DC - Review - FA Online

Strange Adventures 1

On the one hand, I’m all for a revival of DC’s ancient SF anthology; on the other hand, this is Vertigo, and I often get exasperated with them. Unfortunately the balance comes down on that side, for me.

DC Comics Presents Batman: Dark Knight, Dark City

This is a comic-format collection of four twenty year old Detective issues by Milligan, a three-parter and a one-off. Both stories are very good ones, and at eight dollars it’s good value too.

Superman 711

For such an iconic character, there are few truly memorable comics featuring Superman. There’s a balancing act that few creators manage to pull off successfully, and the result is a comic that’s staid, or twee, or camp, or disastrously modified to fit current trends. In this issue, they’ve opted to create a comic that reads like a throwback from the 1970s.

Batman: Gates of Gotham 1

I’m not entirely sure what to say about this – I found very little to get my teeth into. The story starts in the late 19th Century with a Wayne and some other guys planning some unclear but ambitious architecture, including some bridges. Cut to now, and the bridges are getting blown up by someone new, to me at least, for unstated reasons. And that’s it. We are given no reason to particularly care about the bridges, no reason they are more important to the city than bridges naturally are, no sense of what the attacks are for or who the perpetrator is.

Yossel

In this graphic novel, one of the all-time great American comic artists imagines how his life might have gone had his family not left Poland in 1926. As with other Jews, they end up in the Warsaw ghetto. Joe, at 16 (in reality he was a successful artist at DC by then), is soon left orphaned, treated better than most by the Nazis because his drawings entertain them. The story climaxes with the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, one of the most desperately tragic events in modern history, where handfuls of half-starved Jews with a few stolen and improvised weapons tried to fight back against thousands of German soldiers, with tanks, flame throwers and so on, because they knew that not fighting back meant a trip to the death camps.

Superboy 7

Recently nominated for an Eisner award for Best New Series, Superboy is one of the best superhero books DC is publishing. If you haven’t tried it, give it a go.

Flashpoint 1

I wasn’t sure whether to try this, since I have been ignoring the Prelude to Flashpoint comics, and it’s another series that crosses over into countless other titles (a checklist lists 22 of them in June alone), but I believe the intent these days is generally to make the central series readable in isolation, so I gave it a go.

Xombi 2

The most interesting bit of this issue is an upskirt glimpse of a female minor in a Catholic school outfit to which we are made privy. Typically, you’d label it a humdrum bit of fan service and maybe get an editorial or two out of it, replete with a counterbalance of a near triple-digit number of sexist commenters and their always-welcome liberal approach to grammar.

Power Girl 23

The first twelve issues of Power Girl – and the story-arc that preceded it in the JSA Classified title – were delightful. Taking the permagrumpy powerhouse of the Justice Society and infusing her with a wry sense of humour and self-awareness, they humanised a character who had become an overbearing, ambulant wet-dream cliche, placing her in a context where she had actual friends and a life. All down to the hitherto unsuspected (at least by me) scripting talents of Jimmy Palmiotti & Justin Gray, Kara/Karen became grounded and – look, I’m sorry, but there’s no way around it – well-rounded, coming across as more than an ersatz Supergirl.

Showcase Presents Green Lantern 5

They have the back cover blurb right on this: it’s the run of Neal Adams Green Lantern & Green Arrow issues, nearly 350 pages, that will sell this. They call it one of the “most celebrated runs by a creative team in the history of comic books,” and they’re right – except it was also the run that led to the cancellation of the series because of dropping sales, after which GL became a backup story in broken runs in Flash.