DC Comics – Wis[s]e Words

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.

The sad faith of the Big Two’s happy little cogs

Published on March 5, 20131 Comment

Jerry Ordway original art for an All Star Squadron splash page with the debut of Infinity Inc.

It’s hard to believe, but eighties and nineties DC Comics mainstay Jerry Ordway explains isn’t getting any work from them anymore and can’t live on the royalties for his older stuff:

On a recent Absolute Infinite Crisis hardcover, I had 30-odd pages reprinted in there, a book that retailed for over a hundred dollars– a book that DC never even gave me a copy of, and the royalty amounted to a few dollars, I couldn’t buy a pizza on that windfall. I want to work, I don’t want to be a nostalgia act, remembered only for what I did 20, 30 years ago.

In a way, Ordway is lucky. He at least still gets some royalties. Had he worked on Disney comics like Don Rosa, the most popular Donald Duck cartoonist after Carl Barks, he wouldn’t have received any royalty at all, as Rosa made clear in his explanation as to why he stopped drawing:

Disney comics have never been produced by the Disney company, but have always been created by freelance writers and artists working for licensed independent publishers, like Carl Barks working for Dell Comics, me working for Egmont, and hundreds of others working for numerous other Disney licensees. We are paid a flat rate per page by one publisher for whom we work directly. After that, no matter how many times that story is used by other Disney publishers around the world, no matter how many times the story is reprinted in other comics, album series, hardback books, special editions, etc., etc., no matter how well it sells, we never receive another cent for having created that work. That’s the system Carl Barks worked in and it’s the same system operating today.

For a time back in the eighties and early nineties it looked like (American) comics as a field would evolve beyond it’s low rent, exploitative roots and start treating its talent better. But that needed a growning, not a stagnating field and while comics have always been dying, never more so than in the past two decades. Working for the mainstream, commercial comics publishers in the US was always a good working class sort of career, where you could make decent money if you worked hard and were reliable, but were never going to get rich from. Nor would you get a pension from your work or anything other than a flat rate, but at least you’d still might be able to support yourself even after retirement with freelance work.

But when the slow collapse of the comics industry was accelerated with the mid-nineties crash, when the speculators and collectors left the field and superhero comics became what it was always destined to be, a niche market, it meant there were far too many cartoonists for the field to sustain and all the old pros, some having worked decades for the same company, would gradually disappear, retire, retrain, the lucky ones doing reproductions or sketches at comics cons to get some money, but many of them, like Jerry Ordway, finding it harder to make a living from what once seemed a safe job.

In some ways then what’s has happened to the commercial comics industry is a belated echo of what happened to so many American industries no longer needed or done cheaper elsewhere. These days there is still a comics industry, but outside the rotting corpses of the socalled Big Two it’s a much more boutique approach, one aimed at a smaller audience willing to pay more for a particular cartoonist’s vision or for excellently curated collections of the best of American comics history, with little room for those professionals for which comics was always more of a vocation than a personal calling. There’s no call for assembly line workers when you’re building cars by hand.

DC won’t lead us to the digital comics paradise

Published on June 15, 20111 Comment

I’m not actually all that bothered by DC’s reboot plans, as I’ve stopped buying floppies way back in 2000, even stopped buying comics entirely for the best part of a decade. Since I’m not buying any current DC titles, I could care less about them renumbering their titles because I still won’t be buying their comics afterwards. Instead I read the blogs and buy the trades, if they’re cheap and interesting enough. This is not just because I’m a cheapskate, but also because I can’t justify the space taken up if I still bought comics the way I did in the nineties when I’m living in a two room apartment with limited bookshelf space and a wife not too interested in comics yet willing to tolerate them, but not if they come in longboxes — bad enough we had to live with moving boxes in our bedroom for a couple of months after buying our flat.

What I would be tempted to buy, if they were cheap enough and easy to get, would be the digital equivalent. Sadly however, it doesn’t seem likely DC is going to offer what I want:

To clarify from my last note, we will be at “price-parity” for same-day digital. No DC digital comic will be cheaper than its physical counterpart at launch. Same-day (a.k.a. “Day/ Date”) parity pricing is for the first four weeks of release; thereafter, the digital titles will follow our standard pricing, with $2.99 comics dropping in price to $1.99, $3.99 comics dropping in price to $2.99, and so forth. Keep in mind that our goal with our 52 new #1s will be to ensure that the physical comic book is more compelling than ever!

Additionally, we will be offering you an additional special “combo pack” for Justice League. This is a Diamond-exclusive $4.99 physical polybagged JUSTICE LEAGUE comic which will contain a redemption code for a digital copy on the inside cover. So consumers will have three main ways to read Justice League beginning August 31st – $3.99 physical, the $4.99 combo pack, and $3.99 digital. As mentioned above, after four weeks the digital-only price drops to $2.99, per our standard price for oversized digital titles.

I understand the constraints DC is working under: they need to move to digital comics without killing off the comics shops just yet and therefore cannot be too competitive with their core market. Yet pretending that you can just export the direct market online is foolish. But that’s what DC is doing by attempting to get you to buy single issues like you would at the comic shop.

Which I think is the wrong thing to do, if you want to attract more customers. Buying single issues each month makes sense to the dwindling comic shop audience, conditioned over years and decades to consume their comics this way. They don’t mind that most months they’re only getting part of a story, that they have to wait months or sometimes years for a particular story to finish, have it interrupted by the latest crossover, or have it continued in another series altogether. For anybody not already (or still) a comics fan going digital doesn’t solve any of these problems, nor makes buying comics any more attractive. It’s as if you could buy a song through Itunes only by buying each separate verse, chorus and bridge, had to wait a month between each part yet still needed to pay two to four dollars per verse for the priviledge.

The natural unit for selling comics is per story, not per issue. If you want me to pay three bucks for a bucket of bits, give me something that takes longer than five minutes to read and give me something that can be enjoyed on its own, that does not depend on everything else you’re publishing this month. If you do persist in selling your comics per issue, sell me cheap subscriptions. Twelve issues for twenty bucks say, automatically downloaded to my Kindle or Ipad or other e-reader as soon as they become available, without me having to do anything to get them. That would be acceptable. It probably can’t be done with most of DC’s current creative people, all of which have trained themselves to write for the trades or only draw splash pages because that helps sells their originals in the collectors market. But you can’t fob off the general audience with unfinished and incoherent almost stories the way you can those few fans still loyal to DC.

While I’m telling DC what to do, let’s make sure there’s no DRM either. It’s pointless trying to protect your digital comics from pirates, your entire back history is available already anyway. Everything from the first issue of New Fun up to the last Flashpoint tie-in that only came out today is scanned — even in 2009 over 95 percent of DC comics ever published was available for download. It would’ve been nice if all this goodness had been available legally [1], say for a quarter an issues, but for those who don’t mind those niceties and who have a large harddisk, there are hundreds and hundreds of gigs of DC comics waiting for you. And downloaded they are, so there is a market for it.

Course, at the moment DC is so clued up about the internet that the teeny tiny link at the bottom of their main site to subscribe to their comics only leads you to page directing you to a toll-free number, so it’s a moot point what they’ll do. DC can’t hack it anyway.

[1] which it actually is in the Netherlands, as we do have the exemption in copyright law to make copies for “home use”, even when the copies made that way come from an originally illegal source. So downloading all these DC comics and only reading them yourself without spreading them further is perfectly legal, if perhaps not quite moral. [2]
[2] usual disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer, that’s my wife and reality is slightly more complicated than I make it out to be here.

DC Comics still clueless

Published on July 22, 2010

Proof that DC Comics still does not get Alan Moore, even twentyfive years after Watchmen:

However, DC Comics co-publishers Dan DiDio and Jim Lee said, “Watchmen is the most celebrated graphic novel of all time. Rest assured, DC Comics would only revisit these iconic characters if the creative vision of any proposed new stories matched the quality set by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons nearly 25 years ago, and our first discussion on any of this would naturally be with the creators themselves.”

It also shows the essential inability of DC to sell comics any other way but by constant regurgitation of characters, concepts and series, on the monthly superhero pamphlet model. That Alan Moore would want to stay far away from this, that his approval cannot be bought even with the rights to the original series, is both unsurprising and understandable. Watchmen needs no sequls, prequels or side projects: everything Moore and Gibbons had to say about it was said in the original series, which was a product of the time and place it was produced and anything else that will be done in its name will only lessen the original.

Can you imagine a Jim Lee or Dan Didio greenlighted Watchmen project, written perhaps by Darwyn Cooke or a Garth Ennis or Mark Millar (and I don’t honestly know what would be worse: Cooke’s fauxstalgia let loose on Watchmen or the inevitablity of Ennis or Millar going for a Rorschach prison rape “joke”), drawn by whoever is the to-go guy for dark, moody serious superheroics. It would be awful, but still sell on the scale of what DC did to Milestone, with what was a great attempt to create modern superheroes for a properly multiracial America has been folded into the DC mainstream to function as spear carriers and capeholders for old, white supermen.

DC will use up the Watchmen characters because that’s the only thing DC knows how to do, though often they don’t even know how to make effective use of them. As Tim O’Neill points out, this is the main failing of both Marvel and DC, because that’s what their business models are build on. With their comics mean selling points now being their ability to be turned into succesful summer blockbusters (and the continuing sale of pamphlets and deluxe hardcovers to aging fanboys a nice sideline) this has only gotten worse. DC doesn’t just want Watchmen 2: the comic, it wants Watchmen: the Saturday morning cartoon.