stylistic creativity. Might be a bit of Pérez’s influence, but some of it’s on the script level too. However, I think it kind of wrecks his arc to reveal he’s not actually all robot. Plus, tying his backstory to the nonsense that is the Tornado Tyrant is confusing.
The JSA teamup starts okay, but it has a distinctly Gardner Fox-esque “there are like five scenes, but most of them happen ten times with slightly different combinations of characters” structure. Which is in a modern enough writing style to not be as bad, but it’s still ten iterations.
So… in some ways, I felt like this was one of the better years of this title so far because of moment-to-moment readability, but in other ways, the plots were relatively weak for the most part.
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Detective Comics 994-1033
I feel like a kid in a candy store reading Tomasi’s Detective Comics.
7/10
Supergirl: Being Super 1-4
Supergirl: Being Super was amazing…for two issues. The other half was very boring and unoriginal
5/10
838 comics read so far.
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This week I read 84 comics. Year to date my total is 3352.
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Justice League of America: 12 issues from 2009
Writers: Dwayne McDuffie (7 issues), Len Wein (4 issues, backup in 1 issue), James Robinson (1 issue)
So, these Milestone characters aren’t annoying or bothering me in any particular way, but I always get kinda lost when I only know half the crossover. Not really getting anything about it.
… Honestly, I feel a little bad for how much they get dumped on when they get into a fight with the League. Like, Icon and Hardware sorta pull their weight, but the others just get wrecked for the most part.
And then suddenly it’s interrupted by Len Wein rewriting Starbreaker’s early appearances? He was rewriting the Libra issue around this time too, and that sorta made sense since he was being used in a big event and Wein created him. It was a waste of an issue, but I followed the logic. But why this Starbreaker clown?
Shoutout to the inevitable “I am obviously not comfortable with Cry for Justice but have to be a good sport about it” issue bringing in Oracle solely for sarcastic commentary.
Between CfJ, all the Final Crisis deaths, New Krypton, and whatever was going on in the Wonder Woman title that Diana had to leave too, this run really just got divebombed all at once. I guess it was too good to survive late-2000s DC for long. And it was the best the main JL title had been since at least Waid’s JLA, maybe back to Giffen and DeMatteis on JLI. Justice League runs that don’t suck are so rare guys.
Shoutout to Starbreaker being like three times as interesting as he usually is.
Also, shoutout to three times zero still being zero.
Wein’s arc with the Royal Flush Gang is harmless fun.
Robinson opens up by murdering a random C-lister for no reason and insulting Young Justice (using Red Tornado as a mouthpiece, no less), so this run can already bite me.
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Justice League of America: 12 issues from 1982 (plus 2 issues of All-Star Squadron for a crossover)
Writers: Gerry Conway (JLA), Roy Thomas (All-Star Squadron)
In #200, uh, it would be cool to see all the team members in one issue, except, um, we don’t. Where’s Shayera? The following issue suggests she’s missing, but that’s never mentioned in #200 itself and I don’t think it’d have been hard to just be all “This issue takes place before such-and-such issue of whatever title that was happening in. – ed.”
The Royal Flush Gang arc is good, though it’s odd that Green Lantern isn’t in it when it hinges so heavily on Hector Hammond. Huh. I guess this might’ve been during his overwrought “year in space” arc?
“Crisis on Earth-Prime” is a weird premise, and shoutout to Roy Thomas spending multiple pages patronizingly explaining what the Cuban Missile Crisis was in excruciating detail. I think Fidel Castro got more page space in that All-Star Squadron issue than, uh, just about any actual member of the All-Star Squadron?
I always like the concepts of the books Thomas wrote, especially doing more with Golden Age stuff, but in practice he’s one of the most boring writers I’ve ever encountered.
Overall, though, solid year. ’81 had some awkward arcs, so this was an improvement, I think.
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Hey, at least it’s better than Avengers #200. That’s not much of a feat, but it’s something.
I really like Roy Thomas, I just don’t like anything he’s ever written, for the most part, at least in terms of the line by line style. It’s clear that he learned most (if not all) of what he knows from Stan Lee, but he doesn’t have Stan’s voice. Like, don’t get me wrong, Stan Lee was far from a perfect writer, but he had a knack for making things cheesy and fun even when it should have been mundane. Thomas just… doesn’t do that.
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The Rascally One always let his need to overly explain everything to get in the way of the story. Claremont had some of this,too, but benefited from some of the best artists of the time, if not ALL time.
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Off comics, but not…really enjoyed SANDMAN. Watched it all with the wife, who read none of the books, and liked how it kept faithful to the books but not to where it excluded her from getting into the show as well. After the last couple MARVEL movies/shows I was feelin a burnout comin on, SANDMAN was a welcome relief.
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I really like Roy Thomas, I just don’t like anything he’s ever written, for the most part, at least in terms of the line by line style.
Mean either, for the most part. The issue I have with a lot of Bronze Age writers is how beholden to continuity a lot of them are, to the point where stories feel more like history lessons. It is also why I could never get into Busiek’s Avengers, since it almost does too good of a job emulating that era of excessive exposition.
This is actually why I think Roy Thomas is better at doing adaptations like the Marvel Illustrated series he did a few years back, as well as his Secret Origins stories at DC. The focus and pacing is a lot tighter.
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And back to funnybooks… there’s some new high concept non-superhero books out that I give big or at least partial thumbs up:
SURVIVAL STREET, muppets in a post apocalyptic, corporation ran world.
LOVE EVERLASTING, romance comics where the heroine knows something’s not quite right
SAMURAI DOGGY, title sums it up on this one
JUSTICE WARRIORS, kinda DREAD-ish, but with kneeslaps
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Dude would have flashback scenes DURING FLASHBACK SCENES to explain what was going on during the current scene.
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Speaking of adaptations, I think that it didn’t get much better than having Roy Thomas script Conan with John Buscema on art. I’m not familiar with his other work but his Conan was superb (to me).
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The other thing is that I’ve mainly encountered him due to picking up out-of-context issues and arcs for crossovers. While the line-by-line style makes it pretty rough (in some of the later-'80s stuff I’ve read, I also felt like all the characters were kind of jerks, but they weren’t too bad in these earlier All-Star Squadron issues), I do get the sense that he’s trying to build some fairly complex long-term arcs, so I kind of respect that much. I don’t even mind the continuity deep dives; I know it’s not to everyone’s taste, but part of why I’m reading a lot of this stuff is to get a sense of history and continuity. And there are a lot of lesser-known characters who would’ve been forgotten if Thomas hadn’t started fleshing them out. I just draw the line at having characters recap real-world history to each other for pages at a time.
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Justice Society of America: 12 issues from 2009
Writers: Geoff Johns (1 issue, co-writer on 5 issues), Alex Ross (co-writer on 2 issues), Jerry Ordway (2 issues, co-writer on 3 issues), Bill Willingham (co-writer on 4 issues), Lillah Sturges (co-writer on 4 issues)
Johns’ run actually finishes pretty strong here. I wasn’t entirely into the Captain Marvel stuff, but the rest was solid.
In Ordway’s arc before Willingham takes over, it’s… maybe better than I’m used to from Ordway based on late-‘80s/early-‘90s Adventures of Superman, though at this point you could replace Jesse with a pet or a Teddy bear and she’d have about as much agency and plot relevance independent of Rick. Even Rick rarely has much more personality than “Must save Jesse from villain-of-the-month,” but at least he gets to do things. But now, when nobody’s in distinctly more danger than anyone else but things are going down in general, Jay’s just like “Protect Jesse, Rick!”
I know I have a one-track mind, but I feel like even if I didn’t really like Jesse based on earlier material, this would be weird.
When Willingham and Sturges take over, first of all, shoutout to Magog suggesting defeating a single person “in detail.” And, uh, congratulations, I guess that’s technically military jargon. Not remotely how it’s used, unless you intend to fight him one limb at a time, but jargon was technically executed.
Oh, man, I feel a drinking game coming on, too. Every time Magog suggests an outrageously stupid strategy (usually involving the words “in detail” where they make no sense*) and then follows it by saying “Standard military doctrine” as if that’s remotely the case, take a drink and then insult his stupid Loki hat.
(*For the record, “defeat in detail” refers to the strategy of bringing your full force to bear on individual parts of the enemy’s formation one at a time, giving yourself a functional numerical advantage even if you’re outnumbered on paper. Obviously it only works if there’s some reason the rest of the enemy’s forces can’t respond to the attack. It doesn’t work if the enemy is all in one big group in the same place, Magog.)
Judomaster’s dialogue has degraded from “Vaguely plausible non-native English speaker” to “Borderline racist clichés,” too. Note that it started at “No indication that she has any trouble with the language at all” when she debuted in Birds of Prey, incidentally.
I know I used up my obligatory Jesse rant for this post, but I have to shout out her detective skills here: “One of the three people in the building got stabbed. The second says the third was unaccounted for at the time, and the third refuses to acknowledge that that was the case. This is not concerning in the slightest and I will summarily ignore the latter two, because clearly this cannot possibly be related."
OK, Doctor Fate being able to change the blood type for the transfusion? Kinda clever. But why do they need donations from the entire team? Michael only needs one guy’s worth of blood, and he’s still got most of his.
I do have to share this line:
This is my new response to anything I disagree with.
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Justice League of America: 13 issues from 1983
Writers: Gerry Conway (8 issues, co-writer on 1 issue), Paul Kupperberg (1 issue), Paul Levitz (plotter on 1 issue), Len Wein (scripter on 1 issue), Cary Burkett (1 issue), Roy Thomas (1 issue, co-writer on 1 issue)
I think Elongated Man has stretched “further than he ever has before” three times in one year, and definitely twice in as many issues, and it’s starting to not be all that tense.
The “Micro-Cosmos” arc is the first arc in this title to be longer than three issues (four, specifically), and I can’t fathom why. It’s all spent with mediocre sword-n-sorcery-cliché characters who never appeared anywhere else. Actually, it started within a month of the original Amethyst maxi, which is a much more actually-readable attempt at a very similar tone and premise. Was there some kind of specific magic princess craze in early 1983 for some reason?
I guess Conway’s note at the end of the arc suggests that was supposed to be end of his run, so I suppose that might be why it’s so long? It’s still a weird note to theoretically end on, and plot twist, he’s back by the end of the year and continues as the main writer for another three or so.
Kupperberg does not seem to understand that Atlantis is in the ocean. I mean, he seems to, but then he claims that Midway City, Metropolis, and Los Angeles form a triangle centered on Atlantis. Which, uh.
Also,
Ah, irony.
In the Annual, Zatanna says that androids don’t dream, and I bet there are some electric sheep out there who are really offended right now.
As a sidenote not really prompted by any single incident so much as his whole general contribution to this title or lack thereof… I still hate Green Arrow.
On the JLA/JSA teamup, look, Thomas. I don’t even disagree with you. Objectively, Earth-One and Earth-Two should have their names switched. But that’s not the way it is, the way it was done was less confusing for readers at the time, and having characters complain about it every time multiverse stuff happens isn’t going to fix it.
look, ronnie, if you want to embarrass yourself hitting on power girl on your own time, that’s one thing, but try to remember you’re vicariously humiliating professor stein too, will you?
Man, the “Black Canary is her own daughter” retcon is even more baffling in practice than it is in concept. Uh, so, the context for this, which nobody actually explains in the relevant arc (despite any number of irrelevant multi-page continuity lessons that are painstakingly included, such as a blow-by-blow recap of Johnny Thunder’s early teamups with Black Canary that have no bearing whatsoever on the present plot), is that by this point, it had been firmly established that the Earth-Two/JSA characters were aging in real time. But Black Canary had been living on Earth-One with the JLA since before that became clear, and she was still portrayed as being roughly the same age as the other Leaguers, particularly in regards to the inexplicable Ollie relationship (which consists entirely of him saying incredibly stupid things and her dunking on him for it, so, uh, relationship goals?).
So, the needlessly complicated concept to resolve this discrepancy here is that first, Black Canary had had a daughter and been brainwashed to forget. Then, second, the current Black Canary was that daughter, further brainwashed into thinking she was her own mother. Thomas renders this as a bizarre two-stage shuffle executed by Johnny Thunder’s Thunderbolt, with the initial part to protect Dinah Jr. from supervillains by stowing her in stasis in another dimension for some reason and spare her parents from grief at losing her, and then the subsequent part for… uh… um… no… discernable… reason???
I feel like Crisis on Infinite Earths may have been created specifically to get Roy Thomas to, like, calm down.
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This week I read 81 comics. Year to date I am at 3433.
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Trinity: 21 issues from 2009
Writers: Kurt Busiek (plot and main stories), Fabian Nicieza (backup scripts)
Ugggh. I was really enjoying this for, like, the first half or so of it. But by this point it’s just a chain of Big Cosmic Metaphysical Action Scenes. It’s a bit more coherent than when, say, Grant Morrison does similar things, but it drowns out the emotional stakes with how Big it’s trying to be. It’s not terrible, but it’s just getting less and less interesting as it chugs on.
God, the entire back third is just nonstop action, and everything that happens is so vague and metaphysical. It devolved into all the tropes I was complimenting it on avoiding in the early part, and I just have, like, nothing to say about it.
What an utter disappointment.
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Justice League of America: 13 issues from 1984
Writers: Gerry Conway (7 issues), Kurt Busiek (3 issues), Joey Cavalieri (3 issues)
So, uh, on this “beast men” arc. There’s, um, blood now, all of a sudden. A lot of it, too. That was a sudden shift. It inexplicably tends to be purple, though.
I’m not sure whether I like Paragon or not. His powers make him kind of an interesting logic-puzzle villain, but the mechanics are dubious and he’s kind of inherently obnoxious. Basically, his shtick is that he can imitate the abilities (both normal human talents and superpowers) of people around him within a certain radius, but enhanced. So, like, the characters think he’s obnoxious too, but it’s kind of a broken power and he’s really smug.
Cavalieri’s arc is… weird. Like, it’s about this sorta illuminati-lite secret conspiracy, only they don’t really do any conspiring, they just steal some chemical. Except then they use it to summon random demons/monsters/gods/whatevers? And, like, they’re presented as a conspiracy, but they feel more like a cult. Which is a bit of hair-splitting, but they’re not suggested to be controlling anything, just having secret meetings and inducting randos into some kind of nonspecific but ritualistic ideology. And their leaders are all trying to invoke higher powers, but there’s no common thread between the powers themselves. The last guy isn’t even really summoning things, he’s just creating a bargain-bin Jurassic Park.
Anyway, Conway comes back and yes, finally, J’onn! He was actually gone for a pretty ridiculously long time. I get that he wasn’t really an independently popular character at the time, and he was initially included mainly because he had similar powers to Superman. But he’d just been an oddly pointed omission when it was otherwise so rare for anyone to be left off the team for long. I mean, Wonder Woman and Green Arrow sat out reasonably long stretches at various points, but not nearly as much as J’onn. And there are plenty of other Leaguers who don’t have much presence outside the team (particularly Red Tornado and Zatanna), and ones who have similar powers to each other in various ways.
The JLA/JSA teamup for this year is, um… not the easiest to follow, but fine, I suppose.
As we transition to the Detroit era (and it is nuts; Aquaman gets annoyed that a lot of the heavy hitters are busy most of the time, so his solution is to… fire them all so they won’t show up ever, which he can apparently just do), I have to admit something. I want to like Vixen, but she weirds me out. By which I mean: the first black person on the Justice League, and still probably the most prominent black female superhero in DC universe, has the superpower of, um… acting like an animal. That’s… that’s weird, right?
For that matter, Vibe is also not the most, uh, culturally sensitive character. He’s not quite Snapper-Carr-tier “dear god please stop trying to write slang,” but he makes up for it with the, uh, general racial tinge of the whole thing.
… And Gypsy wouldn’t be that bad, except the name.
I wonder if, someday, Steel (Hank Heywood III, that is) will be considered a terribly offensive portrayal of cyborgs.
Conway also appears to have fallen victim to a common affliction among writers setting up a new supporting cast, which I have just now decided that I call a Shipping Frenzy. A common sign of a Shipping Frenzy is when you have three or more instances of characters getting spontaneously struck with a crush over the course of a single scene with another character, especially if the same characters seem to be winding up with multiple such crushes. It’s a particularly common side effect of reboots, retools, and time skips. If you or a loved one is suffering from Shipping Frenzy, ask your editor if Pacing™ is right for you.
Also, the torch of “Annoying guy who complains about things that aren’t problems to drum up conflict” has passed from Green Arrow to Aquaman now, inheriting a proud legacy started long ago by the Atom.
I get that they were trying to New Teen Titans-ify the Justice League, but two issues into NTT, the Titans had saved New York from an alien invasion and fought two dangerous mercenaries hired by an international conspiracy. Two issues in (one of them an annual), the Detroit League have… almost stopped an ordinary gang fight.
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I think it says a lot that George Perez, the guy who’s whole thing was “wanted to draw as many superheroes at once as physically possible”, refused to draw the character unless he absolutely had to.
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