Review: Green Arrow Vol. 2: Triple Threat trade paperback (DC Comics)

I've been pretty high on Green Arrow these past couple of days, having enjoyed two especially good episodes of the CW's Arrow, "The Odyssey" and "Dodger." (Even if "Dodger" is the worst. supervillain. name. ever.) Ann Nocenti's Green Arrow Vol. 2: Triple Threat does nothing to hurt my enthusiasm for Arrow, but certainly if DC Comics wants to attract Arrow fans, Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino's new run can't come soon enough.

Nocenti's stories here are chaotic and confusing, as is Harvey Tolibao's artwork. Moreover, as loosely-defined as Green Arrow Oliver Queen is after just one previous volume (JT Krul, Dan Jurgens, and Keith Giffen's Green Arrow: The Midas Touch), I don't think Nocenti fundamentally understood the new Green Arrow in these pages, or she took him in a different direction than the previous writers intended, which also dampened my enjoyment of this book.

[Review contains spoilers]

The New 52 Green Arrow is more billionaire playboy than the old DC Universe's grizzled activist, and there's nothing wrong with that given how down and dark the pre-Flashpoint Green Arrow had become. But though Krul, Jurgens, and Giffen's Oliver Queen was young and irreverent, he wasn't completely disinterested in his late father's Queen Industries; in issue #3, he challenges the company to create more meaningful products, and in issue #4, he suggests his assistant Jax begin a video games division at Queen's Q-Core (for the purposes of helping Green Arrow, but still, it's a project). The reader understood that Oliver shirked his Queen Industries as a ruse, all the better to mask his use of Q-Core's technology for fighting crime.

But the first pages of Nocenti's Triple Threat have Oliver musing how he hates memos, how running a tech company should be "fun," and how he wishes he could live solely as Green Arrow. If the third part is on character, the first two suggest, disturbingly, that Nocenti has believed the lie; rather than portraying Green Arrow as a billionaire pretending to be a playboy to mask his superheroics, Nocenti's Green Arrow is an actual billionaire playboy superhero -- a spoiled rich kid who fights crime rather than live up to his responsibilities. This might be worthy of exploration, but Nocenti's Oliver is irreverent to the point of unlikability -- Nocenti later blames Oliver's decision to quit his company on mind control, but the damage to the reader's opinion of the character is well done by that point.

The greater difficulty with Triple Threat, however, is the clumsiness of the storytelling. The first four pages of the book are Green Arrow standing around talking to himself, including quoting lines from King Lear, and then that the story's villain just so happens to turns out to be named "Leer" and have three daughters. Why exactly Leer wants his daughters to kidnap Green Arrow is never quite clear, nor -- after Arrow escapes with one of Leer's daughters -- is it why Arrow suddenly seems more concerned with capturing Leer's escaped mutant bear than stopping Leer himself.

There's also often a disconnect between Nocenti's script and Harvey Tolibao's art. Tolibao, though an experienced Marvel artist, struggles from the beginning, as when Green Arrow and Skylark fight in the first issue and often seem to be looking past one another or standing back to back. Toward the end of the second issue, Nocenti's dialogue has Leer telling his daughters to go after the escaping Green Arrow, while Tolibao's art has Leer dragging one of the daughters backward. In the third issue, Green Arrow spits in a saloon, seemingly for no good reason, and only on the next page does Tolibao reveal the "No spitting" sign, totally botching the joke; Nocenti doesn't make it clear, however, why Arrow should want to insult the saloon patrons anyway, so the confusion just compounds.

The next chapter is a one-shot story with a guest artist, and then in the final three issues, Oliver flies to China to try to bargain back shares of his company from corrupt businessman Fang. The details, again, get muddled -- Fang seems to want Queen's facial recognition technology to get out from under the strict government, which wouldn't seem such a bad goal, but Oliver balks, Fang's thugs attacks him, and later Oliver plans to return as Green Arrow just to beat up Fang for having attacked him. When Oliver goes back, Fang suddenly has the ability to resurrect his dead relatives for protection (despite that he didn't know Green Arrow was coming), and Arrow has to lure these spirits to another graveyard where the bodies of ancient warriors just so happen to have recently been unearthed, so the two groups of spirits can fight.

Though having Green Arrow battle to regain Oliver Queen's company is a better use of the character, Nocenti gives Arrow an "arrow gun" for a good part of the arc instead of a bow and arrow, which feels a little far from the character in just his second volume. The Chinese superhero Suzie Ming that Nocenti introduces serves mostly for exposition (it's a shame things didn't line up so Nocenti could use Katana here). On top of Jax and the character Naomi, Nocenti gives Green Arrow a third handyman/jack-of-all-trades, Jimmy Crew, and it's rather astounding that Nocenti doesn't have Oliver blink or even question that Naomi has revealed his secret identity to another person.

I haven't read anything else by Ann Nocenti, whom I know to be a popular Marvel writer, and I can't speak for her other work. I do, however, have good faith in Jeff Lemire after his Frankenstein and Animal Man, and so I'll simply say that I'm looking forward to the Green Arrow/Hawkman/Deathstroke crossover in the next Green Arrow volume, and then I'll be glad when Lemire's stories start.

Aside from all Green Arrow: Triple Threat's other problems, the paper here is pretty thin, perhaps to fit in thirteen seven issues (#7-13) instead of the originally-solicited twelve six (#7-12), and it caused my copy to warp almost immediately. Sometimes a book just doesn't work, and this is one of those books.

[Includes original covers (maybe one variant I couldn't place), sketches by Totlibao and Freddie Williams]

Next week, the second volume of the New 52 Batwoman; tomorrow, the next in our series of Saga of the Swamp Thing reviews. Thanks!

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Batman: Death of the Family collections in 2013, DC One Million Omnibus, and more from ComicPro

As reported on Newsarama, DC Comics announced at the recent ComicPro meeting two collections of the "Death of the Family" crossover event, to be released later this year.

As with DC's collections for the Batman crossover "Night of the Owls," DC will collect both the main story on its own, and then collect the tie-in issues all together. For "Night of the Owls," the main book is Batman Vol. 2: City of Owls and the tie-in book is Batman: Night of the Owls. For "Death," the two titles will be Batman: Death of the Family (probably Batman Vol. 3) and Joker: Death of the Family Companion.

Calling the tie-in book "companion" is a deviation (though keeping with books like Infinite Crisis Companion and others). That the companion book is labeled "Joker" and not "Batman" is an odd choice -- I can see positives and negatives for this -- and I wonder if DC will end up going the Batman: Alternate Title route before the books come out.

DC has said Batman: Death of the Family will be 176 pages, likely collecting at least Batman #13-17. Joker: Death of the Family Companion is reported at 387 pages; DC has added and subtracted various "Death of the Family" tie ins, but this should contain between two and three issues of titles like Batgirl, Batman and Robin, Catwoman, Detective Comics, Nightwing, Red Hood and the Outlaws, Suicide Squad, and Teen Titans.

DC also announced a DC One Million Omnibus, expected to collect all thirty-four DC One Million tie-in issues, plus the four issue miniseries by Grant Morrison and maybe the DC One Million 80-Page Giant, too.

After the Infinite Crisis Omnibus and the DC One Million Omnibus, it does lead one to wonder what other DC crossovers could be collected in full in omnibus format. Blackest Night is an obvious choice if it hadn't just received Absolute treatment. I'd love Armageddon 2001, War of the Gods, or Eclipso: The Darkness Within omnibuses, but I'm old-school that way. Fancy a Legends Omnibus anyone? Invasion!?

Still can't say I know much about Planetary, but the other collections news is a Planetary Omnibus, Vertigo Visions: Frank Quitely, and Children's Crusade, the one and only Vertigo crossover event that included the Dead Boy Detectives and characters from Black Orchid, Animal Man, Swamp Thing, and Doom Patrol (actually, that sounds pretty interesting).

So there you have it -- Death of the Family collected before the end of the year.

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Review: Journey into Mystery Vol. 1: Fear Itself hardcover/paperback (Marvel Comics)

[Review by Doug Glassman, who Tumblrs at Hell Yeah '80s Marvel!]

Even if he hadn’t been the cause of the Avengers’ union in the original comics, Loki would’ve returned as the villain in Joss Whedon’s Avengers film. Tom Hiddleston brought an incredible amount of pathos to one of mythology’s greatest villains in Kenneth Branagh’s Thor film, and Marvel saw the fandom’s reaction to Loki (especially the reactions of the fan-girls) and decided to take a gamble on a Loki-driven series. To make the title character even more irresistible to female fans, they made him a pre-teen boy. Then they tied the entire title into a fair-to-middling crossover, and collected it all in Journey into Mystery Vol. 1: Fear Itself.

This could have gone horribly, horribly wrong. I’m still not entirely sure why it didn’t, but much of the credit has to go to Kieron Gillen for keeping Kid Loki a credible character. Why Loki is a kid is the central mystery of the title, which won’t be resolved until Gillen’s run ends, but after only a few issues, the age of the main character becomes less and less of a sticking point. Loki keeps his arrogance, but he gets put in a rough position in Asgardian society now that he's lost most of his magic. Various characters question why Loki is allowed to walk free in Asgardia (the floating city version of Asgard), and often, he is just barely saved by his guardian, Volstagg.

Putting Volstagg in charge of the young Loki brings back memories of Walt Simonson’s run, and there are thematic and storytelling similarities as well. Like Simonson (and Alex Zalben in Thor and the Warriors Four), Gillen likes using stories nested within stories to keep the plot moving. The origin of Thor’s goats, for instance, leads to a key plot moment about halfway through the book. In order to access his former self’s knowledge, Kid Loki has to go through a series of rituals so complex that it hits ridiculousness; even Gillen-as-storyteller has to fast-forward through some of it to get to the point.

Kid Loki also has the benefit of a strong supporting cast. Along with Volstagg, he gains two pets -- Ikol, an advice-giving blackbird, and the Hel-Hound, a foul-mouthed beast. In the underworld, he adds more allies in Tyr, the now-deceased god of war, and Leah, the handmaiden of Hela. In turn, they recover the Disir, bloodthirsty Norse warrior-maidens. This is where the book's lack of explanation of exterior Marvel events becomes a problem.  The circumstances of Tyr’s death are only addressed in the back of the trade, in a text piece originally published in a Spotlight tie-in magazine.

Even worse, if you assume that reading the Fear Itself crossover will explain any of this ... well, you’d be mistaken. The main crossover has little to do with Journey Into Mystery apart from expanding on some of Odin’s scenes. This ends up being to Journey Into Mystery’s detriment, as Odin is not very well-written in Fear Itself.

However, if you’re patient and can get through the first confusing issues, you’re rewarded with the appearance of the book’s real star: Mephisto. The workings of Marvel’s various underworlds can be confusing, and with Hela literally subletting space from Mephisto’s Hell, Marvel’s king of trolling is brought into the proceedings organically. He and Hela both deal with the arrival of the Tongue of the Serpent, a servant of Fear Itself’s villain and a somewhat blatant rip-off of the Mouth of Sauron from The Lord of the Rings. Dougie Braithwaite’s intricate artwork results in Mephisto having a number of memorable facial expressions.

Journey Into Mystery: Fear Itself ends fairly abruptly in the middle of Loki’s quest to assemble powerful Asgardian artifacts. As the story goes on, Gillen goes further and further into Thor’s past, especially Simonson’s run, so if you haven’t picked up those Thor Visionaries volumes or the Omnibus, now might be a good time to do so. I know it sounds like I’m coming down hard on this book, but as long as you’re fairly well-versed in Marvel’s Thor, you’ll be rewarded with some fantastic storytelling and art.

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Number 1323: Love is a crime

Can a girl from a slum with no prospects for the future find a better life? Can a girl without a father, who knows nothing of men, find happiness with a man who brings her along on a jewelry store robbery? Can a girl meet a hunky parole officer and find true love? Can I stop asking stupid questions?

This is day three of Pappy’s Crime Wave week. For more information visit the past two postings.

Poor Dotty. She is stuck in town in summer. As she so vividly narrates, “. . . the damp tongue of August licked the slum in which I lived!” So she takes up with Nicky, the local bad boy, and he leads her into trouble. Sometimes love comics like this, from Darling Love #1 (1949), could also be crime comics. Simon and Kirby were especially good at stories like this. “I Was Branded Bad” isn’t S&K. but it’s not bad, either. It just looks a bit generic to me. The artist is unidentified, but the publisher is actually Archie Comics, with a bit of distance between itself and the teenage books.

Because it’s a love comic, you know things will turn out well for Dotty, and she will find true love. There’s something for you to love, also. On the last page there’s a recipe for fudge!

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Review: Superman Vol. 1: What Price Tomorrow? hardcover/paperback (DC Comics)

The titular series starring DC Comics's best-known character (or second-best, depending on your point of view) is one where there's not a lot of room for error, history notwithstanding, and especially not at the very start of DC's New 52 initiative. Writer George Perez succeeds in presenting a contemporary Metropolis in Superman: What Price Tomorrow?, but the plot of the book itself is clunky and ill-conceived. Perez publicly blamed editorial interference for any difficulties his six Superman issues might have had, though the problems don't seem to be caused by any mid-arc shift in storyline; rather it seems What Price Tomorrow? takes too long to reach its conclusion for not enough payoff.

[Review contains spoilers]

What Price Tomorrow? begins with the destruction of the Daily Planet building and globe; the Planet becomes part of Galaxy Communications's Planet Global Network, complete with a shiny new building and globe, with Lois Lane as a television news producer and Perry White and Clark Kent still on the print side. The ongoing depiction of Lois's work to run a multimedia news agency (with allowances for fiction) is one of the strong points of Perez's story, but it's countermanded by Clark's boycotting the change because of his new, supposedly corrupt bosses.

If PGN's broadcasts become sensational, there's never any actual wrongdoing committed, such that from beginning to end Clark Kent and Superman seem stick-in-the-muds, the only characters in this book who can't embrace change. "What price tomorrow?" is never a question posed in the book nor does it have much relevance to Superman's battle with aliens run amok; rather it seems Clark -- or Perez -- seems to be warning of some imagined danger of progress that the book doesn't uphold. Like Deathstroke: Legacy, it's tough not to see What Price Tomorrow? and its demolition of the old ways as a metaphor for DC's New 52, but unlike in Deathstroke, it's progress that wins here and leaves Clark and the old ways in the dust.

The doings at the Planet and Clark's unhappiness are background to the first three issues, where in each Superman is attacked by an alien that says "Krypton" and dissipates when Superman defeats them. The three battles proceed almost entirely the same way, to the point where Superman's fight with an ice creature in the third issue is completely predictable based on his fight with a fire creature in the first. Perez, in his defense, may have been barred from using classic Superman villains while they appeared in Grant Morrison's Action Comics, but nonetheless the conflicts here are wildly generic and repetitive enough that they could certainly have been combined into one or two issues.

Perez then takes another issue for the aliens to stalk Superman; an issue for the aliens, as a faux Superman, to act dictatorially toward Metropolis; and then in the final issue the faux Superman battles Supergirl and the real Superman saves the day -- certainly, there's an element of padding there, too. It hasn't been clear before that the aliens could emulate Superman, so when they replace him, it's jarring -- the reader is never confused that Perez means this to be the "real" Superman, but at the same time, for Superman to act out of character in his "first" arc is a questionable decision. That it turns out finally that the aliens were just bugs stuck to Superman's new suit is laughable, saved only by the way in which Perez's story ultimately dovetails to connect with Morrison's.

Perez teases here that Lois Lane knows Clark Kent's identity, something that certainly can't be the case this early in the New 52. Though surely Perez wasn't right for this book, it would have been interesting to see him write his way out of storyline, likely with some of the secret identity tricks that were the joy of old Superman comics and even into the John Byrne era. Early reviews of Superman #1 made much of Lois Lane's "new boyfriend" in that issue, but he's actually a minor character and readers will be interested to see that it's Lois pining over Clark before the story is done, though it's uncertain how long that will last with subsequent writers coming on board.

As a kind of Newsroom meets superheroics, Superman would have an enjoyable atmosphere if the main character himself didn't seem to be so disgusted with it all; though given new roles, Lois, Perry, and Jimmy Olsen are their familiar selves and it's even energizing, to an extent, if the book didn't make it so clear the audience ought not be enjoying it. Perez's incessant dialogue and narration (necessitating two concurrent pages of nine panels each in third issue) is certainly too much, but adds to the "reported" feel of the book. Unfortunately, Superman: What Price Tomorrow? is just a Superman story, neither inspiring nor ground-breaking for the Man of Steel's first New 52 outing. Whomever the audience wants to blame, the book remains a missed opportunity.

[Includes original covers, Superman designs by Cully Hamner and Jim Lee]

Later this week, my review of Ann Nocenti's Green Arrow Vol. 2: Triple Threat. Don't miss it!

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Number 1322: Crime and/or Punishment

For day two of Pappy’s Crime Wave week (see yesterday's post for an explanation) we have the standard crime comic; i.e., what most people, especially censors, bluenoses and joykillers, meant when they pointed at something and said, “That's a crime comic!”

Crime and Punishment #1* came out in late 1947 and became the companion publication to the standard-bearer of the genre, Crime Does Not Pay. The publisher was Lev Gleason, the editors Charles Biro and Bob Wood, just like Crime Does Not Pay. We find the same kind of contents in the latter magazine as we do in the former...panel after panel of lurid criminal acts and in the last couple of panels some sort of moral and the criminal’s just due. He (or she in many cases) either ended up on the gallows, in the electric chair, or died a violent death by either cops or fellow crooks.

The contents of crime comics varied with American crime mixed in with crime in other countries. In this case we see Dan Barry’s great artwork on “Danny Iamasca, Dutch Schultz’s Triggerman” and Jack Alderman’s ink-heavy art on “The Butcher of Düsseldorf.” A note about crime comics: Their use of the word “true” doesn’t mean their version of truth got in the way of telling a good story. Truth may have figured in there somewhere, but not at the expense of cheap thrills. An exception might be made in the case of Peter Kürten, the Butcher of Düsseldorf (also called the Düsseldorf Vampire). His many crimes were so depraved the scripter and artist restrained themselves in telling the story. And that’s the truth.

C.H. Moore had a regular gig doing these informational pages. They were quite good. Moore used a style perfected by sports cartoonists in newspapers and also in the famous “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.”

*There’s internal evidence that the title of the comic was originally Obey the Law but was changed to Crime and Punishment during production.

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Number 1321: Pappy’s Crime Wave shot down!

A few months ago I had an idea. I have a lot of crime comics, with a lot of stories to show. I noticed there were no blogs specifically showing crime comics*, so I thought I’d be the one to do it. I got to a certain point in my plan, but then, like a lot of things, I ran out of steam. I’ve got about all I can handle with this blog, folks, and some other projects I work on that aren’t comics related. So the idea for a crime comics blog ended up in my almost-but-not-quite-completed file. However, during a flurry of energy I worked up a masthead. I'm not one to waste anything so I’ve decided this week we’ll have a theme week, Pappy’s Crime Wave, where I’ll show the first week's postings that were scheduled for the blog that never was.

First up, the introductory story for the newspaper comic strip, Kerry Drake by Alfred Andriola. Andriola, once an assistant to Milton Caniff, was given the Charlie Chan comic strip to do, then he took over the Dan Dunn comic strip as competition for Dick Tracy. That led to Kerry Drake, which debuted during the war year of 1943. A-1 Comics from Magazine Enterprises (ME) reprinted the initial continuity in this unnumbered comic under the masthead of A-1 Comics in 1944.

I first read the story in the mid-1980s in Blackthorne’s exceptional squarebound trade paperbacks, which went five issues. I take them out every once in a while and re-read some of the stories. If you get a chance to pick up this series I recommend it.

Kerry Drake is the good guy, but we know we're more interested in the bad guy, Fingers. He's a prison escapee who holds a young farm couple hostage. It’s the same type of storytelling (the strip was written by an uncredited Allen Saunders) that later brought down heat on Crime Does Not Pay and other crime comic books. For the sensitive, there is a scene of Fingers killing a dog with his bare hands; there is the near-rape of the pretty young farm wife, Zella, and there is torture by acid. You’ve been warned!

*Not that I was aware of at the time, that is. See the comments section for a note on a couple of blogs covering the subject.

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