Review - Formerly Known as the Justice League

Formerly Known as the Justice League
Written by Keith Giffen and J. M. DeMatteis; Art by Kevin Maguire and Joe Rubinstein
2004 Eisner Winner for Best Humor Publication

This is an easy one to put a recommendation on: did you enjoy the Justice League stories from the late eighties where things were funny and cheerful? If yes, then you need to read Formerly Known as the Justice League (and it's even better sequel I Can't Believe It's Not the Justice League). If your response was "Who was that?" then this isn't the book for you. This is essentially a reunion special, a gathering of old friends that will make those who fondly remember the original smile and those who just don't know it wonder what the big deal is.

Maxwell Lord has decided to revive his Justice League as a low-rent non-profit called Superbuddies. He recruits old members like Ralph and Sue Dibney, Captain Atom, L-Ron, Fire, Blue Beetle, and Booster Gold along with newcomer Mary Marvel. Before they're established they have to deal with the world's most erudite street gang, being kidnapped for gladiatorial matches, and the return of one of their old foes.

That's a plot that's uninspiring. It's blandly generic when it comes to superheroes. The key to Formerly Known as the Justice League is that it is a joke (in case you couldn't tell from the title). These characters can't stand in the same room without breaking into a comedy routine. It's the dialog and characters that are a lot of fun in this book. It is a farce and comedy bits will swing back and forth through the whole thing.

The biggest downside here is that it is very dependent on the reader being familiar with the original stories. There are details that color things which only work with knowing the context. Why do Blue Beetle and Booster Gold argue like an old married couple? Or why this Maxwell Lord guy is so important. Or what's the big deal with the superheroes who show up at the end.

The reunion special aspect also hurts the story a bit. It's just not quite as good as the original. The sequel, I Can't Believe It's Not the Justice League, does a much better job of living up to the original stories but there's occasional moments in Formerly where the manic energy just fades away and it feels like the story is just going through the motions. You can hang a lampshade on how cliche of story making superheroes fight in gladiatorial combat is but that doesn't change that it isn't really an interesting story to tell.

I suppose I should add to this review that as a cruelly ironic twist these stories were released simultaneously with stories that derailed these characters. This one came out at the same time as Identy Crisis which leads off with one of the main characters being murdered and adds some rape into the mix. The sequel was released at the same time as a story where another of the main characters murders yet another of them. So don't try to fit these stories into continuity; the creators did and got their work stepped on.

The worst nightmare for a comic book artist is the talking heads scene: a lot of dialog and not much to illustrate beyond the character's face. Most comic book artists play with the staging but there are a rare breed of them who can take those dialog scenes and play with expressions to make those talking heads artistically interesting and their king is Kevin Maguire. I've never seen anyone handle those sequences better than him and since Formerly Known as the Justice League is almost all talking heads. The facial acting that Maguire gives to every single character both prevents that from being boring and aids in the comedy.

I think it's obvious that I loved Giffen, DeMatteis, and Maguire's original Justice League stories. I mean really loved them. I mean to the point that I was disappointed that I didn't go ahead and blow my paycheck on some of Maguire's original art from one of the issues when I had the opportunity to twenty years ago. So Formerly Known as the Justice League was a comforting visit to some old friends for me. If you don't have that fondness then I think you may find it to just be a quirky superhero book.

Review - Gon Swimmin'

Gon Swimmin'
by Masahi Tanaka
1998 Eisner Winner for Best Humor Publication
1998 Eisner Winner for Best U.S. Edition of Foreign Material

Comic books with animal stars are more common than you might expect. Usually these are heavily anthropomorphic with the animals acting essentially like tiny humans. Gon Swimmin' offers an animal comic with a slightly different view. Most of the animals in it act like animals with the exception of the title character.

Gon is a tiny dinosaur that lives in something resembling modern times though no humans or signs of civilization appeared in Gon Swimmin'. Instead Gon encounters different animals in his travels and the animals have to deal with Gon's tough-guy attitude. In this fourth book in the series Gon tries on a turtle shell and joins the migration of baby sea turtles who fall one by one predators, tries to cross a desert with some unfortunate animals, and struts around the savanna with a group of feline cubs.

The stories are completely "silent"; there is no dialog or onomatopoeia. While the later two stories were simple enough that the technique worked fine there was an unusual transition in the first story that left me completely bewildered and without any context. With the art carrying the weight of the story there are some flaws that turn up. On occasion it is difficult to follow the flow of the action and I sometimes had to flip back to make sure I didn't miss something.

On the other side of the art Tanaka draws some spectacular animals. While Gon is clearly cartoony the rest of the cast is drawn almost realistically. The exception is the occasional distortion of their faces to help make them more expressive. It's such slight anthropomorphism that it could easily go completely unnoticed and it brings home the fact that these are stories about animals instead of people.

Even with the weaker storytelling on the part of the art the first story with the turtle migration is by far the best of three in this book. It captures the struggles of the natural world as the number of baby sea turtles dwindle over the course of the story. The second story was the weakest in my view since none of the animals crossing the desert connected with me. On the other hand the final story which might have been the slightest of them in plot was more fun because it just let Gon push his way across Africa.

One thing that I did not like in Gon Swimmin' was that the U.S. publisher added a text introduction to each story that unnecessarily explained the plot. These could have been dropped and it would have improved the book.

After reading Gon Swimmin' I've decided that Gon is not for me. I just didn't find Tanaka's silent storytelling compelling enough to return and Gon himself didn't interest me. Still I can understand why someone might enjoy the series: it's well drawn and has some adorable character designs. If you like cute animal stories then you'll probably have fun with Gon Swimmin'.

Review - All Star Superman

All Star Superman
Written by Grant Morrison; Art by Frank Quitely
2006 Eisner Winner for Best New Series
2007 Eisner Winner for Best Continuing Series
2009 Eisner Winner for Best Continuing Series

I'm a bit fuzzy on the categorization of All Star Superman. It was planned as a twelve issue limited series and ran for twelve issues to tell one story but was awarded "Best Continuing Series" rather than "Best Limited Series". Irregardless of what category it should have won for this series deserves accolades. It is the distilled essence of Superman; arguably the most iconic character of the twentieth century filtered down to one story that puts it all into perspective.

Superman is dying. A trap by his arch enemy Lex Luthor has left him poisoned and with only weeks to live. As he tries to come to grips with his own mortality he seeks to make peace with the woman he loves, tries to find a cure for his affliction, and seeks to leave a worthy legacy behind.

One of the problems with the monthly format for comic books is that there has to be a next issue. When it comes to corporate owned characters they have to keep making comics and as time goes on they become cyclical as creator after creator churn up the past to put forward their preferred version of things. All Star Superman doesn't have that problem because right from the outset it is clear that this is a story intended to stand apart from the ongoing comics. Morrison effectively throws out everything except a handful of concepts that he wanted to play with. That makes this a story where anything can happen.

For much the same reason when it comes to superhero comics I generally apply a caveat that if you don't like superheroes then a story probably won't be for you. The reason for that is while I enjoy superhero comics I also recognize the inherent absurdity of them and the fact that readers have to accept many genre conventions that exist for no good reason in order to enjoy them. I'm not going to say that about All Star Superman. Superman is an iconic figure and for all the talk about superheroes being "modern mythology" All Star Superman is one of the few times that I can feel that at work.

Morrison captures the messianic influences in Superman as a character beautifully. This is a Superman who fits the übermench form. He's a being that has transcended humanity to provide benevolence to the world. And instead of showing that in having him punch a lot of villains until they fall over or putting out forest fires with his breath All Star Superman presents him as a seeker of knowledge capable of unending compassion. This is an aspect to the character that would be impossible to star in the roughly two thousand monthly comics that have featured him but for a story with such a tight, laser like focus it works. For the sake of this story it doesn't matter that Superman is perfect since it's about the world interacting with him instead of the other way around.

The story is very episodic in nature as each issue of the comic comprises almost one complete tale. So you get the story of Lois Lane having dinner with Superman and once it's over they move on to deal with a story about how disturbed Lex Luthor is or one about a pair of replacement heroes or the worst day of Superman's life. The key is that even though there are twelve separate stories they're all tied into the original theme and just look at it from a different angle.

I'm giving Quitely the short shrift here since as terrific as Morrison's story is Quitely's art isn't quite perfect. That is not to say that I didn't like it but I'm aware that it is an acquired taste. Quitely draws his figures in a way that's best described as "lumpy" as opposed to the ultra-sleek styling of most superhero artists. I find that I appreciate it for being so distinctive and I think that it helps All Star Superman because it showcases the imperfections in people. This gets a real showcase in the second volume where one of the stories deals with a planet that is all about imperfection.

Before All Star Superman came along there was exactly one story that I could point to for what makes Superman great. Alan Moore's Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? had a similar theme but with less space available to it Moore couldn't manage the tableau that Morrison creates in All Star Superman. I am prepared to say that this is it for the foreseeable future; there is no need for another Superman story after All Star Superman. It's good enough to stand in for all of Superman's history.

Review - Batman: The Long Halloween

Batman: The Long Halloween
Written by Jeph Loeb; Art by Tim Sale
1998 Eisner Winner for Best Limited Series
1999 Eisner Winner for Best Graphic Album: Reprint

I know that I usually talk about the story first and the art second with these things but I'm in a charitable mood tonight so I'm going to start by saying that Tim Sale does a bang up job with Batman: The Long Halloween. He showcases some wonderful character designs, has some nifty page layouts, and generally produces some very nice to look at art. This is good for this book since his partner in the endeavor fails to produce something worthwhile. Jeph Loeb's story is a disaster; a brain dead lifeless lump that's only interesting when he forgets about his overarching plot.

At the start of his career as a vigilante the Batman is pressing the mobs of Gotham City hard. To finish them off he forms an alliance with newly appointed police commissioner Gordon and district attorney Dent. Complicating their work is a serial killer who is murdering on holidays. They spend a year hunting for this killer and working their way through the new breed of strange criminals who are taking the place of the old families.

The opening of this story is a rip-off of the opening of The Godfather. I don't drop the term "rip-off" lightly and I definitely do not mean "homage". An "homage" would be opening at the wedding of the daughter of a powerful crime boss or perhaps using a line of two of dialog. Loeb lifts chunks of the script whole and transplants them into his story. This sets the tone for Loeb's plotting which often involves taking from better writers than himself and putting Batman into it. This is not a formula for a decent story; the reader is getting carbon copies a bit more fuzzy and you might as well go to the original.

I suppose it could have been worse since the parts that are not taken from other works are the some of the worst parts of The Long Halloween. Toward the end Loeb decides to pile on plot twists in a way that makes the story pointlessly convoluted. I'm trying to avoid spoilers here but if you take all the information given to you as a reader toward the end of the book and try to fit it in with the information you had before then you're only going to get a headache.

There's also a real problem with the pacing of the series. Each issue of the series is tied to a holiday. While this is an intriguing format it means that characters will talk about doing something immediately and then it takes them over a month to actually get around to it. Events that should take only a few days are played out over months because that's the pacing of the issues.

The one good part of The Long Halloween, as I stated, is Tim Sale's artwork. His character designs for this story are terrific and distinctive; this is not a situation where every character is the same body with different clothes and hair. He draws a large cast and manages to make them all appear unique while only using the extreme shapes for the freakish supervillains. And his page layouts for action sequences look terrific. I genuinely wish that I could have seen this quality of artwork tied to a readable story.

So the only reason to check out Batman: The Long Halloween is for the Tim Sale artwork. Loeb's story suffers from the his taking from other, better source and never finding a compelling story of his own to work with. His mystery falls flat in the end making the reading the book feel like time that has been wasted.

Review - Amazing Spider-Man: Coming Home

Amazing Spider-Man: Coming Home
Written by J. Michael Straczynski; Art by John Romita Jr. and Scott Hanna
2002 Eisner Winner for Best Serialized Story

Thanks to the recent movies Spider-Man has been elevated to the most recognizable superhero in the world. His record with the Eisner awards, on the other hand, has been weak. While Batman inevitably has something that wins an award Spider-Man is the perpetual runner up. The one exception when it comes to stories is Coming Home which started the long run of writing Spider-Man by J. Michael Straczynski.

If you listened to fans on the Internet as it was being released Coming Home was the worst thing that ever happened. The problem for these people was that Straczynski came on the book and immediately got around to setting up a new status quo and that tends to upset comic fans who get nervous around new things. From the beginning where Spider-Man is confronted by a man with identical powers who asks him if it was a radioactive spider that gave him his superpowers or if it was just the spider itself. He is confronted with the possibility that his powers are shamanistic in nature and facing a villain who is built to hunt down and consume him. At the same time our hero looks to take a new job teaching at his old high school and the story draws to a close with the promise of an even bigger change.

When a new creative team starts work on a long running title it comes down to that first story for them to define what their run is going to be about. On that level Coming Home succeeds brilliantly; it says that this is going to be a bit more spiritual Spider-Man, gives him a new setting to work with, and establishes a new group of villains. It made me interested in seeing what happened next.

Straczynski gets the tone of Spider-Man's character right. The character shifts between the joking prankster and brooding smoothly without it feeling like it's two separate people. Straczynski does a better job with the lighter moments but I don't have any major complaints about any of it.

The biggest problem with Coming Home is that it just boils down to a fairly unremarkable superhero story. If you've read superhero comics then you've read this basic story plenty of times. Pure hearted hero, nasty villain who is stronger than him, they punch each other a lot before the hero outsmarts the villain. Straczynski tells it well enough that if you like your superheroes then I'd expect that you'd like this but it isn't going to make anyone who is turned off by vigilantes in costumes excited.

Romita's artwork might be the best of his career. This was the comic book that made his father famous and he worked on Spider-Man many times over the years. Of course historical significance wouldn't mean much if the book looked bad and his storytelling abilities are on full display through the story. Take the above page for example: it's perfectly executed with the the panel layout, body language, and structure. While every page isn't quite up to that quality there are more than enough of them to make the art stand out.

I enjoyed Coming Home quite a bit and my enjoyment of Spider-Man has been spotty at best. It's unfortunate where the end of this run wound up but that's not enough to make me say that it should be avoided. If you started reading Spider-Man here and continue on to later volumes of J. Michael Straczynski's run then my advice is to stop reading it as soon as you stop enjoying it; it won't get any better. This is a good example of terrific superhero comics; it's a light, breezy, adventure story.

Review - Herbie Archives

Herbie Archives
Written by Richard E. Hughs; Art by Ogden Whitney
2009 Eisner Winner for Best Humor Publication

Until last year if you asked fifty comic book fans what they thought about Herbie forty-nine of them would say "Who?" and the fiftieth would start babbling about bopping people with lollipops. While Herbie's stories had received a quiet reprint in the early nineties they had been forgotten by the vast majority of comic book fans. With Dark Horse's Herbie Archives reprinting every single Herbie story they've been rediscovered by a fresh generation who are just getting exposed to the manic brilliance of Herbie for the first time.

There is no other word to describe Herbie other than surreal. The stories follow their own kind of strange logic where the titular star is constrained only by what he's willing to do. If he decides that he needs to go to Mars then it's going to happen. It's a series where the main character regularly travels through time by sucking a lollipop and riding in a grandfather clock. Famous figures of the early sixties populate the series and turn up at the oddest moments.

Herbie himself is a boy who brings new meaning to "rotund". Besides being generally spherical with a bowl haircut and thick glasses there is nothing that Herbie would rather do than lie in his hammock and enjoy lollipop all day. His father is disturbed by his son calling him, "A fat little nothing," and pushes Herbie to do things. What his father doesn't know is that Herbie is a world-famous go getter who makes women swoon, world leaders shake, and induces terror in monsters. Through the power of his lollipops Herbie flies (well, walks on air with a lazy gait), travels in time, and occasionally bops someone who deserves it.

There isn't much in the way of dramatic tension in the Herbie stories but that's okay because they exist mainly to set up the gag of Herbie strolling into a situation and watching it spiral out of control as people try to deal with him. Herbie is a fairly passive character to the point that even his speech is structured to the minimum number of words required (Alan Moore has said that he based Rorschach's speech in Watchmen on Herbie) so he'll typically stand there and take the abuse dished out by that story's villain whether it's the devil, a would be cave-girlfriend, or Fidel Castro. There are short, light comedy pieces. The fun in Herbie is in having a character that is both visually and personality wise the exact opposite of the reaction he has on the world.

While Whitney's artwork is very traditional in style he has a great sense of playfulness in the individual images that helps make up for his weaknesses. The comics are filled with the small humor touches that keep me laughing. Whitney's sense of comedic timing gets used quite a bit as some of Hughs's jokes depend on Whitney hitting the right visual beat.

Before Dark Horse printed the Herbie Archives my experience with Herbie was extremely limited. A few extremely beat up old comics and some talk about how crazy his series was. I'm glad that these three volumes are available because without them I'd have never almost all of the series. Now I'm pleased to have the entire run sitting on my shelf. These are some funny books and if you don't know Herbie then you need to check him out.

Review - Little Nemo in Slumberland: Many More Splended Sundays

Little Nemo in Slumberland: Many More Splended Sundays
by Winsor McCay; edited by Peter Maresca
2009 Eisner Winner for Best Archival Collection/Project: Comic Strips

My immediate reaction on seeing Little Nemo in Slumberland: Many More Splendid Sundays was awe. I was unaware of the exact format of the original collection Many Splendid Sundays and while Amazon's listing for this book mentioned it was oversized I couldn't wrap my head around how big it was. Here's a photograph of the book with a slightly irritated cat to give you a sense of scale.

I would say this book is huge but that's an understatement. I own huge books and Many More Splendid Sundays dwarfs them. It is by dimension the largest book I own by a wide margin. It's far larger than any of my shelves so I have to store it between bookshelves. I've only seen a handful of books on this scale ever.

The point of this monstrously huge book is to present the Little Nemo in Slumberland strips in their original format. When they were first published the newspapers the strips took up a full page of the Sunday comics. All reprints since then have had to scale the images down to fit a more manageable size. Many More Splendid Sundays measures twenty-one inches by sixteen inches in order to present the artwork in a lavish style.

The reason I'm going on at length about this is that the size is the entire reason that Many More Splendid Sundays is notable. There are other collections of Little Nemo that are much more affordable for those interested in the strip but this and its predecessor are the only ones that capture the full artwork.

Little Nemo in Slumberland was a very early newspaper strip. How early? Here's the strip that was published one hundred years ago:


I'd use the strip that was one hundred years old this week but it contains a racial caricature that I wouldn't want to inflict on anyone who was unprepared for it (there is a reoccurring "jungle man" character who turns up).

The strips follow a simple format; Nemo wanders his dreams having adventures which conclude when something causes Nemo to wake up in the last panel. McCay's writing is clumsy at best and his dialog is so highly stylized that it is awkward. The real reason to check out Little Nemo is the stunning artwork. McCay was putting surrealism into the Sunday newspaper before surrealism was an artistic movement. He developed a touch for beautiful flowing panels where you can feel the motion captured between them. And his sense of design is terrific; I could examine these panels looking at the details all day. McCay was the first artistic genius in the medium of linear art.

The biggest problem with Many More Splendid Sundays is that the comic strips have already been mined for Many Splendid Sundays making this volume a kind of runner up to the original. Maresca does take advantage of a blank slate by running long sequences of strips where a storyline continued from week to week for several months. Still I found myself hoping for certain strips that I was familiar with to be included only to find out that they were in the first book.

This is a book to buy specifically for the packaging. Before Many More Splendid Sundays the only Little Nemo strips I had read were shrunk down so far you had to squint to make out the words. The selection of strips may not be the greatest but that has simply made me want to get the first volume. I'll cheerfully recommend it to anyone interested in Winsor McCay's art with the caveat that if you are not familiar with Little Nemo you'll want to examine the strips in a less expensive format first.