Real-Time Lord

This week’s new episode of Doctor Who has a gimmick: called “42”, it tells the events of 42 minutes on board a spaceship, unfolded in real time over the 42 minutes of the episode. Presumably, it is no coincidence that “42” is 24 backwards.

Comics’ big recent experiment with real-time storytelling was DC’s series 52, each weekly issue portraying what happened in one week in the DC Universe. The writers found that this placed them under certain constraints (no “man at the door with a gun” cliffhangers, for example) and sometimes they fluffed it (such as the police taking several weeks to turn up to arrest Lex Luthor), but they did have the advantage that readers were tied to the real-time framework too, receiving only a week’s worth of story every week.

Within a single issue, it is harder to regulate the speed at which the reader reads. There is a battery of devices comics creators can use to simulate the flow of time: the number and size of the panels on a page, for example; their proportions (wide panels seem to take more time to read – Frank Quitely uses them for this purpose in All-Star Superman); the density of the images and amount of text to read in each panel; the width of gutters; and the use of images that explicitly indicate the passage of time such as changes in the angle and intensity of daylight.

Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns gives us a clearcut example of some techniques for controlling the flow of time in comics. Most pages are built of a large number of small panels (on an underlying sixteen-panel grid), each containing a simple, quickly read image, with a consistent number words. As a result, these pages tick by rapidly, but then Miller will throw in a full-page splash, and time seems to stand still.


Bullet time, right there on the comics page. But techniques like this only affect the relative speed at which time seems to pass. Is it possible for a single-issue single narrative to simulate the absolute passage of a particular amount of time, an in particular the time it takes to read?

Will Eisner had a go. In The Spirit section for September 11 1949, Eisner told the story of an attempted robbery, killing, and failed flight that took just “Ten Minutes”.



The most obvious technique that Eisner uses to try to regulate time across his seven pages is to read a watch for us at the start of each one. This is less crude than it might seem. Since we know from the start that the lead character, Freddy, will die after ten minutes, the marked passage of time also builds up the tension.



The illusion of the regular passage of time is maintained by the panel progressions. With only two exceptions, each panel follows directly on from the previous one, with no cutting away from Freddy. In general, any given area of any page contains the same amount of imagery and words for the eye to read, although Eisner does not use an identical panel grid on each page.

One of the exceptions is telling. The events of the first two-thirds of page 4, in which two customers discover the dead shop-keeper, seem to pass quickly. Then we get this panel, with no panel boundaries and lots of empty space, which works like those Frank Miller splashes, taking us out of the regular time-scheme. Unlike the Miller example, Eisner brings us back into the story not immediately, but about a minute later.



After the dramatic events of killing, discovery and flight, Eisner reminds us of how short a period of time has passed by bringing back the little girl from page 1, still working through her chant.



Only after this does Eisner bring in the Spirit himself, bringing his story to its tragic denouement, as Freddy is killed by a subway train.



Does it work? Not entirely. It took me four-and-a-half minutes to read this story through, not ten. Some of the pacing also seems a cheat. On page 6, Freddy is hailed by Dolan from a police car (Dolan is asking for directions, unaware of Freddy’s role in the crime that he has been called to); Freddy then walks – casually, hands in pocket – into a subway station, asks for a ticket, drops his change, has it picked up by the Spirit and passes through a turnstile. According the page-top watch, this is all supposed to take just a minute. It doesn’t match.

But I only noticed that when I went back to work out what Eisner was doing. And no-one in their right mind (unless preparing a blog entry, of course) sits down with a stopwatch to time how long it takes to read a comic strip. While reading it, Eisner’s story successfully maintains the illusion of the sustained passage of events in real time. It also tells an effective story pitched somewhere between film noir and O Henry. So, yes, it works.

Let’s see how Doctor Who does, in a rather easier medium for this sort of thing.


Panels

Batman “Hunt the Dark Knight” by Frank Miller (story, pencils, inks), Klaus Janson (inks), Lynn Varley (colours and visual effects), John Constanza (letters), DC Comics, 1986, reprinted in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Titan Books, 1986

The Spirit “Ten Minutes” by Will Eisner and his studio, The Spirit Section, September 11 1949, reprinted in The Spirit Archives Volume 19, DC Comics, 2006

Review: Red Sonja – Vacant Shell

Red Sonja: Vacant Shell by Rick Remender (writer), Paul Renaud (art), Chris Chuckry and Paul Renaud (colours), Simon Bowland (letters) and Luke Lieberman (editor), Dynamite Entertainment, May 2007, 32 pages of strip, US$4.99

Good news: This is a straightfoward story of the classic pulp sword and sorcery model. Sonja runs across something nasty, and deals with it. There is pleasing clunky dialogue, and a distinct lack of epic, potentous overtones.

Bad news: This is a one-shot. Rick Remender is not writing the regular series.

Good news: There is no sign of the regular Red Sonja rape fantasy, in which our heroine will gladly give herself sexually to any man who can beat her in a fight.

Bad news: She’s going to be forcibly married to a demon. That rarely happens to Conan.

Good news: Paul Renaud’s art has an easy, fluid naturalism, whether dealing with figures in motion, horses, woods and buildings or zombies.

Bad news: The chainmail bikini looks silly, no matter who how well it is drawn.


Bad news: I am being drummed out of the Pedants’ Union for failing to mention that “chainmail” is not a genuine medieval term, and, anyway, the bikini is scale armour, not mail. (“Bikini” is, of course, a medieval Flemish term meaning “impractical fetish gear”, and unrelated to the modern English “bikini” meaning “two-piece swimsuit”.)

Good news: No more Pedants’ Union dues.

Review: Welcome to Tranquility

Welcome to Tranquility issue 1, “Fade to Grey” by Gail Simone (writer), Neil Googe (artist), Carrie Strachan (colours), Travis Lanham (letters) and Ben Abernathy (editor), Wildstorm Productions/DC Comics, February 2007, 22 pages of strip, US$2.99

Welcome to Tranquility issue 2, “Snake in the Grass” by Gail Simone (writer), Neil Googe (artist), Carrie Strachan (colours), Travis Lanham (letters) and Ben Abernathy (editor), Wildstorm Productions/DC Comics, March 2007, 22 pages of strip, US$2.99

Welcome to Tranquility issue 3, “A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody” by Gail Simone (writer), Neil Googe (artist), Carrie Strachan (colours), Travis Lanham (letters) and Ben Abernathy (editor), Wildstorm Productions/DC Comics, April 2007, 23 pages of strip, US$2.99

Welcome to Tranquility issue 4, (untitled) by Gail Simone (writer), Neil Googe (artist), Carrie Strachan (colours), Travis Lanham (letters) and Ben Abernathy (editor), Wildstorm Productions/DC Comics, May 2007, 22 pages of strip, US$2.99

Welcome to Tranquility issue 5, “Too Much for the Man” by Gail Simone (writer), Neil Googe (artist), Carrie Strachan (colours), Travis Lanham (letters) and Ben Abernathy (editor), Wildstorm Productions/DC Comics, June 2007, 22 pages of strip, US$2.99

Welcome to Tranquility issue 6, “Fade to Grey, Finale” by Gail Simone (writer), Neil Googe and Billy Dallas Patton (pencils), Neil Googe (inks), Carrie Strachan (colours), Travis Lanham (letters) and Ben Abernathy (editor), Wildstorm Productions/DC Comics, July 2007, 21 pages of strip, US$2.99


Welcome to Tranquility provides a new wrinkle on the superhero genre. Or rather, lots of wrinkles, because the town of Tranquility contains a large retirement community of superheroes (or “maxis” as they are called here), among whom the story is set.

That presents writer Gail Simone with a challenge, because these old characters are also new ones, with no actual backstory to draw upon. She largely avoids the lazy route of making her characters avatars of well-known originals (apart from the Captain-Marvellous Maximum Man and the one-eyed war hero Colonel Cragg). Instead, their past is established right here in the series, with pages of pastiche golden-age comics, along with other ephemera – “trading stamps”, TV listings magazine articles and the like – interleaved into the present-day narrative.

Simone and Googe also use similarly digressive panels to establish elements of their scene. The first issue builds towards the murder of Mr Articulate, who always wears a blue rose in his lapel, at the “Chick ‘n’ Go” restaurant. Before we get there, panels have incongruously featured the Chick ‘n’ Go logo and even one of its menus, while blue roses have spread through the panel gutters, prefiguring the end of the chapter. There is rather less of this in later issues, either because the creators felt that familiarity with the locale had already been established, or because they were unhappy with the effect.

Simone uses her reliance on supposed third-hand accounts for another purpose too. Because, initial appearances to the contrary, this is no fairplay whodunnit. Mr Articulate, himself a hero of fairplay mysteries, leaves behind a traditional cryptic clue. But the only person who understands it is the murderer. And Mr Articulate’s own cases were less clearcut than we might suppose, as the out-of-town thug the Emoticon points out.

The Emoticon’s mask reveals his true feelings at all times, making it almost impossible for him to lie. In Tranquility, only the baddies tell the whole truth. “Comics lie,” says one of the villains, admitting it only after being unmasked. And that includes the very comics we are reading. The heroes are living a lie, or at least hiding a truth. Even the sheriff, not a maxi herself, and for the most part a straightforward and honest type, ends the story by concealing another character’s part in it.

This theme of untrustworthiness permeates the comic. When maxi-heroine Pink Bunny suddenly takes sides against her husband, Mayor Fury, it seems inadequately explained by the events and words we have seen. The insinuation is that the apparently happy marriage presented earlier is another of Tranquility’s deceptions – but that insinuation emerges only from the atmosphere and context of the story.

There are some mis-steps. Five panels showing ants fighting while characters discuss the idyllic nature of Tranquility is four panels more than needed to establish that there are conflicts beneath the surface. Simone and Googe sometimes take their misleads a little too far. In this panel, for example, we see aviatrix Minxy Millions wreathed in Mr Articulate’s blue roses (a symbolic appearance – they are not literally there at the scene). But there is no relationship between the two characters at all in the rest of the series.

Neil Googe’s art is not really to my tastes, but is well-suited to the story. His combination of big-foot character design with comics-realist detail and shading works to animate the most physically aged of the elderly maxi population. It may also be useful if later story arcs bring in characters from other types of comic, as it could accommodate anything up to and including funny animals. In that respect it has much in common with Shane Oakley’s style on Albion. The pastiche pages are not greatly different in basic drawing, but are differentiated by simpler layouts and the use of flat, faded colour with benday dots.

Ordinarily, I would have picked up an issue of this series, seen that I liked it and then waited for the trade paperback collection. But as yet, no such collection has been solicited, and with sales figures very low, I was worried that it might never appear. That would be a shame. The first six issues of Welcome to Tranquility form an interesting and entertaining story that reads best as a single piece. Read this series while you can.

Update, 1 June 2007 DC has now announced a trade paperback collection, due in December.

Eclipsouch

The lettering seems to have fallen off last week's DC in-house ad for Countdown. Let's see if we can help out. (Click to enlarge, as ever.)

The Comic What I Drew

Another find while reshelving was The Morecambe & Wise Special from 1977. So far as I know, this was the only time anyone produced a comic strip starring Eric and Ernie, then at the height of their popularity as Britain’s leading comedy double act (though I’d love to be proved wrong).


At the time this was published, Film Fun had been dead for 15 years, having ended its 42-year run in 1962. The style of cartooning used in this strip echoed that of the older comic, as in the Laurel and Hardy panel below, drawn by Terry Wakefield’s father, George Wakefield, for a 1941 edition of Film Fun, and scanned here from Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury’s fine book Great British Comics. (At least, Gravett and Stanbury attribute this to George Wakefield - Lambiek, on the other hand, says that Terry Wakefield had taken over the strip in 1938.)


I wonder how many readers of the Morecambe and Wise Special remembered the Film Fun style? I think my only exposure to it at the time would have been from the 1971 Shire Publications book Discovering Comics, written by pioneering British comics historian Denis Gifford – who also wrote the Morecambe and Wise strip.

Update, 3 June 2007
In addition to the Reveille Extra strip mentioned by Shaqui in the comments section, I find that Denis Gifford and Terry Wakefield also collaborated on The Morecambe and Wise Comic Book! (Corgi Books' Carousel imprint, 1977) and Eric & Ernie's TV Fun Book (Arrow Books, 1978). I don't know if any of this was the same material reprinted.

Nasty Frank

Frank Bellamy was one of the leading British adventure strip artists of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. I’ve wittered on about his Doctor Who art before, but he was also well-known for the dynamic and dramatic artwork he provided for the likes of Dan Dare, Heros the Spartan and Fraser of Africa for the Eagle, Thunderbirds for TV21 and Garth for the Daily Mirror. But I have never really associated him with comedy. I had forgotten Bert Fegg’s Nasty Book for Boys and Girls.

I stumbled across my copy recently while rearranging my bookshelves (yes, that was a thrilling day at Gad, Sir! Towers, I can tell you). Bert Fegg was a pseudonym for Terry Jones and Michael Palin, and various bits of 1974’s Bert Fegg’s Nasty Book for Boys and Girls later resurfaced in their post-Monty Python work. The chapter “Across the Andes by Frog”, for example, would be developed into an episode of Ripping Yarns.


Most of the illustrations in the book were by the cartoonist Martin Honeysett. The example above is from “The Famous Five Go Pillaging: An Exciting Tale of Children Caught Up in the Danish Invasions”. But Frank Bellamy also contributed artwork for a two-page strip, “A Cowboy Story”. Click the pages below to enlarge them to legible size.


It seems to me that Bellamy’s art here serves the same purpose as the voiceovers on Monty Python’s fake trailers, adverts and slideshow lectures. It creates a set of genre expectations which can then be subverted by deadpan absurdity. It is important that Bellamy should draw this exactly as he would if it were a serious adventure strip: the faintest hint of silliness in the art would be fatal to the joke.

The whole book is quite a hoot. If you ever come across a copy at a reasonable price, snap it up.

Reviews: Blade, Countdown, Cover Girl, Madame Mirage, Rex Libris

Blade issue 9, “The Big Fight” by Marc Guggenheim (writer), Howard Chaykin (artist), Edgar Delgado (Colour), VC’s Ron Wooton (letters) and Aubrey Sitterson (editor), cover by Marko Djurdjevic, Marvel Comics, May 2007, 21 pages of strip, US$2.99

That’s a pretty but rather misleading cover. This issue isn’t a World War Hulk tie-in (thank goodness), and no vampire guardsmen in bearskins appear (alas). I’m not really sure that Russian Constructivist graphics and German Black-Letter type spell “London” to me, but maybe they do to an American readership.

Because Blade is still in London, investigating the secrets of his family, and their relationship to the Order of Tyrana. It seems that one person who can help him is Union Jack. Cue self-referential joke.

"… a key member is a guy named Union Jack. (Which might sound as weird to the Brits as us calling a guy 'American Flag.')"

(That’s assuming, of course, that any of us readers still remember Chaykin’s American Flagg, given how long it has been out-of-print.) Conveniently, Union Jack is back at Blade’s hotel, trying to kill his side-kick Hannibal King.



This comic is a competent, professionally written and drawn issue which advances the overarching plot and gives us a decent fight scene. Even so, it does all feel a bit thin. This is not just because the page count has been dropped by one temporarily to accommodate a text recap page (as of next month, the letters page is being dropped instead). The remaining pages typically contain only four or five panels each, sometimes less, and those panels don’t contain an extraordinary amount of text or detailed imagery either. It's almost as if it was being scripted for a digest or manga page size. It’s worth a read, but be prepared for it to be a short one.

(Obligatory, pettifogging complaints by an Englishman about American comics set here: the story claims to take place in Soho, but, unlike in this comic, you can’t actually see the River from Soho, let alone Tower Bridge, which is miles away. And the Cenotaph is on Whitehall. I’m going to assume that the flat-cap and Model-T flashback scenes are set in the 1920s, so that’s OK.)


Countdown issue 51, “Look to the Skies” by Paul Dini (writer), Jesus Saiz (pencils), Jimmy Palmiotti (inks), Tom Chu (colours), Travis Lanham (letters) and Mike Marts (editor), cover by Andy Kubert, Townsend and Dajeco, DC Comics, May 9 2007, 22 pages of strip, US$2.99

What a disappointment! When I heard that Paul Dini was going to be the lead writer on the new weekly comic from DC, I was quite optimistic. Not only should Dini’s experience in the animated DC superhero shows have prepared him for the job of guiding a team of writers, but his TV track record showed that he could take the convoluted, angsty and increasingly gore-soaked DC Universe and transform it into accessible fun for a general audience.

So what’s the first thing we see here? Blood dripping from a naked man suspended from a meathook through his midriff. And the main plot revolves not just around DC’s barnacled continuity, which is bad enough, but around drawing attention to the contradictions in that continuity. Honestly, did Dan Didio’s mother never tell him that it won’t get better if you pick it?



Jesus Saiz’s artwork can best be described as serviceable. I just wish it were in service to a better story.


Cover Girl issue 1, “Hollywood Shuffle” by Andrew Cosby and Kevin Church (writers), R M Yankowicz (artist), Pablo Quiligotti and Brian Miroglio (colourists), Ed Dukeshire (letterer) and Marshall Dillion (editor), cover by Rafael Albuquerque, Boom! Studios, May 2007, 22 pages of strip, US$3.99

This debut issue is mostly set up. Aspiring actor Alex Martin capitalises on press coverage after he rescues a woman from a car crash (he neglects to mention that he caused the crash in the first place). But the women is being followed by mysterious men in suits and shades, and soon vanishes. Then the men in shades try to kill Alex, so the studio where he is now working hires a bodyguard, Rachel Dodd, the “Cover Girl” of the title.

It’s hard to see yet whether this will run well, given that the title character only appears on the last page. So far the writing is crisp and amusing, with a few good one-liners, and the art does its job perfectly well. As with the only other Boom! studios comic I have read, Mr Stuffins, the whole package feels like it might be more at home on TV than on the comic page. It also shares a muddy colour palette – though nowhere near as overwhelming and monotonous as on Mr Stuffins. But brown seems an odd choice for the dominant colour for a light thriller set in Tinseltown.



Even so, this is entertaining enough for me to want to check out the next issue.


Madame Mirage First Look by Paul Dini (writer), Kenneth Rocafort (artist), Blond (colours), Troy Peteri (letters) and Rob Levin (editor), Image Comics/Top Cow Productions, May 2007, 7 pages of strip, US$0.99

I like the idea of a taster issue like this, but it’s hard to draw any conclusions yet about whether the full-length comic will be any good. It’s a shame that the set-up turns out to be superheroes again, but the shadowy art holds out some hope that the treatment will have more of a pulp flavour than usual. Rocafort’s work is highly stylised (Madame Mirage is about nine heads high, for example), but this may be a sensible choice if he has to present a heroine so inappropriately dressed for running around shooting people.

I’ll probably give the first issue a chance, but if anything this has dampened my expectations rather than raised them.




Rex Libris issue 8, “Escape from the Book of Monsters!” by James Turner, SLG Publishing, May 2007, 32 pages of strip, US$2.95

Our two-gun librarian hero is trapped inside the Book of Monsters and has to fight his way out. Meanwhile, back at the Middleton public library, monsters are escaping from the book and attacking Hypatia and Circe.

Basically, this is just a string of monster fights with great one-liners, pretentious literary and philosophical references and in-jokes about traditions of comics captioning. Just my cup of tea.

Turner’s blocky computer-generated greyscale artwork looks like nothing else on the racks, and fits the surreal tone of his stories perfectly. In addition to the main story, the inside and back covers are packed with absurd humour. The whole thing is great value for anyone who doesn’t have a fetish for colour printing.

Bing-Bang-a-Bong-Woooo-Hooooo

There’s no new Doctor Who on BBC1 this week, because the Eurovision Song Contest is on, and to make room for it the BBC would rather postpone Doctor Who than their musical talent contest show Any Dream Will Do.

Doctor Who’s relationship with popular music has not always been so unhappy. In the TV Comic Annual 1969 (published, in the manner of British comic annuals, in 1968), the Doctor became the manager of a pop group called the Electrodes. After using his trusty rocket pack to save them from an assassination attempt by their former manager, the Doctor and his grand-children, John and Gillian, accompanied the Electrodes on their world tour. Yes, really.

(Art by John Canning)

I’m not sure which was stranger: the stories TV Comic told about the Doctor, or the fact that every single one of them was approved by the Doctor Who production office at the BBC.

... and Counting

In a bold move, the inaugural issue of DC’s new series Countdown is set not on New Earth but on the hitherto unexplored world of Earth-21, which appears to be inhabited mainly by characters from British television series of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In a radical story-telling move, the issue is split into short, almost fragmentary episodes, augmented by fake articles with titles like “Towards 2000” (is that what we are counting down to?). Cleverly, DC have not only hired John M Burns, a veteran of comics of the period, but have found artists capable of mimicking to the last brush stroke the work of his contemporaries Gerry Haylock and Harry Lindfield, among others.

It seems that the recent appearance of the Lord of Time in The Brave and the Bold was a hint of a coup that DC have managed to keep secret until publication day: they have acquired the rights to Doctor Who, UFO and other media properties, and to the hardware designs from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.



Overall this is a smart publication, very knowing in a post-modern sort of way. It may, perhaps, have been a step too far to leave DC’s own name off the credits in favour of the fictional “Polystyle Publications” (which long-time readers will remember as part of the media empire of the Morgan Edge of Earth-Q), as this could confuse potential buyers.

Next issue promises appearances by the Richard Whiteley and Carol Vorderman of Earth-C4, which should be good.

Or was it all a dream?


Cover scan taken from The Book Palace and blown up too big.

A Case of Spirits

Dear DC Comics,

Yes, I would be interested in a Ralph and Sue: Ghost Detectives series …



… provided its authors are thinking of The Thin Man crossed with Blithe Spirit, not Seven crossed with A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Yours,

Steve


Panel
Cropped from 52 issue 52, written by Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka and mark Waid, art breakdowns by Keith Giffen, finished art for this panel by one or more of a large crew of artists whose work I still don’t know well enough to identify, letters by Ken Lopez, edited by Michael Siglain, DC Comics, May 2, 2007

52 Candles on Power Girl’s Cake

So 52 week 52 brought back the DC Comics multiverse, or “megaverse” as Rip Hunter wants to call it (though, really, something called the megaverse should be full of multiple versions of Judge Dredd, not of Superman). And with it came Earth-2.



Before the Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1986, I much preferred Earth-2 to Earth-1, the home of most of DC’s comics at the time. Partly, that was because DC allowed things to change there – Clark Kent had married Lois Lane, Batman had died – but a lot of the appeal was that events there had passed in real time. Superman first appeared in 1938; the Justice Society disbanded in 1951; Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle married in 1955; Power Girl met the reconstituted JSA in 1976 …

… so if Earth-2 is back, she’s aged about 50 now. I’m sure that Dan Didio will soon be issuing a memo to all DC artists reminding them to draw her accordingly.



No, that’s not going to happen, is it? Although Crisis on Infinite Earths remains the worst idea ever perpetrated in superhero comics, for its destruction of the niche ecologies in which different types and styles of story could be told, the truth is that “real-time” Earth-2 was already becoming untenable by 1986. The first generation heroes were hitting their seventies, and after 10 years of continuous Earth-2 stories, DC would soon have had to make choices about whether and how to age the second generation. And since the two most prominent of those, Power Girl and the Huntress, were good-looking women, it’s unlikely that DC would have wanted to let time have its effects.

It’ll be interesting to see how DC handles its new Earth-2. It would be nice if, contrary to its one panel to date, the new Earth-2 turned out to dominated by third-generation heroes, with the youthful Power Girl explained by some sort of time warp. But I’m betting that, instead, the 1976-1986 stories will turn out to have happened in some recent, nebulous comic-book time.

Because you can’t go home again – no matter what the speed at which your home vibrates.


Panels and pictures
52 issue 52, written by Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka and mark Waid, art breakdowns by Keith Giffen, finished art for this panel by one or more of a large crew of artists whose work I don’t know well enough to identify, letters by Ken Lopez, edited by Michael Siglain, DC Comics, May 2, 2007

Power Woman drawn by Alex Ross, from Kingdom Come: Revelations, DC Comics, 1997


Addendum (20 minutes later)
I've now seen Grant Morrison's Newsarama interview, in which he says, "And the parallel Earths you see in issue #52 are not the familiar pre-Crisis versions. If you think you recognize and know any of these worlds from before, you'd be wrong." So my post may be even more off-beam than usual.

On the other hand, Morrison also says, "Each parallel world now has its own huge new backstory and characters," whereas Geoff Johns, when asked, "Do they fit the descriptions of former earths? Or are they kind of open-ended now?", replied, "Right now, they're just out there. 52 earths. That's all. And you'll start to see them here or there, but the goal really is, like the end of the issue said, 'It's a world full of possibilities.' We don't want any rules on our stories. So let's be able to tell stories of all sorts of different things."

Morrison also demands, "And no crossovers! Each of the parallel universes should exist in its own separate stream with no contact from the others - not until we have a story worthy of bringing them together." Countdown seems to have contradicted that within a week.

So who knows?

Reviews: Atom, Simonson’s Fantastic Four, JLU, Superman

The All-New Atom, Volume 1: My Life In Miniature by Gail Simone (writer), John Byrne and Eddy Barrows (pencillers), Trevor Scott (inks), Travis Lanham (letters), Alex Bleyaert (colours), Ariel Olivetti (cover and original issue covers) and Mike Carlin (editor), DC Comics, 2007 (originally published 2006-2007), 143 pages of strip, US$14.99

This collection of the first 6 issues of the new Atom, plus the teaser story from Brave New World is almost as much fun as I’d heard.

Gail Simone throws in one splendidly mad idea after another: an invasion by a microscopic alien race living on the hero’s dog, a Cthuloid monster being worshipped by film-fan puritans, the Atom being swallowed by a naked giantess, foul-smelling ants and chemically-dependent scientists. She holds this all together using some off-beat narrative devices, and deftly sketches in our new hero, Dr Ryan Choi, and his supporting cast at the same time.



So why “almost”? Well, there’s a knife-wielding psycho with a taste for dismemberment who seems to have wandered in from a different story (possibly by Geoff Johns) and doesn’t fit the wacky tone here at all, despite his fondness for poetry. And then there’s the art problem.

Byrne’s stuff is fine: characterful, energetic, action-packed and humorous by turns, and with a fuller finish than I remember from the last comics of his that I read about a decade ago. But half way through, he hands over to Barrows, who provides another argument for DC establishing remedial art classes for its pencillers. He lacks most basic skills, but in particular his perspective drawing is appalling. In the panel below, for example, Choi is supposed to be full sized and sitting on a chair which is level with the feet of Dean Mayland (the character in the foreground). Instead, Choi appears to be minute and Mayland must be on a raised platform. The walls don't match the floor, either. (Amplification added later: The floor tiles appear to be converging on a vanishing point to the left, but the bookshelves and horizontal window frames run parallel to each other.)



There is still enough enjoyable material here for the book to be worth buying, but if Barrows is still the artist on the second volume, and hasn’t managed to learn some draughtsmanship from his assignment pencilling over Keith Giffen’s layouts on 52, I won’t be bothering with the next one.


Fantastic Four Visionaries: Walter Simonson Volume 1 Fantastic Four by Walter Simonson (writer and artist), Rich Buckler and Ron Lim (pencillers on opening stories), Romeo Tanghal and Mike DeCarlo (inkers on opening stories), Bill Oakley and Todd Klein (letterers), George Roussos and Max Scheele (colourists), Ralph Macchio (editor), Marvel Comics, 2007 (originally published 1989-1990), 182 pages of strip, US$19.99

A quick tip: skip the first 73 pages of this book. The first three issues of Fantastic Four that Walt Simonson wrote were part of a long-forgotten, dreary corporate cross-over called “Acts of Vengeance”. In them, the FF go to Washington to testify against a proposed Super-Human Registration Act (yes, yes, how ironic), and are attacked by various C- and D-list villains. Simonson seems bored, and the art is by other hands.

Then, with his fourth issue, everything changed. Simonson took over the art and went cosmic. The FF, augmented by She-Thing, Iron Man and Thor, travel into a future that seems to be vanishing, and encounter a plethora of Kangs the Conquerors, a galaxy-sized Galactus who is devouring the whole Universe, the gigantic armouries of the Shi'ar Empire, guarded by Superman-alike Gladiator, and the ancient implacable menace of the Black Celestial. Wild ideas, artwork so energetic you could plug it into the National Grid and some remarkably daft double-talk from Reed Richards – it's everything you want from the Fantastic Four, really.




Justice League Unlimited issue 33, “Everything Old Is New Again” by Jason Hall (writer), Carlo Barberi (penciller), Bob Petrecca (inker), Robert Clark Jr (letterer), Heroic Age (colourists) and Rachel Gluckstein (editor), DC Comics, July 2007, 20 pages of strip, US$2.25

In this issue of JLU, the League’s oldest member, the Crimson Avenger, and its youngest, Stargirl, find themselves in body-swap comedy territory after they try to stop Morgaine Le Fey from stealing the London Stone and using it to de-age her son Mordred. As is often the case with JLU, our heroes learn a life lesson along the way: constantly sniping at each other for being too old and too young respectively, by the end each has come to respect the other’s viewpoint.

This air of lecturing prevents Hall’s otherwise zippy and well-constructed story from being as enjoyable as it might be. Of course, it is aimed at children, but children can recognise adult propaganda when they see it.

Barberi and Petrecca’s art is efficient and attractive in the animated DC style. The thick outlines they use to delineate characters actually provide something of the feel of a previous generation of animation, when characters stood out more from static backgrounds.




Superman issue 662, “The Weight of the World” by Kurt Busiek (writer), Carlos Pacheco (penciller), Jesús Merino (inker), Sinclair & Loughridge (colours), Comicraft (letters) and Matt Idelson (editor), DC Comics, May 2007, 22 pages of strip, US$2.99

I haven’t followed Superman regularly since the days of Byrne, Wolfman and Ordway, but I normally like the work of both Busiek and Pacheco, so I thought I’d see what they are making of it.

Unfortunately, this issue seems to fall in the middle of a longer story arc. Superman is trying to establish the truth of a prediction by the magician Arion that his interventions will eventually lead to the death of humanity, while also investigating the claim by an alien called the Auctioneer that there is another Kryptonian on Earth besides himself and Supergirl.

On the plus side, I could easily work out what was happening, despite not having read the earlier issues. On the minus, Superman doesn’t find the answers to his questions, and nothing much else happens. The artwork is as nice as expected – detailed but clear, fluid and expressive – but otherwise the main thing I found to enjoy was the delightful new style of lettering used for Zatanna’s backward magic spells, which is as stark a case of damning with faint praise as I can think of.



This issue also features a new superhero called Sirocco. He is active in Iran, but had planned to call himself by an Arabic, not Persian, name, before adopting the one suggested by Superman: an Italian (and English) word for a wind that blows in North Africa. His main personal characteristic is that he is easily offended if he thinks his integrity is being impugned. Really, he just needs a scimitar and a camel to hit all the orientalist buttons. It’s good that DC Comics have decided to create a hero from the Islamic world, but it’s a shame that they seem to think that Berbers, Iranians and Arabs are all the same thing.




Not reviewed this time
Also out this last week were Shazam! The Monster Society of Evil issue 3, Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 issue 3 and Welcome to Tranquility issue 6. All are running serial stories which I plan to review when they are complete (and since issue 6 did end the current Tranquility story, I’ll have a review of that for you in a few days’ time).



In the meantime, I should advise fellow drooling fanboys (and fangirls) that Willow does not wear that outfit on the inside pages. Is there no truth in advertising?