World's Finest

by Robert Greenberger

Superman and Batman have been crossing paths almost since they debuted at the dawn of the DC Universe. As a result, they have battled their arch nemeses Lex Luthor and the Joker with startling regularity. By 1990, it would have to take something – or someone – special to get fans to sit up and pay attention.

Wisely, DC did just that by combining Dave Gibbons and Steve Rude for the Worlds’ Finest miniseries, which has withstood the test of time as one of the best loved team-ups of the Gotham Guardian and the Metropolis Marvel. At this time, Gibbons was best known for his work first on Green Lantern then, of course, Watchmen. But few knew he could also write so this got people curious while Rude had made a splash with Nexus. The Dude had been working on his co-creation for some time but rarely did work for a major publisher. He was coaxed by me into his DC debut with 1988’s Mister Miracle Special and this was his next big project for the company.

Long out of print, this story returns as an affordable trade collection and by all means you should be checking this out. Gibbons was one of the first to really explore the differences in approach between Superman and Batman, which didn’t seem necessary until both characters received the reboot treatment in 1986. But the combination of light and shadow was too appealing to leave unexplored and Gibbons does a nice job here. He creates a scenario that has the two swap cities for their case and exploring a Dark Knight in the city of tomorrow while the Man of Steel trolled the alleys of Gotham allowed for some fresh perspectives.

That concept of opposites is not only in the story and dialogue but it seeps into every panel of the artwork. Rude played with visual contrasts especially noteworthy on the three covers and accompanying retail poster that came out at the time. His sense of composition and design is just brilliant.

His Superman is a streamlined, modern day descendant of Joe Shuster’s lush line work with a fluidity not really captured since the Fleischer Bros. cartoons of the 1940s. His wink and smile are classic while the flying is powerful and graceful at the same time. His artistic influences beyond Shuster are clearly Alex Toth and Doug Wildey for design simplicity but at a glance, it’s easily recognizable as Rude. Gibbons made certain Rude would have a chance to draw his own version of iconic moments, including exchanges with Luthor and Batman.

Rude’s Caped Crusader owes just a hint of the earliest Bob Kane drawings, notably the cowl, and the figure is powerful and lithe, not the overly muscle-bound crimefighter seen in his own title at the time. There’s more David Mazzucchelli than Kelley Jones in the figure work.

His takes on the villains are just as iconic and just as menacing, pure fun to look at.

Making the clean work stay pristine is courtesy of inker Karl Kesel who is a perfect companion for Rude’s pencils.

But the purty artwork is all in service to Gibbons’ story, which doesn’t necessarily trod new ground but effectively explores why each hero works best in their hometown and how their diametrically opposed methods actually work well together when necessary.

The World’s Finest heroes against their deadliest foes, written and drawn by two of comics’ top talents? How could you pass this up?

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World’s Finest SC

The Monolith HC

by Robert Greenberger

The unfortunate fact of life is that people are resistant to sampling new characters and comics unless they directly spin out of or have direct connection with some event. As a result, readers may have missed out on The Monolith, which DC Comics released in 2004-2005 but canceled after a dozen issues. The concept of a golem as a protagonist may have been done before, but not set squarely in the DC Universe and certainly not done with a rich supporting cast.

As Jimmy Palmiotti told Newsarama recently, “They can expect something a bit different than the usual, that’s for sure. We have a monster created in the 20’s that has been alive and bricked behind a wall waiting to be released back into the world with a single mission…to right what is wrong in the world. We have two main characters, Tilt and Alice, that are trying to keep themselves away from their old habits and start a new life together and last, we have a backdrop of a city in constant turmoil.”

Too bad that so few readers supported it because the book was a terrific read. Thankfully, you cannot keep a good golem down. Recently, Jimmy negotiated to gain the rights to the character and is bringing those stories back to print. Image will be Monolith’s new home as the stories will be re-presented in oversized hardcover collections resembling the European album format beginning this summer with the first three issues.

I had the chance to chat with Jimmy about this in late April and he explained how the idea finally became a reality. “Dan DiDio had just become the editor in chief of DC Comics and had told me that there were looking for some new ideas and more to the point, a monster type character,” he said from his Florida home. “I remembered an idea I had from my college days, spoke to Justin [Gray] about it and we pitched The Monolith as a miniseries. Dan loved it and assigned it to Joey Cavalieri, to work with us developing it. Looking back, it still wasn’t exactly the right time to launch the book, but here we are again, giving it another shot at finding an audience. In comics, like most media, timing is everything.”

The two writers have been working well together for a number of years and Jimmy explained, “What he brings to everything when we work together…another way of looking at things and telling a story. Our styles are a bit different and at the same time they complement each other. We are both research nuts and have a love of history, so it all worked out great. The initial pitch was my idea, but Justin came in and built on it more and more till it became the book that it is. I really think everything we do together has a style of storytelling that is unique to our individual work. He always brings his A game to everything he does.”

Visually, the series needed someone who could convey the real world effectively and the choice of the British Phil Winslade may have sounded odd but he admitted “we originally had another artist lined up and doing designs and such and for some reason, the Vertigo office literally took him from the project and put him on one of their books without the editor’s knowledge. We were in a bit of a panic at this point when Joey suggested Phil to us. We were familiar with Phil’s work already and I personally thought Phil was a much better choice than the first artist we had lined up.

“Phil does research better than any artist I have ever met. His attention to detail was something that we knew would make the period jumps in the story believable. We already knew he was an amazing storyteller, but as the pages came in, we were shocked how dead-on everything was …from the clothing to the street scenes…it was amazing. What he also does is dig in deep into the story and relate to the characters. They have a soul, and in this case, Alice and Tilt were perfectly casted by his art. He is a hard worker and every page he really tries to impress the reader. The reason for the larger format in the first collection is to show off his skills and detail.”

Jimmy added, “Because the book is set in Brooklyn past and present day, we had a lot of fun reflecting Brooklyn’s past in the characters. This city is known for its immigrants and we wanted to present a well-rounded cast to make the story more believable. The contrast of characters, lifestyle and religion always makes life more interesting and creating this mix for the series makes the book more realistic and as well, credible. With Alice and Tilt, we wanted to show a group of people that most books do not usually spend time on…people who are lost souls in our world, the underprivileged few who roam the streets doing anything to get by. The rest of the characters introduced are as colorful as we could make them and we felt that this mix is what a city, any city, is all about.”

Meantime, Alice was a drug addict and Tilt a former prostitute, both trying to become better people. The writer/artist allowed that they were not your typical characters but editorial never gave him trouble for their backgrounds. “They understood that we were presenting characters that had problems in their lives that were trying to take a step in the right direction and that alone made them admirable. Later in the series we put Tilt though an experience that was a real life situation, and we tried not to sensationalize it…and it was a few months later that another book did exactly that. We always felt ahead of the curve with the series and that’s probably why we are so proud to introduce a new group of people to these collections.

“A ton of research was done when we were telling the story in the past. The actual idea of the tunnel under the east river came from a painting teacher showing me the sub-basement of his home downtown. As far as making Brooklyn part of the DCU, well, not everything happens in Metropolis and Gotham.”

Speaking of the Dark Knight’s home, Batman guest-starred in three issues in the middle of the run and the deal will not let those pages be reused. As a result, Jimmy, Justin, and Phil are exploring ways to adjust the story to remove the hero without destroying the rhythm. Something like that won’t derail Jimmy, whose affection for the character and miniseries remain palpable despite its commercial disappointment.

“It’s a story that is personal and at the same time a project that didn’t get a fair shake when it first came out,” he said. “No fault of the publisher, but at the time, I think my name didn’t carry much weight as a writer as it does now and maybe it wasn’t the right way to sell the character. I really don’t know. Right now we have a lot of projects that are inspired by stepping out of the expected from us including Creator-Owned Heroes from Image comics and projects like Retrovirus currently on Kickstarter. We really are looking forward to getting The Monolith out there and hopefully telling more tales in the future.”

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The Monolith HC

Wonder Woman: The Twelve Labors

by Robert Greenberger

Wonder Woman was creatively interesting to read in the very early 1970s, under first Mike Sekowsky and then Denny O’Neil, the de-powered Amazon Princess had some real world adventures and attempts were made to make her a role model. Unfortunately, Gloria Steinem had launched Ms. Magazine and editorialized that DC’s premier heroine needed her powers back. With issue #204 in 1973, the old logo was back and so was the tiara, invisible plane, Paradise Island, and more. Under writer/editor Robert Kanigher, it was a feminized return to the kind of wacky storytelling he exercised for over a decade not all that long before.

Kanigher’s return to the editorial desk proved short-lived and he returned to freelance writing and after publisher Carmine Infantino examined the sales, he decided the series needed fresh blood and quickly. He handed the title to Julie Schwartz, by then known as DC’s Mr. Fix-It. Much as he was uninterested in Batman in 1964 and Superman in 1971, “I never particularly cared for Wonder Woman, so I came up with the gimmick of having the Justice League spy on her, so to speak, to see how she handled her activity, and whether she was worthy of being readmitted,” he said in Wonder Woman: The Complete History by Les Daniel and Chip Kidd. “It gave me the opportunity to do a series of issues in which I would have a guest star featured, and it did well in the sales department.”

Mirroring Hercules’ twelve labors, the story arc depicted Wonder Woman’s efforts and for the first time that cycle is being collected as Wonder Woman: The Twelve Labors. The volume is a wonderful time capsule of the mélange of writers and artists working for DC’s heroes in the mid-1970s with some nice match-ups and some scratch-your-head assignments.

Schwartz needed to bone up on the character and her world, research performed for him by letter hack turned staffer Martin Pasko. He told Gail Simone some time back, “It was…odd. I first joined DC in an Editorial-support position, part of a new paid internship program devised by then-VP Sol Harrison. Julie Schwartz had just inherited WW from Bob Kanigher, who’d apparently gone round the bend for the second and final time.

“Julie knew nothing about Wonder Woman — that would have meant actually having to listen to Kanigher talking to himself all those decades they shared an office, instead of just keeping Bob’s records. So my first job when Sol assigned me to Julie was to read every WW story published up to that time and give Julie a report.

“Julie’s associate editor, the ever-anal-retentive Nelson Bridwell, was charged with the same task, as I recall. But Nelson did it with a straight face, waxing rhapsodic about such things as eluding Nazi anti-aircraft fire with an invisible plane that didn’t confer invisibility on its pilot, so that she would, in real life, appear to be zipping across the sky in a squatting position.

“I, unlike Nelson, ambled back into Julie’s office and was, like, ‘Julie, you won’t believe how sick this sh** is!’ Truly, that peek inside the fevered brain of Dr. William Moulton Marston was astonishing — a three-week immersion in a four-color Psychopathia Sexualis.”

Armed with the information, Schwartz asked his JLA writer Len Wein to kick off the new storyline before turning the writing over to Cary Bates and Elliot S! Maggin who write several issues each. Recently, Maggin recounted to me, “The best thing that happened as a result of my writing a few Wonder Woman stories was a letter I got from a reader who identified herself as a lesbian and insisted that she was sure my story was written by a woman, that certainly no one named Elliot S! Maggin really existed, and that Elliot was obviously just a beard for some real writer who otherwise couldn’t get in the door in the comics business in the early 70s because she was a woman. I’ve always said that my politics are basically those of a 14-year-old black girl, but that letter really tickled me.”

Then, recalls Pasko, “about a year after they’d started the book, Julie had another one of his almost Hourly! Creative! Disagreements! with Elliot and, remembering all that research and assisting I’d done, he asked me, in a fit of pique, if I wanted to write WW. I said ‘yes’ without hesitation.

“Look, there was no grand design there, OK? No party planning. Instead, we were shipping books on time, y’know? As you can see, I have no illusions about anything. I always thought the Hercules’ trials bit was just the first thing Len and Julie could think of five minutes before they had to give a cover concept to Bob Oksner. Besides, it gave ‘em a way to vamp for a year and a half.

“The ‘official’ reason for the trials gimmick was that all those guest stars would supposedly attract new readers. I mean, because of all those skillful pairings of artists with the heroes with whom they were most closely associated. Those perfect-pitch matches of tone and style. Yeah, that’s it. Curt Swan and Elongated Man. Batman and Jose Delbo.”

Caustic comments aside, once Pasko took over, he stabilized the writing allowing the cast to grow and he ran with the book, whose sales stabilized and then rose, so he was on hand when the television series debuted, increasing interest in the character. The thing to remember is that this was the first time Wonder Woman was fully integrated into the DC Universe, as familiar heroes, villains and creators came for a visit. There was a charm to the stories since she was exercising powers she had gone without using for some time and had to retrain herself. As with all of Schwartz’s editorial work, there was an emphasis on plotting, making her think through the problems before tossing her lasso.

For many, this was an introduction to the character and these fondly recalled tales are most certainly worth a look.

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Wonder Woman: The Twelve Labors SC

Alien: The Illustrated Story

by Robert Greenberger

Heavy Metal was busily rewriting the rules of what could be done with graphic storytelling in America. Since their debut in 1977, they introduced readers to magazine-sized, full-color work from people around the world, giving many of us our first taste of countless European greats. So, it’s no surprise that they brought that same verve to movie adaptations. Comics had been adapting movies and television series since the medium began and during the 1970s, Gold Key and Marvel were the two major companies producing such works.

Former DC production artist John Workman was at Heavy Metal in 1978 as its art director when the company acquired a license to produce books about Ridley Scott’s forthcoming science fiction film Alien. While others worked on the Making of book, Workman was tasked with finding talent for Alien: The Illustrated Story and immediately thought of Carmine Infantino, inked by Walter Simonson. They had previously collaborated on a story for Creepy #84 so he knew what he’d be getting.

As fate had it, Carmine’s phone was busy so Workman called Simonson, who wanted to do the entire art job. It was the artist who suggested the brilliant Archie Goodwin, by then a recognized expert at adaptations, for the scripting. According to Workman’s recollection, the graphic novel may have been the first comics work to hit The New York Times Best Seller List where it resided for seven weeks. Long out of print, the book is coming back in time for Scott’s prequel film Prometheus. Best, it’s coming back in two interesting formats: Titan is rereleasing the full color book as both The Original Edition and Simonson’s amazing work is showcased in The Artist’s Edition. The Artist’s Edition will be 14″ x 17″ size replete with color tryout pages, Goodwin’s script, plus an interview with Simonson.

Alien: The Illustrated Story - The Artist's Edition

“The second I read it, I knew it was going to go over, very, very well,” Workman told our own Roger Ash and Eric Nolen-Weathington in Modern Masters Volume Eight. While Workman had lettered Simonson’s material previously, this was the next in a consistent line of assignments leading to his becoming the artist’s personal letterer for years.

Goodwin’s pacing kept the creepy unknown factor sustained page after page while Simonson’s stylistic artwork coupled with the brilliant design work meant it had a unique look and feel. For the artist, it was “one of the best experiences I ever had in comics.” 20^th Century-Fox flew Walt over to tour the effects house and see a rough cut of the film, letting him absorb all the visual reference he needed.

Additionally, “20^th Century wasn’t really nuts about whether the comic was exactly like the movie. What that meant was we were able to take bits and pieces from different treatments and put them together in what we thought was the best story. In the end, I thought we got a comic that was a really good adaptation of the film, but in sprit and of most of the stuff that was in it.”

Despite all the support, the final 20 pages of the 60 page work had to be rushed in about a week to ensure the adaptation was in print when the film was released. Released by Simon & Schuster to bookstores and by Heavy Metal to newsstands, the book found its audience but Workman recalls being disappointed by the fan market reaction which was unusually tame. Fortunately, the time has come to properly geek out over this brilliant work which deserves rereading.

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Alien: The Illustrated Story

Marada the She-Wolf

by Robert Greenberger

In the 1970s and 1980s, Chris Claremont couldn’t write fast enough to satisfy his readership as his take on the uncanny mutants made X-Men a major seller for Marvel. He showed deft humor and action in his run on Marvel Team-Up and gave us buddy comedy with Power Man and Iron Fist. But, Chris aspired to write other types of stories, other genres, and needed an outlet. Thankfully, Marvel had exactly what he needed.

Claremont partnered with English artist John Bolton for a story that was to feature Robert E. Howard’s female swordswoman and an extremely popular character at the time. “I met John through Ralph [Macchio], while he was doing ‘Kull of Valusia’,” Claremont told me this month. “The pages came in and we’d go, ‘god this is great!’ The opportunity came up for a Red Sonja story which I pitched to John while I was in the UK. While we finished it, Marvel lost the license for Conan and Red Sonja and there we were with a fully completed book and no home.

“Jim Shooter did one of those things that is very rarely mentioned when talking about him. Man, he really is a decent honorable person. Archie Goodwin suggested we redo the story for Epic Illustrated, buy the story back from Marvel, retool it, and sell it as our own work. I went in and pitched it to Jim and he just said, ‘To hell with it.’ He just signed it over to us which was incredibly magnanimous and brilliant.”

Not that people today remember it, but Marada the She-Wolf was a welcome addition to the world of sword and sorcery. Thankfully, Titan Books remembered and is releasing the first collection of the complete Marada in a handsome hardcover. It will reprint the three stories including one that has never before been collected and it will act as a showcase for Bolton’s gorgeous linework and color.

When the character could no longer operate in Cimmeria, Claremont hit on ancient Rome as an interesting venue and we met this descendent of Caesar. “John and I sat down and restructured it, changing the costume slightly, and we were off and running. Rome was my idea, because I liked the idea of doing something set in the last century BC, first century AD, a time of transition. It made a lot of sense since the world as we understood was in a rich, unknown space. Caesar had encountered a lot of it in Gaul and England to the north; you had the expansion out through the Middle East out to what had been the Persian Empire and the vast expanse of the Caucuses above it. For me it worked as a world where the intersection of a lot of rich, transitional territory,” the writer said.

While Claremont is a well-known veteran comics writer, Bolton is perhaps less known which is a shame since he is one of the most versatile and talented talents at work these last few decades.

Bolton attended East Ham Technical College, obtaining a degree in graphics and design, and only then discovered comics. He began drawing features for Look In, The House of Hammer and the legendary Warrior before being hired for American comics. Ralph Macchio lured him over to Marvel where he made his American drawing Kull for Epic Comics. After Sonja became Marada, the pair also collaborated on 1985’s Black Dragon, another creator-owned project. The duo then produced interstitial stories to fill in gaps during the reprinting of the X-Men run in X-Men Classic.

Marada and her colleague, the princess Arianrod, face court politics, supernatural intrigue and the occasional demon. She has a reputation for never having been bester by man, woman, or demon. Claremont helped earn his rep as a strong writer of female characters with Marada and her handling of the sexual politics of the Roman era. According to Simyon Ashrandiar, “She has powers both temporal and arcane, though she knows it not”.

Claremont said the mail was very positive back then so they had no “problem whatsoever conceiving and selling the two follow-up stories: her encounter with the Queen and the journey from Alexandria to Rome where she finds herself involved with surprisingly finding Arabian Knights resembling pirates. My hope was to close out the arc with her coming into the Coliseum and looking back on it, outdoing Gladiator before the film was conceived of.”

Bolton doesn’t like to repeat himself and has continued to challenge himself elsewhere but both relish the chance to have the material back in print. It languished until a publisher, in this case Nick Landau at Titan, saw the potential audience for this classic sword and sorcery tale.

Personally, I’m delighted to have something so wonderful to look at back in print.

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Marada the She-Wolf HC

Showcase Presents Showcase

by Robert Greenberger

When DC finally decided the time had come to produce thick black and white collections of older works, it needed an umbrella title. Since the mandate was that it was to feature the bigger and lesser names, a venerable title with a great deal of history behind it seemed a natural. As a result, Showcase Presents, launched back in 2005, became the welcome addition to DC’s collected editions mix. After all, it was Showcase that changed the very nature of our business back in 1956.

Jack Liebowitz and Irwin Donenfeld, two of the men who turned the fledgling publisher into a powerhouse beginning in 1937, must have been uncertain what audiences wanted in the mid-1950s. After all, comic books had been under a harsh attack by PTAs, Dr. Fredric Wertham, and the United States Congress. Rather than fight back, as William Gaines wanted, everyone else decided to placate the populace with the Comics Code Authority. While that meant the comics could be displayed on newsstands with pride, it also robbed publishers of the urge to stretch the boundaries.

Such might have been the thinking when the company approved the concept for a new ongoing series, Showcase. The series launched in spring 1956 with the DC editors all taking turns with new series concepts and letting the sales figures determine what might be continued. If not, the risk was limited to a single issue. Mort Weisinger, best known for his work on Superman, kicked things off with stories about firefighters, notably Fireman Farrell, followed by the prolific Robert Kanigher with issues 2 and 3, which spotlighted Kings of the Wild and Frogmen.

Sometime in late 1955, it was decided that one of the concepts to be attempted was the revival of a super-hero. By then, Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman were the only Golden Age heroes still headlining their own titles with Aquaman and Green Arrow headlining backup features. The quasi-superhero Martian Manhunter had debuted that year in Detective Comics and seemed to be doing well. No one can remember who suggested the Flash be the character to be tested, but it was clear that his last editor, Julie Schwartz, should be the one to try again. His genius, though, was keeping only the name and powers while changing everything for a new audience.

Showcase #4

And with Showcase #4, a new chapter in the history of comics was written. For the first time ever, the initial 21 issues of this landmark series is being collected in the appropriately titled Showcase Presents Showcase. Some of these earliest stories have never been reprinted and some not reprinted since the 1960s which allows readers to look at some very fine work by artists Irv Novick, Russ Heath, Jerry Grandinetti, John Prentice, Ruben Moreira, and Sy Barry.

Of course, no one knew what would happen with issue #4 so work continued as Jack Schiff handled the following issue with Manhunters that offers up some fine Mort Meskin work. Issues 6 and 7 were the first back-to-back issues with a single concept, Jack Kirby’s Challengers of the Unknown. By then, the early numbers were coming back encouragingly enough and the Flash returned for issue #8.

Showcase #9

From then on, Showcase was a vital launching pad and laboratory for action-oriented heroes in future settings, or super-hero revivals. Weisinger even tried spinning off Lois Lane in issues #9-10 after the sales success of Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen.

Interestingly, Schiff and Schwartz both wanted to try new space age heroes so were each granted three issues to try out Space Ranger and Adam Strange (billed as Adventures on Other Worlds) respectively. While both gained regular series berths in existing anthology titles, Strange was the standout character thanks to Gardner Fox’s inventive writing and the high-tech designs of Carmine Infantino and Murphy Anderson, even though it was Mike Sekowsky who first pencilled those adventures on Rann.

Flipping through this volume, you can watch the increasing sophistication of the storytelling with some of the most consistent slick art that typified the DC “house style” that was prevalent through the 1950s well into the 1960s.

Classic comic covers from the Grand Comics Database.

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Showcase Presents Showcase Vol. 1 SC

Wolverine and the X-Men Vol. 1 HC

by Robert Greenberger

Let me start by saying upfront that I have some quibbles with the way Schism split the X-Men in twain even though I do agree the mutant franchise needed a fresh jolt of energy. It felt like a lot of mutants were just moping around for months on end. As a result, I welcomed the notion that some new titles were coming with some fresh blood attached. And again, I can quibble that Wolverine’s character has been tweaked beyond recognition that he now has tamed his savage self deep enough to actually become the new headmaster of the School for Gifted Students. He’s most certainly an odd choice to take Prof. Xavier’s legacy and run with it.

But that may be why Wolverine & The X-Men by Jason Aaron and Chris Bachalo has proven so entertaining. It is unexpected with a lighter tone than an X-Men ongoing has had in years. It certainly seems to have struck a chord with readers, propelling the series to the top of their sales charts. For those who missed out, the first four issues are being collected in a premiere hardcover edition.

Aaron is a writer to watch since no two series he writes reads the same way, and that is a rare talent. What’s more impressive is that he has previously written Wolverine in other titles as seen in the Wolverine by Jason Aaron Omnibus. We open with the East Coast mutant contingent returning to Westchester and repairing the damaged mansion, renaming it the Jean Grey School for Higher Learning. Among the faculty are Shadowcat (barely older than the students), Vice Principal Beast, Gambit, Rogue, Rachel Grey, and Iceman among others. Best yet, Aaron brings back Doop from obscurity to be an adjunct.

You know this is a different series just from the opening pages as the mansion is visited by state officials to certify it to operate it as a school. Of course, that’s when the new Hellfire Club launches an assault and things only get worse before a rescue comes from a most unexpected quarter: Krakoa The Living Island. As a result, you don’t know what will happen in any one issue and that’s most welcome.

Wolverine and the X-Men #2

Aaron also does not neglect the social interactions that have kept the X-Men so interesting through the years. We have Rogue and Gambit teaching side by side even through their romance has ended and she now is separated from her paramour Magneto. The students themselves – including the intergalactic Kid Gladiator, Genesis, the clone of Apocalypse, and the new Angel — bring their own baggage which gives Aaron plenty to explore as everyone settles into their academic routine.

He told the Associated Press, “We’re getting to see Wolverine in a position we’ve never seen him in before. We’re certainly a little bit uncomfortable, but I think it still makes sense with the way things have been going in the X-universe. It’s very much a book about this school and Wolverine trying to build something new from the ashes of the old school. Wolverine is leading the show. Not Wolverine with Professor X looking over his shoulder.”

The first four issue arc nicely sets up the new reality, introduces us to the conflicts, and gives everyone a moment to shine. Aaron is clearly comfortable with the convoluted mutant continuity and has done his homework, finding characters and concepts from across the series and decades to compose a refreshed take on the series. It’ll be interesting to see which young character captures the readers’ imaginations, either Kade Kilgore, the new Black King of The Hellfire Club or Quentin Quire.

Bachalo deserves equal credit for the expressive visuals, giving everyone a nicely distinctive look and keeping the storytelling clear despite the dozens of characters in action. He displays a fine sense of visual humor which complements the story.

There’s hope for not only this series, or the mutant franchise, but for Marvel to avoid cookie-cutter comics as their line is trimmed to focus on their core characters.

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Wolverine and the X-Men by Jason Aaron Vol. 1 HC

The Shadow: Blood & Judgment

by Robert Greenberger

I contend that 1986 was DC’s greatest publishing year and one of the projects coming out that magical year was a brutal adaptation of The Shadow from Howard Chaykin, one of the most interesting creators at work during that period.

For those less familiar, the Shadow was a name given to the radio narrator of Detective Story Hour, using stories taken from Street & Smith’s detective pulp magazines. Such was the 1930 show’s success that eager readers asked newsstand operators for the Shadow magazine so S&S went ahead and created one. Walter B. Gibson, a tireless writer, was asked to turn a name into a character, launching a self-titled pulp on April 1, 1931. The series was so successful it went to twice-monthly publication and spawned a radio series followed by comic books, movie serials, and even a comic strip.

Many comic readers first discovered The Shadow when he guest starred in an issue of Batman as a precursor to the wonderful series from writers Denny O’Neil and Michael Uslan and artists Michael Kaluta and Frank Robbins. The O’Neil/Kaluta stories were once collected but that book is sadly long out of print. Anyway, in the mid-1980s, DC once more obtained the comic book rights and handed the character to Editor Andy Helfer, who tapped Chaykin for the role.

Coming off his acclaimed run on American Flagg!, Chaykin wanted to stretch and felt the pulp crime fighter was what he needed.  “The character was extremely violent in its time,” Chaykin told me in the delayed but forthcoming The Art of Howard Chaykin. “That bit of the guy being inside the water cooler came directly from one of the Shadow stories.”

The body in the water cooler scene from The Shadow: Blood & Judgment.

The reference is to the single scene anyone familiar with the four issue miniseries recalls. The Shadow: Blood & Judgment went on to spark a discussion over the rising tide of graphic violence in comics but it also made people pay attention to the character for the first time in years. A fan-favorite, Chaykin’s work on Flagg! led to solid sales on what might otherwise have been a middling release.

“I still don’t see what was so controversial about it. The book had been a commercial failure as a pastiche of the period material. The reason the Shadow was perceived as a 1930s character was because it was canceled in the early fifties. Had Superman or Batman gone through the same process and been revived, they also would have had that same period quality to them. I wanted to bring the material to a contemporary audience that had no interest in period material. And of course I pissed off Harlan Ellison.”

While the character has remained a beloved figure in pop culture, his comic book appearances have been limited. Anthony Tollin has kept the flame alive with his superb series of pulp reprints (which I also highly recommend you order). The collection of this storyline was an early entry in DC’s bookstore program and has been out of print for something like 20 years. Now that Dynamite Entertainment is collecting Chaykin’s works and also has the license to the Shadow, the time had come to bring back this 120-page project.

Dynamite’s press release on the project has a stellar array of today’s talents talk about how influential and downright entertaining the story was with Brian Michael Bendis saying, “This is my all-time favorite Howard Chaykin comic book. This is him at the tip-tip-top of his game and, yeah I’ll say it, the best Shadow story ever published!” Jason Aaron added, “Chaykin at his ballsiest and most dynamic. This is how the Shadow should be done.”

And from what we hear, that’s exactly the model Garth Ennis is following with the new Dynamite ongoing series. In fact, Ennis was part of the quote parade, saying, “Howard Chaykin was one of the few who dared to make mainstream comics different back in the eighties; it was guys like him, Alan Moore and Frank Miller who made sure there’d be no going back. Howard’s work on The Shadow is amongst his very best: razor-sharp character work, sizzling dialogue and an unsurpassed sense of layout and design.”

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The Shadow: Blood & Judgment SC

Elektra By Greg Rucka Ultimate Collection

by Robert Greenberger

Daredevil was pretty moribund as a feature when Roger McKenzie was writing it, until he was paired with artist Frank Miller, who breathed fresh life into the series. In short order, Miller replaced McKenzie as the writer and ran with the character, exploring the dark underbelly of criminal life in Manhattan. The book hadn’t been this good in ages but it proved to be nothing but a warm-up for what was to come.

In 1981, the arguably best character introduction of the decade occurred when Elektra Natchios arrived to kill hornhead only to realize he was actually her college lover, Matt Murdock. Suddenly she was conflicted and as you know, when you hesitate, you can die. Her interactions with Daredevil led to her unexpected and gruesome death at the hands of Bullseye.

Thankfully, she got better.

Had it been handled by anyone other than her creator, fans would have rejected the hardcover graphic novel Elektra Lives Again, but we were all happy to have her back. Since then, she has been a popular character, appearing here and there, fortunately never quite getting overexposed and maintaining some mystique.

One of the early moves president Bill Jemas made when he arrived at Marvel was to green light an Elektra ongoing series, initially written by Brian Michael Bendis, However, with issue #7, acclaimed crime novelist Greg Rucka arrived from DC and wrote the feature through issue #22. Now, for the first time since 2003, those stories are being collected in the aptly named Elektra by Greg Rucka Ultimate Collection, a mammoth softcover that has Elektra #7-22 plus the one-off story from Marvel Knights Double Shot #3.

At the time, more attention was paid to the riveting cover art by Greg Horn, redefining bad girl art for the time, than the content. In reviewing the stories, the comic didn’t turn the assassin into a wuss or a do-gooder. Instead, under Rucka, it explored the ramifications of her actions. Elektra was riding high on adrenaline pumping through her veins, loving the violence.

The first few stories eased Rucka into the world of Elektra, with a multi-parter where a woman named Katamides reaches out to the vigilante, asking her help against the four men who raped her. Once they have been rounded up, though, Elektra stuns the woman by refusing to help her exact sweet revenge.

Elektra, now a violence junkie, is looking to score her next fix when she is been hunted down and captured by the mysterious Mr. Locke. We learn that his girlfriend died, an innocent, during one of Elektra’s previous cases. For that, she must suffer and he abandons her in the Mojave Desert to die. As she struggles to survive the heat and dehydration, we learnt that Locke was just part of a coalition of victims that wanted to be part of her suffering.

Obviously, she survived the ordeal but recognizes the need to retrain herself, adjusting her technique for maximum affect. As she studies under a man called Drake, The Hand come looking for her, wanting her back. The remainder of the 384-page collection is focused on Elektra, the Hand, Drake, and a man who genuinely cares for the woman.

Most of the art from the ongoing series was executed by Carlo Pagulayan, spelled by Joe Bennett, so it has a real world grit to it. While this chapter of her life is usually glossed over, there’s a reason the Marvel Encyclopedia includes it in their list of Key Storylines and now you can find out for yourself.

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Elektra by Greg Rucka Ultimate Collection

Batman Vol. 1: The Court of Owls

by Robert Greenberger

Batman has faced many deadly threats over the decades, none moreso than the writers who seek to add their own pieces to the mythos. It’s hard to reconcile that the New 52 Batman adventures still acknowledge the previous continuity since Grant Morrison’s conceit is that the previous 70+ years of stories really happened. Also, Grant built up the death of Batman by giving us the preposterous and out-of-leftfield Black Glove as the big bad, the meta villains who have been pulling his strings.

With that in the past, now the new resident scribe, and heir apparent to the mantle of the Bat is Scott Snyder, who made a splash in Detective Comics and now writes Batman. Snyder has been feeling his way through the continuity, doing bizarre nonsense like Jim Gordon Jr. being a contemporary of Dick Grayson but also nicely weaving in the Cobblepots to the history of Gotham City as seen in Gates of Gotham.

When he took over Batman with #1, he began laying the groundwork for the next meta villains to be pulling the strings. Forget the Black Glove, they were posers compared with the Court of Owls.

Snyder’s handiwork will be collected in Batman Volume One: The Court of Owls, a hardcover collection of the first six issues. With some really lovely art by Greg Capullo, this will no doubt be a more satisfying read in one sitting as the threads all come together and make more sense.

Ostensibly, the story is about a series of murders that implicate Dick Grayson but Batman digs deeper and finds the Court. As Snyder explained to Comic Book Resources, owls and bats are natural opponents and oddly, this had been rarely played up over the decades. Snyder is rectifying by picking up the few such instances, beginning with Batman #107.

“I’ve always loved the idea of the owl as an antithetical symbol to the bat and the way that that exists in current Batman mythology, given all the different versions of Owlman and him being a kind of reverse Batman in the anti-matter universe. I love those stories.

“My feeling was that the owl is a symbol that has a lot of potency in Batman already, and I wanted to build a story around the Court of Owls as something that creates a real and tangible threat in the physical Batman world – in the main continuity of the DCU. I wanted to do something that maybe hadn’t been done before that brings all that terror to bear on Batman now so that you do feel, I hope, this creeping sense of dread. You feel a bigger plan at work and that the owl is a symbol of not only a rival to the bat now but also something that’s been laying claim to Gotham for centuries. The owl and the bat almost can’t coexist.”

The Court has its avatar, The Talon, and he is a new creation, poised to challenge Batman both physically and mentally. In Snyder’s mind, it’s all personal with the Court being connected in some way with Lew Moxon, the man who ordered Joe Chill to kill the Waynes, and Chill himself. According to the writer, the Court has been interacting with the Wayne family going back generations, dating back over a century to the events depicted in the current incarnation of All Star Western. Not only that, he’s revealing how they have been involved with the Flying Graysons as well, before their untimely deaths.

“So as much as I’m saying ‘No, this isn’t a story that will revamp how his parents were killed in Crime Alley’ there are connections to that time and connections to what made Bruce who he is and Batman who he is and Nightwing who he is and Alfred who he is and the Wayne family and what they stand for. I think it’ll be very earth-shaking to Batfans as well. We would never change things just to be sensational or anything like that, and certain things to me are sacred, but fans can probably guess what those things would be, and they hold them sacred too.”

The 11-issue arc continues to unfold but clearly, this redefines Batman, Bruce Wayne, Gotham City and the rest of the core cast. Snyder has been confident that editor Mike Marts has been coordinating the new threads and connections so all the other bat-titles reflect what has been going on, leading to future crossovers and no doubt new wrinkles.

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Batman Vol. 1: The Court of Owls HC