Review: Thunderbolts: Violent Rejection trade paperback (Marvel Comics)

[Guest review by Doug Glassman]

It’s Thunderbolts time again, and for the moment, we’re going to skip ahead past the “Shadowland” crossover and go right to Violent Rejection. Because Luke Cage’s partner Iron Fist was a key player in that crossover, Cage and his Thunderbolts got dragged into it.

The main result is that Crossbones is gone from the team. In his place at first is Hyperion, one of Marvel’s Superman analogues. He’s part of the Squadron Supreme, an alternate-dimension Justice League of America which has gone through quite a few incarnations. Unfortunately, this Hyperion is not one of the more sane ones, despite what he claims. An absolutely massive battle unfolds in the second part of this story, which includes a great reference to the song “You Don’t Mess Around With Jim” by Jim Croce. Naturally, Man-Thing is on hand to help out, and as Hyperion finds out, it’s a bad idea to be afraid around him. One of the funniest moments in this year’s comic books occurs in this issue. I’m not going to spoil it, but let’s just say it involves the Ghost, his cloud of flies and the ladies of the team.

After a Man-Thing solo adventure (more or less), the team recruits its newest member: Satana, daughter of Mephisto and sister of Daimon Hellstrom, the Son of Satan, because the team needs someone versed in the mystical arts. As a perky, mischievous character, Satana adds some friction to the team’s line-up. Again, Man-Thing is essential to recruiting her, and she turns out to really like the guy, going as far as tattooing a complex mystical spell on him. I’m sorry for emphasizing Man-Thing so much, but I’m only doing so because Jeff Parker, Jason Aaron or another writer with magic-related character experience needs to create a solo series for him. I have room on my schedule if they’re busy.

While all this is going on, Songbird and John Walker are coming up with an ingenious tactic which I can’t believe they hadn’t used before with the Thunderbolts: creating a Beta team to bring in when another member is dropped. A few teams have done this before, most notably Alpha Flight’s trainee teams, Beta and Gamma Flight, and the Avengers’ reserve members in the '90s, but with the Thunderbolts’ turnover rate, a Beta team is almost necessary.

The extensive search results in the crazy and super-strong Mr. Hyde; Gunna the Troll, a half-human feral girl who was captured during the events of Cage; Boomerang, who is more or less Marvel’s version of DC’s Captain Boomerang; Centurius, an arrogant super-scientist; and the Shocker, one of Spider-Man’s more famous rogues. As it turns out, Centurius is not the same person as Ghost Rider’s foe Centurious, which sort of confused me at first.

Kev Walker is back as the artist, and as I mentioned in the Invincible Iron Man reviews, I love consistent writer/artist teams. Declan Shalvey has two fill-in issues, including the Man-Thing solo issue, and like Siege: Thunderbolts, there are no jarring art shifts. Mr. Hyde, both in writing and art, has been turned into the version seen in Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Considering how much I enjoyed that version of Hyde, I have absolutely no problem with this. I do need to give a specific kudos to the cover artist for issue #156, John-Sébastien Rossbach, for invoking the famous Avengers “who will be the next member” covers.

Thunderbolts: Violent Tendencies continues Parker’s excellent Thunderbolts run, which will hopefully keep on going for a long time. This trade does end with a cliffhanger, but I think this is purposeful on the part of the collection department in order to publish a six-issue trade as soon as possible. Also, the next few issues tie in to the “Fear Itself” event, which warrants its own trade. This trade also includes Handbook profiles for Hyperion and Satana, so you can catch up on them without having to search elsewhere. If you enjoyed Cage, then you’ll certainly enjoy Violent Tendencies.

This trade comes courtesy of Twilite Zone Comics in Glen Burnie, MD.

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Number 1114


Bad blondes


Women didn't fare too well in pulp crime fiction or crime comic books of a bygone era; they were either on the covers being threatened in hideous ways by evil men, or inside being victims or victimizers (read: "bitches"). Women engaged in "normal" female activities were usually relegated to character rather than starring roles. Okay, I know that's a pretty broad statement. (Hyuk hyuk. Get it? Broad?) Maybe it's true or just my perception, having read a lot of crime comics and pulp crime fiction over the past half century.

The two blondes who both appeared in 1948's Pay-Off #1 meet the bitch specifications: they are manipulative and murderous. Murderous because they arrange for a killing, but manipulative in that they get someone else to do their dirty work. "The Guilty Conscience," drawn by Louis Schroeder, is even more blatant. Della, the gangster's girlfriend, uses the promise of sex (shown as a kiss and a flash of leg, plus her thought, "I've never seen a chump yet who wouldn't double-cross his own mother for a a pretty leg."*) She gets the youthful criminal wannabe, Jud Gibson, to ice-pick Nick Lavino to death.

In "Diamond Lil of Otsego," art by Bob Jenney, Lil gets her friend May to do the murder of the poor old caretaker for his life insurance. In this case the blonde gets another woman to do a murder, but May is a brunette.














*True.

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Review: DC Comics Presents: Batman: Dark Knight, Dark City comic book (DC Comics)

I finally read Peter Milligan's "Dark Knight, Dark City" from story Batman #452-454 in the form of the recent DC Comics Presents: Batman volume, and to add to the chorus of voices praising this story, I definitely recommend it.

It is not, as it turns out, required reading for Grant Morrison's recent Batman work; as a matter of fact, Morrison's stories rewrite the conclusion of "Dark City," at least, rather severely. To read "Dark City," however, is to appreciate better how rooted Morrison's stories are in already-established Batman mythos; also, it bears mentioning, "Dark City" is a really, really creepy story, of a kind that readers of Scott Snyder's Batman: The Black Mirror are also sure to enjoy.

[Contains spoilers]

For what I expect, in retrospect, from comics from the early 1990s, the three-part "Dark Knight, Dark City" is surprisingly violent. Equally surprising is that Milligan's villain in the piece is the Riddler; even Batman remarks at one point that he thought he and the Riddler's antagonism was built on respect and one-upsmanship, and not on the Riddler trying to kill Batman. Or, at least, the Riddler puts Batman in increasingly dangerous and grotesque situations, not the least of which is when Batman is forced to give a tracheotomy to a newborn baby. The concept is gross enough on its own, and Milligan keeps building the levels of macabre to the story's conclusion.

What we learn in the end is that the Riddler's actually being controlled by a ghostly bat who died, along with a young woman, in a botched eighteenth century demon-raising. Batman's trials, though bloody, weren't meant to kill him, but rather to prepare him through rites for releasing the girl and the bat's spirits. It's here that Milligan's work and Morrison's derivative diverge; the bat-ghost here is not the demon Barbatos (rather, perhaps, just a large bat), and Batman and the ghosts part on friendly terms, whereas in Morrison's Batman and Robin Must Die, the bat is Barbatos (slash-Darkseid's Hyper Adapter weapon) and he merges with Simon Hurt toward the mayhem found in Batman RIP and The Return of Bruce Wayne.

The difference robs neither good story of their impact; indeed "Dark City" is a kind of ghost story told 'round the campfire, which ends pleasantly enough even if it's rather scary getting there. Part of what's scary is the ghost-bat's presence, which haunts Batman throughout the book in a "someone's watching me" sort of way. The bat's corpse has been in Gotham long enough that it's seeped into the soil -- the bat is Gotham, in essence -- and this leads Batman to wonder if some corruption in the city itself lead to his parent's murder and Batman's creation.

It is part and parcel, exactly, of the same kind of corruption of Gotham that Scott Snyder begins to establish in Black Mirror and continues into his New 52 Batman book; it'd be a kick, frankly, if Snyder (who's taken over from Morrison, in my mind, as the "lead writer" of the Batman titles) might also give "Dark City" a direct acknowledgment in one of his stories as well, as Morrison did.

Artist Kieron Dwyer's work seems familiar to me, though looking back I can't claim to have seen it in more than just a half-dozen or so Superman issues. It nicely evokes for me, however, the Batman style of the early 1990s, not unlike Jim Aparo's -- the characters are clear, present in the panel, not distorted in any way like artists portray the characters today; I neither favor one nor the other, but there's something refreshing about the character clear on the page, in the vein also of artists like Dan Jurgens and Jerry Ordway. Dwyer's depiction lends itself to the characterization of Batman at the time, as a public superhero fairly familiar to the police; this Batman, with yellow bat-shield, is more often on the page and visible than he is hidden in the shadows.

This DC Comics Presents edition also contains the one-shot Detective Comics #633, in which an addled Bruce Wayne seems to be the only one who remembers he used to be Batman -- even with another Batman running around. With art by Tom Mandrake, the story has an equally Hitchcock-ian feel as "Dark City." I couldn't guess the ending, which is a point for Milligan; there's a double-dream sequence that I found confusing that maybe lowered my estimation of the story a bit, but another reader might not have the same issue and love it.

There are no covers included in this DC Comics Presents volume; I haven't read many of them so I'm not sure if this is common, but it felt like a significant omission to me. I won't go into my love/hate relationship with DC Comics Presents here, but this was a way in which I felt the volume could have been improved and lacked as a collection.

As the original "Dark Knight, Dark City" issues are hard to track down, however, that shouldn't stop the reader from picking up this book. I've enjoyed what little I've read of Peter Milligan's work (namely his Infinity, Inc. relaunch) and DC Comics Presents: Batman: Dark Knight, Dark City was a story that actually lived up to all the hype I've heard about it; I thoroughly enjoyed it. Milligan has at this point already come and gone from the DC New 52 Justice League Dark, but I look forward to reading something scary from him nonetheless and his additional work that follows.

Up next: the Collected Editions review of the final pre-Flashpoint Batman and Robin collection, Dark Knight vs. White Knight. Don't miss it!

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Number 1113


Beany & Cecil & Bob & Jack


Bob Clampett was the creator of the popular Time For Beany puppet show, a very early children's program on television. When it came time to do a comic book version, Clampett asked for Jack Bradbury.*

It's been a long time since I featured any artwork by Jack Bradbury, who is one of my favorites of the moonlighting animators drawing comic books in the '40s, working on comic books like Giggle Comics and Ha Ha Comics, and his own creation, Spunky, Junior Cowboy.

Bradbury, who was born in 1914, died in 2004.

"Horse-fly Hubbub" is from Bob Clampett's Beany in Horse-Fly Hubbub, Four Color #414 (1952):

















*Source for this information is the web site The Comic Art of Jack Bradbury, a site maintained by Bradbury's son. There are over 1700 pages of comic art scans there, including Beany and Cecil. Another Beany and Cecil story is available from Mykal Banta's The Big Blog of Kids' Comics here.

After this posting appeared I got a nice e-mail from reader John Hindsill, who shared his reminiscence of the Time For Beany puppet show, the basis for the comic book version:

Pappy,

Boy does this take me back...waaay back to 1949 or thereabouts when I was 9 years old. If you did not grow up in Los Angeles, (or even if you did) allow me to flesh out Beany's history as I recall it.

Time for Beany began as a daily live television show during the late afternoon/ dinner time period. It is alleged that its most famous, most erudite fan was Albert Einstein when he was at CalTech in Pasadena. This is not as far-fetched as it might sound, as many of the jokes, puns and use & allusions to current music (Ragg-Mopp, comes readily to mind) often was above the ken of the under-10 set.

The characters were hand-puppets voiced by Stan Freburg, of song and TV show parody, and commercial production fame (Ann Miller dancing on a soup can), and Daws Butler. Freberg is still alive, and, one hopes, in good health.

Fridays were shows either with an in studio audience, of the illusion of same, during the tirst year or two. At any rate, Cecil would hand out presents from the Leakin' Lena to kids in the audience. I don't recall that I ever actually saw any kids, though.

By the time my sister was old enough to watch such things TfB either was off the air or had become a cartoon show. The animated version lacked the charm, the spunk and the imagination (my considered opinion) of the puppet version.

I'm guessing that a fuller and/or a more accurate history can be found on web, but I thought you might enjoy the reminiscence of somebody who really was there.

John

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Number 1112


Delinquent in Space


I've had the scans for these two stories prepared since January, 2011. I'm just now getting around to posting them because in over a year I haven't really been able to think of anything to say about them, except they're crazy. The scripts are by editor Richard E. Hughes writing as Shane O'Shea.

Under the O'Shea pen-name Hughes wrote the classic Herbie stories. There's one sequence in part 2 of "Delinquent in Space" which I could swear I've also seen in a Herbie comic: Gene the delinquent masquerades as a bearded Soviet in order to get access to the spaceship. Or am I just hallucinating after licking one of Herbie's hard-to-find-cinnamon lollipops?

The original story, appearing in Adventures Into the Unknown #114 (1960), was apparently popular enough to call for a sequel in AITU #122. Artist Ogden Whitney, whose solid art style didn't vary no matter the subject, gives it his professional polish, just like he did for Herbie.

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