Forward Into The Past: Justice League 3000 #1 Review

People who know me know that I loves me some 80s-era Justice League International. In a lot of ways, it was the true breakout revelation coming out of Crisis On Infinite Earths: the premier super team of the DC Universe packed with 90 percent B-listers who often didn’t like each other, spent as much time bantering as they did fighting crime, and who seemed to spend about half their time wondering what they hell they were doing there (when they weren’t wondering how to turn a buck from being on the team).

It was groundbreaking, even though it shouldn’t have been – Keith Giffen’s, J. M. DeMatteis’s and Kevin Maguire’s Justice League came right after the horror and debacle of Justice League Detroit, which was also packed with B-listers, wanna-bes and spastics , but was missing little things like entertainment value, or characters you might give a shit about. Seriously: the only person who remotely cares about Vibe is Geoff Johns, and I am still reasonably convinced that he only brought the character back to settle a bar bet with Dan DiDio.

But eventually, all good things must pass. By the mid to late 90s, people began to tire of the humor of the Justice League International books (and to be honest, the balance between humor and action did seem to tilt firmly toward the Bwah-hah-ha-ha side of the scale), and DC rebooted the Justice League with JLA and Grant Morrison’s and Howard Porter’s vision of DC’s Big Five (plus Aquaman, who is only considered a DC A-lister when DiDio asks Johns, “Double or nothing?”).

And it has been with the Big Boys we have stayed for lo, these more than fifteen years. After all, DC launched their New 52 with a Justice League lineup that could have come straight from 1965 but for the inclusion of Cyborg and about 10,000 Jim Lee seams and fine detail lines. And a lineup like that leaves little room for Giffen’s and DeMatteis’s humor and infighting; after all, having Earth’s (Original) Mightiest Heroes sniping at each other as pussies and jackasses would be unseemly to those legendary character and to their owner’s parent company, who is struggling desperately to get a Justice League movie off the ground.

However, you should never count Giffen and DeMatteis out. Because with Justice League 3000, they have found a way to get some conflict and humor out of the Big Five by cloning them, dumping them 987 years into the future, and ripping all the history you think you know about the characters away… kinda like right after Crisis On Infinite Earths.

So the question is: can these guys catch lightning in a bottle twice? Particularly considering they’ve got Howard Porter, who helped revitalized the JLA after they left Justice League International, doing the art?

Well, kinda.

Some Of The Usual Suspects: Judge Dredd #14 Review

A couple of months ago, recognizing a gap in my comics history education and having a 20 percent off coupon from Barnes & Noble burning a hole in my pocket, I started reading 2000AD’s Judge Dredd from the beginning. I picked up the first five volumes of Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files, and have been picking up volumes one at a time since, getting up to volume eight so far.

So while I am by no means an expert on Judge Dredd, I have soaked up enough to have formed the opinions that Ron Smith is my favorite artist on the title other than Brian Bolland so far, that Walter The Wobot is a fucking stupid character, that Dredd should have ventilated The Judge Child as soon as he found him, and that based on the apparently constant appearances of The Fatties, those British comics creators have a fairly solid handle on American culture.

So while we have had IDW’s adaptation of Judge Dredd by writer Duane Swierczynski in the house, it’s been Amanda who’s been picking it up. I haven’t been reading it, because I figured they would hew closer to the recent Dredd movie than the original comics, and that they would go along the lines of DC’s 1990s version of Judge Dredd, that took place in an entirely different continuity from the original 2000AD comics.

But I finally knucked and checked out Judge Dredd #14, and, well, I was half right. The IDW version of the book seems to take place in the 2000AD continuity, with at least a couple of familiar characters who won’t necessarily mean anything to anyone who hasn’t read some of the original books. And it gives us two stories that are pretty solid crime stories with sci-fi elements like body switching and psychic predictions that fit well into the overall Dredd universe.

It’s a good comic, but it’s only an okay Judge Dredd comic. Because it is missing something.

Smoking: The Superior Spider-Man #22 (And As A Whole) Review

I haven’t written about The Superior Spider-Man in a while, even though I am still reading it and still generally enjoying it, because it is beginning to succumb to The Walking Dead disease.

Here’s what I mean: we all know full well how The Superior Spider-Man is going to end. No matter what writer Dan Slott says on Twitter and at conventions, we all know that Peter Parker will return as Spider-Man at some point before the Amazing Spider-Man 2 movie opens on May 2nd next year. And even if you choose to believe that Marvel’s overlords at Disney will be willing to allow that corporate synergy and mindshare (Christ, I feel dirty just typing that) to pass since the movie’s owned by Sony and Columbia, the signs are all here that Peter Parker will return and Otto Octavius will suffer a fall. Otto’s showing hubris, he’s arrogant, and his sense of superiority is rubbing damn near everyone the wrong way.

All the signs point to Otto falling from grace and Peter returning, and the problem is that every reader knows this. Because we read comic books, and we know full well that dead only means dead in comics if the dead guy is Uncle Ben, Thomas Wayne or Martha Wayne. So we all know that the broad-stroke ending of Otto falls / Peter returns is coming (the same way we’ve known that Negan falls / Rick triumphs is the likely ending of the Walking Dead arc that’s been going on since 2012)… but it seems it has been going on forever.

And the events of The Superior Spider-Man #22 continues with the long, slow arc of Otto blindly heading toward a bad end, with yet another instance of Otto interacting badly with someone who would expect Peter to know and be friendly with him. And it’s certainly enjoyable enough, particularly in seeing J. Jonah Jameson’s reaction to some of the events of the issue… but it is also still more of the same interminable setup for a story for which I’m becoming damned impatient to see the punchline.

Happy Anniversary: Nova #100 Review

There are bigger and more ostensibly important comic books that have been released this week, but none of them had quite as much resonance with me when I saw the cover as Nova #100. Not because Nova is the biggest book in the world, but because it sure as hell isn’t the biggest book in the world.

My dad bought me Nova #12 when I was about five years old, mostly because Spider-Man was on the cover. And I really fell for the character, as I did DC’s Firestorm who debuted at about the same time, because even at five years old, I kind of understood that there were so many Spider-Man and Batman and Superman stories that I would never be able to never be able to read them all. But when you find a new hero that I found on the 11th issue? Well, that was someone who could belong to me.

However, I soon learned that the world of comics publishing didn’t revolve around the excitement of five and six year olds with 50-cent per week allowances willing to contribute a big $4.15 to the annual bottom line for a single comic book, because it was cancelled in 1978. And then it was cancelled again in 1995 after Eric Larsen brought it back, and again in 1999, and again in 2010 before returning in its current incarnation with a different dude under the helmet.

So it’s kinda cool that after 37 years, Nova has finally hit the hundred issue mark, showing simultaneously that sometimes the things you love when you’re five stick with you forever, and that the tastes of five year olds should never be used as a publishing strategy unless you want to wind up owned by a toy company, or worse, Disney.

But I’m not writing about Nova #100 just because of nostalgia, even though that is the reason it made its way to the top of my stack. It’s because in recent months, this book has become a fun and solid read, getting the mix of millennial spirit and fun, goofy dialogue that the Ultimate Spider-Man cartoon on Disney XD often whiffs in trying so hard to deliver. And this issue is no exception, with a couple of cool stories about a kid trying to figure out how to be a hero when he’s got classes in the morning and his family has money trouble out the yang. And it’s a lot of fun.

The Riverdale High School Bull Dogs Are Not What They Seem: Afterlife With Archie #2 Review

Editor’s Note: This review’s got spoilers, Meathead. What? Wrong Archie? Well, screw you. Dingbat.

Jesus Christ. And I mean that in the best possible way.

This Archie comic book starts with implied incest, moves to graphically bloody zombie violence, jumps to conflicted and closeted lesbians, spends a little time with spoiled children and their obviously disappointed parents, throws in more graphic violence, tosses in a soupcon of implication toward steroid abuse, and ends with the hero telling a girl’s father that he’s spent years trying to surreptitiously bone his daughter under cover of darkness. Again: this Archie comic has all of this stuff.

So what we have here, if you take away all the Archie elements, is a pretty solid if straight-ahead zombie story for young adults, with with enough social issues to make it relevant and modern. Which is fine, and surely a fun-enough read… but with those Archie elements, you get what feels like a look into the gutters and the bleed of 50 years of Archie comics. It’s like reading a version of Twin Peaks set in the Archie universe, where a violent event throws the covers off some pretty dark and difficult suburban secrets.

This is a really, really good comic book.

Wow, There Are Zombies In This Story!: The Walking Dead #116 Review

I have not been particularly quiet about my opinion that The Walking Dead has been spinning its wheels for a while now – you get Negan making threats, Rick and company come up with some kind of plan to turn things around, Negan sees said plan coming and turns it around with effortless ease and an erudite and witty comeback such as, “In case you haven’t noticed, you’re fucking fucked, you stupid fucker,” – and yes, that was an actual quote from Negan from one of the last few issues – and you repeat and repeat and repeat until you start considering dropping the title and waiting for the trade for the first time since the seventh issue.

This seemingly endless cycle has been going on for at least 17 months, or since Negan killed Glenn… but with issue 116, we finally we have an issue of The Walking Dead where not only does something go wrong for that baseball bat-fellating son of a bitch, but where there’s an actual live zombie attack. It’s a Goddamned Christmas Miracle!

Well… Negan still says irritating cocky shit and gets a hostage out of the deal. So maybe it’s more of a Thanksgiving Miracle. You know, the kind where you still have to put up with drunken racist Uncle Pete, but you avoid jail time for choking him out because for once, you get to witness him slipping on some gravy and falls on his ass.

Beautiful Disaster: Cataclysm: The Ultimates Last Stand #1 Review

Yesterday I complained that DC’s Forever Evil crossover wasn’t working for me because we’ve spent a whole bunch of weeks watching familiar villains in a new version of the universe run around unopposed, doing blatently evil shit for unclear reasons. And while it’s been all Earth-threateney and what-not, it hasn’t been all that compelling, because we all know that once the heroes reappear, there’s gonna be hell to pay. And to get that vaguely dissatisfied feeling has only taken a few months.

Enter Marvel’s Cataclysm, where a villain appears in a new universe and starts doing truly horrific things that endanger the planet without saying a word as to his motives. It’s Galactus, and unlike his prior appearances (and very much unlike Forever Evil), there is no herald and there are no grandiose declarations of superiority or inevitability. There is just hunger and mass destruction… and in one issue, it’s already ten times more compelling and tense than Forever Evil has been so far.

Evil Dicks Are Evil: Forever Evil #3 Review

I think I’ve finally figured out why DC’s latest event crossover, Forever Evil, hasn’t really been working for me, despite the fact that I’ve got a soft spot for the Crime Syndicate going back to the original Crisis On Infinite Earths. The storytelling decisions that writer Geoff Johns has made have made this thing pretty one dimensional up until now.

Think about it: the Crime Syndicate in this series are pretty much just evil for the sake of being evil, and that’s not all that interesting. Sure, there are some little extra beats like Ultraman’s lust and hatred for Superwoman, and Owlman’s somewhat conflicted emotions about Nightwing, and Power Ring’s cowardice, but in general these characters are pricks for the sake of being pricks. They’ve got the raw power to knock the moon out of orbit, but they also need to recruit this universe’s super criminals for power, why exactly? Because shut up, that’s why!

Also, Johns’s decision to get the Justice League out of the way has made sense from the angle that it allows these characters to run riot across the Earth to show us how bad they are, but it has had the unfortunate side effect of accentuating what the bad guys are up to… and a lot of it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Like that whole moving the moon to block the sun. It’s a neat visual, but if you stop and think about it for more than ten seconds, you’d realize that changing the moon’s orbit would alter tides, cause massive crop failures and climate change, and generally cause devastation on a planetary scale. Not that anyone would know, since the eclipse would blind everyone in about 45 minutes or so. And combine that with the fact that every time I see Grid I’m reminded that he split away from Cyborg by the selfsame powers of “shut up,” and we’ve had a bunch of one dimensional characters doing awful and ridiculous things for about three months (or eight when you remember that Forever Evil is, for all intents and purposes, just a continuation of the Trinity War crossover).

Well, this week brings us Forever Evil #3, and the good news is that things are starting to improve and become a little more diverse than just “evil dicks are evil.” But to get there, we get one more big plot point that doesn’t really ring true, and another that relies on, well, evil dicks being evil.

Problem Child: Damian: Son of Batman #1 Review

Editor’s Note: Don’t overlook anything. Spoilers will be hard to find in this amount of carnage.

I don’t think I’ve made it a secret over the years that I was never a fan of Damian Wayne. He was a mouthy douchebag who was designed to irritate, and usually delivered. He was a ten-year-old in all the worst senses of the word: impulsive, opinionated for no good reason, and often disrespectful to his family… and any person with the unmitigated gall to be disrespectful of The Goddamned Batman? He and I can never be friends. So I didn’t shed too many tears when his creator, Grant Morrison, had him whacked a few months ago.

The thing is that Damian was that much of an irritant as a ten (or so) year old, and everyone knows if you want someone truly insufferable, you need yourself a teenager. That’s when kids take their original irritating personalities and add moodiness, mopeyness and just general emo. They start listening to Joy Division (or whatever the 21 Century version of Joy Division is; I’m old and picked all my bands years ago. Do kids go through a Doors phase anymore? Or are they truly fucking hopeless and deserving of being written off? No, I don’t have children, why do you ask?), and they cut their hair all funny and they yell stuff like, “You’re not my real dad!” and “No I won’t get in your fucking van!” and “Who the fuck are The Doors?”

But Damian was safely killed before he could hit those difficult years… which clearly disappointed writer / artist Andy Kubert, because in his new book Damian: Son of Batman, he gives us not only a teenaged Damian, but one with a marked lack of adult supervision. And while that story is generally beautifully illustrated, it is also a little exposition heavy where it’s not needed, exposition light where it really is needed, and retracts an important plot conceit almost as soon as it’s introduced.

Family Reunion: The Sandman Overture #1 Review

Editor’s Note: Since my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me why anyone would consider a digital publication of any kind when he’s sure he probably has a slightly used yet still perfectly good Juggs Magazine he could sell me floating around somewhere, was sold out of The Sandman Overture #1 when we visited yesterday, this review is based on the digital version available on Comixology and read on a seven-inch Android tablet.

So. A prequel to a beloved genre series that is widely considered to be a classic, released about 16 or so years after the original series ended. That almost always ends well.

Seriously: I’ve read through The Sandman Overture, written by Neil Gaiman with art by J. H. Williams III and purported to tell the story of what Morpheus was up to just before that dink Roderick Burgess trapped him in a snow globe, and I’m not sure what I think about it. Because it’s a comic book that’s almost impossible to consider on its own merits… not that that’s a bad thing. After all, if The Phantom Menace hadn’t been tagged with the words Star Wars, it would be best remembered as a Twitter hashtag whenever it aired on the SyFy Channel after Sharknado.

But if you take The Sandman Overture #1 as part of the epic tale of Sandman, that means that you’re not only tacking onto a mythology that took 16 or so years for Gaiman to write, but one that spans thousands of years and just about the entire universe. Gaiman took the long view with Sandman, and there’s no reason to think he’s not doing the same with this miniseries.

But the trouble is that we don’t have the entire miniseries yet. We just have this one issue. And while the sum of the parts might wind up being spectacular, I just can’t say that about this single issue. What we have here is, well, a prequel. And one that shows some disturbing signs of succumbing to the same pitfall that all-too-many prequels to genre properties have fallen over the years.

Fan service.