The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 2104: Galactic #1, August 2003

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The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 2102: Highway 13 #1, January 2001

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The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 2082: Project Superpowers #1, 2008

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Though I hadn't actually planned it this way, I'm ending off with a Modern Age comic based on Golden Age characters.

Okay. Maybe I planned it this way a little bit, but I was already planning on reading the comic before I realized what I'd done. Regardless, an interesting take on some old-school heroes.

Come with me on a bit of a tangent. 

Once upon a time, there was no such thing as copyright. Artists simply accepted the fact that scummy forgers would profit on their name. Eventually someone came up with the idea that an author could sell the right to copy works to a particular publisher for a particular amount of time, allowing for a mutually-beneficial relationship to be established, copyright. And after that period of time was up, the arrangement was renegotiated, with rights to the material reverting to the artist. This didn't stop bootlegging, but it did offer an "official" version, rather than what could often be a very bad bootleg (from which we have previously based some of our "official" Shakespearean texts). Once an author was dead, there was set into a law a particular length of time that had to pass, and then that person's intellectual property passed into public domain. Now, the reason for this is that we have no culture without the culture that came before us. This can lead us down a very strange rabbit hole called Deconstructionism, but instead let's just say that without the stories and art of prior cultures to draw upon, we have no culture. This is why it's necessary for art to pass into public domain, so that it might be processed and repurposed by contemporary society, to retell old truths to new audiences. Sounds pretty good to me.

But then along comes corporate ownership. Or crazy estates like Tolkien or Conan-Doyle. Situations in which rather than the intellectual property being associated with the actual intellect that created it, and its eventual demise, the property is associated with an organization that will exist perpetually, for all intents and purposes, restricting the way in which contemporary culture can take a potentially fruitful and interesting idea and reshape it to speak to a new audience. What it unfortunately accomplishes is excessive linkage to the past (the desire for authenticity or continuity with previous iterations of an idea), rather than extensive linkage to the future.

Imagine for a second that the Catholic Church copyrighted the contents of the Bible. Such that every time any reference was made to the contents therein, they had to be consulted and paid, and had the right to refuse interpretations that didn't fit with their interpretation. Literally, every time a Christ reference or image was used, they had final say as to whether it would be allowed or not. That's basically what corporate ownership of a character like Superman involves, regardless of the fact that at some point we'll be far enough from the original creators' deaths that he should become public property, to reshape and re-present. Without external corporate oversight.

All of which leads me to the characters in today's comic. You see the Black Terror up there on the cover? He's a public domain character. I think I have three or four different reinterpretations of the character, from Alan Moore's Terra Obscura, to Darkline's Dark Adventures. When this sort of thing happens to a character, it puts me in mind of the way that I catalogue the character Thor in my database. I make no distinctions between Thors from different publishers and genres. To me, they're all stories about the same mythic figure, further myths adding to his already ancient stories. This is how myths work. They keep getting built upon to service a new audience. Part of the reason that the Bible is so successful is that it's in the public domain. Anyone can use it to tell their story. So, for me, all of these stories of the Black Terror, and his pals, are all happening to the same characters, as part of their myth.

Though, in the text, they're actually the original characters, brought back from being trapped in an urn. It was a pretty good story.

More to follow.

 

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 2051: Lady Death: Mischief Night #1, November 2001

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I read a little bit of Avengelyne a while back, and noted the fact that, like Chaos!, Avatar seems to publish it's characters ongoing adventures as a series of discrete series, rather than as a single, continuing piece. I think that it must be a marketing thing, though I suppose it also gives a chance for creators to keep on schedule with breaks between each series.

Today's issue throws a bit of a wrench in the works, though. Set between the events of the Alive and Last Rites series, Lady Death has an adventure involving Sarah, the young woman she rescues in Alive, and who returns to her everyday life in the Last Rites series. According to today's issue, Sarah manifests an entity called Shriek who attempts to spread and/or quell fear - it was a bit unclear. However, in the first issue of Last Rites, there's absolutely no mention of this event, only that Sarah needs to return to her family. Both were written by John Ostrander, and both were published not too distantly from one another, so it just seems to be sloppy writing to not mention the previous/subsequent adventure (chronologically versus publication, that is.)

That said, I quite liked today's story. As Sarah is a teenager, when she turns into Shriek she is, unlike every other Chaos! lady, actually completely clad in a costume and her breasts aren't the size of her head. It was a nice change. There was some interesting philosophical stuff about death being the source of all fear that I really think could have been addressed a bit more fully, but as this was meant as a holiday-themed one-shot I can understand why it wouldn't have gone that route. I'm curious to see if the earlier Lady Death stuff deals with that fear, or if it's only after the main character becomes mortal again that we start to see some consideration of what death, and Lady Death, mean to finite creatures like ourselves.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

I really ought to go back and tag the rest, but here's some other holiday-themed comics I've reviewed. Surely there must be more out there than just Christmas stuff, though.

And another take on Death, famously, appears in Star*Reach #1.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 2050: Lady Death/Bad Kitty #1, September 2001

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 Well.

Here we are 12 days later, and I've found myself chest-deep in Lady Death comics from Chaos!.

(The exclamation point is part of the publisher name, hence a period after the exclamation.)

(Nerd.)

 We get here because once I'd finished the "Onslaught" crossover, I needed a break from superheroes, and decided to read comics that I consider to have some of the sexiest covers in the collection. I'll be doing a different article on those. I'm still in the process of reading them. But Lady Death: Last Rites #2, with a cover by today's artist Carlos Mota, is on the list. But I obviously couldn't read the second issue without reading the first, and by the time I was done, I'd come to understand that despite the giant, giant boobs on display on every single female character in the publisher's wheelhouse, there were some really interesting stories being told.

I've looked at Lady Death stuff before, mainly in connection with the character's original artist, the late Steven Hughes. (Though having just gone back and re-read them, I see that I contradict myself. Which I'm happy to see. I'd hate to think I was consistent.) But when I had my comic store in the early 2000s, Chaos! was entering its heyday, and I definitely wanted popular stuff on the shelves of The Magic Mirror. It didn't help much, but at least I now have a really great comic collection. The nice thing is that I have a not-quite-but-almost complete view of what Lady Death's story was like for that year or so that I was in business. Hence today's comic, following reading Last Rites #1&2 and the Lady Death/Medieval Witchblade crossover preview.

To facilitate this, I went looking for a reading order, as Chaos! was using the new storyline = new series publishing format at this point. The most exhaustive I found opens with the same thing I've said a couple of times: despite the fact that the lead characters are virtually naked all the time, there's a really interesting plot going on.

And, I suppose, in the end, in and of themselves, there's nothing wrong with huge breasts. It'd just be really great if there wasn't such a preponderance of them in mainstream comics.

More, probably, to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

London Night Studios offered the grittier side of bad girl art, though I'm not as big a fan of their story.

And then there's the swimsuit issues, that take the girl out of "bad girl" and throw a swimsuit on her...leaving just "bad," really.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1993: Glory #2, January 2002

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Totally forgot to mention in yesterday's post the awesome flashback sequence by Melinda Gebbie. This series was definitely sticking to the format that worked with Supreme, and we get another flashback this issue. These are arranged through comics lying about in Gloria's apartment that are send-ups of the old Wonder Woman comics and the stories they told. Ms. Gebbie's art nicely characterizes the Golden Age tales in yesterday's issue. Today's flashback, by Matt Martin, is a little less apropos. While I love his covers on this series, I'm not sure his style fit what was meant to be a story from the weird superhero era of the 1950s. Instead of EC-style work, we get an Al Rio-esque romp, nicely told and amusing, but definitely not what comics in the 50s looked like. And, holy cats, are there a lot of just full-on panty shots.

And that's it for Glory. The story ends on a cliffhanger, and when we next see the character, she's living on an island, now separated from Gloria, and is discovered by a wandering teenager named Riley. And that series is fucking amazing.

 We'll stick with the remnants of the Awesome Universe for a bit after this, I think.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1992: Glory #1, December 2001

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So finally, finally, we get into the actual story of The Gate of Tears. On a quick art note, I'll say that I enjoy Marat Mychaels' interiors much more than his exteriors. When telling a story, he's a pretty good artist. But those weird pin-up covers don't do much for me. I've written about it elsewhere, most likely in my considerations of the Glory covers, about the different propensities for cover art, which can be broken, very generally into the pin-up shot and the action shot. Unsurprisingly, there's far more pin-up shots for female-led books than there are for male-led ones. Personally, I'd love to see some pin-up covers of Captain America, or Superman.

We've seen the opening of "The Gate of Tears" already, though it definitely looks nicer in colour. Granger Troy is still pretty creepy, though I'm getting the feeling that he's recognizing the goddess in Gloria West and is overcome with a desire to worship her, however he can. And though he continually worries that he's taking advantage of someone with fairly severe mental difficulties, he never takes into account Gloria's own desires or agency, which definitely skew toward her wanting the sex. It seems to me that we're being offered a critique of how neurotypical people see "mental illness" (I don't like that term very much), and of the ways in which we might view those in our world whose mental architecture is a little less Euclidean.

There's always been a link between the neurodiverse and shamanic magic in tribal societies. As with all things, the superhero genre softens and simplifies the metaphor, but it might do us well to listen to the neurodiverse in society. They may not be channeling divinities (though they may!), but they have very important, and different, views on how we might solve some of the problems we see in the world today.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1991: Glory #0, December 2001

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 Perhaps it's appropriate to go over the provenance of this series. The Awesome Preview from 1998 prints, in black and white, the entirety of the prelude story to "Glory and the Gate of Tears." The colourized version is presented in 1999 in the Awesome Entertainment zero issue. It's interesting, as that issue actually takes two of the pages and turns them into double-page spreads, albeit ones that are to be read vertically rather than horizontally. The the Avatar preview issue prints, again in black and white, the first few pages of issue 1. Add to this that today's zero issue includes a history of Glory, unique to the Avatar Press zero issue, which replaces sketchbook material that was included in the Awesome Entertainment zero issue. And it reverts the two double-page spreads to the single pages that were seen in the Awesome Preview. Which, since it's substantially different from today's zero issue, means I'll get around to reading the story again some time. As I've noted before, this is not a series that I'm in any way unhappy to revisit. Aside, of course, from the its truncated nature.

The prelude to "Gate of Tears" is a nice set-up not only for Glory's new situation (a Rick Jones/Captain Mar-Vell-style body sharing situation), but also for the exploration of symbolic nature that comes to its apex in Promethea. I touched briefly upon this in my introduction to the "Faces of Glory" series of posts, and Glory creator Rob Liefeld has often claimed that without Moore's work in the Awesome Universe, there would be no ABC Comics, Promethea, Tom Strong, etc. I find this amusing coming from someone whose biggest claim to fame is a team book that was originally a Teen Titans pitch. Again, however, there are substantial enough differences between both the characters and the universes within which they exist that the exploration begun here and exploration undertaken in Promethea would have been significantly different, even if they arrived at the same places.

Another thing to bear in mind about the Avatar Press series is that it was prepared as a mini-series, consisting of the zero issue and 4 regular issues. Which means, if I'm not mistaken, that there's at the very least bare bones outlines of what happens later in the series kicking about somewhere. And given how the series "concludes" in the second issue, I'd love to get at least a tiny bit more. Pun intended.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

I've written a bit about Alan Moore for the blog. Mostly to do with Supreme and Glory.

And for a deep dive into Glory's origins, here's some stuff about Extreme Studios, from whence she originally sprang.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1990: Glory Preview, September 2001

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 This series' title is one of the highest-occurring tags on my blog. And that's not likely to change in the future. Anyone who's read any of my other stuff about this series and the Awesome Universe that spawned it knows how much I love this stuff.

I talked a bit about this cover in my Faces of Glory series. Marat Mychaels takes over the artwork post-Awesome Universe, and I have to be very honest - his art is just not to my liking. Actually, I should clarify. I like his interiors fine. I find them a bit stiff, but they're light-years beyond what I could ever accomplish. But the exteriors, especially on this series, are basically pin-up model shots of superheroes. The cover of a comic is meant to draw the reader in, and give them an idea of what they're going to be paying for. This cover gives us nothing to do with the story within, which is actually a kind of creepy monologue from a man watching Gloria West, Glory's new human host, at the coffee shot she works at.

Though what I take away from it is the ridiculousness of a dude like this thinking that his purpose is to protect someone who is the avatar of a warrior goddess.

Like all women are.

I'll leave it there for a bit. This preview prints a few pages from issue #1, so I'll deal with the rest of the story tomorrow.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

Mr. Mychaels has shown up a few times in the collection.

As has his usual publisher, Avatar.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1967 - 1974

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 Ugh. Doing my best to stay on top of my project, but apparently not the blogging. Here's what I've been reading for the last week or so.

 Back to blogging regularly with a week of Latinx creators. I'll try to keep up with it, promise.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1957: Luba's Comics and Stories #4, June 2004

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As someone who prides himself on a wide range of knowledge of comics, Los Bros Hernandez are a fairly prominent gap in my knowledge. I have some Love and Rockets issues and collections, and I've read bits and pieces of their work elsewhere, but haven't really spent a lot of time with the stories for which they're famed. I remember their contribution to the art form being celebrated even when I was quite young and first into comics, though it was always a comic for older readers. But, as I say, I've not filled in the gap. Which may explain why I'm confused about virtually every female character, except the titular one (that's a pun that will be come apparent in a second), has the most enormous breasts I've ever seen. Perhaps further research is required ;D.

The stories were excellent - the art is pretty much beyond reproach. Gilbert Hernandez, today's creator, is lauded, and rightly so. He characters move and breath and react. And the stories, of a young girl attempting to understand a much older world around her, are really funny and touching, particularly the movie she attempts to make in the final story. As I rearrange my comics library for the umpteenth time, I'm hoping to get back to reading come graphic novels and posting about them for the project. I'll have to make sure that some of the Love and Rockets books are at the top of the pile. This stuff's pretty good.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

If you're interested in the primary North American publisher of Los Bros Hernandez, have a look at Fantagraphics - they publish cool stuff.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1951 - 1956

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 My apologies. I'm feeling thoroughly burned out, so we're just going to have to have a catch-up post. Each of these comics was really excellent in it's own right, even the early days 90s X-Men annual. Both Omaha and Junkwaffel are worth tracking down, particularly Bode's comic. There really has been very little like him in comics, before or since, excepting, of course, his son. I'll endeavour to get back to posting more regularly. Habits are, sometimes, so easy to break out of.

Just as a reminder, these comics are rounding out my reading of works by queer creators and works by Black creators. And regardless of how I may feel about the particular story, or genre, or era, each of these works is expertly rendered and is a vital part of the larger conversation that is comics.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1943: Head #2, September 2002

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Been a while since I needed a jump...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1942: The Age of the Sentry #3, January 2009

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Today's featured creator, Colleen Coover, won my heart with her amazing, amazing girlie porno series Small Favors. As I was looking for comics to read to celebrate my LGBTQ+ family, I was delighted to come upon her name and this excellent faux-history romp with the Sentry.

For a moment when I was reading the second story, illustrated by Ms. Coover and written by her partner Paul Tobin, I was a little mystified as to why the story was so, so straight. On the one hand, it's definitely because it's a mainstream superhero comic from about 10 years ago, when they weren't quite ready to have so much queerness on display. But then I also thought about the fact that Ms. Coover, according to her wiki, identifies as Bisexual. We're a mysterious breed, we bis, sometimes accused of greed, sometimes of not existing at all. But we exist, and persist, and as a bisexual creator, Ms. Coover is going to create some art that, sometimes, doesn't look very queer at all. I think in these cases, we have to read a little more deeply into both art and words, to see if there is a different inflection to the heterosexual stories that are told by bisexual creators. How do we identify them as bisexual stories?

And, really, do we need to?

More to follow. 

Further Reading and Related Posts

I've got a couple of other posts about Ms. Coover's work here.

And there's some other stuff about The Sentry here.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1931: G.I. Joe #8, 2002

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 I've gone on record (well, I've said it a couple of times) that the old Marvel G.I. Joe series is really, really good. Larry Hama brings just enough authenticity and grittiness to a war comic based on science fiction toys - not unlike what happens with Marvel's Transformers, or even their Star Comics Masters of the Universe series. I think with a toy-related comic, you have to be very careful to balance good stories with advertisement, otherwise the comics can become quite tedious. When I originally collected Transformers, this was the impetus to stop for me - it just seemed like ever month became an ad for the latest toy, which didn't really reel me in. Today's issue, though still attached to a toy line, is far enough removed from the franchise's heyday to allow for some interesting storytelling.

I have some other, and IMHO better, examples of the work of today's featured creator, Jamal Igle, in the absolutely stellar Ahoy Comics series The Wrong Earth. I was going to read an issue of that for today's comic, but I think with a series that well-wrought, I want to do the whole thing as a series over the course of a couple of weeks. So instead, we'll have a look at a much earlier piece by Mr. Igle. He shares art chores on this issue, and while his and Mr. Kurth's art meshes well, it's easy to tell the two apart. One of the things I really appreciate about Mr. Igle's work is that he lavishes as much attention, as far as I can tell, on facial expression as he does on body language. We communicate as human beings in so many ways, and often it's a little off-putting in a comic when we see body language, verbal (print) language, and facial expression not quite meshing. But looking through the Igle-pencilled sections of this comic, the characters all evince different faces and expressions, and through that personality. This comic is dripping with a kind of personality in each character that, despite it's awesomeness, the original series doesn't quite attain.

To that point, I'm quite excited that I have the first 10 issues of the series, though I think this is the only issue that Mr. Igle helps out on. It'll be interesting to see if the things I'm picking up on today continue throughout the series without his artistic talents.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

Larry Hama is a pretty fascinating guy, and I'll definitely feature a bit more of his work when I get to my series on creators of East Asian descent. But here's a couple of places he's already shown up in the project.

The only other G.I. Joe piece in the collection is a neat promo piece that I reviewed here. Get your ABBA ready!

 

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1930: Detective Comics #761, October 2001

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 Shawn Martinbrough, today's featured creator, is not a familiar name for me, though he's got a few mentions in my collection, mostly for this particular run of Detective Comics scripted by Greg Rucka. He also did the art for Creeper #1000000, part of one of my favourite DCU crossovers, DC One Million.

If I might digress for just a moment, writer Mr. Rucka is a great proponent of diversity in comics. Two characters who show up in this issue, Crispus Allen and Renee Montoya, are two of the best POC characters I've read, with Ms. Montoya also getting a shout out for her queerness.

But back to Mr. Martinbrough. I got most of this run of Detective while I was running my comic store, and I've actually not read much of it. Batman, for me, is one of those really overdone characters, much like Wolverine was at Marvel in the late 80s and all of the 90s, so I don't tend to read Batman stories unless it's a favourite writer or a key story from the DCU. This, I'm finding, is a mistake, as we have wonderful runs on the character throughout his history that ought to be considered on their own merits, rather than on blanket thinking about the character. So when I opened up today's comic, it didn't quite look like I expected it to. The art reminded me very much of Michael Avon Oeming's work, and numerous outlets describe Mr. Martinbrough's work as "film-noir" influenced, which I can definitely see. But there's also the stylization, into a Darwyn Cooke-kind of place, that still gives the comic, despite its darkness, the feel of a superhero comic. I think sometimes writers and artists forget that Batman, though unpowered, is still one of the greatest superheroes to have come out of American culture. And even when he's on his darkest cases, we shouldn't forget that. Martinbrough's art manages to bridge these two worlds nicely, and has honestly pushed me over the edge into tracking down a bit more of this run. Rucka is always a draw, but when he's paired with artwork this good, how can I say no?

Though I've not read it in a while, I can also see how Mr. Martinbrough's art would work wonders on the Creeper installment of DC One Million, and it also appears he did the art for the short-lived series as well. There's a few short-lived series from DC at that point that I've made an effort to track down (Chase, Chronos, Vext) - they seemed to be willing to experiment a bit with their shared universe, and I think they produced some really spectacular comics that just didn't resonate with the wider readership. Creeper has definitely just made that list.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

I've read a fair bit of Mr. Rucka's work for the project, if you're interested in some of my other thoughts on his work.

And, despite my previous statements, I've read a ton of Batman stuff for the project. Peter Milligan's Detective run is really quite excellent.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1927: Countdown Special: The Atom #1, February 2008

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I watched, for the first time, Batman v. Superman last night. The "Ultimate" edition.

Bear with me for a moment.

It was 3 hours long, which, even for me, is a long time to spend with superheroes. But I, to be totally honest, didn't mind it. While I was watching it, I was texting my kid, and I suggested to them that the thing about Zack Snyder films is that, to a certain extent, they just play like fan fiction. For superheroes, Mr. Snyder has a very clear vision of what he wants to see: a combination of Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen and Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. But literally. Hence fan fiction. That said, and acknowledging that that's what was going on, it was a decent enough superhero movie with some good set pieces, and Ben Affleck is fucking amazing as old Batman. I would bring him back to that role in a heartbeat.

Near the end, however, I was chatting with my housemate about why it was so panned, and why, again by the end, I had just had enough. And she suggested that, quite rightly, people are just so fucking tired of seeing angsty white dudes on the screen, working out their issues in godlike exercises of power. There's a stab at diversity, in crowd casting for certain, and in the fact that we have an Israeli woman, a Japanese woman, and a Black man in supporting roles. But the three leads, the Bat, the Boyscout, and the Reporter, are white. And angsty. Today's comic reminded me of that.

With the exception that there were no People of Colour in the comic. Okay, I lie. There's one panel, in the latter half of the comic, the part illustrated by my featured creator today, Arvell Jones. In one panel, a group shot of a bunch of telepaths' heads, there is front and center a Black man. I have to assume that Jones placed that there himself. The rest of the comic is, as Batman v. Superman is, a bunch of white dudes. And Supergirl.

Mr. Jones has had a few mentions in the blog, having illustrated a Doom Patrol story in Super-Team's predecessor publication, and having been featured in my first Black Lives Matter-related readings, with Super-Villain Team-Up, and one of the weirdest comics I've ever read.

So what to do with this comic. First things first, it's a late 2000s reprint of stories from the late 70s. I've noted a couple of times in the last few days how strange it must have been for Black artists of the Bronze age to illustrate stories in which they saw nothing of themselves. Do we have to look to the colour artists, perhaps, or whomever it was who created the colour guides for each page. Why are all the background characters white? In fact, by this point in DC continuity, there had been a Black Green Lantern for 6 years. Why not use John Stewart in the story, rather than Hal Jordan? I mean, the short answer is systemic racism. The people involved in these stories very likely aren't racists - they're people who have been brought up in a society that has racism woven into its fabric. There was a default society, and it was white, and that was simply how it was. As comrades to the Black Lives Matter movement, it's incumbent on us to recognize how that racism has manifested so that we can pull the threads, unravel the fabric, and make something new together.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

The Atom has shown up occasionally in my 40 Years project.

Slightly more so the Green Lantern.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1922: Ant v.2 #7, June 2006

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So you'd have to be blind, willfully or otherwise, to not see or know what is going on in the United States at the moment. Sorry, not at the moment - basically since its inception. In the years since the ascendancy of the Trump presidency, the precarious position of People of Colour in the U.S. has never been more on display to the world, and to the citizens whom it affects.

A lot of the rhetoric I'm seeing from white people about the rioting and unrest in the U.S. is either whining about how bad things are, or asking POC "what can I do, I don't understand." And the most common response is that we educate ourselves and stop leaning on the very people this cultural disparity is impacting to either help us understand or assuage our "white guilt." The former is vital, the latter a deep insult. As allies, or comrades as I prefer, we need to understand that our place in this struggle is to stand behind those on the front lines and say "I've got your back, I am 100% in support of you, but I will not supplant you." One of the best ways I've read of to do that is to make sure that the cultural contributions, the importance of POC in the Western world, is plain and clear for all to see.

A few years back I had a similar notion, in the wake of yet another racially-motivated killing, and I made the effort to post about comics with Black creators. I'm going to do this again. Yes, it's repeating myself, but it's also one of the few ways that I know I'm qualified to help, as much as this might help, in combating the horrendous waves of racially-motivated violence that seem to be sweeping across the planet. I'm going to start with Black creators for a while, but then I'm going to move on to creators from other visible, and sometimes not, minority groups. It's important that we recognize that though it often looks like it, the Western world was not constructed by white people alone, nor should it be a haven solely for them.

So let's get started, shall we?

The first thing I ought to say is that just because I'm highlighting these comics in support of what is perhaps one of the greatest and most necessary cultural revolutions to be waaaayyy overdue, it doesn't mean that I'm going to simply offer glowing reviews. Some of these comics, I'm sure, will not be my cup of tea, and I feel that I have to be objective about that, despite my previously-stated goal of celebrating the contributions of Black creators. Not all comics are good ones, regardless of who creates them. (Oh, and I'm doing them alphabetically, so that no creator seems to be prioritized.)

I'm torn about Mario Gully's Ant. I read a bit of the back story, and it actually seems to be a neat consideration of escaping into fantasy, and perhaps also of mental illness, using the superhero as a way out of a difficult situation. What I glean is that Ant herself is a fantasy concocted by a young African American girl whose living conditions are, as they are for many young POC, deplorable.

There's some problems with the book, as(s) you can probably tell from that cover. It's very "fan-servicey," though only having one issue of the series, I don't know if that's something that is ever addressed. But there's one really important thing about this series that I really think Mr. Gully himself should let you know. From Newsarama:

 “I was convicted of robbery and sentenced to one year and probation. The event was a turning point in my life. I used to draw portraits and hot chicks on envelopes for commissary. One day around day #6 of 358, I was depressed about where my choices in life put me. I was looking out the barred window and a single ant crawled in from the outside of my window seal. I said to myself ‘Man, I wish I were an ant! Then I could crawl right out of this place and start my life all over!’ Well, I couldn't pull that one off, so I decided to make a homemade comic book about it. It got around and I had a little audience with my cellmates. Really built up my confidence about drawing. That's when I realized that one day I could be a comic book artist. I sent out my first submission from the county jail. I hope one day my story can be an inspiration to anybody out there who has a dream. You can do it if you want it bad enough. I was determined to do something positive with my life after that.”

It is a well-documented fact that young Black males make up a ridiculous percentage of the people incarcerated in the United States. But even here, under the unyielding thumb of systemic racism, we see creativity, talent, and a desire to contribute something positive. Ant has also got to be one of the few superhero comics that features an Black woman as lead character. It was really difficult to find, in my own collection, Black female creators (though I did find a few), so it's great to at least see a lead character representing that important demographic.

Okay, enough for today. The posts over the next little while might be a bit longer than usual, but that's because this is a long-overdue, or perhaps a long-running, conversation. And I think it's important for us, as comics fans, to consider where our hobby and our passion fits into this important moment of social change in the world.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Links

If you need to get up to speed on what's going on in the U.S. right now, here's a CBC article. I know it might be Canadian bias, but I always feel like the CBC does a good job reporting on stuff like this.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1911: Youngblood #8, March 2009

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And that's it. Shaft and Cougar rescue Scion from her virtual prison, Diehard stops Stormhead's attack, and a deranged Spacehunter makes planetfall - and then nothing. The entire story disappears in favour of a Rob Liefeld helmed reboot where the team hang out with Barack Obama, and the original lineup is basically reinstated. No word on how Badrock stops from crumbling, no word on how the planet survives the impact of a crazed killer from space.

 

I honestly just can't understand Liefeld's decisions when it comes to this team. Indeed, I've just read an article in which he now reveals that the doesn't own the rights to the team anymore, which is why the most recent series simply stopped as well.

So how do I sum up Youngblood? The same way I always do - they're a crap team, a Teen Titans riff that is eventually given the chance to shine in the hands of excellent creators, until their original creator decides that they're popular enough for him to jump on the coattails, at which point the series tanks. I'm glad to see that characters like Doc Rocket, and later Suprema, have made a significant enough impact to be included in later iterations of the team. Indeed, that might be one of the motivating factors for me to have a look at the two series that follow this one, in 2012 and 2017 respectively.

But for now, I think we're done with them. I was going to read the older stuff I have kicking about, but I think I'd rather get back to my alphabetical indie creators. I think I need something a little less mainstream, and a little less inevitably disappointing. I honestly can't think of too many other forms of media where a story gets cut off in the middle like this. The occasional television series, I suppose, but this is truly one of the great drawbacks to producing serialized narratives - there's always the chance that the serial simply won't run long enough to contain the narrative.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1910: Youngblood #7, January 2009

For information on stopping the spread of COVID-19, and on what to do if you are quarantined, have a look at the World Health Organization site.

As we near the end of this iteration of the team, everything that's old is new again in a lot of ways. The Televillain didn't get much chance to be a villain in his initial appearances in Supreme, but Casey and Donovan are playing him to the hilt at the moment. It's cool to see some of the uses of his powers, rather than simply being able to travel through television signals and insert himself into broadcasts. In today's issue he uses his remote to actually rewind action in the real world as it's happening. He also appears to have trapped Scion in a virtual version of the Oprah show, and if she's not rescued soon she'll simply vanish into the ether. I don't recall the Televillain being quite so murderous in his other appearances, but perhaps he's realized that TV is much more violent in the modern era, and he's adapting.

I have to hand it to the creative team with regard to the number of plot threads they're keeping up in the air. At no point do things get confusing, and it never feels like too much is going on in the story. The comics from which Youngblood originally springs were not quite like this. A few of my reviews of Supreme from this era (which I re-read last night) note that entire battles sometimes took 2 or 3 issues, with no other story content to break up the fight. Or there were simply jumps from one place to another without any context or delicacy to the shift. I've read a few interviews with Liefeld, and even he admits his story-writing skills were lacking at the time of the original Youngblood series. I guess once we get to the final issue of this series, we'll find out if he's grown much. I don't recall being particularly impressed by it.

More to follow.