Superboy and the Ravers #17

Superboy and the Ravers #17
"Love is All That Anti-Matters, Part One: No Weddings and a Funeral"
Cover Date: January 1998
Writer: Steve Matheson and Karl Kesel
Artist: John Hood (Pencils), Dan Davis (Inker)

Previously...

Well, someone thought 'Superboy and the Ravers' was a good title for a comic book. That was a pretty shocking twist.

Plot

In the anti-matter universe of Qward, Kindred Grim is trying to marry Kindred Sol in order to unite their energies, which would make him super-powerful, which will then allow him to merge Qward with the regular universe, which is evidently very good for him, and very bad for everyone else. He's hired recurring villains 'Red Shift' in order to assist him.

Back in the regular universe, Kindred Marx, Grim's brother, is explaining to Superboy that they need to rescue Sol or else everyone's fucked. Marx, you see, knows Superboy because he owns the titular rave, that's right, the team is headquartered at some sort of permanent rave hosted by an alien. I can only assume this issue was meant to read with the aid of several tabs of ecstasy. Anyway, Superboy declares Sol to be 'Da Bomb in purple leotards.' Huh, with dialogue like that, I'm not sure the universe ought to be saved.

Meanwhile, in Canada, Sparx tells her grandmother that she doesn't want to ever go back to the rave because she thinks Superboy has eyes for someone else, and her jealousy is killing her. Sparx's grandmother explains that if she doesn't go back, people are going to die. (Note: after re-reading the comic, I found out that Sparx was actually have trouble with the fact that Hero was gay, which apparently really bothered. Which isn't a bad idea for a subplot in and of itself, I guess, except, you know, they're based at a rave, which kind of makes you wonder how the fuck Sparx lasted more than five minutes there if she was that offended by gay people. Oh, and Hero's love interest is named Leander after the myth, which did not end well for either character.)

Back at the Rave, the imaginatively-named 'Hero' is looking with fellow Raver Half-Life for another Raver named 'Kaliber'. Ah, the '90s, when you could non-ironically name a character 'Kaliber'. Anyway, they don't find him, and Superboy and Marx show up to explain that the need to stop that wedding from taking place. Rex the Wonder Dog shows up to help them Sol since the dog is 'saturated with [Sol's] essence' and so can lead them there. Somehow I don't think the guy from mightygodking.com is ever going to use panels from this issue on his blog. They all head to Qward.

And, in fact, that's where Kaliber has been this entire time. It turns out that he's gone permanently blind due to something happening in a prior issue that I don't care to read.

But, before we going any further with that, a team member named 'Lindsey' is beating up her father for killing her number. Just as she's about to finish him off, he begs her to stop so he can explain why he killed Lindsay's mother. He then explains that he killed her because she had super-powers, and therefore needed to be killed, much like Lindsey herself. Well, I'll give the dude credit, he's got stones.

Back to Qward, everyone else is looking for Kaliber and Sol, which doesn't take them very long. Red Shift then attacks in a fight scene that has exactly zero characters I care about. Half-Life then blows himself up to take out a whole bunch of enemies, and his fate is the issue's cliffhanger. To Be Continued!

Next Issue

Half-Life is totally dead.

Commentary

First of all, the 'Ravers'? I mean, I guess I've got to give Karl Kesel credit for actually trying to make the name meaningful, but, well, the name still sucks.

Anyway, this isn't a very good book. From a purely plot-based view, it sucks because the first two-thirds of the book involves the Ravers just kind of milling about, not accomplishing much of anything until Rex the Wonder Dog shows up and magically gives them the information they need to move forward with the plot. 

Beyond that, it's just kind of a mediocre book. I mean, the dialogue is occasionally funny in an unintentional way, but that's only because no DC comic has ever featured a teenage super-hero who sounds like an actual teenager. Fuck, even when Jim Shooter was writing the Legion when he was a teenager it didn't sound natural.

All in all, another book designed to fill the gap of 'Teenage super-group' that had existed in the DC universe that had existed since the Teen Titans stopped being teenagers around 1987. Incidentally, I'm not sure that they really ever have. When Superboy and the Ravers got axed, they then launched new versions of Titans, as well as starting up Young Justice, but that version of the Titans wasn't very good, and Young Justice really only appealed to fans of Peter David, so they eventually tried again with the Geoff Johns' Teen Titans, which really wasn't much better. It's kind of interesting because ever since the Wolfman/Perez run became such a big hit, DC has seemed determined to keep trying to make a team that will recapture that magic, with pretty shitty results.

Damage Stars ****

Bonus

Who were the Ravers?

Superboy- the clone of Superman and Lex Luthor who has been reinvented, like clockwork, every five years.

Hero Cruz- a gay Latino who taught us all that sexuality and race are no real barriers to starring in a terrible team book.

Kaliber- a renegade Qwardian who filled the stoic alien warrior cliche.

Sparx- a repressed Canadian girl who has electrical powers.

Aura- the character I kept referring to as 'Lindsey' up above. Some sort of magnetic powers, I guess?

Half-Life- a teenager from the '50s whose family and girlfriend got killed in an alien-related incident that turned him into some sort of shambling half-dead grotesque.

Primal Force #0

Primal Force #0
"The Call"
Cover Date: October 1994
Writer: Steven Seagle
Artist: Ken Hooper (pencils), Barbara Kaalberg (inker)

Plot

In Northern Ireland, a hero named Jack O'Lantern flies in to save a girl from a burning school bus. He has your standard comic book Irish accent, as is mandatory under the Chris Claremont Accents Directive of 1981. Anyway, he saves the girl, but accidentally get her cut with glass in the process and so immediately gets depressed and is glumly walking away when a mysterious old lady shows up and tell him to go into the water.

Elsewhere, a guy named Dr. Mist is using his foster daughter as a medium. The daughter foretells that a bad guy named 'Cataclysm is about to appear. On the next page, a random guy named Harold Ross is in Peru, throws himself into the well in a village, and Cataclysm flies out. The girl's prophecy might have been more helpful had she given it more than five seconds before it came to fruition, but, well, I guess being an oracle is an inexact science.

Hong Kong! Some guy named Silver Dragon fights a guy named Claw! The old lady from before shows up and Claw disappears into a pool of water. That's some succinctness I can get behind!

Oh, and the broken-down Red Tornado flies out of the Grand Canyon, where he had been just kind of lying there, and in Louisiana, a character named Golem is getting hunted down when he too disappears into a pool of water. All of these characters are terrible. I mean, even the Red Tornado is pretty awful.

Back in New York, Dr. Mist calls a meeting of the Leyman, who, as far as I know, made exactly one appearance before this issue, in Zero Hour, where a bunch of them got killed as part of the crossover. The remaining Leymen immediately resign en masse rather than deal with Cataclysm, and tell Dr. Mist to find new Leymen.

Dr. Mist is less than thrilled, but, well, what's he going to do? He heads to the pool of water that summons new heroes and begins the ritual, which is interrupted when Cataclysm shows up and starts drowning Dr. Mist is the pool. I don't know that I would trust a single character in this book to save us from a villain named 'Minor Inconvenience' let alone a guy named 'Cataclysm'.

But wait, there's still one character left to introduce. There's a woman, she's teaching a karate class, she's from New York, her name is Meridian, and she also falls into a pool of water. Wait, 'Meridian'? Come on, book, I know it's the mid-90's and all, but would it have killed you to use a little subtlety?

Anyway, at long last our heroes come together as they appear in the room where Dr. Mist was summoning them from, just in time to meet his drowned corpse. Claw immediately starts trying to kill everybody, and Dr. Mist wakes up just in time for the issue to end. To Be Continued!

Commentary

Actually, this isn't too bad of a first issue (it's technically labeled #0 because that's just how things were in 1994), it introduces all of the new characters in pretty economical fashion, which is pretty hard seeing as the only character anyone had heard of before this issue was Red Tornado, and he's reduced to a broken-down mute shell.

For what it's worth, it also does a good job of explaining why makes this super-team different than the other dozen or so team books DC was publishing at the time. Granted, the 'ancient, mystic order intakes new members to take on a new crisis' isn't a completely fresh idea, but, well, it's a start.

The biggest problem this book has, and what probably ended up killing it 15 issues later, is that no one really cares about any of these characters. I mean, who are they? I actually looked it up, and it turns out that most of them actually were pre-existing characters, which surprised the fuck out of me.

I don't really have a lot more to say negatively about the book. I mean, it's pretty good, but it's not so great that I really feel compelled to learn anything else about the characters or read any more issues of Primal Force.

Damage Stars: **

Bonus

Part of the problem with Primal Force is that it came out at time when there were tons of similar team books. Here's a list of all the team books published in October 1994, when this issue was released:

Justice League (Pre-Morrison version)
Titans (Last gasp of Wolfman version)
Outsiders
Extreme Justice
Justice League: Task Force (Christopher Priest version) 
Darkstars
Legion of Super-Heroes (Reboot version)
R.E.B.E.L.S.
Xenobrood

That's a lot, and most of those were pretty dire. That version of the Justice League was probably the worst extended run that franchise's history. In fact, the only titles on this list that weren't completely awful were Justice League: Task Force (and that had problems of its own), and the Waid Reboot Legion. Still, asking Primal Force to survive that crowded environment was too much.

Identity Crisis #2

Identity Crisis #2
"House of Lies"
Cover Date: September 2004
Writer: Brad Meltzer
Artist: Rags Morales

Previously...

Okay, let's stop dicking around. I've spent the last couple of reviews talking about dinky little retcons in the early-90s Legion, and they were bad, and they caused problems, but still, they were pretty fucking minor. I mean, who really cares if Lightning Lad was really someone else, it doesn't really change the character of earlier issues.  But this...well, this is different.

Ir has been the better part of a decade since Identity Crisis came out, and I think it's fair to say that its reputation has not been great. But is that fair?

Now, in the first issue of the miniseries, Sue Dibny, Elongated Man's wife had been killed, and, at her funeral, Elongated Man vowed to take his revenge on Doctor Light, for clearly this heinous act was the work of Megaman.

Okay, not really, Dr. Light is actually just a C-List supervillain. But imagine how much this story would have been if the real villain was Megaman. Just think about it.

Plot

Below the church where Sue's funeral service was held, Green Arrow, Black Canary, Hawkman, the Atom, Zatanna and the Elongated Man are talking about the pros and cons of hunting down Dr. Light. The Wally West Flash and the Kyle Rayner Green Lantern show up, and that gives Green Arrow a chance to explain just what's going on.

So, years and years ago, when the former six characters formed the majority of the Justice League, Sue was spending a pleasant evening on their satellite. Suddenly, Dr. Light showed up and decided to rape her. And he did. Holy fuck, no wonder DC has had trouble attracting new readers. I mean, centering your big summer crossover about rape and lobotomies? Shit, I'm kind of amazed that DC even made to 2011. The Justice League eventually make it back to their satellite and beat the fuck out of Dr. Light, as well they might.

Where was I, oh, yeah, so back in the present, Dr. Light knows his goose is cooked, and so head's off to the super-secret satellite where all of the super-villains hang out. He wants to hire somebody to protect him from the Justice League, despite the fact that all of the super-villains on the satellite have basically made a career out of getting the shit beaten out of them by said Justice League.

The heroes have made it to Roxbury, Massachusetts, the last known whereabouts of Dr. Light. At this point, Meltzer decides to double-down on the horrifying retcons. It turns out that after the Justice League had captured Dr. Light and given him the customary memory wipe, Hawkman pointed out that there was no reason Dr. Light couldn't still try and do something as horrible again. He proposes they alter his personality using Zatanna's powers. They vote on it, and Barry Allen casts the deciding vote in favor of the personality alteration. It turns out that because Zatanna didn't really know what she was doing, the effect was basically to lobotomize Dr. Light. Whoops. Anyway, Dr. Light shows up with Deathstroke as his bodyguard, and the Justice Leaguers prepare to take the pair on...next issue.

Elsewhere, Dr. Midnight is doing an autopsy on Sue Dibny. It turns out that she wasn't murdered by Dr. Light at all. So this was all just a crazy misunderstanding! To Be Continued!

Commentary

Shit, it was as bad as I remembered it. Although, to be fair, the writing and art are both quite technically excellent. I mean, Meltzer knows how to write, and I've always liked Morales' pencils. Still, the fact that two talented guys came up with this just makes the shittiness of the issue even worse. I mean, they could have given us a really good story, but this?

First of all, if you want to use rape as a key plot point in your story, that's fine, but putting in a Super-Hero context? Really? Super-Hero comics are escapism. Rape is...not. That's just an elemental fact.

I don't really understand why you'd want to write a story like this. I guess it did make the Silver Age heroes a bit more 'human' in a sense, but what does that even really get you. These are super-heroes, they're wear brightly colored costumes and punch alien threats that seek to conquer the planet.

Anyway, it's worth noting that this mini-series had longstanding ramifications. It triggered a run of similar stories, like the one in Flash where it was revealed that Barry Allen had gotten Zatanna to miss with the minds of one of his enemies. Even worse, Meltzer, a couple of issues hence, revealed that Batman had got wind of what the rest of the Justice League was up to, and the other Justice Leaguers mind-wiped him too, which set off a whole series of stories where Batman became increasingly paranoid, culminating when he built Brother Eye, leading to even more horrible stories.

Eventually, this story helped lead into Infinite Crisis, which the writers promised would spark a return to a lighter, more fan-friendly DCU, where recurring characters weren't raped and brutally murdered to  add shock value to stories.

That didn't quite work out either.

Damage Stars: *****

Legion of Super-Heroes (v4) #33

Legion of Super-Heroes (v4) #33
"Untitled"
Cover Date: September 1992
Writer: Tom and Mary Bierbaum
Artist: David A. Williams, Chris Sprouse

Previously...

The Legion is still fighting the Dominators for control of Earth, as is the other, younger Legion. It was just that sort of time for the Legion.

Plot

Get your tinfoil hats on people, because it's time for some double-barrelled Bierbaum retcon action! Fortunately, I'll be here to keep it all manageable.

Chameleon Boy (the adult one, since his SW6 counterpart died in the previous issue) is on the planet Val to meet with his father R.J. Brande. (Finding out that R.J. Brande was actually a Durlan and Chameleon Boy's father was one of the first and most respected of all of the Legion's retcons).

Meanwhile, on Winath, Adult!Lightning Lad meets with Proty II, the Legion's old team pet/mascot thing. Lightning Lad wishes that he had gone to help Kid Quantum. (Because, you see, he is actually the soul of the first Proty who basically possessed Lightning Lad after the later had died, although very few characters know this fact. This was another fan theory that the Bierbaums wrote into their Legion run.) So, two pages, two retcons mentioned already? We are making good time!

On Earth, a head Dominator hears about the 'Soul of Antares' and so hires a guy named Adam Orion, the Hunter to go capture it.

Totally, definitely, not a rip-off of Kraven.

Anyway, back on Val, a man named Rouvin heads to the local saloon, flirts with the bar-tender, and bribes a robo-sheriff, before heading back to his cabin which contains a Legion Flag, a Legion costume, could he be the mysterious Kid Quantum? And, more importantly, can he convince the readers that he isn't a terrible character that has no reason for existing? Spoiler Alert: Yes, and emphatically no, respectively.

But now it is time for some exposition. Both the Dominators and R.J. Brande and Chameleon Boy have conversations that, between the two of them, give the audience the backstory here. So, it turns out that there was a planet called Antares where a species of telepathic shapeshifters lived, but Glorith, who at this point is essentially the arch-enemy of the Legion, wanted to enslave them, so they...and bear with me here....put their species' sentience into one of their number, who was stripped of his telepathy and shapeshifting skills for some reason. Anyway, he is the Soul of Antares.

And there's some more. So, the Soul of Antares decided to create a new identity for himself, that of James Cullen, Kid Quantum, who had some sort of belt that let him manipulate quantum...stuff. But his identity got compromised, so he faked his own death and has been hiding out on the planet Val ever since.

Okay, almost done. Apparently, seven other Antareans also had their sentience preserved, and so have been bugging R.J. Brande and Adult!Lightning Lad to find the Soul of Antares/Kid Quantum for a while now. Yeah, well, let's just go with it.

So, Adam Orion shows up on Val, and starts wrecking shit and taking hostages, looking for Kid Quantum, Chameleon Boy and Brande try and stop him and fail horribly. So, finally, Kid Quantum shows up to save his friends, but, before he can do that, we really need a page where the characters try and talk themselves into the idea that this whole set-up makes even the slightest bit of sense.

"Yep...no need to question it any further."

 

 

 

But, just as Adam Orion is about to do us all a favor and plug Kid Quantum in the skull, those sentient Antareans from earlier show up and stop him. And so Brande, Cham, and the Kid Quantum head off to Antares to restore the spirit of the Antareans people, except the Emerald Eye shows up to redirect them to a planet called Gallan. I'm beyond caring at this point.

Back on Earth, SW6!Lightning Lad is pissed that a bunch of his SW6 friends got killed last issue. SW6!Saturn Girl shows up and wonders why Garth is being such a dick. The short answer: because of retcon bullshit. The long answer...

The Long Answer (Take Two Aspirin Before Reading)

At this moment in Legion continuity, it had been established that when Lightning Lad was brought back to life, it was really just his body being possessed by the soul of Proty. Now, the SW6 Legion were originally from a time after Lightning Lad had died and come back to life, but, for some convoluted reason, the Bierbaums decided that SW6!Lightning Lad would have the soul of the real Lightning Lad, even though, from a continuity perspective, he should have the soul of Proty. The change in souls also affected Lightning Lad's personality, so SW6!Saturn Girl is confused to why Lightning Lad had reverted to the way he acted before he died, rather than his new personality after he came back from life. And that is exactly the sort of story knowledge and intuition you need in order to make sense of the closing scenes of this issue, which basically explains everything that was wrong with the Legion at the time.

Commentary

Why? Why did they make this story. I mean, if you want to make a new character, fine (although at this moment, readers already had to keep track of something like forty characters). But why retcon another new character into Legion history? It just makes the entire continuity that much more unstable.

As for the Kid Quantum character, well, he's a complete dud. I mean, he's such a dud that when Mark Waid had an edict from editorial to kill off a Legionnaire in the first issues of the reboot Legion, Kid Quantum was his sacrificial lamb.

But, yeah, he's the sort of character where, just due to his backstory, the other characters continually go, "Oh, man, remember the awesome times we had with Kid Quantum", even though no such stories were ever printed, which means if feels like we're something like 80% of the way to fanfiction.

So, yeah,  in summary, 1992 was a shitty year to be a Legion fan.

Damage Stars: *****
 

Legion of Super-Heroes (v4) #31

Legion of Super-Heroes (v4) #31
"The Elements of Heartbreak"
Cover Date: July 1992
Writer: Keith Giffen, Tom and Mary Bierbaum
Artist: Coleen Doran and Curt Swan(!)

Previously...

Okay, get some Tylenol because we're now in the part of Legion history where the stories make no God-damned sense unless you've read thirty years worth of Legion stories AND know exactly how the retcons have affected them.

The adult Legion (I'll get to that in a minute) is on Earth. In five-year gap between Levitz' and Giffen's runs, Earth has been secretly taken over by the Dominators, who, as you might guess, aren't great dudes. Anyway, the revolution against Dominator rule has starter, and the Legion has spent the better part of last year fighting them.

But wait, there's more! As part of the story, some stasis chambers under the surface of the Earth have been opened, releasing the SW6 Legion, who are essentially younger versions of the Legionnaires, meaning that, in addition to the two dozen or so characters already in the Giffen run, now you've got another entire Legion to keep track of. Oh, and no one knows if they're clones or not or where they've come from, but they're fighting the Dominators too.

Oh, and for the past dozen years or so, Jan Arrah, known as Element Lad, has had an on-again, off-again relationship with a Science Cop named Shvaughn Erin. Okay, ready? No, you aren't, but let's get on with it anyway.

Plot

On the wartorn Earth, adult!Element Lad breaks into a drug store to get some pills for Shvaughn. 

At the same time, and not too far away, SW6!Chameleon Boy and SW6!Element Lad are attacking a Dominator patrol squad. SW6!Element Lad fucks up and accidentally kills a bunch of them, so runs off alone out of shame.

Adult!Element Lad get the drugs back to Shvaugn, who is taking them to help her get through her ProFem withdrawal. You know the second you hear the word 'ProFem' that things are about to go off of the rails. Anyway, Shvaughn wants something to take her mind off the pain, so asks Adult!Element Lad to tell her a story.

Not missing the chance to use a tired dramatic device, Adult!Element Lad's narration of the story is juxtaposed with SW6!Element Lad's running around being sad. The story is about a Trommite kid (on Trom everyone had the power to transmute the elements at will, but they all got killed, and now Jan is the only one left). So, the kid asks his father why he can't kill things with his powers. His dad answers "A Trommite can kill no one if not himself." The kid does not respond well to this zen bullshit, and so kills his dad by turning him into "flakes of carbon."

Around this time, Shvaugn cuts her hair and insists on being called 'Sean', but wants Adult!Element Lad to finish the story. So, it turns out that all of the people and animals of the planet Trom shun the kid for killing his father, and, depressed by the isolation, the kid kills himself by turning himself into "flakes of carbon." The End.

The lesson that Sean takes from the story is that he has to go through the rest of this transition on his own, which does not seem like a particularly good interpretation of the story that Adult!Element Lad told. He leaves, and Adult!Element Lad lets him go. Sean stumbles around for awhile, and then collapses into a snow bank, and who should happen by but SW6!Element Lad, they talk for a bit, and SW6!Element Lad gets retrieved by SW6!Saturn Girl while Sean just kind of wanders off.

Meanwhile, in space, SW6!Valor meets Adult!Valor, and they're mighty confused by this turn of events. Also, the Emerald Eye teases a return, but it's hard to get excited about that.

Finally, as was the custom of this era's Legion, there are a couple of text pieces that give important exposition. It's really a testament to how continuity-heavy this Legion was that, even with Keith Giffen using a Watchmen-esque nine-panel grid for every page of his run, they still didn't have enough room to get all of the necessary information in the actual comic.

The important text piece her is a letter written by Shvaugn Erin right before she became Sean. She explains she grew up as a dude on a planet with some seriously regressive gender-identity norms, so he had trouble fitting in, and he had a crush on the young Element Lad, so this led him to run away to some sort of future-hippie commune on Earth, and then decided to become a woman for some vague reasons about not being comfortable with who he was, also, so as to make the wooing of Element Lad slightly easier. And she had been doing it ever since, except the Dominators outlawed ProFem, and now she's about to turn back into a man.

Commentary

I suppose my first question is...why? I mean, on the one hand, I guess making a long-term recurring character a transgender person is a novel form of retcon, but this probably isn't the way to do it, not the least of which is because it kind of conflates being gay and being transgender in a way that's confusing at best.

I've heard two theories about why they made Shvaugn Erin into a man. Keith Giffen in an interview he did for the Legion Companion said that he wanted to kill Erin off, but some other member of the creative staff was against is. Giffen said the only way he wouldn't kill her off is if she had some sort of interesting hook he could use. The other guy blurted out 'She's really a man' and there you go.

The other theory has to do with the Bierbaums, who were longtime fans of the Legion before they became writers. There was a popular fan theory that Element Lad was gay, primarily centered around the fact that he originally wore a pink costume and didn't have an established girlfriend. Eventually, when Paul Levitz took over, he gave Element Lad a new costume and a girlfriend in the guise of Shvaughn Erin, thus foiling the fan's speculation. Ten years later, the Bierbaums find a way to make continuity conform to their wishes by making Shvaugn into a man, which would then lead to Element Lad becoming gay or something.

Anyway, either way, those theories do kind of point to the problems the Legion were having at the time. On the one hand, you had a guy like Giffen, who could be a tad bit capricious, and on the other you had the Bierbaums, whose stories often teetered close to fan-fiction. Incidentally, their partnership ended about as badly as you might think, with Keith Giffen blowing up the Earth in his last issue, and then the Bierbaums moving on to a spinoff featuring the SW6 Legionnaires.

Just not a good moment for the Legion.

Damage Stars: *****

Teen Titans (v2) #9

Teen Titans (v2) #9
"The Lost World of Skartaris, Part 1 (of 3)"
Cover Date: June 1997
Writer: Dan Jurgens
Artist: Dan Jurgens (Pencils), George Perez (Finished Art)

Previously...

Well, okay, these Titans are actually half-alien hybrids sent to Earth to help the aliens conquer it, but they decided to become heroes instead. Also, the Ray Palmer Atom is on the team, except he's a teenager due to some shenanigans leftover from Zero Hour. Beyond that, Prysm, the energy chick on the cover, somehow fell into Skartaris.

Plot

Prysm almost gets eaten by a T-Rex, but then the Warlord shows up to save her. He then goes to kill the T-Rex, but Prysm starts whining about not killing animals. Warlord and Prysm then briefly exposit what's going on: They're in a place called Skartaris, where there are T-Rexes and magic and a bunch of other shit that sold great in the '80s but not so much since then.

Meanwhile, the other Titans are trying to find Prysm. It only takes them about five seconds to crash the jet they were flying right into Skartaris.

Prysm and Warlord then talk about what the Warlord's been up to since his solo title was canceled. It turns out that he has a daughter who's missing and he's trying to find her.

The other Titans leave the wreckage of their jet to find some barbarians, and, as you might expect, get into a brawl. The Atom pulls out a sword, which is supposed to be a callback to the time in the early '80s where they decided that the perfect development for a super-hero who was a scientist and had the power to shrink was to become some sort of Conan-esque hero. I guess you had to be there. It does lead to the line of the issue, where Risk, the Titan who would later go on to be famous for having his arm gruesomely ripped off in Infinite Crisis, explains, "Palmer handles that sword as well as Michael Jordan handles a basketball!" Awesome.

And that's how Risk ruined similes for everyone

Anyway, some chick with a fur bikini shows up and realizes that the Titans all speak English, just like the Warlord, so they're probably connected to him somehow, and demands they lead her to him.

Meanwhile, Prysm and Warlord get ambushed and knocked out by an evil-looking sorceress. To Be Continued!

Commentary

Well, I'll give DC this much credit, back in the day, they weren't afraid to roll out new characters to try and revive moribund franchises. I mean, it never seemed to work, but they tried.

These are the Jurgens-era Teen Titans. Marv Wolfman had been writing the Titans since 1980, but, by the mid-90s, it had gotten kind of stale, mainly because Wolfman hadn't created a good new character in something like a decade. Eventually, it was decided that the Titans needed to start over.

So they turned to Dan Jurgens, the guy who wrote "The Death of Superman". Jurgens decided that he'd create a brand new team of teenagers and decided to pair them with a de-aged Atom because...I don't know, I guess because he could. There was only one small problem: no one liked the new characters.

Now, in fairness, comic fans hate new characters for the most part. So, for Jurgens to succeed, he would have had to have come up with some pretty fucking awesome characters. The Titans just kind of ended up being rather bland, to the point where Risk getting his arm ripped off in Infinite Crisis was about the biggest exposure any of this group of Titans would have after their title got canceled.

Also, this book has a Warlord team-up, a mere eight years after the Warlord's ongoing ended. The Warlord, in case I never get around to doing an issue of it, was a story about an Air Force pilot who crashed his jet into a hole in the north pole that led him into a world of fantasy. It ran for a 133 issues, which just goes to show you how fucking different things were back then. Quite why Jurgens decided the Titans and Warlord would make a good team-up is beyond me, but I suppose he gets points for creativity.

Looking at the book now, though, it's not so bad. Sure, the dialogue isn't great, but the writing's good enough that you can pick up this book and be able to tell the characters apart, which, in the '90s, wasn't particularly common in team books. The art's pretty great, too. So, it's got a few things going for it. I wouldn't recommend you go out and buy issues from this run, but I'll say that the Jurgens run is far from the worst the Titans franchise has to offer.

Damage Stars ****

 

Legion of Super-Heroes (v4) #4

Legion of Super-Heroes (v4) #4
"Untitled"
Cover Date: February 1990
Writer: Keith Giffen, Tom and Mary Bierbaum
Artist: Keith Giffen (Pencils), Al Gordon (Inks)

Previously...
 
A ton of stuff, but the only story that really mattered was the one where the Legion fought the Time Trapper and killed him, but Mon-El got mortally wounded in the process. It's been five years since then.

Plot

On Talok VIII, Shadow Lass is still in mourning for Mon-El, her husband, and gets removed from her position as planetary protector as a result.

Mon-El, however, isn't quite dead, and rises from his grave to find Shadow Lass. The problem is that his body is hosting not only the essence of the Time Trapper, but also the essence of another guy, who we'll hear more about a bit later. The Time Trapper starts making some noise about this all being part of his plan.

Mon-El and Shadow Lass reunite, but he feels compelled to inform her of his possession problem/ They fly off to Colu to meet with Brainiac 5, who will presumably come up with some sort of science-y solution to their problem. Meanwhile, the spirit of the Time Trapper explains who the third voice is. It turns out it's from a guy named Eltro Gand, who was the descendant of Mon-El (just go with it, okay.) Anyway, in an earlier story, it was prophesied that Mon-El would die soon, so Eltro Gand showed up to save him. Of course, prophecy usually wins out, so in trying to prevent Mon-El's death, he accidentally caused it. So, as an act of contrition, he sacrificed his life-force to bring Mon-El back to life, but, as it turns out, that also ended up transplanting Eltro Gand's soul into Mon-El's body, which is the retcon for why Mon-El had been acting kind of erratically for the latter part of Paul Levitz's run.

Anyway, Brainiac 5 figures out how to get the essence of the Time Trapper out of Mon-El's body, but the Time Trapper decides it's time to step in, and manages to spirit Mon-El away to the Pocket Universe (I'll explain in a minute), while siccing Brainiac 5's erstwhile android assistant on Brainy and Shadow Lass.

In the Pocket Universe, the Time Trapper explains that what he really wants is to take full possession of Mon-El's immortal body, and the two start to fighting. Mon-El manages to eventually wear the Time Trapper down, so the villain decides to explain exactly what the fuck is going on. And here we go:

The Time Trapper, who is the personification of entropy and the ruler of the end of time, decided that he wanted to conquer some eras in history where people actually, you know, lived. But, looking back through time, he noticed that the 30th century was ruled by the wizard (and perennial Legion villain) Mordru. The Trapper knew he couldn't beat Mordru in a straight-up fight, so he decided on an insanely convoluted scheme. He wanted a team of super-heroes that would keep Mordru out of power, and then be swept aside by the Trapper himself. To that end, he created a Pocket Universe with its own Superboy that would inspire the creation of the Legion, and made sure that when the Legion traveled back in time, they always ended up in the Pocket Universe. He also put Mon-El in the Pocket Universe as a failsafe, so that the Trapper would have an invulnerable body to retreat into in case of emergency. Finally, he pulled R.J. Brande, the Legion's original financier, from the regular universe's 20th century. The upshot is that the Legion would not exist were it not for the Time Trapper's machinations.

But wait, there's one more catch. Because of the Time Trapper's relationship with time, if Mon-El kills him now, then the Trapper will retroactively cease to exist, erasing all of the things he's done, including the creation of the Legion and the prevention of Mordru's conquering the galaxy. Mon-El's reaction to this news? Well...

"Better oblivion than retcon, motherfucker!"

 

 

And that's the end of the issue.

Commentary

In case you're wondering, this wasn't actually a reboot. What happened was that Levitz had set up the Pocket Universe explanation to get around the fact that Superboy, who was crucial to most of the Legion's early stories, was no longer in the main continuity. It was a pretty good work-around, but after he left, the Superman editorial staff issued an edict that no Superman or Superman-related characters could appear in Legion stories anymore. Giffen and the Bierbaums had a choice between either never mentioning the vast majority of past Legion stories, since they contained the offending material, or rewriting continuity to remove all instances of Superboy and the Pocket Universe. They elected the latter.

So, this issue was the set-up for the next issue, where history is restored, but with several notable changes, starting a period known as the "Glorith continuity". Honestly, though, it was just a bad idea all over. Almost every single story had some sort of retcon in it, whether from which characters were in it to much more drastic changes. For example, in Legion of Super-Heroes (v3) #50, a group of Legionnaires traveled to the end of time to kill the Time Trapper for killing the Pocket Universe Superboy. In the revised continuity, a group of Legionnaires traveled to Glorith's home planet to get revenge on her for destroying Daxam. And these stories are supposed to occupy the same slot in the Legion's history.

Really, this was basically end of the first incarnation of the Legion. Once Giffen and company were forced to rewrite the continuity this heavily, things were never going to work right, because virtually every story was somehow different. Not that Giffen and the Bierbaums are blameless, since the Bierbaums, who had started the careers as two of the more prominent fans of the Legion, seemingly couldn't help themselves from retconning things for no particularly good reason. In this issue alone, they decided that Mon-El's character over the past five years or so of Legion comics hadn't been to their liking, so they decided he was acting oddly because he was possessed by Eltro Gand. And they did stuff like that every issue, culminating in the infamous issue where they decided, since the popular fan theory had been that Element Lad was gay, but had since been paired, in continuity with a female character, that they would retcon the woman into really being a man, which would somehow square things. Not coincidentally, shortly thereafter Paul Levitz ordered a hard reboot for the Legion's continuity.

 

Justice League Europe #21

Justice League Europe #21
"Blood, Sweat, and Tabloids"
Cover Date: December 1990
Writers: Keith Giffen (Plot), Gerard Jones (Script)
Artist: Marshall Rogers (Pencils), Joe Rubenstein (Inker)

Previously...

The Justice League Europe accidentally blew up their headquarters in Paris, so they had to move to London.

Plot

Captain Atom is talking with Catherine, the team's non-powered U.N. liaison  about the events of last issue. Maxwell Lord, who was in control of both teams of the Justice League at this point, calls in to demote Captain Atom to field commander, and promotes Catherine to be his boss. Captain Atom is delighted that he no longer has to be in charge.

Elsewhere, the Silver Sorceress, possibly the most forgettable member of the Justice League in history, tries to introduce herself to her new teammates, despite the fact that they, much like me and I'm going to guess pretty much every reader, doesn't care.

Power Girl, in the middle of a twenty-year stretch of shifting origins and spotty characterization, marches up to Captain Atom and starts complaining about a tabloid photograph of her in a bikini. Captain Atom cheerfully points out that he is no longer in charge of shit like that, and continues on his merry way.

Also, in subplots of marginal interest, Flash and Metamorpho go clothes shopping, Blue Jay broods and the Crimson Fox...it's the Crimson Fox, a character who's main selling point is that she was originally played by identical twins, so could be used as C-List fodder twice.

Anyway, Captain Atom and Power Girl go out for a walk, and talk about her cat...that's not a metaphor, they're actually talking about Power Girl's pet cat. Power Girl offers to get Captain Atom a gift to give Catherine. Later, Captain Atom gives Catherine the gift, which turns out to be lingerie. Captain Atom swears revenge. The End.

Comment

Kind of a hard issue to summarize, seeing as something like 90% of its charm is in the dialogue. Justice League Europe was never really a good comic. It was always basically a poor man's version of the Giffen/Dematteis Justice League run, and while that was a good run, I mean not sure that it really demanded a spinoff.

Especially, since, you know, they didn't apparently have enough characters to staff two full teams. At the time, the Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman teams didn't want their characters in a team book, so they were out. So, what did they have available? Well, they had the Wally West Flash, who was a great character...after Mark Waid had a chance to refine him, but in 1990, that hadn't happened yet. Captain Atom had his own book, but, well, it's Captain Atom. Power Girl would eventually become a popular character...fifteen years later, when they finally had a chance to settle her origin, powers and characterization. For whatever reason, Giffen and friends had decided to portray Power Girl as...well, as a raging bitch.

Now granted, this was for the sake of comedy.

Still, it's a book that captures a moment in time where the Giffen/Dematteis vision of a super-hero team played as a sitcom was so strong that they thought it could sustain a second monthly title. Also, to serve as a convenient holding place for C-List characters that could be killed off when the time came.

I don't know, I guess you might like this book if you've gotten every Justice League story every written by the Giffen/DeMatteis team, but need more, but it's pretty inessential as far as these things go.

The really amazing thing about the book, though, is that it lasted for over five years from 1989 to 1994. That's pretty good, even when you consider that it was a boom time for the industry.

Damage Stars: ****

Adventures of Superman #647

Adventures of Superman #647
"Rack and Ruin, Part II"
Cover Date: February 2006
Writers: Greg Rucka (Plot), Nunzio DeFilippis and Christina Weir (Script)
Artist: Renato Guedes

Previously...

Superman had spent the better part of a year battling a new villain named Ruin, who turned out to be Pete Ross, Superman's childhood friend and ex-president of the United States. but, last issue, it was revealed that the previous revelation was a deception, and that Ruin was actually Emil Hamilton, Superman's super-scientist friend.

Plot

Hamilton is gloating over the remains of Mxyzptlk, who he killed at the end of the last issue. He then explains that he's manipulated some female cop into shooting Pete Ross by staging a rather elaborate ruse of making it look like Pete Ross is about to kill his wife and kid. Hamilton then turns on his handy red-sun projector, which all non-magical supervillains carry around nowadays in lieu of Kryptonite, and taunts Superman a bit.

Superman, however, manages to retain just enough power to speed across the city to arrive where Pete Ross is being held just in time to watch the cop shoot...the air, because she knew it was a set up. Hamilton then shows up to try and kill Superman's supporting cast himself in a fit of pique, but can't pull it off. Superman then manages to escape into the yellow sunlight, and Ruin realizes that his goose is cooked.

But wait, Hamilton's got one last chance. He rigs his Ruin suit to explode so that Superman will have to kill him in order to defuse it, and he's also managed to rig a visual feed in the televisions of Metropolis so that everyone will see Superman kill him. In theory, not a terrible plan, but Superman manages to solve it by just ripping the suit off and flying it into the air where it explodes harmlessly. Which is kind of stupid, if only because Ruin's whole schtick was that he knew a lot of Superman's secrets, and so you'd think Hamilton could figure out a last-ditch failsafe that wasn't so easily thwarted.

Anyway, Superman and Rosses reconvene to express their gratitude at the story being over, and Superman promises to clear Pete Ross's name. The End.

Commentary

Well, it's a Superman story that takes place right at the end of a creative team's run, so it's kind of an exercise in seeing how hard you can hit the reset button.

Beyond that, I don't know. the Ruin storyline had been running for over a year at this point, although I'd imagine some of that length is due to the fact that crossovers kept getting in the way as the DC universe lumbered towards Infinite Crisis.

The big idea with Ruin is that he knew a ton about Superman, and so would know how to defeat him, but, well, look at the conclusion to the story. Ruin's last-ditch effort takes Superman roughly three panels to undo. Also, Hamilton's last words in the story are, "You RUIN everything," So that's pretty bad.

But yeah, this was what Superman has been like for the past few years. A writer comes in, sets up his own supporting cast, finds himself a new villain, starts a couple of subplots up, and I guess the idea is that everyone wants to tell a Superman story that's going to be remembered. But honestly, has their ever been a good, main universe, Superman story than ran longer than two or three issues? Around the same time as this comic, Brian Azarello was writing a TWELVE-part story called "For Tomorrow" in Superman that was powerfully mediocre. A while before that, still in Superman, Steven Seagle wrote an eight-part story featuring a new Supergirl.

So, I guess my conclusion is that the over/under for Superman switching back to his normal costume is eighteen months.

Manhunter (v2) #6

Manhunter (v2) #6
"New Values"
Cover Date: April 1995
Writer: Steven Grant
Artist: Vincent Giarrano

Previously....

Okay, this is the mid-90s version of Manhunter, who is generally forgotten because it's about a million mile away from every other incarnation of the character.

Chase Lawler was a musician, who was afraid that his girlfriend was about to be crushed by the music industry, so he did the only reasonable thing: summoning an ancient Welsh demi-god, the Wild Huntsman, to hunt down some music executives. Anyway, it turns out that was an extremely stupid thing to do and the demi-god starts rampaging through Star City. Long story short, Chase manages to stop the Huntsman, and gains a measure of his powers, and so becomes the Manhunter. And then his girlfriend, Brenna, breaks up with him because, well, he just unleashed an ancient spirit rather than just talk to her.

Plot

At a company named Necrodyne, which apparently lacks a single PR employee, a guy named 'The Barbarian' shows up and makes trouble.

Elsewhere, Chase teams up with a guy named Goodish to try and make some money off of his powers. They take a missing persons case that leads them to an elderly invalid who has been secretly working against Manhunter for several issues. However, Manhunter doesn't know this, so he agrees to take the job. It turns out that the old man is the head of Necrodyne, and Goodish and Manhunter head off.

As they approach Necrodyne headquarters, they almost get killed by an out-of-control truck. The Barbarian pops up to explain that he's really some sort of super computer-hacker, as so managed to hack into the truck to slow Manhunter down. Remember, this was back in the '90s when everyone thought that's how hacking worked.

The two engage in a running battle across the city, aided by the fact that Manhunter has super-tracking powers as long as he's actually come face-to-face with his quarry, but the battle abruptly ends when the Barbarian jumps off of a bridge onto a speedboat piloted by a goth woman. Goodish wants to pursue Barbarian, but Manhunter's tired, and he's got a date, and he really doesn't want to work for Necrodyne anyway, so he decides to ditch Goodish.

Chase heads off to a fancy restaurant with his new girlfriend Beth, but sees his ex-girlfriend Brenna, and then immediately collapses. To Be Continued!

Commentary

A very odd book, to say the least. Chase Lawler is kind of a douche. I mean, he just decides to quit in the middle of the story because he doesn't feel like doing anymore man-hunting today.

This was one of the books launched right after Zero Hour which was thought of as a chance to essentially smooth out some of the continuity wrinkles that the first Crisis caused. Looking back, though, the only real substantive change made was the rebooting of the Legion of Super-Heroes, and even that didn't really take.

Anyway, the books launched in the wake of Zero Hour were:

Extreme Justice
Fate
Manhunter
Primal Force
R.E.B.E.L.S. '94
Starman

Hey, at least people liked Starman! The other ranged from the terrible (Extreme Justice, Fate) to the forgettable (R.E.B.E.L.S., Primal Force, Manhunter), but none besides Starman lasted more than a couple of years.

I guess the idea was to restart some of mid-tier properties that had recently fallen on hard times. For example, Dr. Fate has a decent run in the late-80s, but had foundered since then, same with Manhunter and Starman. For whatever reason, this led to all of them being imagined as your typical anti-heroes of the time. Fate and Extreme Justice tended to play that relatively straight, but Manhunter kind of played around with the concept a bit more, seeing as Steven Grant mixed the idea of street-level super-hero with fantasy elements. I'm not sure it quite works, but you can't really Grant for trying.

Green Lantern (v3) #117

Green Lantern (v3) #117
"Found Art"
Cover Date: October 1999
Writer: Ron Marz
Artist: Darryl Banks

Previously....

It's 1999, so Kyle Rayner is your Green Lantern. Also, despite a statue of him appearing on the cover, Hal Jordan is not in this issue.

Plot

The issue begins in media res with Kyle being choked to death. But how did he get there?

It turns out that he was working on a painting for an art show (Kyle Rayner was an artist, you see), but he had to stop over at Guy Gardner's bar to housesit or something. So he goes over to the bar, and, wouldn't you know, the Manhunter that Guy kept deactivated in his bar for some reason immediately comes to life and begins attacking. I suppose the moral being, do not keep deadly, deadly robots as trophies.

So Kyle and the Manhunter get into it, and that leads us back to where Kyle was at the beginning of the issue. In shocking twist, he is not then brutally strangled to death by the killer robot, but instead manages to eventually decapitate it with a power ring axe.

But wait! In the middle of the fight, Kyle's painting got destroyed, and the art show is in one hour! What will Kyle do? Well, despite learning first-hand how dangerous it can be to keep Manhunter technology laying around, he decides to take the battered Manhunter head and pass it off as his latest work of art...although I thought he was a painter.

The issue, realizing that it's several pages short, then has Kyle hang around his supporting cast for a while, before he decides to leave the art show with his girlfriend, Jade. Just then, his ex-girlfriend, Donna Troy, and that's the cliff-hanger ending. Because nothing sells comics like the prospect of awkward conversations with an ex-girlfriend. To Be Continued!

Comments

Like most of DC's output in the late '90s, this issue is basically innocuous. I wouldn't exactly call it good, but there are worse comics out there.

I don't know, it's kind of hard getting worked up over a book starring Kyle Rayner. This issue brings attention to the fact that he's an artist, which always seemed to me like a crappy occupation for a super-hero, because, when you think about it, artists are usually pretty unlikeable. The comic opens with Kyle working on his painting, and talking about his latest work draws from Impressionists. So, by the third page, I'm kind of rooting for the robot to kill him so I won't have to hear him talking about his fucking art show anymore.

I guess the only thing I'd recommend is the final page, where Kyle and Jade react to the presence of Donna Troy with horror:

Legion Of Super-Heroes (v3) #55

Legion of Super-Heroes (v3) #55
"Different Paths"
Cover Date: Holiday 1988
Writer: Paul Levitz
Artist/Co-Plotter: Keith Giffen
Guest Artists: Ernie Colon, Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, Erik Larsen

Previously...

Okay, settle in.

Polar Boy was elected leader of the Legion, which hasn't been going all that well. The most recent catastrophe is that a few Legionnaires banded together to go kill the Time Trapper after the villain put together a hopelessly complicated plan that ended with an alternate version of Superboy getting killed. The grand result of the plan is that a bunch of Legionnaires resigned for various reasons.

In another sub-plot, the guy named Atmos, from the same planet as Star Boy, has stolen Dream Girl, Star Boy's girlfriend, which led to Star Boy quitting the Legion out of frustration.

Finally, Blok, a giant rock-man, is going through puberty.

Plot

The White Witch is on the Sorceror's World, having resigned from the Legion a few issues ago. She's trying to decide whether or not she want to rejoin the team, but eventually decides to stay on the Sorceror's World and be a mentor to a young Khund boy in the ways of sorcery.

Elsewhere, on Colu, Brainiac 5, who also resigned from the Legion, is hanging out on Colu trying to figure out what they hell he's supposed to do now. He eventually decides that he wants to tinker around with time travel, since it was recently revealed that the Legion didn't really know how to travel through time so much as the Time Trapper wanted them to think they did. Some Coluan leaders come into to tell Brainiac 5 that he's not allowed to fuck around with the fabric of space and time for fun, and this makes Brainiac 5 sad.

On Xanthu, Atmos, feeling that merely stealing Star Boy's girlfriend from him doesn't really show the depths of his own assholish-ness, has decided to show Star Boy up on their home planet out of spite. Star Boy, who must be secretly hated by every Legion writer to date, decides to just get the hell off of Xanthu. This pisses Atmos off, and Dream Girl starts to suspect that Atmos is using his powers to screw with her mind.

Somewhere else, Blok is having the least-subtle subplot about being a teenager in comic book history.

"Adults don't understand, man!"

Anyway, it turns out the Blok is being manipulated by some villain to...you know what, there was a reason that neither the reboot or Threeboot Legions featured Blok, and why Keith Giffen couldn't off him fast enough.

Back at the Legion base, Polar Boy is kind of depressed that he's been such a terrible leader. The End.

Comments

I know a lot of people like the Levitz Legion, but I'm not really one of them. Probably because I didn't really grow up with them, so I don't have that same sort of emotional attachment. I did have something of an attachment to the reboot Legion that came around after Zero Hour, but well....

At any rate, this comic falls near the end of Levitz's initial run of Legion, and it came at a weird time for the book. After the crisis, the Legion had to hurriedly figure out how to fix its continuity to make up for the fact that Superboy, who had appeared in basically every foundational Legion story was no longer in continuity. So Levitz wrote a story that involved a pocket universe and an incredibly convoluted scheme by the Time Trapper, and it basically held everything together as long as you didn't think about it too hard.

And it wasn't all bad, since the story itself was decent enough, and it did lead to one of my favorite Legion stories ever, an epic showdown with the Time Trapper in Legion of Super-Heroes (v3) #50. But, by this point, it's fair to say that the Legion was getting kind of stale. After all, Levitz had been writing the book for something like a decade straight.

I guess the thing I was always thought was interesting was that Levitz took a book set 1000 years in the future, one which had loads and loads of characters, and decided, 'What the hell, I'll make a soap opera out of it.' In his defense, it worked out pretty well, but it did create one rather large problem.

Soap operas rely, to a large extent, on continuity, in order to have tons of character development, you need earlier stories to be recalled by the reader. Once the Crisis hit, the Legion's continuity started falling apart, and that kind of made this version of the  Legion untenable.

Here's what I've never gotten, though: What is so fucking special about this version of the Legion? I mean, what's so great about it that DC went to extraordinary lengths to bring it back after about twenty years in Limbo? It's a fine book, but a book like this is never really going to attract new readers, as evidenced by the fact that the Levitz-penned Legion #1 released as part of the line-wide reboot was denounced as wholly unwelcoming to new readers.

Damage Stars: **

One for the book, one for Atmos' Mohawk

JSA # 71

JSA #71
"JSA/JSA, Chapter IV: Past Mistakes"
Cover Date: May 2005
Writer: Geoff Johns
Artist: Don Kramer

Previously...

Per Degaton, a time-traveling Nazi, has decided to try and go back in time to fuck with JSA, since they keep thwarting his plans to change history so that the Nazis win. For whatever reason, he decides the best way to accomplish this is to head back to the early 50s and dick around with the past versions of the JSA. A bunch of the present-day members of the team get wind of this and head back in time to help out, and...well, that's about it, so far.

Plot
  
The Golden Age Atom is about to break into the Golden Age Hawkman's house for reasons too boring and meaningless to get into here. Atom Smasher, his future godson, steps in and they get into a fight. After a while, they stop fighting and start talking, and decide to help round up both version of the JSA to fight Degaton.

Still in 1951 the present-day Mr. Terrific has gotten himself captured by the Ku Klux Klan, which leads to him beating up them all up. Then he meets the past-Mr. Terrific who was in the area. The past-Mr. Terrific remembers the last time the two of them teamed up, which kind of encapsulates the problem of this story right, come to think of it. I mean, most of these guys have already hung out with their namesakes at some point, often for several decades.

Per Degaton finally appears in the story to torture the past Hourman for a while by wiping out his friends and family from ever having existed. But then the current Hourman, the past Hourman's son, shows up to rescue his dad. They both escape.

Stargirl and Starman also team up, with Stargirl trying to get Starman past his guilt of having help build the atomic bomb, which takes her exactly one page because if a teenage girl from the future tells you it's going to be okay, who are you to argue? This subplot is also notable for being a retread of the last few issues of James Robinson's Starman run.

Oh, and Sandman and past-Sandman, and the Johnny Thunders of two eras also come together to team up. Because most dudes reading comic books really want their comics filled with page after page of maudlin emotional conversations, especially if they're mostly retreads of earlier issues!

Both versions of the JSA convene to realize that while they want to stop Per Degaton, none of them actually know how to do that. The Hourmen bust in to announce that Degaton to assassinate the president of the United States! To Be Continued!

Commentary

I can remember a time when seeing the name 'Johns' emblazoned on the front of a comic didn't fill me with a sense of dread. And, in fact, I'm pretty sure it's comics like this one are what soured me on this one.


I guess, from a comparative standpoint, this really isn't so bad, the writing is decent and the art is good enough, but still, when 75% of a comic is about characters having stupid little sentimental moments, you kind of wonder...

Let's take the Atom and Atom-Smasher conversation, which is the centerpiece of this issue. The Atom is helping a bunch of goons arrest Hawkman for some nebulous reasoning that has to do with the Red Scare. But then the Atom decides he can't go through with it. It's a story of redemption. That is supposed to be a mirror of Atom-Smasher, who is currently on the outs with the JSA because he...murdered a few guys. In Atom-Smasher's defense, you can't help an anti-hero conquer a country without killing a few enemy soldiers. So, you've got some doubling there, but it's rather clumsy, and it's between two characters that no one has ever cared about, despite the two having been in existence for a combined eighty years at this point.

Still, the real problem here is if you were a kid in 2005, you just spent $2.50 on a comic that has roughly four times more heart-to-heart talks than fights, and that must have...wait, I bought this comic, and I basically have the emotional maturity of a kid, let me try and channel my past self:

2011 Dynamo: Past me, I have come from the future with an important question?
2005 Dynamo: Wait, you're from the future! Did the Cubs win the World Series?
2011 D: Fuck, they don't even win a playoff game,  but that's not why I'm here, I need to know, what was your reaction to JSA #71?
2005 D: The one with all of the talking? Why didn't anyone fight anyone? Why does Geoff Johns insist on making Stargirl a Mary Sue? Why? Answer me that, Future-Dynamo! Answer me now!

Damage Stars: ****
(It gets an extra star for obliquely mentioning the actual Damage in the story)

Batman (v1) #410

Batman #410
"Two of a Kind"
Cover Date: August 1987
Writer: Max Collins
Art: Dave Cockrum

Previously...

Crisis on Infinite Earths hit the DC universe, including Batman. For whatever reason, the revision to the Batman Canon were minimal, mainly pertaining to the writers taking efforts to try and distinguish Jason Todd, the 2nd Robin, from Dick Grayson. Also, Batman: Year One just happened, hence the 'New Adventures' part of the letterhead.

Plot

Batman has been training Jason Todd for six months to be the next Robin, as Batman figures that the only way he can prevent Jason from falling into a life of crime is by making him Robin. I don't know, he's fucking Batman, who are we to question his views of sociology.

Anyway, they take a break so Batman can give the official post-crisis version of Two-Face's origin. It's basically the same as the old one, Harvey Dent was a D.A. who pissed off some mobsters, one of who threw acid at his face during a trial. Which, come to think of it, must have led to an awkward closing statement by the defense, "Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, I know you saw my client disfigure the D.A. and thereby turn him into a raving madman that has already managed to kill or maim dozens, but..."

Two-Face also still has his classic compulsion to organize his criminal life around a 'twin' motif. Which leads to my favorite panel of the comic:

"I will kill you, Apollo Creed!"

Who robs a movie theater?

Robin then goes back to training as Batman explains to Alfred that Jason Todd is not yet ready to know that his dad was one of Two-Face's flunkies before he got iced. The Dynamic Duo then get called in by Commissioner Gordon.

Gordon, who seems unhappy by the fact that Batman is once more partners with a kid, gives Batman an envelope addressed to him that contains a poker hand with a two pair. Two-Face is apparently back, and felt compelled to make sure everyone knows. Two-Face doesn't need to keep a low profile!

Two-Face is just standing outside of a casino. Apparently no one finds it odd that a garishly-dressed man with half a face is casing a casino. His plan is to rob the casino just as they're transporting the day's winnings from the vault to armored cars. Now, you might think that Two-Face and his henchman might have some trouble with casino security, but no, they manage to get the cash, only to be ambushed outside the casino by Batman and Robin.

Two-Face then manages to take a hostage, and is about to escape. Robin volunteers to swap places with the hostage, and despite Two-Face being smart enough to recognize the danger in trading the hostage for Batman, cannot see the potential problem with keeping Robin hostage. It take Robin precisely three seconds to get free, though Two-Face manages to escape. Batman is then oddly philosophical about a mass murderer still being loose, and Batman and Robin return to the Batcave, where Robin looks up Two-Face on the BatComputer to find out that his father was probably killed by Two-Face. To Be Continued!

Comments

I don't really see the appeal of Batman having a Robin, but I can understand why you'd have one due to tradition.

What I don't get, though, is why DC insists on continually replacing the guy in the Robin costume. Jason Todd was the first guy to come in as a replacement Robin, As most of you know, it didn't quite work out, as the writers later effectively dared America to kill Jason Todd via a call-in vote, and America called their bluff.

The only real amazing thing about Jason Todd is that he has somehow set a record for sucking for thirty uninterrupted years, no really, here's the character progression of Jason Todd:

1. Introduced as a clone of a Dick Grayson.
2. Retconned into being a hothead who managed to get himself killed.
3. Dead, and repeatedly brought up as a source of guilt for Batman, which got old fast.
4. Retconned back to life in heroically stupid fashion.
5. Decided to become sort of a half-assed quasi-villain.
6. Decided to become sort of a half-assed quasi-hero.
7. Starred in the worst of the DC Relaunch titles.

Thirty years, and he was a terrible character at every step, You'd think a writer would eventually blunder onto a good hook for the character, but no. Hell, he was probably at his most popular when he was a corpse.

Outsiders (v3) #13

Outsiders (v3) #13
"Five by Five, Part One: New Business"
Cover Date: August 2004
Writer: Judd Winick
Artist: Tom Raney


Plot

The four surviving members of the Fearsome Five have re-united to bring their dead compatriot, Shimmer, back to life. Which, you know, would probably be more meaningful if the Fearsome Five were more than B-Listers. Anyway, they head to Dr. Sivana, Captain Marvel's arch-enemy because apparently he's got the technology to do it.

Meanwhile, the Outsiders are out at Alcatraz island because of some flimsy pretext so that they can discover that one of the Fearsome Five has escaped from prison. Also, we get this delightful panel

Oh, Judd.





Anyway, the Outsiders decide to split up and hunt the Fearsome Five down.

Elsewhere, the Fearsome Five go out a kill some Lexcorp executives. Eventually Jade (the Golden Age Green Lantern's daughter) and Metamorpho (or more accurately, a copy of Metamorpho) finally track down Mammoth, the muscle of the Five,  They are able to beat him down for a bit, but then Shimmer, the member of the Fearsome Five who had been dead, shows up alive and manages to knock out Metamorpho, leaving Jade alone to fight the two of them. And then the issue ends. To be continued!

Ongoing Subplot Roundup

1. So how did the rest of the story go?

Eh, the Fearsome Five dicked around for a couple more issues before the Outsiders foiled them just as they were about to nuke Vancouver.

Comments

It feels like nothing happened in this issue. Then again, decompression was 'in' at the turn of the millennium, so I guess I shouldn't be that surprised.

Anyway, the 3rd incarnation of the Outsiders came about when DC wanted to reorganize their teenage superheroes. At the time, they had Young Justice and Titans, but both were kind of limping around. They gave the Titans franchise to Geoff Johns, who swiped most of the characters from Young Justice, while Judd Winick took some of the remaining characters from Titans, added some horrible characters of his own, and then decided to punish the world he hated so much with this book.

This incarnation of the team included Jade, Metamorpho (sort of), Nightwing, Arsenal, Indigo (a robot girl from the future), Grace (A gigantic woman who falls into the "bitchy + promiscuous = empowered female character!), and Thunder (Black Lightning's daughter who can manipulate her density.). So, basically, it's for all the Nightwing fans who bought his solo title, but said, "Wait a minute, God damn it, I need two crappy titles starring Dick Grayson a month!"

Since it's a Judd Winick book, the idea is that it's 'edgier' or some shit like that, which  mainly manifests itself in exchanges like the wetting the bed joke.

Damage Stars: ****

Team Titans #23 + Introduction

Introduction

I could bore you all with a long ramble about what this blog is, but here's a one sentence version: I grew up with DC Comics in what was called the 'Post-Crisis' continuity, and now they're gone and I am compelled by nostalgia to look at random comics from that era (1986-2011). Hmm...kind of a run-on, there.
 

Team Titans #23
"Secrets in the Sand"
Cover Date: August 1994
Writers: Jeff Jensen and Phil Jimenez
Pencils: Terry Dodson(!)

Plot

The Team Titans are in Qurac, a country some DC writer made up primarily so he could blow it to bits with a nuclear bomb as part of some earlier story. At the moment, the Titans are holed up in some sort of shelter on the run from the survivors of the nuclear fallout, who have mutated into some sort of beast-men, only to be confronted with their teammate Redwing, who has mutated herself into some sort of bird-person.

Being turned into a bird person freaks Redwing the hell out, but gets calmed down when her brother, the oddly-named Prester Jon, injects her with tranquilizers. Some chick named Chimera exposits that the beast men are the result of a 'radioactive mutant plague.'

But wait, some other woman then uses her magical powers to discover the REAL reason people are turning into beast-men, it turns out that an alien spacecraft landed in Qurac. At that point, Circe, who in this continuity is an evil sorceress, found out that she could use the blood of the aliens to turn people into said beast-men. Got it?

No, you don't, because that's not the real reason for the beast-man plague sweeping the Persian Gulf region! Remember how the alien blood could turn people into beast-men? Well, some of the aliens escaped the crash, only to wander off into the nearby desert and die, but then a nuclear bomb destroyed Qurac, which vaporized the remains of the aliens, which, when combined with the nuclear radiation, created the plague that's creating all of the beast-men.

At this point, Chimera declares that the spreading of the illness is due to tainted black market oil that is somehow being distributed from irradiated ruins of Qurac, and this plot is somehow making less sense with every successive page. They really should stop trying to explain things.

Anyway, the beast men finally get around to attacking the Team Titans, which turns into a stalemate, as the Team Titans don't want to kill these poor victims of the alien-radioactive-mutant-virus. Chimera suggests offering them the chance to leave for another magical dimension, and opens a portal. Prester Jon, who, like the reader, is completely out of patience by this point, and just drives all of the beast-men into the dimension by force, much to the irritation of Chimera.

At this point, Redwing, seemingly out of nowhere announces that her mutation wasn't caused by the virus, but was 'natural' and irreversible, and that everyone has to get used to it.

Anyway, the Team Titans head home and get into a bit of scrap with their government liaison, which ends abruptly when team member Killowatt threatens to brutally murder the man before the rest of the team members stop him and realize that something is terribly wrong. Meanwhile, a shadowy figure watches the Team Titans from behind a tree. To Be Continued!

Comments

The Team Titans, for those who don't remember, were a team of teenage super-heroes from the future who traveled back in time to prevent the rise of a super-powered tyrant named "Lord Chaos". So, they go back in time to before Lord Chaos was born and kill him. But it turns out that Lord Chaos is the unborn child of Donna Troy, and, long-story short, they manage to strip the unborn Lord Chaos of his powers and thus prevent their dark future from coming to pass. And all of that happens in the first three issues, which kind of left the book adrift for its remaining year and a half of existence.

This comic is basically impossible to understand outside of the context it was created. After all, exactly zero of the characters featured in this issue are still in continuity, and, in fact, most of the characters would be wiped from existence within one month of this comic's release. Back in the day, X-Force was big. Really big. And that Titans? Well, George Perez had moved on, but Marv Wolfman was still writing the main book, so, someone must have thought, "Hey, what would happen if we jammed X-Force and Teen Titans together? Also, is there some sort of way we could release five different copies of the first issue to make more money?"

As for this issue itself, well, the primary plot is moved along by the atomized remains of aliens somehow turning into a virus that mutates people into furries. That's probably not apt to be much of a classic, especially if the only way a writer can figure out to relay all of that information to the reader is to literally just have a background character suddenly discover that knowledge from basically out of nowhere. 

Bonus Material

Ongoing Subplot Roundup!

1. Who was the shadowy figure?
2. Why did Killowatt suddenly want to kill that guy?

Two questions with one answer. Since the book was winding down anyway, DC decided to fold its conclusion into Zero Hour. So, they decided that the Team Titans were actually sleeper agents created by Monarch, one of the villains of the crossover, in order to help him conquer the world. Killowatt's reaction was his programming showing through. In the end, pretty much all of the team ends up being erased from existence during Zero Hour.


The top three pieces of dialogue least likely to be spoken by a teenager from the future:

3. "Kinda like the Andromeda Strain, eh, P.J.?"

2. "All right, you two, quit the Nixon-Krushchev routine, I've got news!"

1. "Okay, Quincy, do your best Jack Klugman and unravel the little medical mystery you postulated back there."

Damage Stars: *****

A note on Damage Stars:

In the mid '90s, DC introduced a new character named Damage who managed to embody all of the sins of the Post-Crisis era in one character. Convoluted continuity? Check. An unnecessary amount of angst masquerading as character development? Check. A terrible, terrible name? Check. So, he is the standard by which I'll be measuring all of these books. More stars doesn't necessarily mean a book is bad, it just means it isn't very good.