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Showcase Sunday: Hawkman (and Hawkgirl)

Published on May 24, 2015Leave a comment

cover of Showcase Presents: Hawkman Volume One

Showcase Presents: Hawkman, Volume 1
Gardner Fox, Joe Kubert, Murphy Anderson and friends
Reprints The Brave and the Bold #34-36, #42-44, 51, The Atom #7, Mystery in Space #87-90, Hawkman #1-11
Get this for: Great Kubert art, followed by somewhat bland Murphy Anderson art

This was a lot harder to get through than the Atom or The Flash volumes, because unlike them, this is much more of a grab bag of Hawkman appearances. Whereas the previous two heroes had a relatively straightforward path towards their own title, Hawkman went from several appearances in The Brave and the Bold, DC’s other tryout book, to a guest appearance in The Atom, a backup spot in Mystery in Space, as well as a teamup story with Aquaman back in The Brave and the Bold again and then only got his own title. Through all this save his Aquaman teamup his adventures were guided by Gardner Fox, also the Atom’s writer of course. He is his usual dependable self, though some of the later stories are on the formulaic side.

The real problem is in the art, which starts off very strong in his Brave and the Bold appearances. Joe Kubert had handled the Golden Age Hawkman and his expressive, scratchy, Noel Sickles/Alex Toth influenced art style is perfectly suited to the new series. It grounds the series, more so than the slicker, more sci-fi inspired artwork of Gil Kane or Carmine Infantino would’ve done. But he only does the art in Hawkman’s first six appearances. Once Hawkman gets his first series in Mystery in Space the art is handled by Murphy Anderson, whose art is both sleeker and blander than Kubert’s. Especially his characters are much less interesting than Kubert’s, who could do a lot with a simple look or expression.

Joe Kubert draws the Hawks

The Golden Age Hawkman and Hawkgirl were reincarnations of an Egyptian prince and his lover and were solid second string heroes. They never had their own magazine, but had long runs in varius anthology series. As with other Silver Age heroes, Gardner Fox upgraded their origins to being alien police officers from the planet Thanagar, come to Earth to study our policing methods, choosing the USA’s Midway City to settle. I like the way in which they casually reveal themselves to the local police commissioner, who just as casually accepts their story and gets them cover identities working in Midway City’s museum, taking over from his brother who handily is going with retirement. Sometimes nepotism works. The museum also helps to inspire them to take up “the weapons of yesterday to fight the crimes of today”.

Hawkman and Hawkgirl: an equal team

Those first six appearances, which I’ve read before, are the best stories in the volume and what I like the best about them is how equal Hawkman and Hawkgirl are as a team. There’s some unconscious sexist nonsense in there of course, starting with Hawkgirl’s name, not to mention the romantic triangle subplot with her, Hawkman and Mavis Trent, but on the whole Fox allows Hawkgirl to do her part even if Hawkman always has to be slightly better. As with other SA DC heroes, they have to use their heads as much as their fists, figuring out the gimmick of each story’s villain.

What’s new in these stories is the larger soap opera/continuity element compared to the first volumes I read. There’s Mavis Trent as a repeated foil, but there are also more appearances from other DC heroes: the teamups with Aquaman and the Atom, the crossover with Adam Strange, who also provides the origin for one recurring Hawkman villain, in general a greater awareness that there’s a larger universe outside their own stories. It’s nowhere near the Marvel level of course, but it’s welcome.

Hawkman and Hawkgirl by Murphy Anderson

Less welcome is the change in artists. Murphy Anderson, though better known as an inker than a penciler, is certainly not a bad artist, is no match for Kubert. His figures are stiffer, his characters more bland, it’s closer to DC’s unofficial house style as seen in the Superman titles. It made the last half of the book much less interesting to read. I’m not sure why Kubert left the Hawks, but I wish he had stayed on.

Showcase Sunday: The Atom

Published on May 17, 2015Leave a comment

cover of Showcase Presents: The Atom Volume One

Showcase Presents: The Atom, Volume 1
Gardner Fox, Gil Kane, Murphy Anderson and friends
Reprints Showcase #34-36, The Atom #1-17
Get this for: Gorgeous Gil Kane art and more inventive than usual Gardner Fox scripts

Though it isn’t quite true that the sixties renaissance at Marvel was due to the work of three men: Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and Stan Lee, it is more true than false, in contradiction to DC. There the whole Silver Age revolution took place while the company as a whole went on with business as usual. The Batman and Superman titles would largely stay out of it until the mid-sixties and there wasn’t an equivalent to that core of Lee, Kirby and Ditko driving everything. Therefore there was much less of a house style to DC’s superhero titles, as we can see if we compare Carmine Infantine’s work on The Flash with Gil Kane’s work here, on The Atom. Both in their own way are emblemic of DC’s Silver Age, but even when both are inked by Murphy Anderson, you couldn’t mistake the one for the other.

Like the Flash, the Atom got his tryout in Showcase, which by the time he got his spot, had perfected its formula: three sequential issues, followed by another three if needed, or in the case of the Atom, directly into his own magazine. As with The Flash, most issues of The Atom had two stories, with the second often dedicated to the Atom’s adventures in time thanks to professor Hyatt’s time pool, introduced in issue three, which also saw the debut of Chronos the Time Thief. Of course, like the Flash, the Atom was a reworking of an existing DC superhero, in this case just a bruiser whose small stature and his girlfriend mocking him for it set him on a path to fight crime — in the Golden Age this was actually one of the more complicated origins.

Sixties Atom was much more interesting of course, based in a science fictional origin. A piece of white dwarf star matter had fallen to earth near Ivy Town, where scientist Ray Palmer (named after Amazing Stories editor Raymond A. Palmer) found it and experimented with it. Palmer was attempting to find a reliable way to shrink down objects for reasons and thought the white dwarf fragment could help. In the end it turned out he could use it to shrink himself down with, but nothing was stable. So enter the Atom, the world’s tiniest crime fighter. Having not just the ability to shrink, but also to regulate his weight, moving from feather light to his “full 180 pounds weight” while six inch heigh, means the Atom can move about quickly while giving him a concentrated punch when needed. It also means Gil Kane gets to do a lot of great action scenes, utilising his skills to the fullest. His Atom is constantly in motion, hopping, punching, using the environment to reach his opponents and knock them out.

Talking about getting knocked out, that’s something the Atom himself does a lot too, almost as much as Hal Jordan is over in Green Lantern. Almost every story when the writer feels the need to drag a fight out or slightly complicate matters, something accidently falls on the Atom’s head, or some crook flails wildly and just manages to hit him, or something else happens that makes it all slightly less one sided. Though hilariously dumb when taken out of context, it does make sense in the sort of fights he gets into, with thugs flying everywhere and crashing into furniture as the Atom yanks their legs out from under them. Nevertheless it’s a miracle he never suffered a concussion; he should’ve been as punch drunk as an ex-NFL player by now. But it’s perhaps only when reading so many of these stories one after the other that formulas like this become noticable. These are after all still stories meant to be discarded, with little attention paid from issue to issue to continuity; it also must’ve helped that The Atom appeared bimonthly. You wonder if the original readers noticed these things or not…

As said, there’s little in the way of continuity in these stories, bar the occasionally reappearance of certain villains or crooks. Like Barry Allen in The Flash, Ray Palmer shows up complete with a girlfriend and like Linda West, she’s a professional woman, working as a criminal lawyer, not wanting to marry until she’s proven herself as a lawyer. A hint of feminism there? Of course, in the Comics Code world of Silver Age DC, she’s the sort of criminal lawyer who only defends the innocent, usually her friends, so you wonder how busy she is…. But it is interesting to see how many of DC’s early Silver Age heroes had working girlfriends: Flash, the Atom, Green Lantern and of course Hawkman and Hawkgirl. A far cry from the childish antics of the Lois Lane/Superman “relationship”.

Gardner Fox was of course a veteran comics and pulp writer already when he wrote The Atom and what I like about his scripts is that he often bases them on some piece of scientific or historical or even legal knowledge, which is then dutifully footnoted, only for it to get all crazy as only a silver Age DC comic can. All done seriously, but in one story based on how lactic acid builds up in muscles, you have the crook ironing the Atom to give him precognosis because apparantly that buildup gives off “ato-energy” which in turn caused precognosis!

To be honest, in the end you rarely read these comics for the story, but rather for the great Gil Kane art, which comes out very well in black and white indeed.

Supergirl

Published on May 17, 2015Leave a comment

I sort of see why people were mocking this when it first came out a couple of days ago, what with looking more rom-comy than superheroy in places, but really this looks fun. A superhero who actually wants to be a superhero and has fun doing it? Not to mention that it looks like this is basically the same way Superman was introduced all the way back in the first Christopher Reeves movie, with the wanting to be normal, the clumsiness and awkwardness, even the picking out a costume scene.

A bit more soap opera in your superhero adventure isn’t a bad thing; that’s how Marvel got so big after all, it keeps your heroes grounded and it makes it more interesting than just an endless stream of hero vs villain fights.

the only things I could’ve done without were the awkward gay joke in the middle and the inevitable secret government service keeping taps of superheroes being hostile without reason, especially not when it’s yet another Gruff Black Military Guy.

Sunday Showcase: The Flash

Published on May 3, 2015Leave a comment

cover of Showcase Presents: The Flash Volume One

Showcase Presents: The Flash, Volume 1
Carmine Infantino, John Broome, Robert Kanigher, Joe Giella, Murphy Anderson, Frank Gaicoia, Joe Kubert and friends
Reprints Flash Comics #104, Showcase #4, #8, #13, #14, The Flash #105-119
Get this for: The comic that kickstarted the Silver Age

Once upon a time, in the cultural wasteland men call the nineties, getting to read Silver Age comics was actually kind of hard. Not as hard as it had been in the seventies or eighties, when it was basically getting the back issues themselves or hope for a reprint series to come out, but still the only really comprehensive reprint programmes were the Marvel Masterworks and their counterpart at DC, the DC Archive Editions. These were expensive, library quality hardcovers, fifty bucks for ten issues of a key Silver Age series, not very accessible for the average reader. That all changed when Marvel came up with their Marvel Essentials line, big black and white trade paperback slabs of comics, anywhere from twenty to twentyfive or more issues of a series, or comics featuring a particular character, from all parts of their history. As an idea it was of course ripped off from the way Manga publishers in Japan published their collections, by way of the Cerebus phonebooks, but it was still a great step forward in making comics history available. Longtime readers may remember I did a fifty Essentials in Fifty Days review series back in 2010.

Now DC only started its comparable reprint series in 2005 and unlike Marvel, they mostly focus on Silver Age titles. And until recently, I only had a few Showcase titles myself, not having run across them much here in the Netherlands. Comics retailers seem to dislike them for the same reasons I like them: they’re big and relatively cheap, hence less attractive to stock. However, I recently discovered a new source of cheap comics online and splurged out on a job lot of Essentials and Showcases, so I thought why not do a regular series of Showcase reviews like those earlier Essential ones? Not at the same insane rate, but why not a weekly series? Hence Showcase Sunday.

And what better title to start with than the one that kickstarted the whole Silver Age in the first place? The Flash’s appearances in Showcase, followed by his own series, numbered from the original Golden Age Flash Comics (which in fact only ended seven years before the S.A. Flash’s first appearance), is what sparked the interest in resurrecting other old DC heroes, culminating in the Justice League of America, which in turn made Marvel start a copycat title to which Stan Lee and Jack Kirby put their own unique touches, The Fantastic Four. There are other candidates for first Silver Age superhero like the Martian Manhunter, but the Flash was the one that really lit the touchpaper. It took a couple of years though: his first appearance in Showcase was in October 1956, his last before he got his own title was in June 1958, with The Flash 105 coming out in February 1959. Guess things moved slower in those days.

Reading these stories more than sixty years after first publication it’s both easy to see why these strips were so successful back and realise they’ve aged badly, much more so than their Marvel equivalents. On the whole, these are simple stories: a criminal or supervillain causes havoc in Central City, has some gimmick that defeats Flash the first time they meet, but in the last two-three pages Flash has the upper hand and explains why. Inbetween the battles there’s some soap opera with Iris West, Barry Allen girlfriend, complaining that he’s never on time and comparing him unfavourably with his alter ego. Nothing really changes in these stories and reading them back to back in a day really shows that. It doesn’t help that each issue has two 11 to 12 page stories, rather than one story per issue, as in the early Marvel titles. There’s less room for characterisation and plotting in such a limited space, let alone proper continuity, though there is a rudimentary form of it here, with villains returning for a second shot at the Flash.

Mostly though these are standalone stories, reinforced by the fact that e.g. in this volume there are half a dozen or so stories in which Flash has to deal with undersea or subterrean invaders, that none of the villains know of each other yet, or the fact that many of them have roughly the same order: criminal with engineering bend tinkers his way into supervillainy by inventing some sort of superweapon. That’s Captain Boomerang, Mirror Master, Weather Wizard, Mr Element/Doctor Alchemy and Captain Cold. All already established criminals, all inventing their signature weapon in their first appearance.

Now these are actually enjoyable stories, for all their simplicity. None of the nonsense you’d associate with Silver Age DC like in the worst Superman/Superboy stories; they are actually remarkable modern save for their approach for continuity. And what I also found noticable is that Barry Allen and Iris West are clearly adults, with adult responsibilites even if those aren’t milked for soap opera like Marvel would do. John Broome has a knack both for creating villains and for creating scenarios in which to showcase their powers, without cheating.

As for the art, if there’s one artist who is synonymous with the Silver Age Flash, the penciler on all of the stories in this volume, it’s Carmine Infantino. Now I first encountered his artwork on a much later title of his, the Marvel Star Wars series, where his elongated, rubbery characters and blocky space machinery where actually the perfect match for the movies’ aesthetic. His version of Star Wars is still the one in my head when I think about it. Here however his style is much more realistic, missing the trademark elongations and perspectives he’d become infamous for. It is gorgeous though and you can see it evolve through the stories, as well as the influence his various inkers: Joe Kubert, Frank Gaicoia, Joe Giella and Murphy Anderson have on the finished art. Joe Giella especially seems to have a positive influence on his faces, much more expressive even than with Murphy Anderson inking, no slouch himself. The black and white printing shows up the line work beautifully. Though straitjacketed in a fairly conservative page layout there’s plenty of gorgeous work to keep your interest.

Eric Heuvel sketching

Published on April 18, 2015Leave a comment

Eric Heuvel sketching

You may know that Ligne claire/Clear Line was a term coined by Dutch cartoonist Joost Swarte to describe the artwork of Herge and E. P. Jacobs, a style that was enormously popular in Franco-Belgian comics up until the sixties, combining strong colours, an uniform thickness of line and cartoony characters with realistic, detailed depictions of things like cars, planes and other machinery. It was appropriated in the late seventies by Swarte and others like him (Theo van den Boogaart in the Netherlands, Yves Chaland, Ted Benoit, Serge Clerc et all in France) to provide an ironic contrast between the definately adult stories they wrote and the seemingly innocent, straight forward art style, long since coded as belonging to childrens’ comics.

In the Netherlands however this resurgence in Clear Line artwork went further than just as an ironic fad. New generations of artists in the late seventies and eighties rediscovered the style as perfectly suitable for straightforward action stories, the most successfull being Henk Kuijpers, who with his Franka series produced arguably the most popular Dutch comics series of the eighties, not hindered by his habit of getting his heroine to take her top off.

Eric Heuvel is another of these Clear Line cartoonists, perhaps the best one currently active in Dutch comics. He started his aero adventure strip January Jones together with Martin Lodewijk, veteran scenario writer, in the early nineties and restarted it a few years ago, when the biweekly comics zine Eppo was resurrected. He’s one of the magazine’s most popular writers and at normal comics cons in the Netherlands there’s a huge line waiting for his autograph or sketch. At the Dutch Comic Con though, the Eppo audience wasn’t quite there, which meant I only had to wait a short time to get the sketch below and got to talk to him about his love for aeroplanes. I love his work and I love the January Jones series for having a no-nonsense, capable woman as its protagonist without any of the bagage that sometimes brings with it.

Eric Heuvel Sketch