Super-Powered Comics: J. Michael Straczynski's Red Circle

I hyped up DC’s The Red Circle a few months back. Well, August brought us the J. Michael Straczynski-pinned series of one-shots in case you were already unaware. Apparently a lot of people were, as the sales on the books were so-so at best. It’s a shame more people aren’t interested in trying out these new characters, but the format for their release honestly only encourages people familiar with the characters’s previous incarnations any chance of interest. DC did nothing to market these at all, and that is a damn shame. Even a small spot in the current Blackest Night crossover might have helped, but as I surmised when DC licensed these characters along with the Milestone line, they have no plans of using their licensed characters in anything that will potentially be reprinted again and again and again.

But I am here to review the four new takes on the old Archie heroes, and that is what I will do. Make your own judgments about DC’s handling of the license, but try not to let that keep you from buying any book you want, including these titles.

The line opened with The Hangman. With pencils by the criminally underrated Tom Derenick and inks by the legendary Bill Sienkiewicz, the art shines through. The character of the Hangman definitely has similar themes to other mystical immortals. I can best describe him as a cross of the Spectre and El Diablo, but with a genuine secret identity. Of all the characters, he has the most potential as the initial four stories end.

Inferno came next with art by Sword of Dracula’s Greg Scott. A lot has been made by Inferno’s fiery alter ego resembling Dan Didio. Inferno fills the standard John Doe/cypher character slot. His past is a mystery to everyone, including himself; he doesn’t know the origin of his powers; or even understand his transformations. JMS tweaks the formula a bit, but the initial chapter is quite predictable. He does have a brief and somewhat entertaining battle with the previous week’s star, but it does more to show how intriguing a character Hangman could be.

The Web opens week 3, with art by Roger Robinson (of Prototype and Azrael fame) and Hilary Barta. Here we get a rather large digression from the original concept. Now The Web is a rich heir with too much time on his hands. To prove to himself he can do good, he dons a costume and sets out to answer calls from help off the internet. The concept works better than I expected, even though I think JMS shoehorns a bit of tragedy in to the story to give it more of a Spider-Man meets Batman origin. The Web has the potential to either be great or an absolute mess. It will be interesting to see where the ongoing ends up.

The Red Circle rounds out with The Shield. The utterly out of place art team of Scott McDaniel and Andy Owens provide the story’s art. A survivor of a bomb blast in Afghanistan gets an experimental exo-skeleton and becomes the military’s first on-call hero. The book runs to the serious and the cartoonish stylings of McDaniel distract from what could otherwise be a solid political action thriller. JMS does more to hint at the backstory of the Shield than any other character, which is unfortunate...

as with last week’s The Shield #1, most of those subplots are nowhere to be seen. Instead we get a rather dull trip in to post-52 Bialya which seems less of a story than a set-up for a guest shot by DC’s other new military hero: Magog. Hopefully, Eric Trautmann can bring a little more to the story with subsequent chapters. I will say the art team of Marco Rudy and Mick Gray are far and away more suited for this character than McDaniel and Owens.

The backup featuring Inferno gives us a little bit more about the character, but it only serves as a set-up to a repeat from his one-shot, only this time he fights Green Arrow instead of Hangman. Greg Scott remains solid on the art, and Brandon Jerwa seems to have the seeds of a decent opening story arc. I just wonder if a co-feature is the best way to deal with a character that clearly has the longest story drive of these four heroes.

The Web #1 debuts later this month, and I am sure I will be back with a review of that when it is out. FOr now, I recommend The Red Circle but suggest you can take a pass on The Shield #1. Let’s hope later issues show some improvement, as I do not want to see the Red Circle heroes go the way of the late, lamented Impact Comics.

Super-Powered Comics: Rampaging Wolverine

With the release of X-Men Origins: Wolverine on DVD today, I thought I would go back and look at the single best release the movie gave to us. (I still haven’t watched the film yet; expect my review in the near future) That title is a one-shot called Rampaging Wolverine from just a week before the film. Behind a painted cover by Nelson are forty-eight pages of glorious black and white art. The concept harkens back to Marvel’s magazines of the seventies and eighties. I still miss Savage Sword of Conan, so I gave it a try as soon as I saw it in Marvel Previews.

Joshua Hale Fialkov and Paco Diaz Luque open the book with a tale called “Sense Memory”. The story details Logan’s first experience with Madripoor. Pirates get involved, and Wolverine uncovers secrets in both the present and the past. It brings back great memories of the early Claremont/Buscema days of Wolverine, a time period I still fondly remember.

“Unconfirmed Kill” by Chris Yost and Mateus Santolouco is by no means as strong a story, but it does offer a short and clever play on Logan’s healing factor.

“Kiss, Kiss” is a prose story by Robin Furth with spot illustrations by Nelson. Furth may have been reading Lord of the Rings before she wrote this one: it involves Wolverine’s battle with a giant spider. Even so, the story does have a couple clever bits in it, and just the embrace of superhero prose in the book makes me happy.

“Modern Primitive” by Ted McKeever closes out the book. The author of Metropol and Eddy Current seems like an odd choice for the Canadian mutant, but his art style actually offers a pretty cool Logan. The story is a rather straight forward affair about his battle with a giant baboon (no, seriously, it is a giant baboon), but the story really isn’t the star here. McKeever’s art is not for everyone, but if you enjoy it at all you will get some fine work in this one.

Though no story but the lead are rock-solid, Rampaging Wolverine offers a compelling and entertaining package. The art is beautiful through-out, and even in black and white, forty-eight pages with no ads for $3.99 is a steal in today’s market. A black and white follow-up book is on Marvel’s schedule in the near future, this one starring Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu. If it is as good as Rampaging Wolverine it too will deserve a Recommended.

Super-Powered Comics: Silver Surfer Requiem

As I said in my review of Bullet Points, J. Michael Straczynski is one of those creators who is either great... or terribly off-base. That work was an exceptional example, and Silver Surfer: Requiem is another.

With art by Esad Ribic, Straczynski crafts another of Marvel’s tales of the fall of one of their characters. In Requiem, Norrin Radd falls under the influence of some kind of virus that eats away at his very being. With each subuquent issue he sets out to make even the most minute changes to make his legacy mean something as he moves inexorably to his demise.

The Fantastic Four guest star in issue one, but it is issue two guest-starring Spider-Man where the story starts to shine. We get a look at what the Surfer sees everyday as he soars the cosmic spaceways... and perhaps the world improves for it. Issue three gives us his attempt to stop an intergalactic war, while four takes us back to Zenn-La and his impending demise. And a certain cosmic being known as Galactus...

Though a quick read, Requiem offers an excellent look at the strange enigma known as the Silver Surfer. Ribic’s painted art is gorgeous, and JMS keeps the story flowing along well while channeling the feel of the late sixties Stan Lee issues. All in all, a good solid edition to “The End” line. Recommended.

A Day for Real Heroes / That Old Piece of Cloth

This being a blog about fictional characters, I think today it is best to pause to celebrate the real heroes of seven years ago. My thoughts and prayers go with them and all who died on this day in 2001.

But I will post this speech by comic writer/artist Frank Miller from the fifth anniversary of the attacks in 2006, entitled “That Old Piece of Cloth”:

I was just a boy in the 1960s. My adolescence wasn’t infused with the civil rights struggle or the sexual revolution or the Vietnam War, but with their aftermath.

My high school teachers were ex-hippies and Vietnam vets. People who protested the war and people who served as soldiers. I was taught more about John Lennon than I was about Thomas Jefferson.

Both of my parents were World War II veterans. FDR-era patriots. And I was exactly the age to rebel against them.

It all fit together rather neatly. I could never stomach the flower-child twaddle of the ’60s crowd and I was ready to believe that our flag was just an old piece of cloth and that patriotism was just some quaint relic, best left behind us.

It was all about the ideas. I schooled myself in the writings of Madison and Franklin and Adams and Jefferson. I came to love those noble, indestructible ideas. They were ideas, to my young mind, of rebellion and independence, not of idolatry.

But not that piece of old cloth. To me, that stood for unthinking patriotism. It meant about as much to me as that insipid peace sign that was everywhere I looked: just another symbol of a generation’s sentimentality, of its narcissistic worship of its own past glories.

Then came that sunny September morning when airplanes crashed into towers a very few miles from my home and thousands of my neighbors were ruthlessly incinerated—reduced to ash. Now, I draw and write comic books. One thing my job involves is making up bad guys. Imagining human villainy in all its forms. Now the real thing had shown up. The real thing murdered my neighbors. In my city. In my country. Breathing in that awful, chalky crap that filled up the lungs of every New Yorker, then coughing it right out, not knowing what I was coughing up.

For the first time in my life, I know how it feels to face an existential menace. They want us to die. All of a sudden I realize what my parents were talking about all those years.

Patriotism, I now believe, isn’t some sentimental, old conceit. It’s self-preservation. I believe patriotism is central to a nation’s survival. Ben Franklin said it: If we don’t all hang together, we all hang separately. Just like you have to fight to protect your friends and family, and you count on them to watch your own back.

So you’ve got to do what you can to help your country survive. That’s if you think your country is worth a damn. Warts and all.

So I’ve gotten rather fond of that old piece of cloth. Now, when I look at it, I see something precious. I see something perishable.

“That Old Piece of Cloth” from NPR’s This I Believe.

Super-Powered Prose: Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko

Some people are probably familiar with the movie version of Night Watch, one of the best foreign films to appear in the last few years. But before it was turned in to a fine film by Timur Bekmambetov, it was equally entertaining in its original form: as a novel by Russian fiction writer Sergei Lukyanenko.

The premise of Night Watch is straight-forward: two secret societies exist unseen to human eyes. Locked in constant conflict, the sides of Light and Dark now sit in a truce to keep their war from destroying everything. The light sorcerers belong to the Night Watch and monitor the forces of the dark, which cover everything from sorcerers to vampires. The dark in turn have the Day Watch, which serve as an answer to the light. This leads to multiple political machinations. And these machinations unwitting pull several people, including Anton, our narrator.

I do not want to go in to plot points for those unfamiliar with the work, because I feel Night Watch in both its forms deserves a much large audience. But I will say that what at first seems like another supernatural thriller quickly morphs in to a battle of right and wrong played out by dozens of super-powered beings. I have long listed the movie as one of my favorite pieces of super-powered film-making. The novel equals, maybe exceeds it, as a look at a real world populated by metahumans.

Clocking in at well over four hundred pages, Night Watch the novel is a much deeper experience than the movie. If you have seen the film and wondered about the book, go out and read it. If you are unfamiliar with either work, go check out the book for a great combination of the supernatural and the super-powered. And if you’re worried seeing a Russian name in the author slot, don’t be. Andrew Bromfield gives the book an excellent translation. He keeps the depth the original novel clearly possesses while making sure it is readable as a modern American novel.

Night Watch is a novel not to miss. Highly Recommended.