Number 1393: “This guy ain’t human!” Introducing Flash Lightning

Flash Lightning was born of the “mysterious East.” We find out the bare bones of his origin on page 1 of his introduction in Sure-Fire Comics #1 (1940), published by Ace. He was trained in Egypt. Whatever gave him his powers, by 1940 superheroes were basically old hat and the origin was just a means to an end. And the end was action, action, action! That’s exactly what happens to Flash as he goes right to work rescuing a beautiful girl’s dad from a life of slavery.

The Grand Comics Database lists Robert Turner as writer. There is an indexer note that the story is based on the May 1938 pulp magazine, Captain Hazzard. A lack of originality in the story is matched by swipes from Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon by artist Harry Lucey. A year or so later Flash’s name became Lash Lightning, and while I can’t find official information on the reason for the change, it’s likely DC Comics’ character, the Flash, had something to do with it. Another name change came with the comic book title, which after four issues as Sure-Fire Comics became Lightning Comics. Like many other superheroes born in the wake of Superman, Flash/Lash Lightning disappeared shortly after the end of the war. Had I been in charge of him in 1946 I might have taken away the super powers and made Lash Lightning a private eye with a whip. He couldn’t be a cowboy, because Lash LaRue was already whipping up bad guys in the Western B-movies in which he starred.

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Number 1392: Advertising for love

The story today is of mid-century advertising boss Katherine Laurel and her rocky road to romance with subordinate, then rival, George Dunn. It's interesting that Katherine, despite her weakness for love (which happens to all of us), is presented as a successful business owner and career woman. That wasn’t the norm in real life-1951 when the story was published in Charlton’s True Life Secrets #2. I know the ending is sort of a cop-out, but it is of its time, and you can cherry-pick the positives in the tale for young female readers.

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Review: Before Watchmen: Minutemen/Silk Spectre deluxe hardcover (DC Comics)

Whether the Before Watchmen books should exist, disowned as they were by Watchmen creator Alan Moore, is a valid conversation, but one that I find unresolvable. Even if Moore had embraced the books, the result would be the same -- they exist, they're arriving on shelves now, people will read them.

I don't disregard the larger conversation and by all means, feel free to continue to have it if you want in the comments section. My reviews of the Before Watchmen books, however, seek to address the questions that I think I can answer, at least for myself -- accepting as a given the existence of the Before Watchmen books, are they themselves enjoyable reading? Do they expand on or contribute to the story of Watchmen in interesting or useful ways?

For Before Watchmen: Minutemen/Silk Spectre by Darwyn Cooke and then Cooke and Amanda Conner respectively, the answer is "yes." Cooke's Minutemen, especially, is an "untold" Watchmen tale that shines new light on some of the book's background characters and even helps flesh out those in the forefront. Cooke and Conner's Silk Spectre is more uneven, though it's a worthwhile read even if only to see how Conner's art meets the occasion.

[Review contains spoilers]

Minutemen, written and drawn by Cooke, begins with the original Nite Owl Hollis Mason, but Mason is mainly the vessel through which the book touches on the lives of formerly background figures like Silhouette, Mothman, Hooded Justice and Captain Metropolis, and even Sally Jupiter and the Comedian. The Minutemen are barely a team, never actually foiling any real crime, but Cooke offers additional, behind-the-scenes exploits in which Nite Owl, Silhouette, and Mothman team up against child-kidnappers, and for a few pages these three, at least, become the heroes that the Minutemen supposedly aspire to be.

I am familiar with but haven't memorized Watchmen, so I can't say for sure if Mason's attraction to Silhouette is canon or not, but it adheres well to Mason's character; Mason is the best-intentioned of the group but always a step behind, never the leader nor necessarily a very striking hero, and his misguided love for Silhouette, who is gay, is another believable example of Mason coming up just short.

Cooke gives impressive depth to Silhouette Ursula Zandt, who's not more than a shadow, so to speak, in Watchmen; here, Cooke's depiction of Silhouette that includes her harrowing escape from the Nazis and her eventual murder make the character much more vivid. Mothman Byron Lewis, too, appears in Watchmen mainly as a senile old man, but Cooke's depiction of the risks Mothman took launching himself into the air make his later deterioration more understandable.

(Hooded Utilitarian has a more critical take on Minutemen that makes some excellent points and backs them up with images from Watchmen old and new.)

Perhaps one of the central questions of Watchmen is how Sally Jupiter, nearly raped by Comedian Edward Blake, could later return to him and bear his child. Cooke gets a leg up on original Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons, if I may blaspheme, in that Cooke's art makes it clear to me for the first time just how young the Comedian was during his time with the Minutemen, more a belligerent teenager than the fearsome force of nature found in Watchmen's flashbacks. Cooke subsequently shows Blake arriving at a memorial for Silhouette, just back from a traumatic experience at Guadacanal, and running into Sally, who's dealing with her own guilt over Silhouette's death and the fallout from Sally having murdered the villain who himself murdered Silhouette.

The scene is a rare calm moment for the Comedian, who's ever bellicose through the pages of Watchmen. Cooke's simple lines make Blake and Sally both look like children, unprepared for the evils the world has thrown at them. In this way, Cooke demonstrates how the two might be kindred spirits, offering at least one theory for why things later happened the way they did.

The Comedian dies, of course, at the beginning of Watchmen, so his presence is felt more than seen throughout that book. Here, Comedian is like a freight train, shoving events this way and that, as when he tricks Mason into murdering Hooded Justice. Blake also makes a sizable cameo in Silk Spectre, again influencing events from behind the scenes; in both stories, the writers make a smart parallel between Mason and Blake as two sides of the same coin -- both aging heroes, both surrogate fathers to Silk Spectre Laurie Jupiter, both chasing a certain love they never had in their own lives.

The difference between the Minutemen and Silk Spectre stories is that Minutemen manages to tell the story both of these people and of the time period all together -- one is the other -- and still call out to Watchmen with the gridded pages, frequent circles, and so on. Silk Spectre is (probably purposefully) loud where Minutemen is quiet -- the 1960s aesthetic is turned up so high as at times to overtake the story, and the calls to Watchmen are perversely overt -- numerous panels where Laurie resembles Blake, even in his death throes, and perhaps Silk Spectre's prime over-the-top achievement, offering up the origin of Blake's smiley-face pin.

When Silk Spectre loses a bit of its focus -- especially in the second issue with a wild villain plot cooked up by a rogue Frank Sinatra with Ken Kesey and Owsley Stanley making a guest appearance -- the reader can still entertain themselves with Amanda Conner's art, which sheds just a little bit of its cartoony-ness for this miniseries. The characters are still starry-eyed, but Conner plays them a little straighter, less animated or distorted -- see especially Laurie and her housemates -- and it's an appealing shift that serves the story well.

Laurie in Cooke and Conner's story is a far cry from the harried Laurie engaged in an early mid-life crisis in Watchmen -- the two aren't mutually recognizable, nor do they really add up. Silk Spectre is far more an exercise not only in simply exploring 1960s San Francisco, but also in showing where in Laurie lies aspects of the Comedian. I'm not sure that teaches us as much about the character as the Minutemen story does its characters; Silk Spectre is more of a tribute to Watchmen, less related, while Minutemen fills more the bill of a "prequel."

Either way, I think my next reading of Watchmen will be positively affected by having read Before Watchmen: Minutemen/Silk Spectre.

Monday, my review of Before Watchmen: Ozymandias/Crimson Corsair (what I consider the "fourth" Before Watchmen book, but for some reason DC saw fit to release it this week with Minutemen/Silk Spectre) and more.

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Review: Man of Steel movie (2013)

Let's talk about Man of Steel, shall we?

[Spoilers for Man of Steel, and maybe a little for Iron Man 3 and Star Trek Into Darkness, too]

I would rate Man of Steel as a fair movie, maybe 5 or 6 out of 10 stars. For comparison, I'd rate it just a smidgen higher than this season's Iron Man 3, though I could be convinced otherwise -- I'm more partial to Superman, but Iron Man had a villain twist and better humor than Man of Steel. Surely, Man of Steel doesn't hold a candle to such superhero movie greats as Dark Knight or Dark Knight Rises, nor Avengers or the years ago first X-Men or Spider-Man films. At the same time, Man of Steel was definitely a head and shoulders improvement over the Green Lantern movie.

Probably my biggest knock against Man of Steel is that I thought it was just too long. That fight with Faora and Non in Smallville, and even the climactic battle with Zod, just went on and on. It's a superhero action flick, sure, but at times the action became so chaotic (I saw it in 3D) that I couldn't necessarily tell who was beating on whom, and in all the movie seemed to devolve into a typical superhero flick at these moments -- there was little in one guy punching another that really said "Superman" to me, whereas I didn't think the action sequences in the Dark Knight movies suffered from the same problem.

In all, I was often bored. And while I liked some of the changes the movie team made to the Superman mythos, I was surprised, with the opportunity to completely reinvent Superman for the twenty-first century, just how much they left alone. The destruction of Krypton, the banishment of Zod, Clark gets in trouble at school and then Pa shows him the spaceship that, yep, they're still keeping in the barn. As an introduction to Superman, I can see how an unfamiliar audience might enjoy seeing Clark Kent in Smallville, how he gets his costume, how he learns of his heritage, etc., a la Batman Begins (which I thought was the least of the three Dark Knight movies, for similar reasons), but as a tried and true fan, I felt I'd seen a lot of this before, many, many times.

I did like the cast very much, though I wished they'd had a better script to work with. Henry Cavill did fine as Superman and, turning back to the script, I appreciated that the movie team did seem to know who Superman was (or, seemed to share my perception of who I believe Superman to be) -- that this was not a dark or angsty Superman, but rather a good-humored Superman who earns the trust of the US military, who takes the time to tell the people on the Smallville streets to take cover because it isn't safe. I felt comfortable with this movie Superman as a descendent of the Christopher Reeve Superman, the controversial end of the movie aside.

Amy Adams comported herself well as Lois Lane throughout; I enjoyed that the movie thought to pair Adams and Jor-El Russell Crowe for a few scenes (this might've been the most surprising moments of the movie). Adams and Cavill have good chemistry, and the movie's other inspired change (the kind of risk I wish they'd taken more of) was having Lois be smart enough to uncover Clark's identity from the start, and then to stick with it and not "kiss it away" in homage to Superman II (I did appreciate immeasurably that Man of Steel was not to Superman II what Star Trek Into Darkness was to Wrath of Khan). There's a Lois and Clark vibe to the closing scene (and how has no one used the line "Welcome to the Planet" before?!) that I liked and that I look forward to being built upon in the inevitable sequel.

Lawrence Fishburne was a fine Perry White with good interplay with Adams; I have questioned whether the Superman mythos really needs Perry White, but he offered a good "man on the street" perspective. Certainly I chuckled when I understood this other Planet reporter was Steve Lombard, and it was a nice call-out to fans -- but then again, with the inclusion of Emil Hamilton, Pete Ross, Lana Lang, even Whitney Fordham for crying out loud (plus Kenny Braverman in the credits), I again rather wished the team had made up their own stuff instead of working to hew so close to what had come before.

And then, of course, Superman breaks Zod's neck. Now can we have a collection of John Byrne's "Supergirl Saga," DC?

Thematically, I totally get it. Clark was raised human, he feels human, but he's got Krypton's whole genetic code (or something) inside of him, he's been fighting the last survivors of his home planet, and when it comes down to it, he has to choose -- let the humans he's adopted die, or kill the very last existing member of his own species. Clark chooses the humans, of course, and he effectively orphans himself a second time. The triumph and tragedy of being Superman.

But Superman doesn't kill ("Supergirl Saga" notwithstanding), as those of us know who've been around long enough to have seen Clark find that darn spaceship in that darn barn at least three or four times. And there's no way the movie team didn't know that, too. Which, if we want to be cynical about it, makes this kind of a funny Superman recreation -- the team does enough fan service to include Steve Lombard and Whitney Fordham, and then wham! -- a bit of adolescent violence at the end just to underline this isn't your grandma's Superman, "suckerz." I don't think that's quite the truth, but it's one way of looking at it and to that extent, I find Man of Steel vaguely insulting in that vein.

But moreover, I think it was bad moviemaking. For one thing, if you're going to have a scene where Superman has no choice but to kill his enemy, you really need Superman to have no choice. Zod was spraying the people with his heat vision because Superman had him in a headlock, so maybe Superman should have let him out of the headlock -- it's not the best option, but it's an option. Another would've been for Superman to have put his hands over Zod's eyes. I'm sure the team has explanations for why all of these wouldn't work, but the bottom line is that the moment needed to be airtight, and it very clearly wasn't. The audience needed to feel Superman had no other choice, and I don't think they did.

The perhaps greater problem, however, is that even as I understand the moment thematically, it's not well built in the movie. Clark never has a moment where he's interested in Zod or his disciples as representatives of Krypton, so we don't really feel Clark's loss here (Man of Steel's Zod is also too one-dimensional, a far cry from Geoff Johns's recent take on the character). We have absolutely no idea, either, how Clark feels about killing his enemies before this point, nor how Ma or Pa Kent would feel about him doing it. Clark doesn't want to kill Zod, but then he does, and then he screams, but it's hard to say which of these things Clark is necessarily screaming about. And then the movie immediately cuts to a happy-go-lucky Superman in a scene where a female serviceman calls him "hot"; Superman's killing of his enemy in this way holds no more consequence than a moment's hug with Lois.

I don't expect this, but it would go a long way toward redeeming Man of Steel in my eyes if the next movie actually dealt with the consequences -- actual or emotional -- of Clark killing Zod (this you can say of "Supergirl Saga"; they surely made a lot out of it). If this is meant to be "Superman Begins," as it were, then perhaps we can hope Man of Steel is the first part in Superman's evolution toward deciding not to kill -- he killed once, didn't like the hero it made him, vows never to do it again, and then that vow would be tested, say, in battle with Lex Luthor, where Superman is in a position to kill Lex but then finds another way. (There, I wrote the sequel for them.)

That would be worthwhile to me -- not a movie where Superman kills his enemy in the end as is modern fashion, but a trilogy where Superman comes out the other end understanding that killing is not the answer. Again, I don't expect it, but that's the hope I'm holding in my heart now.

Man of Steel accomplishes its goal of giving DC Comics a new movie franchise on which it can hang its hat after the end of the Dark Knight movies, and that's a good thing that I'm happy about. But strangely enough for a comic book fan, between Man of Steel, Iron Man 3, and Star Trek Into Darkness, I'm beginning to think superhero/big budget sci-fi movies just aren't for me; they're not impressing me this season the way they once were. Help me, Wolverine, I guess -- you're my only hope.

What did you think of Man of Steel? (Bonus: enjoy frequent guest reviewer Zack King's review of Man of Steel.)

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Number 1391: Kidnapped to the future!

Blonde Phantom, alter ego of mousy secretary Louise Grant, lusts after her boss, Mark. But like many comic book masqueraders, she finds herself in a love triangle with herself. Tsk tsk. My advice to Louise is to tell Mark — don’t keep secrets; they lead to mistrust. (Short lecture over.)

Louise and Mark are kidnapped by a group of future men who put them in a zoo to be studied by the thirtieth century citizens. If Louise had been a guy she would have just used brute force and whupped on the kidnapers. But Blonde Phantom uses her brain to overcome her adversaries...and she does it all in an evening dress and high heels. This entertaining story, from Marvel’s Blonde Phantom #21 (1949) is credited by the Grand Comics Database with art by Al Gabriele and Harry Sahle.

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Review: Legion of Super-Heroes Vol. 2: The Dominators trade paperback (DC Comics)

Paul Levitz's first Legion of Super-Heroes foray into the New 52 offered a smidgen more action than characterization than I might have preferred, suggesting perhaps a "dumbing down" of the Legion for the DC relaunch. With Legion of Super-Heroes Vol. 2: The Dominators, however, Levitz rights the ship quite well. The team is pulling in a bunch of different directions at once, in inimitable Paul Levitz style, and he balances them well, peppering the engaging "A" plot with two or three different smaller "B" plots and character vignettes. All the more a pity that Legion has been cancelled, because when Levitz is on it, he's on it, and he's on it in The Dominators.

[Review contains spoilers]

Dominators begins with the specter of a reborn Fatal Five, but as befits a good Legion tale, that subplot dips just below the horizon when Brainiac 5 and Dream Girl are kidnapped by the alien Dominators. What follows is a multi-part jailbreak/rescue storyline that we've undoubtedly seen in a Legion title before, but Levitz hits all the right notes -- the cellmate banter between Brainiac and Dream Girl, the plucky rescue effort by a team of otherwise second-string Legionnaries, and a grand "all seems lost" finale. It's an oft-told tale, but with Levitz and these characters, it works.

Levitz adds unusually good complication to the "Dominators" arc when the ruling Earthgov forbids the Legion from breaching the supposed treaty with the Dominators, and leader Mon-El complies. Mon-El has travelled a long road in Levitz's recent stories, imprisoned again in the Phantom Zone and estranged from long-time love Shadow Lass, and even becoming for a time a Green Lantern. Here, Levitz demonstrates how heavy the crown weighs on the Legion's new leader, especially in some good scenes with Mon-El and former leader Cosmic Boy debating whether or not the Legion should follow Earthgov's rules. This, too, is one of Levitz's smaller subplots, until it takes off at the end when Mon-El and Cos devise an inspired way to convince Earthgov of the Dominators' treachery.

This eight-issue trade (larger by one or two than most DC Comics paperbacks) includes the single-issue prologue, the four-part "Dominators" story, and then a two-part tale before the book's Zero Month issue. The two-part story features new Legionnaire Chemical Kid, a nice counterpoint to the last trade's two-issue focus on new Legionnaire Dragonwing. Chemical Kid is unsure of himself and new to being a Legionnaire, and so serves to offer a new reader's perspective to the story. I was surprised that Levitz showed perhaps the most experienced Legionnaire, Cosmic Boy, being defeated so easily by two-bit criminals in this story, but it gave Chemical Kid and his mentor Element Lad a chance to shine in the issues.

Legion has never, however, been the most approachable book, one that rewards study rather than casual readership, and Dominators is no exception. Levitz starts out with a scene with Invisible Kid that hearkens back to Legion events in the 1980s -- pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths, even. Levitz never quite explains who the Fatal Five are, why they're a danger, or where their current members are, so the reader must trust that they're a threat rather than fully understanding it.

Dominators also picks up a number of character bits from the final pre-Flashpoint Legion book, When Evil Calls, and the earlier volumes -- this wasn't all that long ago, but that story was so (good and) complicated that I felt even though I read it, I could have done with a refresher. This doesn't put me off as a reader -- again, I'm not sure you can love the Legion without loving its continuity -- rather I think it's probably good that Levitz is making the reader "work for it" more than he did in Hostile World (though whether this contributed to Legion's cancellation is a possibility).

The only discordant note in the book is the Zero Month issue. It's good that Levitz ties this to his Legion: Secret Origin (at least we don't have two Legion origins running around) and in all his characterization of the Legionnaires here is better (more mature) than in Secret Origin. But the story moves at breakneck speed, and it was hard to know what was history and what Levitz was newly establishing (Coluans only have one child a century? There's a baby Coluan girl somewhere -- probably not a baby any more -- that Brainiac has to deal with somehow?). Apparently Brainiac 5 does something bad (in a story called "Brainiac's Original Sin") involving his ancestor Brainiac, though what he did and why are never made clear. There's also a cut scene that seems to involve Brainiac turning an errant thief into Tharok, leader of the Fatal Five, but this, too, is so quick -- Who is this thief? How did he get on Colu? -- as to be more confusing than engaging.

If, as it seems, the Zero Month issue is supposed to tie into the Fatal Five story (and indeed the next and final Legion trade is called The Fatal Five), possibly that issue would have been better served leading off the third volume instead, where it would be prologue instead of uncertain ending.

But overall, Legion of Super-Heroes: The Dominators is more proof that Paul Levitz really "gets" the Legion, from founding members Saturn Girl and Lightning Lad kidnapping Cosmic Boy for a night out, Cos's problems with Mon-El as leader, Brainiac and Dream Girl and the rest. Reading such a good Legion book -- Levitz back up to his recent standards -- makes it all the more disappointing this era is about to come to an end.

[Includes art by former Legion artist Steve Lightle, Francis Portella, Scott Kolins. Original covers; Kolins Zero Month sketchbook.]

Later this week, we'll talk Man of Steel, and then join us Thursday for a sure-to-be-controversial review ...

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Number 1390: “All that glitters...”

For a time in the 1950s comic artist John Forte’s work could be found prominently in ACG titles. He went from there to DC where he did the Bizarro World stories in Adventure Comics, written by Jerry Siegel. He then became the first artist for the Legion of Superheroes. He died young in 1965.

I never really saw him as a superhero artist, although his Bizarro stories are some of my favorites of the era. My affection for Forte is for his work on mystery and supernatural. This particular story, “The Glittering Nightmare,” is credited to Forte and writer Shane O’Shea (actually ACG editor Richard E. Hughes). It has a scientist obsessed with a project that ruins his marriage and an alien lifeform taking on earthly shapes, reminding us of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I showed this story in the early days of this blog, but these are my new and improved scans.

From Forbidden Worlds #76 (1959):

Some pre-Comics Code Forte here. Just click the picture.

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