The V

This thread is intended for talking about old comics that haven't been traded, that aren't necessarily worth starting a whole thread for.

Friday, one of the local comic shops stayed open late for a quarter sale, clearly trying to dump excess stock from  collections they've bought out over the years. My friend insisted on going, and it was worth it for coming across a Legends of the Dark Knight arc by Englehart (#109-111) I had no idea existed.Also among what I picked up:

Shadow of the Bat #45 by Alan Grant
-I generally found Grant to be hit and miss on Batman. For a quarter though, I was willing to take a chance on a cover based on 'Tec #31, that boasted how it was "disturbing, strange, and very, very unusual." Rather than having any of those stories, instead Grant spins a yarn about how Bruce Wayne and Alfred find a 150 year old body in the Wayne mansion wine seller which turns out to belong to a member of the Wayne family who helped on the underground railroad, while wearing a mask and a costume.

If this comic were a TV episode, it would be an Emmy-showcase done for sweeps. It's perfunctory at best, and certainly doesn't rate two verys in front of "unusual."

DC Comics Presents: the Flash #1 by Loeb/McGuinness and O'Neil/Mahnke
-This was one of the Julie Scwartz Tribute issues, based on the beloved by Morrison Flash #163. The O'Neil story is an OK, if unremarkable tribute, very much in the mould of the original story.

The Jeph Loeb tale should be exhibit #1 in why Loeb is a shitty, shitty writer. The story opens with Barry Allen providing damning testimony in a case against Sal Maroni (yes, that one).  Maroni's lawyer is clearly worried, but Maroni assures him, "I got it covered." The judge declares a recess, Allen goes out to meet Iris on the courhouse steps, and is apparently shot through the chest by Deadshot.

Allen surives, of course, but how on Earth does that make sense? How does Maroni have anything covered? Deadshot popped Allen after he had testified! Loeb could have gone with the same idea and had Maroni talking to his lawyaer before the trial! How did no one catch this?

Making it worse, Barry had slowed down time, used a squib and stopped his heart to make people think that he had been shot, so he could flush out the shooter as, "We got word Maroni was spreading money around to make sure Allen didn't testify." So Loeb calls attention to how Deadshot was supposed to stop Allen from testifying, and rather than, oh, going after Deadshot, Allen instead comes up with a complicated plan to fake being shot to flush out Deadshot. I won't even go into how rather than catch or stop the bullet, Alan lets it ricochet and hit a newstand worker.

DC Comics Presents: Green Lantern by Azzarello and Pasko
-Much better than the Flash issue, Azzarello's GL tale is oddly mean spirited-- the JLA investigates why Jordan is selling power rings, and when they leave:
-cracks are made about forgeting Aquaman. Again.
-They discuss how  powerful how the GL ring is limited only by the imagination of the user, and then they make fun of Jordan's lack of imagination.
-The JLA each briefly think about what they would do with a GL ring, and when they start to think about Batman with a GL ring, everyone gets an "Oh shit" look on their face and clam up.

It's all very amusing, don't get me wrong, but the tone is really weird, especially for a tribute comic.

I'd love to see trades of some of the early 80's Dan Dare stuff.

Those were some of the very first comics I ever read as a kid. Picked up a batch of them from Ebay a couple of years ago for kicks. Ian Kennedy's art on those is terrific.

From the Eagle relaunch?

About 6 years ago I found a nearly complete run of the first 5 years or so of teh relaunch for about $10. Once they got out out of teh wwhole fumetti thing it was amazing. Though fumetti DOOMLORD! was all kinds of wall to wall crazy awesome.

Atlantis Attacks: I'm one issue shy of finishing my re-read of this 14-part crossover from Marvel's 1989 annuals (originally read once, in 1989).  And you know what?  It's quite a lot of fun.  The first few issues were pretty ropey but once the story gets going about a quarter of the way through, it becomes quite engaging -- even with the feature stories in each issue being a bulky 30 or more pages each.

Once thing they do here which is sort of a lost art is the big crossover where all sorts of different characters get their own part to play, instead of just being in the background while the same three or four guys do all the heavy lifting.  This probably comes from it being a crossover through a bunch of basically already extant titles, instead of living on its own.  Nobody minds Dr. Strange showing up in the Daredevil annual, but Daredevil had still better be the main character.  And he is.

The timing is such that there's a real interesting melange of talent on the books, too, esp. artists.  A lot of the future Image guys get their hands on a chapter or two.  In fact, I quite like Liefeld's take.  This is before X-Force and his becoming super-popular, so his excesses are less excessive -- he does completely murder Namorita's feet a few times, though.  At the same time, Simonson, Byrne, and Don Heck turn out some really nice pages.  (Heck, over Al Milgrom layouts, does a really horrifying inside-out snake monster in the climactic Thor annual.)

Indeed, I found this so much more enjoyable than expected, it makes me interested to see if they kept up the same level in some of the smaller cross-annual events Marvel tried over the next few years.  I've got The Terminus Factor  and Days of Future Present sitting on my bedside table, so I suppose I'm about to find out.

--Alex

is Atlantis Attacks collected anywhere? I've never read it.

I doubt it.  It's really big -- the main story is probably ~300 or more pages, plus another 40 or 50 for the Saga of the Serpent Crown backup.  (Most issues had other stories to fill the 64 pages of each annual, but they're part of the fun for me, seeing where various characters were at that period in history, both for books I followed at the time and those I didn't.)

--Alex

Atlantis Attacks may have been the crossover that crossed the line for me, and I stopped buying them altogether.

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LiveJournal

Considering some of the other crap they've put out in the format (i.e. Secret Wars II), I wouldn't be surprised to see Atlantis Attacks or the Evolutionary War Omnibii at some point.

Two more from the quarter bin:

Secret Files DCU Heroes
Secret Files DCU Villains
-if you're a fan of Chase but came to it late, you probably missed these issues, like I did. They feature interwined lead stories by D. Curtis Johnson. The Heroes one stars Shase, the second one, the Word. They also very lightly tie-into  DC 1,000,000.

Also of note:
Heroes has a guide to Resurrection Man's powers by DnA, a Vext one page story by Giffen (that has some fans here), a Millar short on how the DEO plans to kill superheroes (so Tower of Babel before ToB), and a Yearbook page for Stargirl by Johns.

Villains has a Resurrection Man short by DnA, a one page Martian Manhunter story by Ostrander, a hilarious Mr. Mind maze, and a schematic of Solaris, which is really neat. If you're a Solaris fan and into the Marvel Handbooks (i.e you, Paul Pogue), it's worth tracking down just for that.

Yeah, the ones following the original Dare's great-great grandson.

Atlantis Attacks may have been the crossover that crossed the line for me, and I stopped buying them altogether.

Me too, at the time.  But in hindsight -- and with low expectations -- I enjoyed it a lot.  Plus, the cost of the crossover at the time (14 annuals, each priced two times that of a regular issue) was a lot higher then than it is now (free, after I found them all in my parents' attic).

--Alex

>>At the same time, Simonson, Byrne, and Don Heck turn out some really nice pages.

That X-Factor Annual, Simonson over Byrne, is lovely.

For anyone curious as to what Alex is undertaking, I just came across this:

http://jshayer.tripod.com/comics/atlatt.htm

Doomlord, the 13th Floor (which I know came from the other classic mag of the time SCREAM) and a few other tales were brilliant. I was going to add Death Wish - the great one about the stuntman - but I think that was Roy of the Rovers...

No, pretty sure Death Wish was in the Eagle. I remember it well, and I didn't get RotR.

Death Wish was the guy with a horribly scarred face yeah? that was Eagle. And the one about the kid whose friend gets trapped inside arcade games thathe has to win to rescue him.

I think Death Wish started in Tiger or Scream, but was moved to Eagle when it merged with one of them.

Ah Eagle and Tiger, yeah - that was about when I started reading it.

It was around then when I started getting it regularly as well...

Shade the Changing Man:  to my mind they traded the wrong ones to start off with, which is probably why they haven't traded any more.  They should have started with the Vertigo issues.  Chris Bachalo's art was at it's best around the - he'd figured out framing and anatomy, but it was before his style got so ridiculously busy.  Peter Milligan's writing was quality too, his surrealist approach at this point being energetic enough to be fun and structured enough to be readable.

They collected 7-13  in a trade a few months ago.

Ah - I only remembered first one out.  However, now that you mention it... still, though flawed in many places, it was a great book.

Fair enough. I was thinking that it was an illfit for RotR. Remember the great days of all these comics - SCREAM, BATTLE, TIGER, 2000AD, ROY OF THE ROVERS and so on - all coming out on Wednesdays? And then at Xmas it all went mental and you had two in one week and all sorts? Happy times.

Funny, Atlantis Attacks doesn't hold up for me. And this is someone who spent the 90s searching for all of the Annuals tracking down the annuals.

WAY TOO MUCH PADDING and the too much time spent on focusing on the Atlantis Invasion and not building the Serpent Crown so Nightmare Fuel Elder God Set. Plus the ending is anti-climatic to the max (no big Set and his brainwashed bride/Marvel Universe fight, just Thor fighting inside out Set and the FF fighting each other while under mind control).

But there are good stuff though buried in the mess. The Byrne artwork, X-Men Vs Serpent Society, Spidey and She-Hulk Vs Abomination, Jean Grey versus Attuma, the Punisher/Moon Knight team-up. But it doesn't hold up well, when read from start to finish.

That being said FUCKING HUNT DOWN WHAT IF VOLUME 2 #25, which is the coda for the whole thing and delivers the big, apocalyptic Everyone Vs Set ending that the actual story never gave us.....

The ending to that What If... is one of the more fucked up and chilling ones they ever did.

Well, it is when you're 10 and haven't seen that trick before, anyway.

But by that point there's loads of backstory that's alluded to but not really explained - the Lenny/Shade/Kathy triangle, Shade's bodies, Kathy's ex-boyfriend's ghost, all that stuff. It would be completely impenetrable, I think.

You'd also have the problem that Hellblazer has now, where they're having to alternate between new and 'classic' trades, which is a bit confusing if you're trying to get into the thing for the first time and don't have a message board or helpful shop staff to fall back on.

Shade improves pretty quickly, I think, so hopefuly the second trade wil pique peoples' interests enough anyway to make a full go of it.

You mean the days when we had a British comics industry? ;) Yeah, I remember it very well. Halcyon days, etc. etc.

Vol.2 of What If was perfectly timed.  In the era of the giant crossovers, it was great to see how they could have ended up.

Too bad the art was almost always horrible.

There were some serious gems in What If? vol. 2. Kurt Busiek wrote a lot of good stories. As did Simon Furman. Furman's "What If Death's Head I Had Lived?", "What If Iron Man Sold Out?", and "What If Rogue Posessed the Power of Thor?" in particular are well worth checking out.