Rick Flag’s unknown son is kidnapped by one of his old team mates turned zombie master in this double sized extravaganza told by John Ostrander, Kim Yale, Luke McDonnell, Geoff Isherwood, Grant Miehm and Karl Kesel.

It’s a tribute to all involved that this story, which leans heavily on knowledge of not just all previous 49 issues, but also on that of the original Suicide Squad, was so readable even to a new reader like I was at the time. The Suicide Squad had been a classic The Brave and the Bold feature. The Jack Kirby created Challengers of the Unknown had set a vogue for four person adventure themes and over the years DC would introduce Rip Hunter and his team (time travelling Challengers), Cave Carson and co (cave digging Challengers), Seadevils (underwater Challengers) and the Squad itself (paramilitary scientist Challengers). They got six appearances in The Brave and the Bold but didn’t do much and were forgotten until Rick Flag was brought back in a Superman adventure as one of the Forgotten Heroes. That’s where I knew him from.

I bought this new when my local comic shop started carrying it as it expanded the American comics it carried. It was the first ever Suicide Squad issue I bought. It took me a couple of issues to get used to the series. Issue 53, which started the Dragon’s Hoard story that ran for several issues, was the one that hooked me. A story not unlike the one that hooked me on Captain America, with multiple dangerous groups fighting over the same treason and the Squad caught in the middle. If issue 50 left me a bit confused and unsure about the Squad, it was still good enough to let me keep buying it. and once issue 53 hooked me completely, I kept buying until the end and started buying the back issues, filling in pieces of the puzzle that issue 50 had presented.

What made suicide Squad so good was the simple fact that John Ostrander and Kim Yale were the sole writers for the entire series and had a coherent vision of it from the start. The Squad fit in with the more cynical nature of the Post-Crisis, mid-eighties DC Universe. You had an ambitious bureaucrat/politician, Amanda Waller, looking for a way to get ahead in the Reagan administration, coming up with a plan to use convicted supervillains on missions for the government. You had a good mix of actual heroes like Rick Flag, Bronze Tiger and Nightshade riding herd on a mix of outright villains and amoral scum like Captain Boomerang, Deadshot, the Enchantress and others. They weren’t shy about killing off characters either, with every mission leaving at least one member dead behind (the odds increased whenever a Firestorm villain was involved). By issue 50 the Squad had been exposed, cut loose from the government and now operating as out and out mercenaries.

A fun series that quickly became one of my favourites. In general I liked that whole dark corner of the DC Universe the Squad operated in. One of these days I should write more about it.

Mike W. Barr and Terry Dodson proving you don’t need to be Japanese to come up with gender bender stories, but as an US comic it features a lot more violence and lot less of checking out your new boobs.

Lukasz is one of four disciplines of the Archimage, fighting the minions of Boneyard through a centuries long war. Each time he’s killed or otherwise dies, he jumps into another random body, completely wrecking the lives of whicever poor soul he possesses as well as that of their family and friends. Having done so for a hundred times or more he long since has stopped worrying about it, justifying as the cost of the war he must wage to stop the evil Boneyard. The details of the war or why Boneyard is so evil are a bit unclear, though he’s certainly not above kidnapping and murder. It’s halfway through the issue that Lukasz is killed for the second time in the story, as Archimage and his men are betrayed and most die while Archimage himself is kidnapped. Once again Lukasz jumps bodies but for the first time it’s a female boy he ends up in…

Now this being a 1993 vintage comic don’t expect too much in the way of a trans friendly narrative here, though Lukasz’s struggles with his new body continue to make up a part of the series. Not just how he feels about his body, but also how other see him now. What with it being a nineties series, rape or at least the threat of it plays a large part in this. There’s also the question of the family Lukasz left behind this time: as a man he has walked out countless times on lovers, family, children; as a single mother now it’s more difficult…

When Malibu — flush with the money it got for publishing the first Image titles before they became a proper publisher — launched the Ultraverse in 1993 it was incredibly exciting. Unlike Image, this new superhero universe was writer driven (including Mike W. Barr, Steve Englehart, Steve Gerber, James D. Hudnall, Gerard Jones, James Robinson and Len Strazewski) but was also created as a coherent world from the start, rather than as with Image where each of the founders went with whatever interested them at the time. Even so, not every series was a winner for me and Mantra was one of those with which I didn’t click. Neither the overall plot nor the idea of a man trapped in a female body appealed to me to be honest. I only bought the first couple of issues of Mantra when they first came out, though also got a few more from the back issue bins. Not a bad series, just not one I liked all that much.

Imagine as if you started watching a kung-fu movie never having seen one before, just as the climactic fight scene at the end starts and you have no clue who any of these people are or why they fight. But at least the fights are very cool.

Which I guess is why I bought this, one of those weird, anomalous comics you get because you probably won’t see it ever again if you don’t. Probably at that time when I was really into Dough Moench & Paul Gulacy’s Master of Kung Fu which I was buying from a market stall as black and white Dutch reprints. Anything that scratched that same itch I’d snatch up.

Oriental Heroes is an interesting title, part of the short lived Jademan Comics line. Originally a Hong Kong publisher owned by Tony Wong, who created Oriental Heroes back in 1970 and his company on the back of its success. It’s still being published today though he is no longer involved. Hugely successful in Hong Kong, Wong decided in 10988 to try his luck on the American comics market, turning Oriental Heroes and three other titles (Blood Sword, Drunken Fist and Force of Buddha’s Palm into proper US style comics, with Mike Baron and Roger Salick providing scripting/adapting duties for them at first. The latter two, like Oriental Heroes were also created and drawn by Tony Wong, who must’ve been the most productive comics publisher who ever lived if he did all that and run his company at the same time.

As you may guess from the titles, all four are kung-fu series. Oriental Heroes is set in contemporary Hong Kong and the overall plot as far as I could make out is the fight between a loose band of good kung fu artists and the evil Global Cult, who uses “an army of kung fu assassins to protect its illegal drug, gambling and slavery operations”. In episode 16 the two sides clash, which is unsuprisingly structured like a kung fu movie, with lots of individual battles between the two sides’ heavy hitters. Lots of punching and kicking of course, but there are also a lot of special techniques each given its own powerful name. In English it’s all slightly awkward but it works nevertheless.

Jademan comics lasted until 1993, when it ceased publication on all its titles, promising to return with new ones but that never happened. Either they were another victim of the superhero boom and burst of that time or developments in Hong Kong put a stop to their American adventures, as Tony Wong had been ousted from his company not long before. Apart from the original four Jademan also published two other kung fu books, Iron Marshal and Blood Sword Dynasty, all of which lasted until the end. They also put out an anthology book that was more like a regular manga/manhua style magazine and a horror anthology but neither lasted long. An interesting experiment to sell manhua to America at a time when country was barely even aware Manga existed.

An interesting footnote is that, according to a news report in The Comics Journal 120, the coming of Jademan in 1988 caused a bit of controversy. Not only was the company promising steep discounts to distributors if they bought enough, it seems two distributors even bought shares in the company, on “a personal base”. Both Bud Plant and Diamond distributor’s owner Steve Geppi bouhgt shares at the time, but both said that was done as a gesture of goodwill…