To celebrate my son's 17th birthday, I'm reading a comic today cover dated for the month of his birth.
I'd decided a few months ago to read through the DC One Million crossover, a huge cross-company story that DC did in the waning years of the 20th century. I think it is perhaps the best superhero crossover story I've read. It's got gravitas, it's got humour, it's got amazing superheroics, and scads of cool new characters who are both familiar and unfamiliar. Today I was up to Young Justice, the issue that rounds off the first week of the month-long series.
I haven't read a lot of Peter David's stuff, though I have substantial runs on Incredible Hulk and Aquaman that he wrote as a result of having owned my store. He's also done acclaimed runs on Supergirl and Young Justice, but for some reason his titles have never been ones that I've collided with. I'll have the opportunity, eventually, and this issue of YJ was a nice portent of things to come.
The three members of Young Justice Legion S, pictured above, tell legendary stories of their 20th century predecessors, muddling crisis with crisis, Zero Hour with Millenium Giants. I've been teaching a course on the ways that myths travel down the ages to us, so this was an amusing reminder that even the stories that I revere now, and that I think will last...thousands of years from now, they'll be mixed up tales of flying people and monumental, but silly-sounding, events. It makes me wonder, as I often do, what the stories that we tell from thousands of years ago actually started out like.
The comic is also cool because each of the flashback sequences is drawn by a different artist, so we even have art styles that hearken back, to a certain extent, to the crossovers the characters are butchering. All in all, a pretty satisfying comic.
I remember the day my son was born, I went over to a convenience store and bought a couple of comics to read while he and my wife were asleep at the birthing center. I can't remember what comics they were. At the time I was getting my comics at a small store in a town called Listowel, about 45 minutes from where we lived, and the owner was kind enough to put one of each copy of the One Million crossover aside for me. It took me about 3 months to buy them all. Whenever I read it, I'm reminded of that time in my life, and of the remarkable change my wife and I underwent. I must have read these comics as he dozed, small and fragile, on my shoulder. A great story to be exposed to at such an early age.
Something else random tomorrow. I'm enjoying the things I've been pulling out. I will get back to my weekly posts on the Con, and The Flash soon. Work's been a bit killer lately. See you tomorrow.
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