Number 1156: Ritzy Fritzi Ritz

When I look back at Sunday strips like these examples of "Fritzi Ritz," it makes me nostalgic for the golden age of newspaper comics. Full pages. Good drawings. Nowadays I look at the Sunday funnies of my own local daily newspaper and need a magnifying glass to read them.

Besides some very nice Fritzi Sunday pages going back as far as the 1940s from St. John's Fritzi Ritz #49 (1956), there are a few pages of "Nancy," which looks like a standard comic book story, but is actually five pages of unrelated daily gag strips. There are also three pages of Charles Schulz's "Peanuts" from the early days. It’s always nostalgic for me to see these early strips. I started reading it in the days when the kids in the main cast were Charlie Brown and neighborhood kids Violet and Patty, Shermy and Pigpen...and when Snoopy walked on four legs.

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Number 1155: Star Spangled Tomahawk

 

There isn't a lot of information available online about artist Edmond Good. He was born in 1910 (no death date listed; is he still alive at age 102?) Worked in Canadian comic books during WWII, then came to the U.S. to work on the comic strip, Scorchy Smith, and then comic books. He was the first artist on "Tomahawk," which began in Star Spangled Comics in 1947.

Tomahawk's first appearance was shown in Pappy's #985. Good worked for Fox, doing Dagar, Desert Hawk, and also at ACG in the 1960s, doing supernatural stories for editor Richard E. Hughes. He had a very pleasing style, which once identified, becomes immediately apparent when spotted.

In the answer to a question in Adventures Into the Unknown, Hughes further identified Good as a member of the Woodstock, N.Y. art colony.

 Joe Samachson wrote this tale, the second-ever Tomahawk story, in Star Spangled Comics #70 (1947):

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Review: Batman, Incorporated Vol. 1 deluxe hardcover (DC Comics)

The first volume of Grant Morrison's Batman, Incorporated demonstrates just how versatile a writer Morrison is. The stories run from entertaining if mundane team-ups between Batman and regular members of his Bat-family, to location pieces profiling individual members of the Batman, Inc. network, to the kind of time-shifting, multi-perspective work Morrison is known (and often praised or cursed) for.

This is ambitious, adventurous work, though the end is just the beginning (a theme of the book itself). This may disappoint some readers hoping for more than just a prologue in Batman, Inc.; there is a second story here just below the surface -- as there often is in Morrison's works -- that I found interesting enough, but ultimately my expectations for this one might just have been too high.

[Contains spoilers]

It's hard to know what you're going to get, chapter after chapter, in the first volume of Batman, Inc.. The first two issues are a Batman/Catwoman team-up in Tokyo; well-written, but nothing to truly raise Batman, Inc. to the level of Morrison's earlier works (the first two issues of Batman, Inc. do not compare, for instance, to the first two issues of Batman and Robin).

With issue three, however, Inc. becomes a trippy time-traveling tale full of false identities and double-crosses; this extends as something of a trilogy through issue five. Issue six is a bit of scene-setting for the Batman, Inc. network overall; issue seven profiles the Native American Man-of-Bats and Raven in a story where Batman hardly appears. Issue eight is a "regular" Batman/Oracle team-up, differentiated only by computer-generated art. "Issue nine," which with the DC New 52 became the first part of the Leviathan Strikes special, is mostly a Batgirl Stephanie Brown story with a little Batman thrown in; the second half of that special returns to the book's earlier trippiness for a altered tale that rivals the end of Final Crisis in its complexity.

I emphasize this to underline the range of stories found in Batman, Inc.. It may not seem so impressive for Morrison to write a "regular" Batgirl story, but it is impressive that Morrison can write the "out there" Doctor Dedalus issues and then also do a (close, but not quite) Bryan Q. Miller impression for an issue dedicated to Batgirl Stephanie Brown. Given how bizarre Morrison's work can sometimes be, I'm often surprised when I'm reminded of this important fact: Morrison is also a fan and he also loves these characters even more perhaps than some other creators do, and it shows through in the range of his work.

The Dedalus conflict is what will define what Morrison calls the first "season" of Batman, Inc.; it's complicated, but not as hard to surmount in my opinion as Final Crisis. We encounter Dedalus first when he's imprisoned by British super-team the Victory Vs; the Knight seems to time-travel here, but I think it's more just an artful flashback from the end of their attack to the beginning. The scenes of Dedalus's own perspective are equally unclear, but explained away at least in part by Dedalus's dementia -- when he seems to have killed his aide, for instance, this is a trick of Dedalus's own mind played on the reader, too.

"Leviathan Strikes"'s final chapter is the most similar to the end of Final Crisis, employing numerous shifts in time even as the forward action continues. Batman Bruce Wayne seems to attack Dedalus in his psychedelic headquarters, but later perspectives show the room in ruins, with Dedalus behind instead of in front of Batman. The finale takes place on the ship Leviathan, sinking fast; however, Dedalus only causes the ship to sink some pages later, and when Oracle sends reinforcements to the ship, it is whole and sailing. The ship is rising, figuratively, even as Batman's fortunes are sinking; in keeping with the story's theme of "oroboro," the end of the story is equally an aspect of its beginning. Like the word "Leviathan," this is another of Morrison's clues as to the villain Leviathan's identity -- Morrison's Batman saga is returning to where it began, as well.

I have faith in Morrison, but I actually found Batman, Inc.'s conclusion a let down. We've seen Talia al Ghul give over her son to Bruce Wayne, and then fight and fail to get him back. Damian remains a point of contention between the two, but when the newly resurrected Bruce Wayne talks about having seen an apocalyptic future, and Dedalus is working for the skull-headed Leviathan who promises a world-wide reign of terror, it seems far too simplistic that this boils down to Talia trying to get Damian back from Batman. The sole saving grace is the weird bat-figure at Talia's side, one who (as of Batman: The Return) himself seems to be a time-traveler and suggests an extra level to what's to come.

Under the surface of Batman's Leviathan problems, however, Morrison is also integrating with modern continuity Batman's Silver Age relationship with Batwoman Kathy Kane. Morrison touched on this way back in Batman RIP, and it's a treat for fans who've stuck with Morrison this whole time (and really, who hasn't?) that he's delving into more detail now. I had understood that Batman, Inc. was not always the intended direction of Morrison's Bat-saga, but the Kathy Kane tie throughout the books makes it seem that way, and adds to the scope of this story. Batman's relationship with Kane has long been a sore spot in continuity -- Bronze Tiger remembers his hand in Kane's death (or did, pre-New 52), but Batman never mentions her -- so it's great to see Morrison make it all make sense. That Morrison suggests Kane is still alive and returning for Batman, Inc.'s next season was the best part of the conclusion.

The first volume of Batman, Incorporated was not as dynamic as I expected; despite that I praised Morrison's "regular" issues, I'm surprised to see so many of them in this book, with less space given to the really wild international concepts the title promises. Batman, Inc. is well-illustrated throughout and offers a more detailed reading experience than most Batman comics you'd pick up, but it left me wishing this book's real story would get here already.

[Includes original and variant covers, sketches and text on all characters by Grant Morrison]

Next week we're back in the DC New 52 -- times two! -- with the Collected Editions reviews of Batman: Court of Owls and Green Lantern: Sinestro. See you then!

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Review: Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes: Ultimate Collection trade paperback (Marvel Comics)

[Guest post by Doug Glassman]

It might be unfair to call the two Earth’s Mightiest Heroes mini-series, brought together in this Ultimate Collection, an “origin story,” as the team assembles off-panel. In fact, many of the team’s major battles occur away from the main story. Earth’s Mightiest Heroes is closer to Kurt Busiek’s Untold Tales of Spider-Man in that it takes the original Lee and Kirby stories and weaves around them. We see the behind-the-scenes of the characters reacting to their new world and to their own issues.

Much of the first issue, for instance, deals with the controversy surrounding the Hulk’s membership. Iron Man assures the public that he will keep the giant reined in … and shortly thereafter, the Hulk goes rogue.

Once Captain America appears in the second issue, the first mini-series locks in its characters’ roles. Iron Man is the logical team leader, harried by the pressures of his teammates, the press, and the government, represented by Agent Murch and the wonderfully psychotic Henry Peter Gyrich. Giant-Man is the distant scientist always trying to one-up himself; the seeds for his later madness are sewn. The Wasp does her best to be the team mom and her boyfriend’s confidante. Thor is an enigma, as at this point, not many people believed he was a god; even Iron Man was skeptical. Jarvis establishes himself as the team’s backbone, even trusting in Hawkeye before any of the others do. Rick Jones is there first as an annoyance, but then as Captain America’s moral compass.

As the first half goes on, the story sets up for “Cap’s Kooky Quartet,” the second of the team’s incarnations. Had I not read The Captain before this, I would have been angry that Casey portrayed Cap as shell-shocked and hell-bent on vengeance. But Gruenwald’s Cap and Casey’s Cap both go deep into his character and point out that he is simply a great man, not a god. Rick Jones helps adjust Cap to this strange new world, and his victory over Baron Zemo is satisfying. As the first new recruit, Hawkeye wants to be a hero more out of ego and showmanship than any spirit of heroism. Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch join up simply as a way to save their lives.

Unfortunately, there’s a big gap between the first and second Earth's Mightiest Heroes series, jumping right from the formation of the Kooky Quartet to the Seventies Era. An "infodump" catches us up when Jarvis and Hawkeye explain the history of the team to the Vision. I think this robs the story of a lot of its potential; there really should have been a third mini-series between these, letting us see the Quartet and their next recruits, Hercules and the Black Knight.

The second miniseries retells the Yellowjacket storyline, in which Hank Pym went crazy and the Wasp decided to marry him to bring him back to sanity. This is merged with the return of the Super-Adaptoid and a surprising subplot for the Black Panther, both of which redeem this part story-wise.

The art for the first mini-series is from Scott Kolins, and while his art has some of the more standard “Kolins lines” at the start, it softens as it goes on. This makes for a solid transition into Will Rosado’s work on the second mini-series. The one major difference is that Kolins loves his shadows, while Rosado’s art is far shinier, which is fitting for the somewhat happier seventies-era characters. Both artists are able to strike a solid balance between the long-past era of the original stories and the modern era.

Aside from a few lines about using the Internet and some of the super-technology, it’s hard to notice that this is an updated story. It would have been tempting to update the Quinjet and some of the costumes, like the Wasp’s pointy-headed first costume or Giant-Man’s bizarre mantle/helmet costume from Avengers #15, but leaving them alone makes it easier to read these alongside the originals.

Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes can be read as its own story. It’s mostly self-contained, and the off-screen adventures are briefly shown or alluded to. However, the best way to do it is to have a copy of the original stories on-hand, either in the Marvel Masterworks versions or the cheaper Essentials. Whenever they talk about one of their adventures, jump over to the older story, read it and go back. It takes a bit of work and time, but if you’re familiar with going back and forth from one of Alan Moore’s stories to Jess Nevins’s annotations, then it all should work out.

If you enjoyed the movie and/or the cartoon that shares this books’ name, then grab some form of the original Avengers issues and make your way here. Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes is a great second stop on an Avengers reading journey. Joe Casey fleshes out the original team members and updates them while simultaneously not making them clichéd. The artwork of Kolins and Rosado is beautiful, and be sure to check out the covers, which make up the chapter dividers. They each pair a letter of “Avengers” with a character or scene.

My only major complaint is that it feels like a chunk is missing out of the middle of the book. Casey has gone back and done the actual origin tale in his Avengers: The Origin, and I hope he does the same with the Kooky Quartet and the rest of the late sixties Avengers.

Next week, it’s Captain America, Thor, the Uncanny X-Men, Bishop, X-Man, Iron Man, the Avengers, Gambit, the Adjectiveless X-Men and the Unlimited X-Men, all together in a desperate attempt to keep Earth from turning into a prison planet. [And be here tomorrow for the Collected Editions review of Batman, Incorporated!]

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Number 1154: Blackhawk and the slinky, kinky Black Widow

There’s a panel on page three of this tale from Blackhawk #94 (1955) that shows how disconnected comics could get between visuals and scripting. Although the Blackhawks’ jets are screaming away from an airfield, a mechanic is shouting, “Hey, Blackhawk, I wanted to ask you...” His buddy says, “Let him go, Sam!” as if there was a way to call Blackhawk back.

(I can just visualize artist Dick Dillin's first encounter with that panel in the script, exclaiming, “....Wha---?!”)

Blackhawk and his fellow soldiers of fortune have just captured the villain, Mogreb, who has hidden the plans for an “atomic ray machine” and won't say where they are. He's sentenced to hang at noon by a judge who presides in a court in whatever unnamed country the story takes place. In the aforementioned strange panel on page three the second mechanic says, “Blackhawk hates capital punishment,” and in the very next panel Blackhawk says to his men, “I’m not mooning over Mogreb's hanging! He deserves to die!”

A girl masquerading as a reporter shows her true colors by becoming the villainous Black Widow, and the race is on to the plans for the atomic ray machine. The slinky, kinky Black Widow, like many other bad-ass women in Blackhawk, acts the dominatrix, in control of a gang of men in masks. That fetish stuff fits with the leather-clad Blackhawks. I like her, even if other things in the script are off-kilter.

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Review: Animal Man Vol. 1: The Hunt trade paperback (DC Comics)

I admit that even though I enjoyed the DC Comics New 52's first collected offering, Justice League: Origin, it was not the kind of "instant classic" comic I was hoping for to launch the New 52. Animal Man: The Hunt is that comic.

Though The Hunt does not really take its impetus from the reborn DC Universe (aside from foreshadowing a crossover with another "Dark" title), it is nonetheless a fantastic take on the Animal Man character by writer Jeff Lemire with artist Travel Foreman, and a great start to DC's new line. Animal Man is witty and frightening, faithful to Grant Morrison's definitive portrayal but a smidge less meta, a little more pop horror. This is what the Vertigo imprint looks like meshed with the DC Universe, and it's just about perfect.

[Contains spoilers]

Jeff Lemire's Animal Man Buddy Baker is a good guy who doesn't quite fit in anywhere, a sense we got of the character in his recent appearances in the weekly 52 series and Countdown to Adventure, too. The initial text interview that Lemire conducts with Buddy (a nod, perhaps, to Grant Morrison's own talks with his character) points out that Buddy can never quite sit still -- stunt man, super-hero, activist, actor -- and yet he's had a stable marriage throughout his modern depiction. What would seem a credit to Buddy, however, is the source of most of the book's tension. Buddy is not an overly successful super-hero, but neither is he entirely present for his family; grasping at both, he succeeds at neither.

Lemire makes this worse in that Buddy learns he's an agent of the cosmic force The Red, meant solely to father and then protect his even-more powerful daughter Maxine. The reader detects a hint of jealousy on Buddy's part, and it's another complexity Lemire adds to the situation -- Buddy isn't who he thought he was nor who he wants to be. The Red wants Buddy to protect his daughter for the benefit of all humanity even if it means sacrificing son Cliff and wife Ellen, something Buddy's not prepared to do (yet).

Buddy therefore exists in this in between space, victim of a good life yet unable to please anyone, including himself. It makes for a fully-rounded character and wonderful reading, because we root for the inherit goodness of Buddy (even his name suggests someone you'd get along with) even as we can see the threads of that good life beginning to come unraveled at the seams.

One way in which Lemire demonstrates that life coming unraveled is in the book's final chapter, which shows in part Buddy's movie about a down-on-his-luck superhero, Tights. The movie finds former Red Thunder Chas Grant divorced, drunk, unable to see his son, and ultimately almost beaten to death when he puts on his costume again. The film is obviously a vision of there but what might otherwise be Buddy himself, being watched surreptitiously by Buddy's often-troubled son Cliff.

The movie underlines all that Buddy stands to lose as he takes his family on the run from the Red's opposite, the Rot. At the same time, mixed media and meta-interpretation has long been a facet of Animal Man series, and I wouldn't be surprised if we found Buddy living out Tights before too long, or if in an Alice in Wonderland twist we found out Buddy's life is the dream and Chas Grant is the dreamer, or the like.

The horror in this book evokes the early days of DC's mature Vertigo imprint and the series that lead up to Vertigo, of which Morrison's Animal Man was one. It is not gross-out horror here, but the fear of something hideous waiting for you when you turn the next page; I was reminded, for instance, of Neil Gaiman's first arc in Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes. Lemire balances this with a lively amount of humor, both in superhero Animal Man's absurd family drama, the hilarious voice of precocious four-year-old Maxine, and the tropes of a family-horror flick -- Ellen and Cliff run over a Rot monster with the family car, for instance.

All of this is sold handily by artist Travel Foreman. In previews of Animal Man I wasn't sure I'd enjoy this series because Foreman's art is sketchy and distorted, but indeed it's just right for this series. He's got the facial expressions right for the family drama, but also depicts grotesquely distorted monsters -- akin to Doug Mahnke's work, perhaps, except Mahnke zigs toward science-fiction while Foreman zags to the supernatural. On occasion I had trouble telling members of the Red apart, but this is a small matter in the book as a whole.

It's only the beginning of the DC New 52, but I'm already eager for the second round of collections -- Swamp Thing gets name-checked quite a bit in Animal Man: The Hunt, and it ought be in the second collection that we see these two series come together. Lemire has already departed the other DC New 52 series that he started, Frankenstein, Agent of SHADE -- a shame but one I can't feel so worked up about, just as long as he'll be sticking around on Animal Man for a while.

I said Justice League was an accessible book? Animal Man is even more so. Don't let this one pass you by.

[Includes full covers, Travel Foreman sketchbook section]

We're going to dive back into the "old" DC Universe coming up, but I don't think you'll mind -- next is the Collected Editions review of Batman, Incorporated! See you then.

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