Review: Infinity Inc.: The Bogeyman trade paperback (DC Comics)

Writer Peter Milligan concludes the series' final collection with Infinity, Inc.: The Boogeyman, and in the process demonstrates a curious cross-section of what this curious title might have been.

The Boogeyman contains two stories, "The Influencing Machines of Metropolis" and "The Bogeyman," and they offer two conflicting pictures of the character of Infinity Inc. "Bogeyman" shows the members of Infinity, Inc. as a more traditional superhero team with costumes, codenames, and an intended mission; "Influencing Machines" reflects the amorphous, accidental Infinity Inc. group we saw in the first volume, Luthor's Monsters. Of these, I much preferred "Influencing"; while I'm a fan of artist Pete Woods who arrives at the end, the wide-eyed, mildly cartoony work of Matt Camp in the beginning seemed the more zany tone Infinity, Inc. craves.

In the two stories, Milligan's tales remind the reader ever more of early Smallville seasons. Here, the refugees from Lex Luthor's Everyman program, joined loosely together more as friends than a superhero team, track other Everymen (or, in Smallville's case, "meteor freaks") with the goal to help them, though low and behold they often end up having to fight them. Though Milligan limited Infinity's adventures mostly to suburbia so far, I'd have been interested to see a globe-hopping Infinity Inc. perhaps, that chased down Everyman across the four-corners of the DC Universe.

Infinity, Inc. ends after issue #12, however (though unfortunately issues #11 and #12 aren't included in this book), so it's tough to know whether Milligan would have kept the traditional superhero tone or returned to the team's loose roots. Personally Milligan didn't quite sell me on the Infinity superhero team, if that was his goal; Nuklon, one of the more interesting team members, makes fun of the team uniforms and also the truly awful codenames that the hero Steel bestows on them, and the reader can't help but do the same. Having powers has been demonstrated so far in this title as a liability rather than a boon, so it's hard to picture the characters satisfied as traditional heroes.

Part of the shame of Infinity, Inc. ending is that Milligan did create some memorable characters here. There hasn't been a triplicating hero in the DC Universe since Triplicate Girl, and I was eager to see how Nuklon's troubles with his unexpected triple would play out; I was also intrigued by how the gender-bending powers of Fury (one guesses Pete Woods never thought he'd been drawing a character mid-transformation between man and woman). Milligan also gave depth to Superman character Mercy Graves, bestowing a personality beyond just Lex Luthor's bodyguard, and it's unfortunate that her leaving the team is a plot thread Milligan can't follow through (in addition to why the character Lucia, suddenly, has wings).

The Boogeyman continues Milligan's focus on the psychological aspect of superheroics (one villain's powers, Steel expounds, have to do with his using introjection as a defense mechanism), and there's an entertaining teen-horror-movie vibe to this volume. Unfortunately, I think the series fell short of reaching its intended audience, and this collection falls short without the two concluding issues of the series. Nothing earth-shattering here, but a generally satisfactory read.

[Contains full covers]

A review of Final Crisis: Rogues' Revenge coming Thursday!

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Number 585


Bloodsucker


I feel like posting a vampire story. It's the end of August and I just got my property tax notice for this year, so a bloodsucking vampire story, "Villa of the Vampire," seems appropriate. In this recession the value of my own "villa" has gone down, but my taxes have gone up. Even when you've paid off your mortgage you find out that you never truly own your home. I bought my house in 1975 and since 2007 have owned it "free and clear" after paying off the third mortgage. But that's a myth of homeowning, really. If I don't pay my taxes it will no longer be mine. Grrr. Gripe, grumble...

The story is from the one-and-only issue of Challenge Of the Unknown (not Challengers Of the Unknown, an entirely different comic), published by Ace in 1951. As pointed out by reader Charles of the South in the comments section for this post, the artwork is by Lin Streeter, and as pointed out by Karswell, the name Lin is in the lower right corner of the splash.

I like the vampire's gimmick.

**********

Say what...?

That's when he realized he'd brought the wrong person on his honeymoon to Niagara Falls...

From Gang Busters #16, 1950.

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Number 584


The imitation Flash Gordon


My correspondent, Nix, who supplies me with great scans from MLJ comics, has contributed this from Blue Ribbon Comics #1, November 1939.

Back in the earliest days of the comics, when they were almost exclusively anthologies, they tended toward certain types:a cowboy, a magician influenced by Mandrake the Magician from the newspaper comics, a spaceman like Flash Gordon...you get the picture. Dan Hastings is the spaceman, and he's not only influenced by Flash Gordon, he appears to be lifted right off the Sunday funnies.

Well, sorta...the artwork by an unknown artist isn't Alex Raymond, but the story is sort of a mishmash of various Flash Gordon stories, including the Saturday matinee serials with Buster Crabbe. Dan has his Dale in Gloria, his Dr. Zarkov in Dr. Carter, his Ming the Merciless in Eutopas, his Mongo in planet Mexady. Errrrr...Mexady? Even though it's issue number one we're dropped into the story with no prelims, no backstory, so it's as if the writer expects us to know about Dan already. And we do, if we read Flash Gordon every Sunday.

Anyway, it's not so surprising to find an imitation Flash Gordon in Blue Ribbon Comics #1, when the lead strip is an ersatz Rin-Tin-Tin called Rang-A-Tang. I love the old MLJ comics but at the company's beginning originality was not a strong point.

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Number 583


Harvey Kurtzman's Mr. Risk


The Art of Harvey Kurtzman, The Mad Genius of Comics by Denis Kitchen and Paul Buhle is a fabulous book, highly recommended, which covers the most pertinent aspects of the career of one of comics' most revered creators. Kurtzman, born in 1924, first got work in comics at an early age. The biography shows examples of his postwar comic book work, but doesn't show any of his comic book art before he went into the Army. This particular Mr. Risk strip, from Four Favorites #9, dated February 1943, was drawn in 1942, when Kurtzman was barely 18. There's very little, if anything, of what we would later know as the Kurtzman style (arms and legs like noodles, bold graphics, stylized). It looks more Jack Kirby than Kurtzman.

Still, it's always fascinating to look in on an artist's early work, if only because you know how he developed. Had Kurtzman continued on with this Kirby-style artwork we'd remember him today as a copier, not an innovator. The story is a fairly typical programmer of its day. Kurtzman also drew the Lash Lightning feature in that issue of Four Favorites, but the copy I have is too damaged. Of the two strips I think Mr. Risk is the better drawn, which isn't saying a lot, but considering his youth it's actually extraordinary. I ask myself what I was doing at age 18. Nothing like this, anyway.

Hairy Green Eyeball has Kurtzman's 1949 syphilis comic book here.

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Review: Infinity Inc.: Luthor's Monsters trade paperback (DC Comics)

When I think of Peter Milligan, I think of Doop. I never actually read X-Statix, but the image of those Mike Allred-rendered mutants is near seared in my brain, along with the idea that Milligan is a writer of not-quite-traditional superhero comics. And that's what I found in Infinity Inc.: Luthor's Monsters, the first volume of the series -- a meta-interpretive take on superheroes through the lens of pop psychology, profoundly creative but likely too smart for its own good.

Milligan takes Infinity Inc. as an opportunity to critique our culture's predilection for analyzing -- or perhaps over-analyzing -- ourselves. Late in the book, in a moment maybe too on-the-nose, one character muses "maybe the whole business about ... talking it all through is a passing fad" and "we're the most psycho-analyzed ... behaviorally readjusted people ... so how come there are more crazy people out there than ever?"

Milligan populates the book with characters in need of, and being failed by, therapy. Those teens recently released from Lex Luthor's defunct Everyman program include the self-replicating Nuklon, diagnosed with "pathological narcissism," who dreams of posing naked for himself, and also the shape-changing Fury, who struggles with a predilection for his mother's clothes (the abandonment issues faced by Natasha, niece of the hero Steel, seem mundane by comparison). It's only when each of the characters leave therapy and come together in a shared apartment that they find an aspect of normalcy; this suggests an anti-therapy theme that the only people who can understand one another are those with specifically shared experiences.

I won't argue here the benefits or drawbacks of talk therapy here, but I will say Milligan's story doesn't quite convince me of what it suggests. Certainly Milligan writes a brainy superhero comic (where else would you find an explanation of "negative hallucination?"), but it relies too much on standard tropes -- the therapists are all stodgy adults who "just don't understand" where the kids are coming from. The debate isn't even-handed -- there's no protagonist on the side of therapy -- so the discussion never rises above basic ideas of good/bad and right/wrong.

My sense of Infinity Inc. (cancelled after the second volume) is that it probably needed an art team like Mike Allred to attract the audience it required. Max Fiumara and Matthew Southworth's art is perhaps only slightly moodier than what you'd find in a standard issue of Teen Titans and suggests traditional teen superhero fare, when perhaps the real audience of this book is instead those who might've enjoyed Milligan's Shade, the Changing Man or Animal Man, and the art doesn't set the book apart in that way. Also, that these characters make up a new Infinity Inc. might've been important in 52, but here it might lead the audience to expect a kind of teen Justice Society, when really these characters would better lend themselves to the Doom Patrol.

I did enjoy that Milligan accomplishes what writers of teams like Outsiders and Extreme Justice have tried for years -- that of a super-team which is indeed not a super-team, but rather just a desultory gathering of heroes. Though the book is called Infinity, Inc., what we find is actually the remnants of the team, and they're not teammates here so much as roommates. The book evokes Smallville's "meteor freaks" in that the characters don't formally fight bad guys, but rather reunite with other Everyman cast-offs and ward off attacks from their own as they go.

I'm also pleased to see (even for a short time) Steel appear again in what's essentially his own title; Milligan portrays John Henry Irons just right as both doting uncle and resident mechanical genius. Milligan also picks up on a loose thread from the early 2000s Superman titles, spotlighting Lex Luthor's bodyguards Mercy and Hope, the latter of whom defected from Luthor roundabouts the "Our Worlds at War" storyline. The characters' appearance is random, to be sure, but I appreciated that Milligan didn't forget the totality of Steel's Metropolis roots.

It doesn't surprise me that next volume ends Infinity, Inc., and the brevity of the series hardly gave it room to become required reading, but I imagine fans of Peter Milligan won't be disappointed with these collections that demonstrate not quite business as usual.

[Contains full covers.]

We'll look at the second Infinity Inc. volume coming next week.

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Number 582


Ka'a'nga by Maurice Whi'i'tman


From Ka'a'nga #20, Summer, 1954, the last issue of that Fiction House title, we have the final Ka'a'nga story by one of the best and yet underrated artists in comics, Maurice Whitman. Whitman did covers for Fiction House in all the company's genres, did interior art, and was great at all of it. Why isn't there a Maurice Whitman cult following like there is for so many comic book artists? I don't know.

He was in the field a long time, from the 1940s until the 1970s at least. I see on his Lambiek bio that he did a Doc Savage in 1977, and that got my attention. I don't think I've ever seen it.

There's an interesting string on Collectors Society about Whitman, showing some of his outstanding covers. One correspondent said that Whitman's son is a tattoo artist and the fan thought of getting the son to do a tattoo as homage to his father, a cover like Ghost Comics #1. Only a comic book fan would think of that.

Ka'a'nga, with the unpronounceable name (I read it as Kah-ah-ahnga or a slight variation, and I avoid pronouncing it out loud) is yet another Tarzan type. Ka'a'nga starred in Jungle Comics from issue #1, and got his own title in 1949. He had his origins in Fiction House pulps under the name Ki-Gor,and why the name was changed to Ka'a'nga is anybody's guess. If you believe pulps and comic books there were about as many white jungle men and women as there were African natives. Personally, I always wondered how they kept from being eaten alive by bugs, or killing their bare feet running through jungles (calluses thick enough that spears would bounce off them, no doubt).

Ah, but I digress. Here's Ka'a'nga as drawn by the underappreciated but really fine comic artist, Maurice Whitman.

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Review: The Question: Five Books of Blood hardcover/paperback (DC Comics)

[Contains spoilers for The Question: Five Books of Blood]

Five which are three which are one -- sounds like a case for the Question. And such is the case of Greg Rucka's The Question: The Five Books of Blood, which in five nearly self-contained chapters tells a story that works on three levels (the Question's hunt for the Religion of Crime, the Question's growing seduction by the Religion of Crime, and the origin and status quo of the new Question), combining to form one incredible tale. Five Books of Blood is a perfect fusion of superheroics and hard-boiled crime novel, and the last page left me hungry for the next time out.

Rucka sends the new Question, Renee Montoya, on a globe-spanning search for the Religion of Crime in Five Books of Blood, and in that way quickly demonstrates the new Question under a number of different circumstances. We see Renee both undercover and interacting as herself with her old life, and we see the Question solo, as part of the larger superhero community, and interacting with the first Question Vic Sage's life.

Most importantly, the new Question fails to prevent at least three people from dying in this story, demonstrating the character's inexperience and imperfection. Much like Daniel Craig's new James Bond, there's a certain attraction in following a Question without Vic Sage's skill, but rather one still finding her way.

There's an aspect of Five Books of Blood that's not unlike Heart of Darkness, where the deeper the Question searches, the more she's affected by the evil around her. Rucka weaves this quite subtly in the second chapter, where the Question's affair with one of the Religion's prostitutes can be written off as the cost of an investigation -- but by the third chapter, we see the Question has almost an addict's need for one of the Relgion's artifacts, and perhaps for the Religion itself. The Question's descent becomes all the clearer on the book's last page when we find her now the head of the Religion of Crime; Rucka charts the Question's journey in Five Books of Blood so carefully it almost bears reading the story a second time with the whole book in mind once one finishes.

Perhaps my favorite chapters of the book were the third and fourth, where the Question visits Gotham and Hub cities respectively. Even as Rucka builds Renee's new life as the Question, he remains expertly aware of where she's come from, including not just Gotham Central's Captain Sawyer in the book, but also recognizing how long it's been since Renee has seen Commissioner Gordon and -- best of all -- addressing Renee's tarnished partnership with Harvey Bullock. I'm not as familiar with Vic Sage's old supporting cast, but the fact that Rucka includes them (as writers have done in the new Blue Beetle, Manhunter, and other series) enhances the legacy element of the character.

The Question's interaction with Batwoman in this volume make me eager to see her with the rest of the DC Universe. As an urban detective, the Question straddles the line of just not quite fitting in with the superhero pantheon, but Renee Montoya's spent so long as a civilian that I'd be interested to see her grasp the full implications of her costumed identity in an adventure with, say, the Justice League. She's hardly membership material, of course, but for so long Renee was not a "cape" that I'd be interested to see how she deals with the recognition that she is a "cape" now.

As described on Vic Sage.com and elsewhere, articles from Renee Montoya's journal made their way from the DC Universe to the real world. In an end of the book section, Rucka describes the considerable difficulty to which he, his wife Jen Van Meter, and constant co-writer Eric Trautmann went in order to prepare these documents; if the story alone doesn't convince you that Five Books of Blood was a labor of love, a look at the journal will. I only wish Rucka had the space to describe a bit more how the journal fit in to the Five Books story overall; we learn about the suspicious death of the lead singer of a band called Darkseid's Bitch, for instance, but not what role the Religion of Crime played or why they killed him.

Indeed in speaking of extras and production value, while there are plenty of collections for which I'm content to wait for the paperback instead of the hardcover, The Question: Five Books of Blood is worth the hardcover cost. DC stamped the faux leather binding with faded red lettering, and this combined with the Crime Bible pages that introduce each chapter evoke a tome from the Religion of Crime itself. It's these kinds of moody extras that suggest to me a collected edition done right.

[Contains full covers, "Montoya's Journal" section by Greg Rucka]

Starting Thursday, a two-part look at fan-favorite Peter Milligan's Infinity Inc. series. Don't miss it!

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Number 581


Case of the Counterfeit Cigs


Two things make this short story interesting: Madman Mort Drucker's artwork, and the subject matter, cigarettes.

Yes, folks, there was a time when cigarette smoking was not viewed with utter disdain and loathing. For my international readers, in America smoking is still a legal activity, up to a point. When I started smoking in 1967 I could go anywhere, walk into a retail establishment, store or restaurant, and be able to pull out a cigarette and start puffing away. That began to change, and by the time I quit in 1977 the road to pariahdom for smokers was being paved with clean air ordinances, health warnings, and the dirty looks of passersby.

When I see working folks taking a smoke break, outside under awnings or in doorways as it rains or snows, I cringe. I remember my own cigarette jones very well.

I have only one word for the miserable huddled masses, having to go outdoors to puff: QUIT. The writing on the wall, or should I say the smoke signals, tell you that society has decreed that in the social pecking order smokers are only slightly above criminals.

This story is from DC Comics' Gang Busters #51, a Comics Code-approved story from 1956. In "The Case of the Counterfeit Cigarettes" the fictional cigarette company is not the villain, but the innocent victim of counterfeiting.

By coincidence, the Vanity Fair magazine web site currently has an article on North Korea's government sanctioned program of counterfeiting, both U.S. currency (called supernotes) and cigarettes. You can read the article here.

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