And now for something you'll really like!

There's a new year around the corner and this one sucked. Let's shake things up a bit.

Those of you silly enough to follow me on my on-again-off-again blogging exploits may have noticed my non-comic blogs (like Work/Shoot and Age of Mega) have all but faded away. I've decided to fold them into this one blog, since it was my first and receives the most traffic . . . but not by much . . . So be on the lookout for all sorts of pop culture content.

But that's not why I called!

In 2013, my friend Evan Arnold and I hosted a podcast called The Club of Heroes. The blog is still up, but the episodes have since been devoured by a stray Chronovore. Anyhoo, I miss podcasting and hearing my own disgusting lisp, so I'm going to give it another go.

HERE is the first episode of Back Issue Diving in audio form, something I hope to make a weekly thing. It's about Watchmen, it's brief, it's informative, and I consider it a "pilot episode" for the kind of audio content I want to make.


Give it a listen and let me know what you think at the usual address, @ChrisBComics on Twitter.

Crooked Miles To Go

Following the events of Cataclysm and No Man's Land, a multi-year story arc that had driven the entire Bat-line of comics to Hell and back, the two core titles at the time were handed off to two of comics then-up and coming crime writers, Ed Brubaker and Greg Rucka. I've written about Rucka's work on Detective Comics before, and lauded it for its exploration of themes like gentrification and substance abuse, but today I'll be looking at the other side of the coin, Brubaker's Batman.

Rucka was plucked from the world crime novels to pitch in to the No Man's Land saga, scripting a few stories throughout the year-long event, usually involving either Renee Montoya or Harvey Dent, characters he would revisit many times. For Rucka, the transition from pinch hitter to full-timer was almost immediate, but Brubaker didn't get his crack at the bat until a little later. Immediately following the conclusion of No Man's Land and cover redesign was a brief stint by industry veteran and G.I. Joe Godfather, Larry Hama. Hama's run was panned by critics for being a bit too toyetic, as Hama's gadget-of-the-week version of the caped crusader was intended to run as an alternative to Rucka's more street-savvy version. It never clicked, despite some keen artwork by Scott McDaniel, and Hama had to make way for Brubaker.

McDaniel stayed on as Brubaker took over the book and immediately took things back to the mean streets and alleyways of a grimy, post-reconstruction Gotham. Brubaker set aside the gadgets and Batmobile upgrades in favor of a more personal story involving the murder of the Waynes and the changing of the guard in Gotham's underworld. He wasn't the first writer to bring the death of the main character's parents to the forefront, and he certainly wasn't the last, but what drew me in to this particular run was the connection Brubaker established between Bruce's father Thomas and the old guard in Gotham's underworld, namely the crime boss Lew Moxon.

In a flashback story just a few issues prior to #597, we learn that one of Lew's men once went to the Waynes to have one of his injured goons looked at. Wayne suggests they take the gunshot-stricken man to a proper hospital, but they refuse since the place will be swarmed with police and they'll be busted. They try to bring Wayne into the fold with the usually underhanded bribery and threats, resulting in a memorable outburst where Thomas (decked out in a Zorro costume) warns them, "Touch my family and I'll see you in Hell!"

The image of an enraged Thomas Wayne in full Zorro garb diving at a mobster must have been burned into young Bruce's memory as he undertook the journey to become the Batman. We see shades of Thomas in Bruce from then on, every time he pounces on a crook; every time he intimidates a hood. It's a great little bit courtesy of Scott McDaniel's art. Not everyone was a fan of McDaniel, who came to Batman after a lengthy stint on Chuck Dixon's Nightwing, but I always found the flaws in his work to be buried under layers upon layers of dynamism and interesting layouts. Yes, most of his male faces look the same (a la Jim Lee), but he seems to strive for something really interesting or eye-catching on every page.

The fued between the Moxon family and the Waynes seems to imply, at least for the extent of Brubaker's time with the character, that the murder of Thomas and Martha could have been a "hit" ordered by either Moxon or one of his associates. This is the dangling thread that Brubaker introduces in his run and uses to bait the reader furthur. The Wayne/Moxon dispute is reborn is the forms of their respective heirs: Bruce Wayne, our hero, and his boyhood crush and inheritor to the Moxon empire, Mallory Moxon. We get a few cute glimpses into their past via flashbacks, and their interactions (Whether as Mallory and Bruce or as Mallory and Batman) prove that Brubaker is a writer with a knack for old-school noir and pulpy drama.

It's almost a bad fit for McDaniel's art, except that Brubaker keeps the action very modern and martial arts-tinged thanks to the introduction of Zeiss, a hitman loyal to the Moxons who uses an interesting set of lenses to record and counter his opponent's fighting ability. This proves to be too much for Batman in their first encounter and only thanks to a lucky Batarang throw is Bats able to survive their second clash. As we dive into the issue I've spotlighted today, Zeiss and the Moxons have kept their trail squeaky clean and have remained one step ahead of Batman . . . until now.

"Crooked Miles" begins with a dead man wrapped in a rug. This grisly piece of evidence gives Batman to clues he can use to track down Zeiss and engage him again, after breaking things off with Mallory and recieving at least some closure about the true link between his parents and the Moxons. Brubaker's solution for Batman dealing with Zeiss is so simple you'll slap yourself. Rather than rely on a secret martial arts technique that the villain can't copy or some other means of tomfoolery, Batman simply does the one thing every hero in their own book should attempt once in a while: Call in other heroes.

Also a divisive character of the era is that of Cassandra Cain, the deaf-mute ninja Batgirl who made her debut along with her father Cain during No Man's Land. Since then, she'd graduated from Oracle's buddy to full-fledged member of the Bat-squad, acting as the newer, darker, Batgirl. I know a few of my friends at the time longed for the Barbara Gordon version of the character to make a return, but I preferred the Oracle/Cassie dynamic. They had kind of a Batman Beyond thing going on, with one hero doing the butt-kicking and another providing info and sage advice through an earpiece. The Batgirl series from this time deserves its own Back Issue Dive, so I'll summerize her character quickly: she's a badass who doesn't mince words.

So badass, in fact, that Batman tags her in during his third battle with Zeiss to even the odds. This sums up another thematic bit that both Rucka and Brubaker had been toying with up to that point: Batman doesn't have to be alone. His struggles in both titles saw him asking very personal questions and alienating those around him. Bringing Cassandra into this story is a kick-ass reminder to our hero that one of the things that gives him the edge over his opponents is his compassion, and with that, a capacity to help and train other outcasts like himself. Meanwhile, poor Mallory Moxon has built a fortress around her heart and blames Batman for allowing the assassin Deadshot to shoot her father. (In fact, Batman was dealing with Zeiss at the time.)

Just as "Crooked Miles" marks the end of one saga, it sparks another that would bring the entire Bat-line into the fold that summer. Bruce's habit of keeping his allies at arms length would come back to bite him in the spandex during "Bruce Wayne: Murderer", an arc that saw the reclusive Wayne examined like the Howard Hughes of the modern day, and his eccentricies making something like a murder in his own mansion seem more and more plausible to those who don't know about the Batman side of things.

Whoo . . . there's just too many jumping off points here for me as a reader. We go from Murderer to Fugitive to Hush to Under the Hood . . . there's also Joe Casey's Tenses, Gotham Central, Gail Simone's Birds of Prey, that weird Riddler arc from Legends of the Dark Knight. I think Batman and his world really exploded for me at this point and it wasn't until the Morrison/Dini period began in '06 that I would get my pull list back down to just two Bat-titles. Anyhoo, I cherich the Rucka and Brubaker runs as the last time Batman was really "street" in the main titles. From Hush onward, it's mostly big villains, Golden and Silver Age revivals, and attempts at new I.P.s like Gotham City Sirens.

Thanks for reading!
Twitter: @ChrisBComics

The daze of our lives - Gambit's departure and return in Uncanny X-Men

While every superhero title relies on the elements of soap opera, few lean on it quite as heavily as the X-Men. Marvel's merry mutants always seemed as concerned with interpersonal relationships as they were with threats like the Sentinels or The Brood. If you're a child of the 90's like me, the most emotionally potent of those relationships was that of Rogue and Gambit.

The Fox Kids cartoon series is partly to blame for my obsession with the would-be couple. While Wolverine's snarling temperament had him at odds with field leader Cyclops and Xavier's feud with Magneto echoed the differing ideologies of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, the will they/won't they/can they of the Rogue/Gambit relationship kept the series alive in my mind well after it went off the air and even after I'd moved on from the X-Men as a concept.

While many elements of the show weren't terribly loyal to the comic source material, the Gambit/Rogue stuff was similar enough to keep me invested. 90's X-Men writer Scott Lobdell would throw a wrench in things soon after I'd only begun to follow Uncanny, removing Gambit from the team in a harsh fashion that still doesn't sit right with me to this day. Y'see, Lobdell teased that Gambit had a "secret". There was an episode from his past that would come back to haunt him. (They always do.)

In Uncanny X-Men #350, the X-Men learned that Gambit had aided the villainous mercenaries called The Marauders in slaughtering the Morlocks, a group of (mostly) harmless misfit mutants who lived beneath the streets of New York City. He's ousted from the team and left to wander the frozen wastes where the X-Men had found themselves on their then-latest adventure. Even his lover Rogue turned her back on the cajun card slinger, and understandably so: Gambit had helped a group of mercs commit what was essentially genocide. Sure he was just an informant, leading Sinister and the Marauders to the Morlock's hidden tunnels, but that association was more than enough to have him be literally dumped from the team. This story was a callback to the Mutant Massacre arc of the late 80's, but I wouldn't get to read the original story for quite a while yet.

Flipping through this issue today reminds me of what a strange point in the X-Men's history this really was. Joe Madureira's anime influence made the book stand out on the magazine rack, but some of the cast members weren't all that palatable to me, even under Joe Mad's pencil and ink. This was the era of foot-noters like Maggot, Dr. Reyes, and the Magneto clone known as "Joseph". Mix that with Angel at his most cherubic and Psylocke at her most ninja-y, and you have a strange roster of attractive misfits that probably couldn't carry a title if it weren't for the inclusion of mainstays like Beast, Rogue, and Gambit.

Gambit's "trial" and removal from the team was kind of traumatic to me as a young shaver. Well, as traumatic as a big reveal can be, I suppose. This might be the first time I ever experienced genuine nerd rage and felt the need to take an author to task. I remember hand-writing a letter to Lobdell demanding justice, but I don't think I ever sent it. I would continue to follow the X-Men, but with my interest in DC comics and Spawn increasing, it would slip down my personal list quite a bit.

Until Gambit came back. (I was a sucker then and I haven't gotten much better since.)

Eleven issues later, Steven T. Seagle had taken over the writing chores and artist Steve Skroce was on art. Both core X-Men titles had gotten a kick in the pants "soft reboot" in their previous issues, and Seagle set out to do what most comic writers do when they take over a long running title: undo whatever the previous guy did. This can be a good or bad thing. In the case of Uncanny X-Men #361, my younger self was more than happy to have a new writer come in and "fix" what had been done to my favorite energy manipulating Southern mutant the previous year. The roster was also a little more "classic" by this time; characters like Colossus and Kitty Pryde had returned to the fold following a stint with the British mutant team Excalibur.

(It didn't resemble the cartoon that had sucked me in, but in that year since #350 I'd become more accustomed to the Claremont era X-Men, so the change in roster was a-ok with me.)

Seagle returned to Gambit's roots as a thief in this issue, having the X-Men bump into them while chasing a McGuffin also being sought out by Black Tom Cassidy and his protege, the Juggernaut. There's also some ninja action mixed in there as well, and it's all beautifully rendered by Mr. Skroce, an artist whose work I don't feel I've seen enough of. He did a miniseries with Brian K. Vaughn recently, but other than that and a short run Gambit solo series, I don't think I've seen his name in the credits of too many comics.

Seagle doesn't completely negate Lobdell's previous story, but instead begins the long road to recovery for the X-Men's relationship with Gambit. It's quite a task, but the mere notion dragged me back into the X-Men for a while. Then I would drop it for a minute. Then Grant Morrison happened. Then I found Ultimate X-Men. Then Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men. Beyond that, I sadly haven't read too many X-Men stories since. Even great writers like Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction couldn't get me back on board. A silly movie every couple of years and Storm and Wolverine being in Marvel vs. Capcom 3 have been my major points of exposure to the characters in recent history.

I think there's a certain momentum these serials accrue that can either usher in new fans or drive them away. Trying to get into the X-Men at times is like to trying to jump on the hood of a speeding car. The myriad storylines and vast roster of characters is far less intimidating when you're a little kid with nothing but time on your hands. As an adult fan I find it tedious and often have to reminds myself, "This isn't for me anymore." There's some new fan out there who can pick up where I left off, pining away for Rogue and wondering if she'll ever get with Remy and be able to touch and stuff--

WAIT. SHE GOT WITH MAGNETO?! THAT'S IT! I'M WRITING IN!

Thanks for reading and follow me on Twitter (@ChrisBComics) for more sloppy word soup and inappropriate levels of nerd rage for a supposedly full-grown adult.

Superboy's Wild Ride

DC's Multiverse: one of the coolest, geekiest, mind-blowingest things about superhero comics. Ever since Barry Allen ran into his comic book idol Jay Garrick in the historic "The Flash of Two Worlds" from Flash (Vol. 1) #123, the idea that all of those lost Golden Age heroes were out there somewhere fluttered about the collective fanboy imagination. The Justice Society of the 40's occupied Earth-2, the dark reflections of the Justice League known as the Crime Syndicate rules Earth-3, and the whitebread Marvel Family of Fawcett City patrolled Earth-S. Every I.P. that DC had absorbed into its library had a home and team-ups between your favorites were little more than a vibrational frequency away.

Of course, being a 90's kid, I would learn about that whole magilla much later. In my day, we had "Hypertime", the ugly-but-still-kissable cousin of the Multiverse concept. It was a creative convention born out of necessity: a way to use old concepts that had fallen out of favor or "grandpa'd out" of DC's cosmology following the mythic Crisis on Infinite Earths. It seemed at first to serve the same purpose for writers as the Multiverse had in decades previous, but it never had the same fan support and never really lived up to it's potential. One of the rare cases it did is the story I'm spotlighting today, from the radical days of Karl Kesel and Tom Grummet's Superboy run.

The Kon-El (or Conner Kent) Superboy is going to be quite a strange curio for fans down the line. He was early 90's 'tude in the form of a teenage clone of Superman, sporting John Lennon glasses, a leather jacket, and a sick fade cut. He was a one note character at first, begrudging the masses for calling him "Superboy" and being quite the cut-up around his superheroic peers. Over time, he gained momentum with fans and even got his own series starting in '94. In an era of "grimdark" 90's comics, Superboy became one of those rays of light where dormant Kirby concepts and obscure characters from DC's groovier days could hang out, go on adventures, and strive for relevance.

Fast forward early '99 and I'm doing my best to build up a comic collection from whatever I can get from local convenience stores. I had Batman, Superman, JLA, X-Men, and Spawn pretty much locked down, but I was bereft of any real selection when it came to smaller titles like Superboy. Every now and then a random issue or two of a series would show up on the magazine rack and I'd get to try something a little left of center. Superboy #60 and #61 were two of those times. Being parts 1 and 2 of a five part story, I was hooked enough to venture into nearby Corpus Christi on my own and awkwardly make my way into an honest-to-God comic book shop. There I was able to follow Superboy, as well as other things I'd read about in Wizard. My initiation into official comic fandom was complete, as well as my ability to save money.

Superboy #60-64 contained the "Hyper-Tension" story, where the titular character is thrust into a number of parallel worlds thanks to a big ol' rocket ship and a mysterious tech jacket of unknown origins, meets a variety of different Superboys, and finally does ultimate battle with a Kryptonian-themed baddie named Black Zero for the fate of EVERYTHING. It was a colossal story to me then, far greater in scope than anything I'd ever read outside of some Grant Morrison JLA arcs. My main takeaway from the story was the concept of parallel worlds. I'd been exposed to the concept in various science fiction movies and things, but if you attach superheroes to something, I'm immediately ten times more interested. The cave boy version of Superboy, the Camelot version, the girl version (Superboygirl?!) . . . they all got my imagination going. I imagine I probably went right to my drawing pad and doodled fifteen variants for Spawn or Batman after reading it.

Superboy was flanked by a really fun supporting cast that made the book a truly great cape serial. His adventures usually centered around the crew and subjects of Cadmus labs, the place where Kon-El was cloned and other shady things usually happened. There was the high-tech hall monitor Guardian, his girlfriend Knockout, and a whole bunch of other weirdos and aliens for Superboy to bounce off of. They aren't much of a presence for the middle of this story, since Superboy is tripping from one world to the next in a pretty rapid fashion, but they open the story as his confidants and are there at the end to button things. I kinda stated this above, but I like to think of this series as DC's island of misfit toys. It's a place for all the "kookie" characters of yore to have the kind of fun adventures that weren't always allowed in the self-serious world of pre-Millennium comics.

Looking back on it now, the villain, Black Zero, is pretty bland. (I still like his costume design, though.) His deal is that he's a version of Superboy from a world where Superman never woke from his coma following his battle with Doomsday in the popular Death and Return of Superman story line. He goes on to become a tyrant, naturally, and conquers his world. After a run-in with the Challengers of the Unknown, he becomes aware of the existence of other realities and expands his mission from global or galactic conquest to multiversal conquest. In the spirit of escalation, we learn later that he and the villainous Cadmus director Paul Westfield have even amassed an army of Doomsdays from various worlds. They break out, some stuff happens, and things get pretty trippy before it's all said and done.

Karl Kesel is the writer for these issues, and he does a great job making the book feel like a throwback without explicitly using old slang or Ben-Day dots. It reads like a Marv Wolfman book from the 80's crossed with some of the strangeness you might find in Arnold Drake's Doom Patrol. The characters are stock characters, sure, but they aren't offensively trope-y or anything. Tom Grummet is the artist for this story and his art is a nice fit, echoing the anatomy work of guys like George Perez or John Byrne, but with its own youthful enthusiam. (His Knockout is especially cute, if you like muscly redheads.) It's clean and crisp and I can't really describe it as anything but "comic book" art.

The story is one of a few in the late 90's and early 00's that got me interested in the larger DCU, outside of just Batman and Superman. Big ideas like the multiverse or "hypertime" were just as fun for me to follow as characters and teams. I kind of miss Kon-El in the current DC Comics. There's a version of him in the post New 52 continuity, but it's muddled and not fun and kind of lame. And that's saying something, seeing as the kid of steel used to sport a fade cut and Lennon shades. Geoff Johns also took the piss out of him during his run on Teen Titans a few years after his series had wrapped, although I did like the idea of Lex Luthor contributing some of his DNA to Superboy's clone embryo.

Anyway, no regrets at all: Kesel and Grummet's Superboy is fun stuff. Thanks for reading and follow me on Twitter @ChrisBComics where I assault the masses with more blogs like this one and sometimes attempt to comment on current events.

Saturday morning style with Marvel Team-Up #90 and Marvel Adventures #17

For a long time as a young collector, the oldest comic I owned was a beat up copy of Marvel Team-Up #90 I got from a yard sale along with some issues of DP7, Ghost Rider, and the Ultraverse's Mantra. I couldn't tell you a thing about Mantra or DP7 without revisiting them, but I can recall MTU#90 very vividly for some reason. Maybe it's the dynamic 1980's cover by Jack Abel and Al Milgrom which features Spider-Man and the Beast doing battle with gigantic, electrified Modular Man and the flying Shrike. Maybe it's the groovy, dated dialogue that I fondly remember poking fun at as a kid, or maybe it's just the done-in-one episodic completeness of the story that makes it so memorable.

Later on I would acquire some much older issues of Spider-Man and Batman and that copy of MTU#90 wouldn't seem quite as impressive, but for a window of time that was my most frequent exposure to "old comics". The Marvel and DC books I was getting in the mid-90's were glossy, printed on thicker paper, and usually contained stories that were "Part 7 of 14" or somesuch. I was already becoming a jaded hipster even then, riding a wave of fake nostalgia for a bygone era of comics from a simpler time.

(I should mention Marvel Team-Up #90 came from the simpler time of 1980.)

Nevertheless, there was a part of me as a young collector that really wanted the Marvel Team-Ups and Brave & The Bolds of yore to make a comeback, so when a new Marvel Team-Up series was announced in the backs of Spider-Man books from circa '96, I was estatic. Soon after that initial rush, I realized that I didn't have access to comic shops in my area and that series was most likely going to come and go without me ever realizing it.

I've mentioned in previous posts that the town I became a collector in (Port Aransas, Tx) had comic books on nearly every convenience store rack and if all you wanted was to piece together the monthly Superman titles or get a smattering of X-Men comics, you would have been okay. Outside of the bigger characters, it was rare to see something like Incredible Hulk or Legion of Super-Heroes in my area, but for whatever reason, Marvel Team-Up occasionally showed up. I got one taste of it, realized this wasn't to my liking and then discovered a series that carried on the legacy of Marvel Team-Up even better than its successor did.

My portal to comics being animation, I would often pick up the various Adventures books whenever I saw them: Batman Adventures, Superman Adventures, etc. Marvel got in on this trend of doing comics in the Saturday morning cartoon style and that's how I bumped into Marvel Adventures, in particular, issue #17.

This series built upon the shared visual language (gawdy as it was) between the Spider-Man and X-Men 90's cartoons and imagined a world where The Avengers and other Marvel properties could get the animated treatment. (Yeah, I know there were those Marvel Action Hour shows and a late 90's Avengers cartoon, but those don't seem to count here for some reason. I guess the Spidey and X-Men shows were more ubiquitous with fans.) Issue #17 features Spidey and Iron Man teaming up to battle the Grey Gargoyle in a simple, fun adventure that took me right back to my then only retro comic memory, which was MTU#90.

I got a few more issues here and there of Marvel Adventures, but it wouldn't be until a few years later and my first fledgling trips to the comic shop that I could seek out earlier issues. (And they were surprisingly hard to come across!) Looking at the run now, it isn't a milestone or anything special, but it's one of those series that helped expose me to characters other than Spidey and the usual X-Men. The stories would branch out beyond NYC into other locales and even go cosmic for a few issues with characters like Silver Surfer and Thanos, all rendered to look like they'd be right at home on an animation storyboard or action figure mold. It might've seemed like a lame, sterile comic to older fans at the time, but I appreciate the episodic stories and the low commitment/high entertainment value ratio.

Andy Kuhn was the main artist for the series and his stuff here is very energetic and clean, even if there were stylistic limitations due to wanting to capture that 90's animated feel. He's a manga/anime fan and it shows in his work here, as well as his more modern projects like Firebreather. Ralph Macchio, who used to be big time editor at Marvel, wrote a lot of them. They're serviceable scripts, but pretty plain when compared to what DC's writers were able to pull off in the similar Batman Adventures and Adventures in the DC Universe titles across the way.

Well shucks, I'm just rambling at this point . . . So, if you have any hidden gems from this area that you like for uncommon reasons, hit me up in the comments or follow me on Twitter @ChrisBComics. Thanks for reading!

There was a crooked man - Prometheus makes his debut in JLA

Grant Morrison's JLA run restored DC's central superhero team to prominence, mostly due to the threats he would concoct for them to face. In the first ten issues alone you have assaults on Earth by White Martians, Darkseid, and even Heaven itself. Each threat that rears its ugly head requires the strength of all the combined Leaguers, something the "Bwa-ha-ha" era creative teams were never too worried with.

One contribution of Morrison's that really captured my imagination was that of Prometheus, a villain designed to be the "Anti-Batman" and push the League to their limit. His introduction in the New Years Evil: Prometheus special details his life story pretty well: the love child of a Bonnie and Clyde-like couple is orphaned at a young age and uses his parent's underworld contacts to amass the skills and weaponry needed to wage a one man war on the very concept of Justice. His origin takes a turn for the trippy when he journeys to a hidden enclave of monks (not unlike Batman Begins or Iron Fist's origin) and is privy to something called the Ghost Zone. The Zone becomes a secret, trans-dimensional hideout, and the location of his Wayne Manor-equivalent, the Crooked House.

The setup for Prometheus's introduction is pretty brilliant. The JLA has just rejuvenated their roster after temporarily disbanding and they want to make a good first impression with the press, so a contest is held to find one fan with a costume who wants to "join the JLA for a day". The winner is a well-meaning fan going by the handle Retro who finds his identity and costume stolen by Prometheus on the way to meet the League. With a little disguise work and some forced smiling for the cameras, the League's newest enemy is invited aboard their lunar watchtower by the heroes themselves.

The story is continued in issues 16 and 17 of the monthly JLA series. Prometheus quickly ditches his stolen "Retro" costume and hatches his plan, which results in the rookie supervillain taking down nearly the entire League one by one. Issue 16 also acts as the introduction to the League's redesigned watchtower, so Morrison actually has the villain give us a grand tour of the new digs while he destroys it. Trapped aboard a burning lunar base with over a hundred nervous reporters and other civilians, the new JLA is forced to work the kinks out of their new lineup on national television.

Prometheus makes pretty quick work of most of the league; he hijacks Steel's armor with a virus, sends Zuriel to the Ghost Zone, and even knocks Batman for a loop with martial arts moves downloaded directly into his body through his helmet. Him standing before Green Lantern and The Flash with a defeated Batman at his feet acts as the cliffhanger between issues 16 and 17. It's especially effective since Morrison spent most of his run building up Bruce Wayne into what fans now refer to as the "Bat-God" version of the character.

 If not for his humiliating defeat, Prometheus would be the villain equivalent of a Mary Sue. I won't give away what trips him up here, but let's just say it involves a bull whip to the crotch and the intervention of a second surprise visitor to the JLA's press conference. The scene where Prometheus's plan falls apart and he's forced to make idle threats and retreat is beautiful in its simplicity; Morrison shows us in one fell swoop why the JLA will always have the upper hand on obsessive loners like Prometheus and Luthor. There's still the press to be dealt with however, "This looks like a job for the JLA!"

To give you an idea of the frenetic pace Morrison's whole run moved at, the Prometheus encounter is over for exactly three panels before Orion and Big Barda appear from a Boom Tube and the seeds for the next story arc are planted. No lengthy epilogues or baseball picnic issues here true believer, just one fantastic threat after another.

Prometheus never became the huge name villain that I think they were hoping for, but his story does branch off into a few interesting places from the end of issue #17. He returns as a part of Lex Luthor's lastest Injustice League group about two years later, but is once again foiled, this time by Batman and the Huntress. The concept of Prometheus having files and contingencies on each hero would return in the Mark Waid written Tower of Babel story, where Batman is discovered to have employed a similar tactic against his friends in case they ever "go rogue", leading to his temporary expulsion from the team. Prometheus would later return again in the Batman: Gotham Knights series, but the less said about his lackluster appearance there, the better.

I think in the time since then Prometheus has become a b-level villain at best with a really great introduction. There seems to be more potential in the character, especially with his relationship to the realms of the dead via the Ghost Zone, but that aspect of him is hardly mentioned again. In fact, over the course of his next few appearances, Prometheus devolved into little more than a Deathstroke knock-off, which is a shame since he has more in common with the old Batman foe Wrath than any assassin or merc for hire.

I've already gushed about Morrison's work before (see my obsessive love letter to Marvel Boy), so I'll talk about the art here instead. Morrison's regular JLA collaborator Howard Porter only draws #16 of the issues mentioned, while the other two are by Arnie Jorgenson, an artist whose name I don't see around much. His style is a bit more wide-eyed and manga influenced than Porter, but there's a commonality in the inking and both artists penchant for drawing the characters in very exaggerated, almost Kirby-esque poses. I even like his take on the electric blue Superman, something Morrison was saddled with during the first half of his JLA run.

Thanks for reading! Follow me on Twitter @ChrisBComics and be sure to check out Gotham Animated for more superhero goodness!

"This scattered scene of fervent calamity is to be the theater of your passing stage, aye!" - Paul Pope's Battling Boy

Battling Boy by Paul Pope is a great introduction to a new young hero that has an energy and style that many superhero and adventure comics are lacking. It's a confident book about having a lack of self confidence and melds mythology with comic book standards in a way not dissimilar to Gaiman's Sandman.

The title character Battling Boy is cast down to a world much like our own to deal with threats we mere mortals can handle, especially since the science hero Haggard West was killed in battle. BB's father is an Odin/Thor type from a stylish Asgard-like world who entrusts his son with a set of magic t-shirts that will allow him to converse with various animal totems and find his way in a desperate world besieged by wonderfully illustrated and energetic ghouls and monsters. This comic sets its own pace, defying your expectations and making seemingly odd choices at first, until you realize this is just the first act of a larger coming-of-age story.

My only real complaint about the comic is that this first installment ends just as things are getting started. We're introduced to the orphaned daughter of Haggard West and Battling Boy himself, witness a battle with a car eating monster and a gang of underworld hoodlums who wear bandages and kidnap children, and get the briefest of glimpses into this dystopia and how things work. It's the first issue of a great comic series, blown up to just over 200 pages. Where Pope plans to go from here is what really interests me, but this was a fun introduction.

The settings, from Battling Boy's home dimension to the dark chambers of the underworld at the end are all a feast for the eyes. Pope let's the ink fly and something about his art reminds me of the rough-hewn golden age comics I'd see reprinted in the backs of anniversary issues. The streets of the Earth analogue in this story are a mix of 1930's urban settings and the desolate expanses of anime series like Trigun. Every vehicle, weapon, and microphone is designed to look familiar, but also spawned from a slightly divergent timeline.

The book has many dreamlike sequences and has a tenuous relationship with reality. The plot escalates like an old school superhero story or Saturday morning cartoon, dropping ideas and concepts on every page at a Grant Morrisonian pace. Any one of the myriad threads introduced here, like the relationship between the thieves and their master or the mysteries Haggard West left behind for his daughter, could spin off into a whole other 200 page volume easily. There's nothing but potential here.

I was first introduced to Paul Pope's work by Batman: Year 100 obviously, since I'm a huge Bat-dork. He has a distinct style that I know turns some people off a la Frank Quitely, but even if his weird faces bug you, you won't be able to deny the man's ability to tell a story with pictures. If you want a classy, slightly more expensive alternative to a superhero hardcover and you have no time for dawdling in some other shared universe, this is the comic for you.

(While writing this, I learned about the Rise of Aurora West sequel to this. I'll have to get on that!)

Thanks for reading! Follow me on Twitter @ChrisBComics where I call attention to myself and the things like this that I'm doing. It's a self indulgent vortex, really.

New releases for the week of 9/7/16

New comic book day up in here! Here are some choice selections from the release schedule for this week that I think deserve a shout-out:

Skybourne #1 (Boom! Studios)
Frank Cho's latest series has been described as James Bond with fantasy elements, and that sounds pretty interesting to me so I'm spotlighting it here. Also, it's interesting to see a Cho comic that isn't marred by controversy over the length of someone's skirt.

Rise of the Black Flame #1 (Dark Horse)
Mike Mignola presents this case file from the Hellboy universe, a tale scripted by Chris Roberson and drawn by Christopher Mitten. I'll always recommend anything Hellboy or BPRD related, and this is no exception.

Cyborg: Rebirth #1 (DC Comics)
DC wants to get folks on board with their cybernetic hero, especially since he'll be a movie star in a year's time. This Rebirth special by John Semper Jr. and Paul Pelletier poses the question, "Is he a man turned machine, or a machine that thinks it's a man?" Sound very much like Alan Moore's Swamp Thing; I'm down.

The Great Divide #1 (Dynamite)
A dystopia that sees man driven apart by a deadly virus caused by skin-to-skin contact is the setting for this new series from writer Ben Fisher and artist Adam Markiewicz. Contagion stories are always full of potential and this one looks a little more manic than even the worst of them.

Godzilla: Rage Across Time #1 (IDW)
Learn about the myths and legends that inspired the modern day nightmare of Japan's nuclear lizard. This first issue focuses on the feudal era. Creators Jeremy Robinson and Matt Frank have already proven their Godzilla chops before with the fantastic Godzilla In Hell, so this is a "buy" for sure!

Glitterbomb #1 (Image)
If you follow TMZ and Gawker for their morbid headlines, this latest offering from writer Jim Zub and artist Djibril Morissette-Phan might be right up your alley. It follows a middle-aged actress named Farrah, as her desperation to get work unearths something terrifying and otherworldly. Ring-style horror with a Hollywood backdrop? Could be fun.

Night's Dominion #1 (Oni Press)
Writer/artist Ted Naifeh takes you to the spawling city of Umber, where a barmaid and an unlikely crew of adventurers try to get rich quick by stealing an ancient treasure. It sounds like D&D with a touch of Eastern influence and Naifeh's art is gorgeous, so I'd give this a shot.







I'm normally not a huge horror fan, but some of these new titles have such interesting hooks, I couldn't resist. Anyhoo, thanks for reading! Follow me on Twitter (@ChrisBComics) and check out my other blogs like Work/Shoot and Gotham Animated!

"I may not breed" - Talking to girls at parties with a little help from Neil Gaiman

Girls. I've met a few.

Parties. I've been to one.

Yeah, neither of those two things were my area of expertise when I was the same age as Enn from How To Talk To Girls At Parties. Enn's buddy Vic explains simply, "You just have to talk to them", a sentiment I heard from many "Vics" in my day. I could definitely identify with the worry and wonder of Enn's predicament, as he tries to work up the nerve to talk to what he thinks are ordinary teenage girls.

Being a Neil Gaiman comic, of course they aren't just ordinary dames. Gaiman provides the three sirens in this story with an otherworldly presence, and the art of Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon makes them seem even more fae and fragile. (Apparently, this is based on a short story by Neil I have not read.) This is a touching little number from one hell of a creative team.

It's a short one, hardly requiring the hardback treatment of the version I got from my public library, but it is a complete package. This done-in-one follows teenage horomoaners Enn and Vic as they try to get lucky at a party. Enn is the nervous, wallflower-y one, while Vic the swinging dick of the two. I saw a lot of my own past in the interactions between these two and some of the conversational bits between them felt like they'd been pulled from a diary I never kept.

It should come as a surprise to no one that Gaiman can spin a yarn, whether it's in novels like American Gods, long-form series like Sandman or smaller graphic novellas like this. He's a master of the craft and knows how to shift things into that cosmic gear without ever losing the humanity in his stories. I wouldn't mind seeing more one shots like this in the future.

The brothers Ba and Moon provide some of the best art of their careers here. When Enn and Vic arrive at the party, the way they animate the music flowing from panel to panel is so lucid you can almost hear the sounds of a high school mixer. Stella, Wain, and the other girls are rail thin, moving like blades of grass in the wind. They each seem fragile in one panel, then mysterious and sometimes evening unsettling in the next. Their story is a tragedy; alien entities peeking in on mortal mating rituals as part of a larger implied story that is never fully revealed and ultimately doesn't matter.

Sci-fi and fantasy trappings aside, this is a tale of "one crazy night" and an episode that nearly shook Enn and Vic's friendship to its core. The ending in uncomfortable, familiar, and goddamn brilliant.

This is also one of those comics you can hand to people who don't normally groove to this stuff. It's a short film of a book, easily digested but enriched with nutrients. Or something like that. It's really good. Check it out if you can.

Thanks for reading! Follow me on Twitter (@ChrisBComics) and check out my other stuff at Gotham Animated and Work/Shoot!

New releases for the week of 8/31/16

It's that time again. Time to part with all of your disposable income at the comic book retailer of your choice. Here are some suggestions:

Monty the Dinosaur #1 (Action Lab)
Writer Bob Frantz and artist Jean Franco present the tale of the last living dinosuar and his ten year old human companion Sophie. Fun for all ages, especially the dino-lovers among you!

La Muerta: Last Rites #1 (Coffin Comics)
Chaos comics alumni Brian Pulido and artist Joel Gomez bring us the epic confrontation between the sugar skull wearing vigilante La Muerte and the murderous crime boss Mama Z. Probably not for all ages, unless you wanna raise those kids right!

Witchfinder: City of the Dead #1 (Dark Horse)
Sir Edward Grey is the occult adviser for the queen and his latest romp sees him uncovering a temple devoted to Ra beneath the streets of London. Hellboy creator Mike Mignola writes this one, so you know it'll be good and the art by Ben Stenbeck ain't too shabby either!

Suicide Squad War Crimes Special (DC Comics)
Writer John Ostrander returns to the team he helped put on the map in this one shot special with artist Gus Vasquez. The Squad is tasked with cleaning up one of America's blunders and rescue a politician who may have committed a war crime or two. Expect sparks to fly and Waller to shut somebody down hard. (Just a prediction.)

Eden's Fall #1 (Image)
Characters and concepts from three different Image series (Think Tank, The Tithe, and Postal) are combined into one tale of mystery and mayhem with the sleepy town of Eden, Wyoming as the backdrop. Brought to you courtesy of writer Matt Hawkins and artist Antonio Rojo.

Howard the Duck #10 (Marvel)
I just gotta give Chip Zdarsky and Joe Quinones's Howard the Duck some love before the powers that be pluck it away from us. This has been one of the funniest monthlies I can recall and this issue promises a showdown between Howard and the villain who's been pulling his strings since the beginning. WAUGH!


Good stuff all around. A nice mix of heavy bloodshed with Howard and Monty the T-Rex in there for a bit of levity. What looks good to you? Let me know in the comments or on Twitter @ChrisBComics. Thanks for reading!

And check out Gotham Animated, where I look at every single episode of Batman: The Animated Series one by one.

The freak show is in town - Circus themed shenanigans in X-Men #111

The circus is in town and the freak show is something to behold. Hank McCoy sees some familiar faces in the troupe, but his old X-Men pals don't seem to recognize him. Something wicked this way comes in X-Men #111

The Claremont/Byrne run on X-Men is the kind of thing you sort of have to love if you're a fan of superheroes. It's required reading by this point, especially if you want to understand how a team book should function. Despite the pair not always seeing eye to eye creatively, it stands the test of time as one of the best Marvel runs, standing on a pedestal side by side with Lee and Kirby's Fantastic Four and Frank Miller's Daredevil.

Today's issue is a fun little one-off that dovetails into a larger story involving the Merry Mutant's number one nemesis, Magneto. It's the prologue to one of their most memorable confrontations with the Master of Magnetism, but for today we'll be looking at one of their lesser-known adversaries, Mesmero.

First appearing in 1968's X-Men #49, Mesmero was a small time crook with a hypnosis gimmick endowed to him by the X gene. His wacky look and persona could possibly be attributed to Arnold Drake, a creator I know best for his work with on Doom Patrol. Drake's characters and stories were always more than a little off-beat, and I tend to think of him as one of predecessors to "trippy" writers like Grant Morrison. Mesmero is set up like a wrestling jobber here, at first portrayed as a huge threat, only to be knocked aside by Magneto to cap off the issue.

I guess I'm getting ahead of myself, so I'll back it up to the start of the issue. Hank McCoy, the bouncing Beast, is looking for his former X-Men teammates (he was in the Avengers at the time) and tracks them to a circus tent in Texas of all places. There he finds them performing in a circus with no memory of their former lives. They and the other circus folk get the drop on him and he has to lead a jailbreak of sorts against their captor, Mesmero. Just as things are about to play out the way you'd expect, the real big bad rears his ugly, helmeted head.

Beast is the star of the issue and Claremont does a good job of making him an endearing protagonist. He's a stand-in for fans of the pre-Giant Size #1 X-Men fans who maybe don't care for the new team or aren't familiar. Beast is one of my favorite X-Men, and if there's one thing I dislike about the Claremont run, it's that Beast isn't in much of it (from this era anyway).

The brainwashed, "circus folk" versions of the X-Men are pretty amusing. Jean Grey is a trapeze artist and sexpot, while her boy-toy "Slim" (Cyclops) is a buffoonish bouncer. Wolverine is kept in a cage and appears feral. Banshee in the carnival barker shouting "Hurry hurry hur-RAY!" Nightcrawler and Colossus are performing freaks. Each character is seen acting pretty much the opposite of their usual self. Between this and the Beast's P.O.V., this must've been a nice break from the usual soap opera stuff for Claremont.

The cover is by Cockrum, but the interiors are by Byrne. What can I say? It's John Byrne. It's great. His X-Men stuff is some of the best comic art of its time. The layouts are pitch perfect and he knows how to pick just the right moments for each panel. He and Claremont had hit their stride by this point.

Most remarkable to me is the fact that these old issues are only 17 pages long. Modern comics are usually 20-22 pages and they still have to stretch things into trade-filling arcs. The economy of storytelling here is great. (Of course Claremont is as verbose as he is clever so it's no wonder they can jam so much into such little space.)

I think the ending of this issue is brilliant because they lull you into this basic villain of the week kind of story and then drop Magneto on you out of nowhere at the end. When I first read this in Essential X-Men Vol. 1 as a kid, that last page reveal of Mags was one of the few non-John Romita Jr. images I would try to draw again and again. That splash has really stayed with me.

That's the Back Issue Dive for today, Thanks For Reading! Follow me on Twitter @ChrisBComics and check out my other writings at Work/Shoot, Age of Mega, Tabletop Legends, and my favorite passion project, Gotham Animated.

Spin the bottle and robots - Superman: The Man of Steel #88

Robots are great. In the saccharine world superhero comics and Saturday morning cartoons, you can do things to robots that the power-that-be would never let you to do to a living character. Just look at Batman: The Animated Series. Episodes like "The Last Laugh" and "Heart of Steel" pit the Caped Crusader against mechanical menaces, allowing him to cut loose with a level of violence that was never unheard of. Heads are smashes, limbs are torn asunder, and LED eyeballs are crushed underfoot. You can't kill a robot, and therefore, you can't be accused of masochism if your antagonist is a synthetic, no matter how lifelike.

I was a pitiless robot-hater myself until the Animatrix installment "Second Renaissance" turned me around. Or maybe it was Ghost in the Shell. Maybe these artifical beings were developing an intelligence that could be compared to human consciousness . . . perhaps their own capacity for compassion could even rival our own.

Naw.

Silver Age Superman knew the score: robots are meant to be used as slaves for fighting crime. The Supes of the late 50's and 60's era comics employed an entire troupe of S-shield wearing helpers, using them for everything from aiding him against threats to acting as body doubles when that sneaky Lois Lane was a little too close to putting two and two together and realizing farm boy Clark Kent and her costumed savior were one and the same.

John Byrne's Man of Steel miniseries ushered in a new "down to Earth" Superman, stripping away some of what were considered the "sillier" elements of the hero's lore. Byrne would go on to have his time at the helm until another wave of creators took the reigns in the 90's. Cue the "death" of Superman. Cue the marriage between Lois and Clark. Cue the Electric Blue costume. And once these new and exciting ideas had been exhausted, the authors behind out monthly Super-adventures looked to the past to reinvigorate the series.

The Superman robots had found their way back. Into our comics and our hearts.

By spring 1999, there were still four main Superman titles: Action Comics, Superman, Man of Steel, and Adventures. They were interlocking, with a new issue of each dropping every week and advancing the weekly soap opera. This practice barred me from being a huge Super-fan for a while, for in my humble burg I could only find two out of the three titles at any given time.

A reboot of sorts was just around the corner. I'd read in Wizard magazine that a new wave of writers and artists were set to take over the books in the fall--names like Jeph Loeb and Joe Kelly and Geoff Johns, just like how Mark Schultz and Louise Simonson had done nearly a decade prior. The current creative teams were ramping up their storylines and bringing everything to a head, with a new galactic baddie named Dominus going to new and terrifying lengths to disconnect Superman from his friends, family, and even the rest of the JLA.

Dominus appealed to Superman's sense of responsibility, slowly warping it over time into a mix of vanity and paranoia. Recent events had made Superman more aware than ever that he could not, in fact, be everywhere at once. He fashioned a new wave of Superman robots to help him patrol the globe, while withdrawing from his Clark Kent persona entirely. Naturally, the Superman robots under his (and Dominus's) command were over stepping their boundaries are leaving world authorities on edge. Who knew the global police state would come wrapped in a red cape and blue spandex?

Man of Steel #88 sees Superman coming to his senses, at least to some degree, after Lois Lane and the cosmically-powered faerie-like creature Kismet appeared at the Fortress of Solitude to slap some sense into him. (Well, Lois throws a boot at him, but you get my point.) The world is on edge, preparing to declare war on Superman and his robot army, and it may take more than the usual fisticuffs to settle things.

It takes a kiss. A fairy tale, cosmically-endowed kiss.

Doug Mahnke provides the art in this issue, and his Superman robots are definitely the highlight. They aren't quite as humanoid as their Silver Age predecessors, instead sporting a raw mechanical look that just scream, "Break me!" His human figures are nice too, but he's years away from becoming the modern master we'd see in the more current Green Lantern and Justice League titles. Looking back at this issue, I was surprised to see how long Mahnke had really been in the game. He's one of DC's go-to guys, that's for sure.

Scripting this one is the aforementioned "Mr. Science" Mark Shultz. He seems to come from the Elliot S! Maggin school of Superman writing, using the character and his world to ask those vaunted "big questions" about society and the state of our world. However, this issue in particular has a personal touch to it. There's even a flashback to Clark playing spin-the-bottle with Lana Lang in his younger years. Love and sex conquer hate and death. The Kismet/Dominus stuff is almost a Jim Starlin-like cosmic opera, but the feels creep in a little more than in any issue of Warlock I remember.

And that cover. Awesome. When you're an adolescent like I was at the time, darker, edgier characters like Spawn are constantly stealing your attention (and allowance) away from classics like Supes. All it takes is an action packed, mechanical bone crunching cover like that to draw me back in.

I never managed to get every chapter of the Kismet/Dominus story, but I must've liked what I read because those issues seemed to have stuck with me while other ones from the time have faded from my memory, and my collection. The Loeb/Kelly run that was about to start was arguably the stronger material, but aside from President Luthor and Our Worlds at War, I couldn't tell you off the top of my head what any of those issues were about.

But I guess that's what this rambling little blog is for!

Thanks for reading!

Twitter: @ChrisBComics
E-Mail: backissuechris@gmail.com
More heroes in peril: Gotham Animated

Angst wrapped in a cape - Spawn #107 on the Family Values Tour

Spawn.

Yeah, that guy.

You take the look from Venom, the cape from Batman, the chains from Ghost Rider, whip them all together and BAM!, you have a "grimdark" character with an alarming amount of staying power.

I was not immune to his demonic charms. Spawn might very well be my first "indy" book, or at the very least, my first regular title to collect that wasn't published by Marvel or DC.

(Well there were some Sonic the Hedgehog comics I had from somewhere . . . and a random issue of Power Rangers, but I didn't go whole hog on those.)

When a young lad hits just that right age, and the cosmic forces of angst and self-loathing start to set it, a character like Spawn has a certain appeal. Could I relate to being a black ops soldier dude who was sold out by his bosses and left for dead? Not really. Did I feel like I'd been spat out of Hell every day on the way home from school? Sure!

Spawn #107 wasn't my first issue of the series or anything, I just came across it when going through some of my old, unsorted books. Pressed between two thick gaming magazines, it had been preserved pretty well for a comic without a bag and board. Inside I found echoes of my youth, and a pretty decent first chapter to a story arc I may or may not have ever finished collecting.

This one is kind of a by-the-numbers "act one". Heck, it's not even a proper act one for Spawn himself since the central conflict doesn't really rear its head. Shoot, I'll double back on that. This story isn't about Spawn at all; it's a backdrop for a father-son drama between a member of Spawn's supporting cast and his estranged son.

You folks remember Sam & Twitch, right? The Bullock and Montoya to Spawn's Batman, these two coppers would often weave in and out of Spawn's world and occasionally we'd get a peek into theirs. Marvel scribe and Jessica Jones creator Brian Bendis even did some journeyman work on their spin-off title. This issue starts a Twitch arc. A little over a year prior to this, Twitch and his problems at home had become the center point for a storyline involving pedophile-turned-demon Billy Kincaid, and I remember his reunion with his wife at the end of that arc almost moving little me to tears.

(Or maybe it was Greg Capullo's bodacious babes, of which Twitch's wife was one.)

So Twitch's family drama is set to return in this arc, with his son living like a couch surfer and falling in with what we're led to assume in this first chapter is the "wrong crowd". Don't panic, Spawn and several other groovy ghoulies appear aplenty to keep things from going all after-school special.

Alright, Sam & Twitch were hardly "obscure", but a show of hands for who remembers Wolfram, Spawn's hobo werewolf buddy. Anyone? I had forgotten about him too. It's all good though, because in this issue he meets his end thanks to a holier-than-thou monster slayer named Simon Pure.

(Simon Pure. I just know the younger me thought that was dope.)

What about the guy on the cover? With the guns and the blasting and the necroplasm stuff? He appears in this ish, taking on both sides of a mob war and getting his chain yanked by this Simon Pure fellow. Simon seems like the type who might try to read Spawn the riot act, but instead he alludes to a greater threat . . . something on the horizon, dun dun DUUUN!

Brian Holguin was writing the book at this time, with what I'm sure was pretty lax supervision by creator Todd McFarlane. I haven't read any non-Spawn work by Holguin, but I can't say he's a lousy writer or anything. He would have been just as at home cooking up punchy little pot boilers for Marvel's X-Men line or DC's Bat-books at that time. Unobtrusive stuff that speaks to teenage boys--man knows his audience and I can respect that.

Capullo had left at this point (I think for personal reasons) and we get Angel Medina as the main artist here. I've since read some Spidey's drawn by Medina, and while that 90's "Image style" isn't exactly my thing anymore, I can appreciate the detail on every page. These pages are overstocked, if anything.

This is a pretty typical setup issue that could also function as a first issue for new readers, or a "jumping on point" as publishers are wont to call them now. You get an explanation of what Spawn is and an example of what he does, a new enemy/rival in Simon Pure, and the introduction of a sub-plot that'll keep the soap opera suckers coming back to see if poor Twitch will get his son back.

If I sound a little "meh" about this issue, I think it probably reflects how I felt back then. Like I said, I don't know if I even got the rest of the arc. This is from a time in my personal reading history when aesthetics were becoming less important to me than story. And stories needed to be "trippy" for me to get into them. Cue Morrison's X-Men. Cue Warren Ellis's Planetary. Cue my first experiences with marijuana. I was morphing from one teenage stereotype into another.

So yeah, Spawn. That guy. I don't really miss having his adventures as a part of my monthly schedule, but I don't regret having read them either the way I regret the music from that era. (Jonathan Davis and Fred Durst have a lot to answer for.)

Thanks for reading!
Twitter: @ChrisBComics
E-mail: backissuechris@gmail.com
Similar angsty content: Tabletop Legends

Normal hands are overrated - Fond memories of Peter Parker: Spider-Man #81

When a company makes something, and you like, and they know you like it, they'll make more of it. I think that's how business and commerce and whatnot works. Once enough people like something, a culture might develop around it, and the unified love of something will eventually splinter off into subcultures.

(I'm going somewhere with this. I think.)

Amazing Spider-Man was Marvel's flagship book for a while, and depending on who you ask, it still is. While the Fantastic Four lost some of it's creative "oomph" in the period between Jack Kirby's run and the John Byrne stuff in the eighties, mass market appeal shifted over to ol' Web-head. Sure, the X-Men were hot stuff once Claremont took over and Daredevil wowed readers under the pen of Frank Miller, but Spider-Man had a Macy's Day float.

He had a float. As the kids say: Hol' dat, Wolverine.

Spidey was such a huge hit in the comics and burgeoning multimedia star that Marvel knew they had to get more content out the door, and fast. There were several sister books over the years, from Marvel Team-Up to Spectacular Spider-Man Magazine, all providing some variation on the themes of power and responsibility and everyone, I imagine, had their preference.

Fast forward to the go-go 1990's and I'm a chubby little superhero nerd following Spidey's adventures in Amazing whenever I saw a new one appear at the convenience store spinner rack or the magazine section of the local HEB. Amazing was my jam for a time, which is surprising to me now since the comics at the time were in the midst of the clone saga and Ben Reilly was the main character more often than not. This didn't sync up with the Fox Kids cartoon I was watching, but I guess the younger me didn't care.

I knew Amazing wasn't the only game in town. I'd seen blurbs in the issues for other titles like Sensational Spider-Man and Untold Tales of Spider-Man, but those didn't "count". Amazing was where the title began and that's the "real" one, right?

(Maybe that sounds silly now, but seriously . . . look at the hang-ups fanboys have about geek stuff nowadays and you'll see nothing has changed.)

My family moved. Not far, but far enough away that I couldn't get back to my usual "dealers". Comic book stores were a myth to me at this point. If there even was one in my area at the time I didn't know of it, and my pop damn sure wasn't going to take me anyway. I was left to scour a new network of store shelves and racks for my Spider-Man fix.

Then I met John Romita Jr. For the second time.

Well, I didn't really meet the man, I just came across his work. The first instance was my older brother getting me a copy of Spider-Man: The Lost Years #1. This one was a little heavy for me, and had very little actual webslinging in it, but I remembered the distinct art style and holofoil cover when I later found Peter Parker: Spider-Man #81 at a Circle K store near our trailer park abode.

Romita Jr.'s art might be the first style I tried to copycat as a young doodler. Something about the way he constructed his figures (Spider-Man's shoulders and calves for instance) really stuck with me and to this day any time I get a wild hair and decide to do some sketching, I still fall back on those basic shapes. I didn't know much about comics history at that time; that Johnny Jr's dad was one of THE Marvel artists of the silver and bronze ages, or that Peter Parker: Spider-Man was the continuation of the monthly series started by Todd McFarlane back in his heyday. All I knew was this guy drew a bad-ass Spider-Man and before long, I'd completely abandoned my Amazing roots.

About the issue at hand: this is a quick and dirty done-in-one issue where our titular hero gets embroiled in a Kung Fu-tastic feud between The Cat (I swear to D'jinn it's not Shang Chi) and his enemies Razorfist and Shockwave. There's a youngling that needs rescuing, a depressed Mary Jane Watson at home, the works. This is a time capsule comic for me. As in, you could drop this in a time capsule and future folks could dig it up and go, "Huh. So that's what Spider-Man comics were up to back in 1997!" I don't know if anyone would actually do that, but that also can't be the dumbest thing anyone's put in a time capsule either.

Another milestone in this issue (for me, anyway) was the appearance of the aforementioned baddie Razorfist. He has razors in place of fists. Younger me would have loved this handicap, wiping be damned! Writer Howard Mackie must've been a fan of Marvel's Shang Chi, Master of Kung Fu.

In an attempt to bring things full circle, I'll say this: Peter Parker: Spider-Man #81 is not a remarkable comic in any way save for some cool art and a great Steve Ditko-esque "Spidey landing a K.O. punch" splash page, but it did introduce me to the concept of interpretation. It was no longer about the "real version" or the "canon" for me, it was about seeing Writer X and Artist Y do their take on a character.

Also, Razorfist. AGAIN! AGAIN! AGAIN!

Thanks for reading this nonsense! And if you liked it, I do this kind of thing in a few other places. Whether you're into pro wrestling, video games, or pretending to be a vampire, I got you.

Twitter: @ChrisBComics
E-Mail: backissuechris@gmail.com