Can the Batusi be far behind?

See here for the original (link via the Absorbascon).

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The Brave and the Bold issue 5 “The Lords of Luck” Chapter 5 “The Batman of Tomorrow” by Mark Waid and George Pérez (storytellers), Bob Wiacek (inks), Tom Smith (colours), Rob Leigh (lettering) and Joey Cavalieri (editor), September 2007, DC Comics

Reviews: Aquaman, Hellblazer, The Brave and the Bold

Aquaman, Sword of Atlantis issue 50: “Cold Water” by Tad Williams (writer), Shawn McManus (penciller), Walden Wong (inker), Todd Klein (letters), Dan Brown (colours), Joey Cavalieri (editor), cover by Mario Alberti. DC Comics, May 2007, 38 pages of strip, US$3.99.

I hadn’t encountered Aquaman since Grant Morrison’s JLA. But Scipio at The Absorbascon has a list of fun things from this issue, and with a new writer and a new art team starting here, I thought this might be a good jumping-on point. I was wrong. Oh, there’s lots of good humoured silliness and oddity, particularly involving King Shark and the new version of Topo, but the story is highly confusing. There are no fewer than four leading characters who are either amnesiac or living under assumed identities, or both. At least two of them might be Aquaman. What I take to be the new plot – about a nasty underwater church – seems to be tangled with untucked threads from early issues that are not adequately explained.

Shawn McManus’s art is clear and expressive, but Walden Wong’s inks seem to have robbed it of the texture and character I remember from McManus’s fill-in issues of Swamp Thing. Most oddly, whole pages go by without anything to remind the reader that the action is supposed to be taking place underwater: characters stand rather than swim and talk without breathing out air bubbles. Several have long hair, which resolutely refuses to billow around in the water.

A curious feature is that all the intelligent sea creatures have human bodies, albeit topped with heads derived from marine life. Topo, for example, is no longer an octopus, but a humanoid with a squid-like head. Presumably, the authors either find it impossible to maintain sympathy for beings that look too odd, or they expect their readers to feel that way.


Overall, a disappointment. Despite all the welcome humour and invention, I don’t think that I’ll be back for issue 51.


Hellblazer issue 230: “In at the Deep End” Part 1 by Andy Diggle (writer), Leonardo Manco (artist), Lee Loughridge (colourist), Jared K Fletcher (letterer), Casey Seijas (editor), cover by Lee Bermejo. DC Comics/Vertigo, May 2007, 22 pages of strip, US$2.99.

This was another return to a character I’d neglected for some time, facilitated by the arrival of a new writer. Unlike Aquaman, this really works as an issue for new readers. All you need to know to follow Andy Diggle’s debut issue is that John Constantine is a supernatural expert mixed up with low-life, and that is explained within the story itself. This is a modest vignette, about how Constantine found himself tied to a pier support waiting to drown, and how he gets out of it, but it makes confident use of flashback, with solid characterisation, and a slow reveal of the plot. The cockney hard-man dialogue is perhaps a little overdone.


Leonardo Manco’s art seems perfect for this series: it is dark and gritty, and shows a particular talent for realistically varied faces.

Overall, this issue is spot-on, both as an entertaining story in its own right and as a hook for the continuing series.


The Brave and the Bold issue 2: “The Lords of Luck, Chapter 2: Ventura” by Mark Waid (writer), George Pérez (penciller), Bob Wiacek (inks), Tom Smith (colours), Rob Leigh (lettering), Joey Cavalieri (editor), cover by Pérez. DC Comics, May 2007, 22 pages of strip, US$2.99.

Oh, dear, this is an unpleasant surprise.

The first issue of the revived Brave and the Bold was light-hearted superhero fun. But this issue, telling of Green Lantern and Supergirl’s attempt to recover the Book of MacGuffin from the gambling-mad planet of Ventura, is dominated by teenage Kara’s blatant passes at Hal and his response.

Significantly, we are given Hal’s internal monologue, but not Kara’s; a clear signal that we are intended to identify with his viewpoint. Unfortunately, this seems to be same opinion held by puritans of assorted religions – that women are temptresses who inflame innocent males to lusts which they must manfully resist.

The whiff of antedeluvian sexual politics becomes stronger when Hal tells Kara that she’ll never get a boyfriend, because no man wants a woman who is stronger than he is. This proves to be the inspiration for Supergirl’s decision to flush out the man with the Book by hiding the big red “S” under a four-year old’s impossibly short pink dress and pigtails.

Yes, really.


Illustrating this distasteful tale, Pérez, as usual, portrays his hero and heroine with the looks of Ken and Barbie, though Supergirl is drawn with a genuinely young and animated face. The art team manage to convince us that they are giving an accurate portrayal of a crowded and gaudy planet, rather than just producing crowded and gaudy pictures. Tom Smith’s colours, in particular, are appropriately bright, and help ensure that no images dissolve into confusion.

Where I'm Coming From

My first memories of comics date from around 1970. I must have read nursery comics before then – or had them read to me – but, like many Brits, I find The Beano lurking at the start of my memory lane. My favourite strip was The Bash Street Kids, by the remarkable Leo Baxendale, but my favourite artist was Robert Nixon, who had taken over Roger the Dodger from Ken Reid.



I would later follow Nixon over to IPC (or Fleetway, or whatever the company was called that week), and strips like Kid Kong for the likes of Shiver and Shake and Whizzer and Chips.

Adventure comics at the time were dominated by television adaptations. The finest in my young days was Countdown, later renamed TV Action, and I was particularly taken by the artwork of Gerry Haylock on UFO and Doctor Who.



It wasn’t until a dying TV21 was swallowed by Valiant that I encountered the original characters now associated with 1970s British comics, like The Steel Claw, Kelly’s Eye, or my favourite, Janus Stark.



By the time 2000AD started up, I felt that I was too old for comics, so it was with guilty pleasure that I picked up the occasional issue. A few years later, and more secure in my tastes, I bought up a complete run to date from a younger boy.

But I hadn’t given up comics completely in the meantime. The hardbound volumes of Astérix were much more respectable than the British weeklies, and Albert Uderzo’s artwork appealed to me enormously (as did René Goscinny’s writing, although at the time I tended to attribute all virtue to the artist). I soon ran out of the English translations, and started struggling through my older brother’s copies of the French editions, whose British distributor used to enclose notes explaining all the French puns and cultural references.



And there were also newspaper strips. My father preferred the Daily Mirror, my mother the Daily Express or Daily Mail, so I was exposed to a range of strips from Andy Capp to Garth to Fred Bassett.



There were also the political cartoonists: Keith Waite, Cummings and Mac in those three papers, and, best of all, Trog (Wally Fawkes) in The Observer and Punch.



(The original of that portrait of British Prime Minister Ted Heath would have been in colour, but I have scanned it from the 1977 black and white collection, The World of Trog.)

What of American comic books and superheroes? To tell the truth, I wasn’t impressed. To be sure, I hadn’t seen them at their best, but in the weekly editions put out by Marvel UK. What had been intended as a single issue in America would have been chopped nonsensically into three or four parts to be read separately. In addition, the colour would be missing, and the artwork blown up to about half as big again as the intended size (and possibly “bodged” to fit a different shape of page), leaving it looking empty and crude.



It wasn’t until I missed a bus in 1981, and bought a US comic on a whim to pass the time, that I engaged with the real thing. The comic was Justice League of America 195, the first part of a JSA/JLA team-up by Gerry Conway and George Perez. I was instantly taken with the idea of Earth-2 and its 60-something Superman.

After a few months trying to cope with the seemingly random distribution of US comics to British newsagents, someone told me about specialist comic shops. So, during the 1980s, I was able to eat up Frank Miller’s Daredevil and Dark Knight Returns, Warrior, with its remarkable starting line-up of Marvelman, V for Vendetta and Laser Eraser & Pressbutton, Eddie Campbell’s Alec, Love & Rockets, Levitz and Giffen’s Legion of Super-Heroes, American Flagg, Escape, Watchmen … in short, I had joined the mainstream of English-language comics culture; where I am still paddling a quarter of a century later.