CLASSIC EBI: TAX TIME? TIME FOR OLD COMICS
Another Classic Everything But Imaginary for you today, friends. By the way, I've been doing these classic TAIs and EBIs as the whim strikes me (and, in the case of EBI, to rebuild the database of those columns no longer archived at Comixtreme). But if you guys remember a specific column you'd like to see again or want to hear if I had anything to say about a particular topic, heck, feel free to request it.
Anyway, here's one that should apply to most of us this time of year -- what do you do for entertainment when the taxman cometh? Dig out some of those great old comics you may have forgotten about! From April, 16 2003, here is...
EVERYTHING BUT IMAGINARY 4/16/03 -- TAX TIME? TIME FOR OLD COMICS
Well friends, it's April 16, and that means one of two things. Either you just paid your taxes or you're going to be reading future installments of this column to your cellmate, a delicate little flower named "Guido."
Now I'm sure it's possible that many of you got refunds this year, in which case, this column isn't for you, you jerks. No, this column is for those of us who just forked over our annual dues to Uncle Sam, and I don't mean the Alex Ross trade paperback. Let's face it, it would take a fiscal catastrophe that makes Enron look like a misplaced decimal point to make most of us give up our regular weekly comics, but if your pocketbook is feeling the pinch, you may think twice before shelling out the cash for that Batman: Hush hardcover.
So this week, we're going to take a look back at some of the cool comics of the past - some that you probably already have in your collection, assuming that your collection mirrors my own right down to the autographed Uncle Scrooge #300 where Don Rosa wrote "Best Wishes Blake." Why spill the extra cash? You've got gems in your longboxes already that haven't seen the light of day in far too long. Nothing ultra-rare, nothing ultra-expensive, just good, solid comics you've forgotten you have.
Justice League/Justice League International/Justice League America #1-60 and Justice League Europe #1-35. After the doom and gloom of Crisis on Infinite Earths, in a world still reeling from Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, Keith Giffen and his co-conspirators J.M. DeMatteis, Gerard Jones and more artists than I will insult by failing to list them all found a way to take superhero comics and make them wacky, silly and positively joyous. They did everything in this series, from turning Guy Gardner into a pansy to making the Martian Manhunter an Oreo fiend. Two of the biggest second-stringers in DC history, the Blue Beetle and Booster Gold, became a comedy team to rival Laurel and Hardy, and the League’s globe-trotting adventures never failed to solicit a “Bwaa-haa-haa!”
The way they ended this incarnation of the series was a little bittersweet - the League sort of fell apart. (The Justice League charter requires the team to periodically disband amidst a cacophony of in-fighting and bad costume changes.) But on the other hand, Dan Jurgens took over, marking the first time in current DCU continuity that Superman was a member of the League. So, y'know. Tomato, to-mah-toe.
Magnus: Robot Fighter #21-37 and Rai and the Future Force #9-22. It's often difficult to pinpoint the exact place where a company begins to go downhill. Sure, it's easy to pick on the Spider-Clone, but that was really just the latest symptom in a slow decline for Marvel. It's easier with Valiant Comics - they began to suck at about the same time the ink dried on the check Acclaim used to purchase the company. Because of that, it's easy to forget that before those days they did some of the best science fiction-oriented superheroes this side of the Legion.
During this run, which included writing mostly by John Ostrander and current Negation scribe supreme Tony Bedard, we got the story of the invasion of 40th-century Earth by freewill robots, the Malevalents. Adventure, pathos, drama, and space-faring superhero action. After this run the two series jumped ahead 20 years and began to focus on the offspring of the respective leads, which didn't have nearly the punch. Up until then, though, we got a good, complete story that read beautifully.
Astro City: Confessions (the trade paperback which reprinted AC Vol. 2 #3-9). Kurt Busiek's own little universe of familiar (yet tantalizingly different) heroes has been at the top of my reading list since the series first debuted in 1995. (Hard to believe it’s that old, isn’t it?) This paperback collects the best single story arc to date. Young, orphaned Brian Kinney travels to Astro City in the hopes of becoming a superhero. Fate lands him in the hands of the Confessor (a clear Batman homage), who takes him under his wing. It's a superhero epic wrapped in a serial killer mystery that all works to conceal something even bigger. It's flawless.
The paperback also collects Busiek's masterpiece, "The Nearness of You," originally presented in Astro City #1/2. Michael Tennicek has been having dreams. His nights are haunted by a woman he knows he's never met, but can't stop thinking about. Busiek distills the sort of story that, in a mainstream universe, would encompass 12 issues plus 37 crossovers, and tells it in a few short pages that are more quietly powerful than any comic I've ever read. When I read this story, I cried. Yeah, I can admit it. I'm secure in my masculinity. (Sniff.)
Tales of the Green Lantern Corps #1-3 by Len Wein with art by Joe Staton (who will always be the Hal Jordan-era GL artist to me). It seems to be an unwritten rule that every Green Lantern writer do an "Exile in Space" story and that all such stories are terrible. However, when there’s no exile involved, GL-in-space stories can be really good. Case in point. When the Guardians of the Universe assemble all 3600 Green Lanterns on the Planet Oa, some nasty stuff is clearly going down. It turns out to be nothing short than the end of all existence. The renegade Guardian Krona has returned, this time backed by the mad god of death, Nekron. Nekron has discovered that, by killing immortals, he can make his way into the world of the living and destroy everything. As immortals, the Guardians are a convenient target.
Hal Jordan and the GLC have 24 hours, the time of one ring-charge, to find Krona and defeat him. This was pretty hard stuff for the time -- characters died, new ones were introduced and there was a real sense of menace despite the fact that you knew Wein wasn't about to destroy the DC Universe. (They were saving that for Marv Wolfman a few years later.) This remains one of my favorite Green Lantern stories of all time.
Fantastic Four #337-#354. Written and pencilled by the esteemed Walter Simonson, this run of FF comics took the awesome foursome (or fivesome, at the time, since Ms. Marvel was doing Thing-duty, with Ben Grimm in human form) through several journeys through time and alternate realities. We also got an epic showdown between Reed Richards and Dr. Doom that was at least as good as the 264 other epic showdowns between Reed Richards and Dr. Doom we’ve seen. And lest we forget the battle with the faceless goons of the Time Variance Authority, Death’s Head II, the three issues of the “new” Fantastic Four and some freaky cosmic executives that bore a chilling resemblance to the late Mark Gruenwald. Issue #352 is especially notable for the neat time-travel trick Simonson used to tell the story -- if you read the pages exactly in the order they were printed, you were left scratching your head in confusion. Unfortunately, they put the note explaining how to read the comic in the lettercolumn at the end, which meant most of us read it the wrong way the first time around. The second time, though, it ruled.
Blake M. Petit is the author of a novel, Other People’s Heroes, a couple of plays he’s still trying to get on a stage somewhere and a regular column in here at Think About It Central. None of these, as of yet, are making him enough money to just hire someone to worry about his taxes for him. E-mail him at Blake@comixtreme.com.
Anyway, here's one that should apply to most of us this time of year -- what do you do for entertainment when the taxman cometh? Dig out some of those great old comics you may have forgotten about! From April, 16 2003, here is...
EVERYTHING BUT IMAGINARY 4/16/03 -- TAX TIME? TIME FOR OLD COMICS
Well friends, it's April 16, and that means one of two things. Either you just paid your taxes or you're going to be reading future installments of this column to your cellmate, a delicate little flower named "Guido."
Now I'm sure it's possible that many of you got refunds this year, in which case, this column isn't for you, you jerks. No, this column is for those of us who just forked over our annual dues to Uncle Sam, and I don't mean the Alex Ross trade paperback. Let's face it, it would take a fiscal catastrophe that makes Enron look like a misplaced decimal point to make most of us give up our regular weekly comics, but if your pocketbook is feeling the pinch, you may think twice before shelling out the cash for that Batman: Hush hardcover.
So this week, we're going to take a look back at some of the cool comics of the past - some that you probably already have in your collection, assuming that your collection mirrors my own right down to the autographed Uncle Scrooge #300 where Don Rosa wrote "Best Wishes Blake." Why spill the extra cash? You've got gems in your longboxes already that haven't seen the light of day in far too long. Nothing ultra-rare, nothing ultra-expensive, just good, solid comics you've forgotten you have.
Justice League/Justice League International/Justice League America #1-60 and Justice League Europe #1-35. After the doom and gloom of Crisis on Infinite Earths, in a world still reeling from Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, Keith Giffen and his co-conspirators J.M. DeMatteis, Gerard Jones and more artists than I will insult by failing to list them all found a way to take superhero comics and make them wacky, silly and positively joyous. They did everything in this series, from turning Guy Gardner into a pansy to making the Martian Manhunter an Oreo fiend. Two of the biggest second-stringers in DC history, the Blue Beetle and Booster Gold, became a comedy team to rival Laurel and Hardy, and the League’s globe-trotting adventures never failed to solicit a “Bwaa-haa-haa!”
The way they ended this incarnation of the series was a little bittersweet - the League sort of fell apart. (The Justice League charter requires the team to periodically disband amidst a cacophony of in-fighting and bad costume changes.) But on the other hand, Dan Jurgens took over, marking the first time in current DCU continuity that Superman was a member of the League. So, y'know. Tomato, to-mah-toe.
Magnus: Robot Fighter #21-37 and Rai and the Future Force #9-22. It's often difficult to pinpoint the exact place where a company begins to go downhill. Sure, it's easy to pick on the Spider-Clone, but that was really just the latest symptom in a slow decline for Marvel. It's easier with Valiant Comics - they began to suck at about the same time the ink dried on the check Acclaim used to purchase the company. Because of that, it's easy to forget that before those days they did some of the best science fiction-oriented superheroes this side of the Legion.
During this run, which included writing mostly by John Ostrander and current Negation scribe supreme Tony Bedard, we got the story of the invasion of 40th-century Earth by freewill robots, the Malevalents. Adventure, pathos, drama, and space-faring superhero action. After this run the two series jumped ahead 20 years and began to focus on the offspring of the respective leads, which didn't have nearly the punch. Up until then, though, we got a good, complete story that read beautifully.
Astro City: Confessions (the trade paperback which reprinted AC Vol. 2 #3-9). Kurt Busiek's own little universe of familiar (yet tantalizingly different) heroes has been at the top of my reading list since the series first debuted in 1995. (Hard to believe it’s that old, isn’t it?) This paperback collects the best single story arc to date. Young, orphaned Brian Kinney travels to Astro City in the hopes of becoming a superhero. Fate lands him in the hands of the Confessor (a clear Batman homage), who takes him under his wing. It's a superhero epic wrapped in a serial killer mystery that all works to conceal something even bigger. It's flawless.
The paperback also collects Busiek's masterpiece, "The Nearness of You," originally presented in Astro City #1/2. Michael Tennicek has been having dreams. His nights are haunted by a woman he knows he's never met, but can't stop thinking about. Busiek distills the sort of story that, in a mainstream universe, would encompass 12 issues plus 37 crossovers, and tells it in a few short pages that are more quietly powerful than any comic I've ever read. When I read this story, I cried. Yeah, I can admit it. I'm secure in my masculinity. (Sniff.)
Tales of the Green Lantern Corps #1-3 by Len Wein with art by Joe Staton (who will always be the Hal Jordan-era GL artist to me). It seems to be an unwritten rule that every Green Lantern writer do an "Exile in Space" story and that all such stories are terrible. However, when there’s no exile involved, GL-in-space stories can be really good. Case in point. When the Guardians of the Universe assemble all 3600 Green Lanterns on the Planet Oa, some nasty stuff is clearly going down. It turns out to be nothing short than the end of all existence. The renegade Guardian Krona has returned, this time backed by the mad god of death, Nekron. Nekron has discovered that, by killing immortals, he can make his way into the world of the living and destroy everything. As immortals, the Guardians are a convenient target.
Hal Jordan and the GLC have 24 hours, the time of one ring-charge, to find Krona and defeat him. This was pretty hard stuff for the time -- characters died, new ones were introduced and there was a real sense of menace despite the fact that you knew Wein wasn't about to destroy the DC Universe. (They were saving that for Marv Wolfman a few years later.) This remains one of my favorite Green Lantern stories of all time.
Fantastic Four #337-#354. Written and pencilled by the esteemed Walter Simonson, this run of FF comics took the awesome foursome (or fivesome, at the time, since Ms. Marvel was doing Thing-duty, with Ben Grimm in human form) through several journeys through time and alternate realities. We also got an epic showdown between Reed Richards and Dr. Doom that was at least as good as the 264 other epic showdowns between Reed Richards and Dr. Doom we’ve seen. And lest we forget the battle with the faceless goons of the Time Variance Authority, Death’s Head II, the three issues of the “new” Fantastic Four and some freaky cosmic executives that bore a chilling resemblance to the late Mark Gruenwald. Issue #352 is especially notable for the neat time-travel trick Simonson used to tell the story -- if you read the pages exactly in the order they were printed, you were left scratching your head in confusion. Unfortunately, they put the note explaining how to read the comic in the lettercolumn at the end, which meant most of us read it the wrong way the first time around. The second time, though, it ruled.
Blake M. Petit is the author of a novel, Other People’s Heroes, a couple of plays he’s still trying to get on a stage somewhere and a regular column in here at Think About It Central. None of these, as of yet, are making him enough money to just hire someone to worry about his taxes for him. E-mail him at Blake@comixtreme.com.