The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1575: Teen Titans Spotlight #9, April 1987

Days 1571 - 1574 were The New Teen Titans #28 - 31, February - May 1987. They feature Cliff in much the same way the earlier issues did, as a guest from Gar's past who helps the Titans on one of their adventures. Cliff gets torn to bits, just like he used to every second issue in the original series, and, strangely, his head is attached to Cyborg's body in the last issue, which somehow helps the team take down Brother Blood. These issues were interesting in that they chronicle probably a total of a half hour or so of time, basically the whole of Brother Blood's "resurrection" and their takedown of him. Kind of cool to see such a minute dissection of a superhero battle. Also, it appears that Mento is crazy again and trying to kill Gar. So it goes.

Today's issue, however, was really fantastic. It opens with a take on the original team battling their old foe General Immortus. I"m trying to figure out if it's actually one of their original adventures or if it's a new one, and if so, where in the chronology it fits. Anything with Gar has to be after issue #100. Guess I'll just have to go back through them - *sigh* ;)

The present tense story, however, features Cliff telling Gar he's retiring, that he's had enough of the weirdness of the superhero life. Though Cliff is often written as a race car driver, he's originally meant to be something of an adventurer, and racing cars is simply one of the things he did. But now he's tired of the adventure, and is thinking of settling down on a ranch. An attack by Mr.104, an old foe of the Patrol, further cements Cliff's plans to retire. The irony of this is that his issue is just a few months younger than the first issue of the 1987 Doom Patrol series, and must have surely been in the pipeline by the time this comic went to print. Despite my misgivings over his tenure on the title, Paul Kupperberg has to be given props for his ardent desire to keep this team alive. The Patrol inspires this kind of loyalty from those who love it, I think.

I spend a lot of time thinking about what I would do if I had the kinds of powers that my favourite superheroes have. I sometimes worry about whether I'd be a hero or a villain. With the Doom Patrol, regardless of era, I always feel like that's much more what I'd be like: In a constant state of healing, but with hearts in the right place.

"Burn, Robotman! Feel yourself burn!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1266: Zero Hour: Crisis in Time #0, September 1994

This one's gonna have to wait too. My wife's leaving for Europe and things are in a bit of chaos at the Miller household!

On second thought. This was an utterly uninspired crossover. I don't want to say anything more about it.

More tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1265: Zero Hour: Crisis in Time #1, September 1994

Ugh.

Early 90s DC really was a mess. This series was obviously designed, in part, to bolster interest in some of the newer characters that DC had introduced, but they're so bland that by the time they've been erased from reality, you're not really that bothered. I often wonder, when I see a crop of these "new gods" spring from the pages of a venerable mythic structure like the DCU, whether any of them will go the same kind of distance as their progenitors. A similar thing is happening again at DC in the wake of the Metal Knights event. I think. I didn't follow it at all.

The other thing I'm trying to figure is the utter hate on DC seemed to have for Hal Jordan in this era. I know he went evil, but they seem to go out of their way to make him super-fucking-evil. It's a strange treatment for one of their more iconic characters.

Not that I mind. I really liked Kyle Rayner.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1264: Zero Hour: Crisis in Time #2, September 1994

Gah. Does the "crisis in time" involve my lost time from reading this series? They've lost me. Can you tell? Somehow Extant, who is also Monarch from "Armageddon 2001," and who is also Hawk, of Hawk and Dove, and has Waverider's powers to manipulate space and time, also has a couple of teams of superheroes under his control, and it's never actually explained how this happened, except to tell us on the last page that it's explained in the Team Titans ongoing series.

And that's where they lose me.

This was a major plot point of the entire issue, but there's no reason or logic to it unless you've read an ancillary title that you might not actually be reading regularly to begin with. Once line-wide crossovers started pulling stuff like this, they lost what the crossover was meant to accomplish - all your favourite heroes in one story together, and that story made, as much as superhero stories do, sense. The original Crisis did this par excellance, as did Hickman's Secret Wars. I read Crisis with no other context for the DCU except that I knew of Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman. And the series made sense. The first Secret Wars is the same. I didn't have to read any of the other ongoing series to get a good, complete story.

I've ranted about this before, but I think it bears repeating. Not only is it, in my opinion, rude for a company to expect us to spend even more of what little we earn on comics we wouldn't normally want to buy, but it's also demonstrating some class-based exclusion. In a lot of ways it's saying that if you can afford it, you can get the whole story, but if you can't, then you get an incomplete experience. And that's not fair, and it's certainly not how art or media should be. But, unfortunately, it is.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1263: Zero Hour: Crisis in Time #3, September 1994

I hadn't realized that this was a weekly event - I was about to complain that all kinds of stuff is alluded to in this issue that we never see, and that that's a sign, to me at least, of poor writing. But with a weekly crossover, you have the ability to so stuff like that. I think the DC One Million crossover is just about the most perfect line-wide weekly crossover I've ever seen. Perhaps some of the failings I'm noticing - rough pacing, moments that should be dramatic but lack any gravitas - are a result of not reading the crossover as it's envisioned, as a line-wide story.

Given the dodgy era that the story comes from, I'm not certain I want to track the issues down. DC was just finishing up with its experiments with grittier, Image-esque superheros, but Starman and The Flash, under Robinson and Waid respectively, were leading the DCU back to a place in which I think it flourished. But then, I quite like that Morrison guy who came on not too long after this.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1262: Zero Hour: Crisis in Time #4, September 1994

Let's just take a complete, 180 degree turn, and read some sort of crappy early 90s DC, shall we?

*sigh*

Another crisis. Granted, this is one of the earlier ones, but I think by this time, DC had figured out that they could make scads of cash doing multi-part crossovers. The one thing I will give Zero Hour is that it introduces Jack Knight, the best Starman, and one of the best superheroes, I've ever read.

That aside, meh.

I'll keep reading the rest of the series, and maybe some of the zero issues I have, but it's pretty run of the mill. I keep worrying that I'm judging these things by the standards I have now - crises like this weren't a dime a dozen back then, or not as much as they are now. But I think even by this point, they were getting a bit ridiculous. This is also around the time that the X-franchise seemed to have two or three major event crossovers every year.

Not that things are much better these days, though I do feel it might have slowed down a bit. Or, perhaps, I've stopped paying quite as much attention as I once did.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 777: Dark Nemesis #1, February 1998

I don't really have a lot to say about today's comic. It's a pretty standard DC super-book from the late 90s, which means it's going to be generally pretty good (DC were having one of their upswings at the time, well before Geoff Johns got his hands on the DCU). But having read no other issues of the Teen Titans from this era, I'll admit I was totally lost on this one. The Atom is a member of the Titans? I seem to recall something about that, vaguely, but very little else about this era of the venerable super team.

It's kind of amusing that a team consisting of young people can also be venerable.

Anyway, today's featured creator is penciller Chriscross, or Chris Williams. Williams got his professional start in a pretty big way as one of the primary artists for the Milestone Comics project. Much of his work since has been with DC, though he's done some fairly substantial runs at Marvel as well. His Wikipedia entry notes that he's currently creating some graphic novels for Humanoids in Europe, and also pencilling The Midnighter. I'm on the fence about his art, I'll admit. It's very much typical of the post-Image boom DC style, in which they were getting away from the hyper-kinetic style of McFarlane or Lee and moving more to a synthesis of that style with the 80s pseudo-realistic style that I talked about with Iron Man a couple of days ago. One thing I do appreciate about Chriscross' art, specifically in this issue, is that he doesn't draw his women as if they're going to snap in half. There's an excellent shot of Scorcher and Axis (the two ladies up there on the cover by Jason Pearson) getting ready to bust the rest of their team out of The Slab, and they look like they could kick the hell out of just about anyone. It's nice to see an artist who recognizes that female bodies can be every bit as kickass as the male ones in superhero comics.

Looking through Williams' GCD listings, I'm pretty sure I have a fair bit of his work. The late 90s was one of my favourite eras of DC Comics. But I'll admit that with the amount of amazing artists that I'm seeing involved with Milestone in the early 90s, I'm getting pretty excited about reading some of those comics. I think the first issue of Hardware is somewhere in the stack I put aside for these next couple of weeks.

Looks like I did have a bit to say about the comic.

To be continued.