A Free Comic Book Day Miracle
The only serious newsletter about comic books returns, PLUS: whoa so many new releases
It's a good thing nothing funny happened in comics while I was away, or it might seem like I've been extremely neglectful in my duty to chronicle all that is great and good about the greatest and most good artform on the planet --that's comics, in case you forgot-- and that would make me a poor steward of what is, no matter what the darkest recesses of my self-doubt claim any time I am alone with myself and the darkness of my own soul, the greatest goddamn newsletter about comic books of all time in all of history ever.
Readers that may be more attuned to current events across the industry might, on reading these opening statements, tell me that I'm wrong. That, as a point of fact, several funny things have happened across the comic book industry since you read me last, and that I should have been there to greet them with the usual self-aggrandizing pseudo-satirical posturing you've come to love and expect, plus some barely coherent reviews that only talk about the comics they are supposed to be about on an extremely tangential level. (To tell you the truth, I've experienced a lot of self-doubt while I've been away)
But is that really the case? Take, for instance, the fact that Ike Perlmutter got ousted from the position of chairman of Marvel Entertainment as this relatively small consumer products and also incidentally comics unit got folded into the greater ecosystem of the Disney Empire, long may it reign. Yes, he was notorious for being comically frugal, to the point where it has been Marvel Lore for as long as I've read comics that the offices where your favorite comics are put together only ever had the one functioning toilet. Is there anything funny in imagining what the future of Marvel Comics might look like with editors having access to several toilets? Is there any mirth to be found in asking whether Dark Web would have happened in a universe where The Amazing Spider-Man editor Nick Lowe had been free to piss and shit at his own leisure? Can you get 500 words speculating on whether or not X-Men line editor Jordan D. White would have greenlit a book that sounds as obviously bad as X-Men Dark if he had been granted the opportunity to ponder on it while taking a dump, and can you make them funny? No. There is nothing funny about toilets. It does not work as a comedy premise.
What of DSTLRY, the hot new comic book publisher led by the recently out-of-Amazon founders of Comixology, announced with so much pomp and a list of associates-slash-shareholders-slash-creators so long you'd think it had anything to do with NFTs? What's so funny about that? Their obviously bad idea to limit the availability of their digital comics to create an exclusive secondary market of digital goods they can regulate to skim a little off the top of every transaction, which is used to pay the artists, which would be immoral (the bad idea, not the part where artists get paid) if it wasn't so deeply stupid? What's so funny in that? That you'd probably get better and more reliable results just taking the profits you'd make from selling the comic books and putting them all on red at any roulette table in Vegas? Who would laugh at the sentence "an operation so fly-by-night that its side A opens with Anthem"? It's a fucking Rush joke! No one likes prog rock! At this point you might as well give up the ghost and admit no amount of whimsy, not even those flights of fancy that involve cursed apple orchards, magical imps from the underworld, and a creature only known as He-Who-Gnaws-On-Bone, could make a fairly cut-and-dry demonstration that creating a speculative bubble around comics has never been good in any way for the business palatable for the masses and their ever-increasing hunger for any kind of laugh in times that dare not get better anymore.
See, things are fucked up right now. Anything less than the full might of my vis comica would afflict the already afflicted in a way I cannot fathom. There's enough bad in the world right now without me pouring on the misery. There are people, and they are suffering. And that's just the Spider-Man fans! Hiyooooooo!
Okay we're back. Let's fucking get to work.
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS: IN THIS WEEK'S "SPIDER-MAN" SPIDER-MAN GETS TOLD OFF BECAUSE ONE PERSON DIED WHILE HE WAS RESCUING A DOG AND THIS IS SUCH AN HILARIOUSLY ON THE NOSE SUMMATION OF HOW THE CHARACTER IS VIEWED IN CONTEMPORARY MARVEL COMICS THAT I CAN'T REALLY MAKE THAT ANY MORE FUNNY THAN IT ACTUALLY IS
Chip Zdarsky's Batman run has been a pretty tough nut to crack. It's not that it wasn't good, mind you: it was, it was extremely good comics, that's just the only way Jorge Jimenez and Tomeu Morey can make them, and they had near-lethal quantities of that pharma-grade blockbuster comic book nonsense. They had Batman forced to negotiate his own fall and re-entry into Earth's atmosphere in a mostly scientifically accurate way! How could one not be entertained? Sure, this wasn't Daredevil, but, on aggregate, it turns out very few things are.
The problem, as I have come to see it after months of running it in my head over and over again, was that, while this run had been generous on the ideas, very few of them had actually been its own. By design, Failsafe, the very first threat it had put against the Caped Crusader, was devised as Batman's Doomsday. All the mean while, it was laying out familiar plot beats and references to Batman's past with the diligence of the over-eager fanfiction writer: Batman was dreaming of Three Jokers, constantly gripped with the fear of another Death in the Family. The Batman of Zur-En-Arrh returned, building on the threats issued at the end of Tower of Babel. Hell, even the run's inciting incident, where Batman was framed for murder, had recycled a gambit the Chipster had pulled over in Daredevil.
And then, Batman jumped universes, leaving behind a dystopian Gotham City that had been weaponized by one of his foes for the fourth time in as many years only to find himself in a dystopian Gotham City that was weaponized by one of his foes, but in a universe where the circumstances had been somewhat different, but not really all that much. And, at that point, I feared this comic would lose me.
It is a good thing, then, that Batman #135, an oversized milestone celebration issue packed with just the one story, pulled off what had seemed nearly impossible, and put into perspective everything the book had done up to this point, laying out the vision that had been hiding in plain sight. More than any other run before it, this is a Batman comic about Batman comics. Beyond "playing the hits", this is a story in which every single story that has threatened to "change Batman forever" in recent memory is happening at once. An endless assault of deconstruction and reconstruction pushing the Dark Knight beyond the extreme, using what remains as the scaffolding on which to build a better Batman.
There is, to me, no clearer illustration of this process than the events transpiring in this issue, in which one Joker in the Multiverse mainlines The Killing Joke in gaseous form (there's a reason for it but let's not put it in the way of a good metaphor) and trips the light fantastic through version after version of Batman, infecting each and every one of them with murderous nihilistic madness. Eventually, as it must, the ensemble collapses in on itself, leaving in its aftermath nothing but ruins and rubble. And then, in a move that feels pretty Grant Morrison, but doesn't call attention to itself as such, which is how you know it's the really good stuff, the idea of the Joker re-appears, taking that familiar shape of the hole in things. It is dressed up differently, of course, with a great deal more teeth, and a smile painted in smeared make-up, but it is the abyss at the end of every Batman story nonetheless. Because Batman and Robin will never die, it gets soundly defeated, but the damage might have been done already, and the final page, very fittingly, feels like both a celebration of what has been and a threat.
Oh, and, also: this is Jorge Jimenez returning from his day job having made a solid gold barrel's worth of cold hard cash money drawing a Mark Millar comic, and flexing with skill beyond skill, pulling off perfect mimicries of just about any take on Batman worth recalling, while delivering some of the most perfect pictures you will find in a comic all year. There is stuff in here that only plays for one single solitary panel, and that still managed to drop my jaw to the floor. It's an achievement. It's made me more excited to read Batman comics than I've been in a hot minute. I re-read Batman R.I.P. in preparation for this review! It fucking ruled! Life is good.
And one day, as I woke up, I realized I just couldn't be the Tom Taylor hater the rest of the comic book crit literati expected me to be. It happened after I read Adventures of Superman #2, but this week's Adventures of Superman #3 went and confirmed it: Tom Taylor is Good, Actually, and I am ready to admit that to the world. All it took to convince me was a return to the scene of his very first crime: the Injustice universe, yes, the one from the tie-in prequel comics to the fighting game that somehow managed to rock everyone's world with a steady clip of infinitely quotable panels all those years back.
As it was then, the appeal comes from a couple of factors. First, there's the intense high-stakes melodrama, getting mined for all that it is worth. Yes, by pitting good ol' Jon Kent against Injustice's Superman, it pits a child that was robbed of a childhood against a father that was robbed of a child. It knows that, and it knows how to make it gut-wrenching, especially when drawn with Clayton Henry's clean, clear, and very expressive style. Every which way you look, there are characters beset by deep personal tragedies, and they are all simple enough that they don't require full knowledge of the vicissitudes that played out across two games and several years of tie-in comics to pick up on. (But if you know, oh boy, they're downright tasty)
Second, and this is arguably what makes the book tick, is the fact that this melodrama is deployed through outright gleeful twisting of iconic imagery. By which I mean that yes, this is a comic where Superman is out there breaking some necks, which speaks to me on a very deep level for reasons too obvious to re-state here. What you need to know, besides that which I don't want to spoil for you, is that it is a complete blast. Somehow, that's all it takes to shut me up.
For the record: when I immediately called, in my review of ISSUE FUCKING ONE that Batman/Superman: World's Finest would turn into a re-litigation of Kingdom Come, I was supposed to be wrong. I saw a twisted pair of horns, I immediately jumped to Magog, and I got clowned on by the facts. Until, somehow, I didn't. From there, it became impossible for me to treat Mark Waid's triumphant return to DC with anything but contempt, because it had appeared clear that I had nothing but familiarity with what it was putting down. Here was a book whose gaze was stuck firmly backwards, making itself irrelevant on purpose, and thus not worth caring about.
And yet, shockingly, the people that made that book just pulled off the most successful attempt at modernizing the adventures of Billy Batson I have ever seen. Very obviously against its writer's wishes, it's called Shazam! #1, but don't be fooled: this is a Captain Marvel book through and through, recapturing the imagination and the sense of wonder of those Golden Age comics, but setting it in a modern context.
Most important of all, it gets that Billy is a child, with a child's point of a view and a child's problems, and how that plays with the character's voice is genuinely great. This is a comic that absolutely nails the wish fulfillment fantasy aspect of the premise, and runs with it to incredible results. Most cleverly of all, this is also a comic that gets that the superhero side of him is not exactly the same person, and that there is a tension there that is interesting to see play out.
And, of course: this is an action comic drawn by Dan Mora, which immediately makes it a joy to behold. Working from the starting point of Golden Age simplicity, his style is brighter and cleaner than it has ever been, which makes everything, from the dinosaur adventures to the daring rescues and all the life in-between, pop with timeless charm. I had a big goofy grin the whole time I was reading this. Check it.
Finally, a quick heads-up: they let Kyle Starks do a Peacemaker book, and Steve Pugh draws it. That's it! That's all there is to say about Peacemaker Tries Hard #1, a comic book that is the perfect expression of itself. If you liked the profanity-laden macho action posturing with a hint of deep-seated insecurities and gratuitous violence that made the show one of last year's biggest hits, you will love the work of Kyle Starks, who has made that his whole thing, and turned in a few masterpieces like Sexcastle along the way. Steve Pugh, as usual, gives the proceedings a consummate sense of deadpan, giving gravitas to outright goofy circumstances, which makes everything land as hard as it needs to. It is what it is, and what it is kinda rips ass. Nothing more to say.
Wow! That was a lot! Turns out I LOVE doing this shit! I missed it! I missed you! Let's never do that again! When I'm not doing this, I'm usually on the one good social media website, having a blast, and maybe I'll see you there? In the mean time, let's trade one promise for another: I WILL return, but, in exchange, as always, you will HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS!