Where Did It All Begin?

Where did your love of comics begin?
I'm writing for the comics audience here, and assuming that those of you reading have a love for the form to begin with. If not, it's your loss and you probably won't find anything of value on this blog.
While I remember reading comics and watching superhero cartoons as a very small child--I particularly remember having an Aquaman action figure I was very fond of at about five and a handful of issues of a late '80s Captain America run that I re-read over and over--it wasn't until after I'd had a hiatus from reading them, that I truly found my place in comics.
When I was in middle school, I didn't have a great many friends. As such, any time I wasn't spending with my two younger brothers I spent with the small number of people at school with whom I was close. One of those--my friend Jonathan Bidwell--still figures prominently in my life, but for the most part they've moved on to other things. One such friend was a guy I'll just call Joe. Now, it was 1992 and we were 12 or 13 years old. It was getting to the end of summer vacation, as I recall, and we were up until all hours of the night at his house (his father had left and his mother was a third-shift nurse, so we were basically watching ourselves whenever I spent the night there). Joe and I were watching the 11 o'clock news when a story came on--featuring some truly ugly critters drawn by Jon Bogdanove--to say that DC Comics had announced the forthcoming death of Superman.
Having been a fan of other characters, liked the Batman movie of the late '80s and never really getting into Superman, I remember very distinctly sitting in the bedroom at Joe's and thinking, "I gotta see that character die!" It was really just one of those mean-spirited teenage boy things, inspired by a desire to see bad things happen to a (too-) good character more than anything else. It began a love affair with comics that has now lasted almost two decades, and my admiration for the way the stories were carried off (by Roger Stern, Tom Grummett and Dan Jurgens, among others) was so impressive that I followed the series until they were all gone, and have continued to follow Jurgens' career for years after.
As a result of getting on board with mainstream American superhero comics at that time, of course, I've got a unique perspective. While there's a healthy amount of hate for the '90s out there, much of it justified, there are a lot of perfectly good comics that get painted with a broad brush. On top of that, we're now in the throes of a period in comics history where everything that happened between 1985's Crisis on Infinite Earths and 2004's Identity Crisis. It means that all the character and plot development that I followed for the ten years that most engaged me in mainstream superhero comics and the soap-operatic universes they create for their characters...well, it doesn't "count" anymore. And that's kinda irritating. That's what's got me writing this column.
Next time: The Fastest Man Alive.

Booster Gold #30: “Things Are Booming in Coast City, OR Rip was tripping on mushrooms and no one was even there.”

Check this article out on ComicBook.com!

“World’s greatest superheroes?” I just don’t see it.

The first issue featuring the newest incarnation of the Justice League of America’s lineup hit this week, and over the top of the title, DC blares that the book features the world’s greatest supeheroes. While no more inherently ridiculous than the Fantastic Four’s long-held claim to being the greatest comic magazine, this one’s a lot more offensive. Why? Because the cover features Congorilla, Mon-El/Valor wearing a Superman logo (everybody’s doing it—the Eradicator, raised from the dead without explanation in this month’s issue of The Outsiders, is back to sporting a big, red S as well) and Starfire, who’s come to this team straight from the orgy of failure that is The Titans. Joined in this comic by fellow Titans (not Teen Titans—Titans. There’s a difference) Donna Troy, Dick Grayson and Cyborg, it soon becomes clear that the Justice League of America has become the dumping-ground for promising characters who just don’t fit into DC’s idea of what they want to do with other titles (like letting a crazed badguy who’s already been overexposed since Identity Crisis lead his own team of “Titans”). Mon-El and The Guardian, both so incredibly popular with the fans that during the time they’ve starred in the Superman titles, sales have dropped by about forty percent, represent the Metropolis contingent with Batman’s understudy and Hal Jordan (currently featured in three monthly books as well as guest-starring all over the place) being the closest thing this team has to A-listers. Seriously, folks, I think that the upcoming Justice League: Generation Lost by Keith Giffen and Judd Winick, which will feature Guy Gardner, Booster Gold, Fire, Ice and the rest of the old JLI—once known as the all-time bottom of the Justice League barrel—may feature a more prestigious lineup than these clowns.

Inside, Red Tornado has been torn to pieces for something like the 185^th time in his last 185 appearances. Vixen, the only representative of the Detroit Era JLA to make it into this volume of the title and who has been, to the disappointment of many fans, a member of the team since J’Onn J’Onzz left for no reason after having been with the team since its founding, decides that she’s got to quit the team, because she’s ashamed of what they did at the end of the hideously misguided editorial abortion known as Justice League: Cry For Justice (yes, the end of the miniseries that hasn’t ended yet).

The rest of the team struggles to recover from the aftereffects of Blackest Night (yes, the end of the miniseries that hasn’t ended yet), which raised many of their old teammates from the dead as villains, and even forced some living heroes to play dead for a while so they could be villains. Don’t worry, James Robinson assures the readers, “We ‘awoke,’ though. We survived.” That’s good news, I guess, for the thousands of readers who are eagerly awaiting February 24^th’s Blackest Night #7 (of 8), in which the story of those heroes who have been taken over by Nekron continues to play out. I’m sure nobody would mind being told that the biggest event of the year, in which many fans have invested hundreds of bucks following every arcane tie-in, comes out alright enough in the wash.

All of these little editorial gaffes might be forgivable…if the comic were any good. Or original. Or fun. It’s none of those things. Mark Bagley’s art looks rushed and is outright hideous in some places (look at Damien’s face as he declares himself part of the Justice League, or Donna’s as she arrives to invite Batman. Also, if Hal Jordan’s body hasn’t been horribly mangled on a torture rack of some kind by the end of Blackest Night, there’s no reason whatsoever for the length of his torso and legs in comparison the rest of his body on the final story page). The story is dull and something we’ve all seen a hundred times before—Wonder Woman, acting as the only member of DC’s trinity not currently dead or living in outer space, picks a League and the rest of the issue is spent on a recruiting binge. There’s very little in terms of logical, reasonable cause to bring the characters together. Instead, it’s a team that’s being forced together out of the disparate pieces that DC editorial have decided, and Wonder Woman has prescribed, will compose it. It’s a whole issue of going through the motions, and the cardboard dialogue and pedestrian plot has to remind readers of last week’s awesome Starman #81 that James Robinson is best when he’s not handling the icons. Taking a franchise that nobody believed in or cared about, he crafted arguably the best ongoing monthly of the 1990s. Taking control of Superman and the Justice League of America, he’s created a directionless mess filled with uninteresting takes on third-tier characters.

Creative Team Changes Imminent for Booster?

On Monday, in an exclusive interview with CBR, DC honcho Dan DiDio announced that Jaime “Blue Beetle” Reyes will lose his co-feature in Booster Gold and be relocated to another book, but not as a co-feature or as the headliner of his own title. Additionally, DiDio announces that Manhunter will be dropped from Streets of Gotham. That’s a huge disappointment for this Manhunter fan, who has repeatedly written to DC in support of the title and who has bought dozens (literally) of graphic novels to hand out to potential new readers and get them hooked. So, already–not off to a great start…and then he says that there are “creative team changes” imminent for Booster Gold.

Dan Jurgens, who created the character and has drawn virtually every solo Booster story ever told, is currently the writer and artist; he participates in a monthly creator commentary here on Blog@, and also at Comic Related, that looks at Booster Gold shortly after publication. The possibility of Dan’s imminent departure hasn’t come up in any of our interviews, or off-topic e-mail conversations; I can say, though, that in order to replace Jurgens, the team would have to be phenomenal for the book to remain afloat.

I don’t think Booster Gold is as marketable a character as DC apparently does; it seems clear to me that the thing that’s kept the character going this long is that Jurgens has connected with the title’s (and the character’s) core fans. That his art keeps a level of consistency in the title that’s rarely, if ever, matched by a book in mainstream publication is an added bonus. For the title to work without Jurgens…I don’t know. It seems like it would have huge potential to feel a lot like when Aaron Sorkin was dropped from The West Wing, and the show deteriorated into mayhem, which they had to bring Sorkin back to attempt to salvage so that it could go out with dignity rather than be canceled after seven seasons as one of TV’s most respected shows.

As a Booster Gold fan, I actually am not as frustrated as many of my column's readers are with the loss of the Blue Beetle backup. Frankly I always thought second-features for mid-selling or low-selling books were a dicey proposition. Adding an extra buck to a title that was selling somewhere in the vicinity of 50k at $2.99 seemed like a pretty bad idea, unless the backup brought in a TON of extra readers, which didn’t seem to be the case. I’ll miss Jaime in a starring feature, but would be just as happy if he were starring as a backup in Teen Titans or some other title that’s less likely to shed readers for the extra buck.

Certainly I might be overreacting to the announcement–and I’ll of course keep readers posted as information comes into my hands–but the last two times they’ve needed a fill-in penciler, they’ve gone to Patrick Olliffe who, while a perfectly serviceable draftsman, is not right for the title. Rick Remender, whose two-issue fill-in as writer was the undisputed low point of the title’s publishing history, also expressed a desire, during his turn at bat with The Gold Exchange, to return to Booster in a more regular fashion so that he could tell the Chronos-and-Booster story he’d had planned during his time as writer of The All-New Atom. He is, as far as I know, Marvel-exclusive, but just the idea of him as the title’s ongoing writer makes my skin crawl.

Just so he's an equal opportunity disappointer, in the same CBR interview where DiDio talked about this, he also discusses the disappearance of basically every backup we know. Some titles (the lower-selling ones), like Booster Gold, Doom Patrol and Green Arrow, will revert to $2.99 and just be single stories again. Certain other books will get new backups. The Flash family appears hardest-hit, losing both the Wally West backup feature AND the Kid Flash monthly in the shuffle, leaving only Barry Allen, whose last turn as Flash ended in 1985. Way to reach out to younger readers, there, Dan!