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 1561: The Superman Family #193, Jan.-Feb.1979

Supergirl and the Doom Patrol finally meet! After the villains are defeated, and the chaos subsides. Supergirl says thanks, and lets them get back to their vacation. All in all, not the Patrol's finest hour.

A while back, I read the issue that follows this one, an issue that finishes up a number of the storylines I've read in the last few days. I'm going to have to read it again, I think, just to get a bit of closure. The Doom Patrol are absent from comics for a couple of years after this adventure, and it's a very different version that we'll see next. But that can wait til tomorrow.

If you're looking for a stereotypical DC comic of this era, Superman Family is pretty much it. It's kind of a last gasp of these versions of the characters, as the Crisis looms in the not too distant future. Superboy's Smallville backstory is never quite this naive ever again, nor Krypto's inner dialogue so wry. Lois loses a bit of her independence in losing her own feature. So, despite what I've called their unremarkability, their naivety is charming enough that I'd recommend giving them a go.

"I'd hoped my little absence wouldn't undermine our splendid relationship!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1560: The Superman Family #192, Nov.-Dec.1978

I think the thing about these stories is that they are, for the most part, unremarkable. It's not that they're not good stories - they're wonderful, silly, weird stories, just not remarkable ones. I get the sense that writers and artists were starting to really feel the stifling shadow of the Comics Code at this point, especially those creators who had come up through a more revolutionary culture than the generation before. You can see this in the pushing at the boundaries in some of the stories, most interestingly the Krypto feature. The Dog of Steel is involved in some inner city gang trouble, but it all turns out okay. Perhaps that's the problem - everything turns out okay in these stories. There never really seems to be too much on the line.

That aside, the Doom Patrol feature in this issue, and last, is odd. It's touted as a team-up with Supergirl, but the two haven't even come close to meeting. And the Doom Patrol's part of the story seems fairly straightforward, and really could have featured any superteam. I think that if you're going to have a guest star, you have to respect the version of the genre that star comes from. I'm prepping a post that is the first article I ever had published, and it thinks about how we can reconcile a satiric or parodic comic like Doom Patrol, Ambush Bug, or Hitman, with the more serious fare of the Batman books, for example. I explain it through inflection theory, which very quickly would mean that if the Patrol are guesting in Supergirl's feature, there should be some specific reason it's the Patrol. Just as if she were guesting in their book, there would have to be some reason it was her.

I'll try to get the article up soonish.

"Gosh, Supergirl---you're even better than the Bionic Woman!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1559: The Superman Family #191, Sept.-Oct. 1978

A little less than a year later, the Patrol return to assist Supergirl in her series in the anthology title The Superman Family. Although the stories are, for the most part, the generally pretty undramatic fare of comics in the throes of the Code, I have a soft spot for these kinds of series. These, to me, are comics aimed squarely at kids, and at giving them a fair bit for their hard-earned money. Some of the stories are standalones and some are parts of series. They're all well-rendered, much in the vein of the era, like their stories. One thing I will say for this era of DC is that despite having some lackluster stories, their artists were still top of the line.

The Patrol stumbles into trouble today while on holiday in England. I suppose that's as good a place as any to find them, and let's assume that some strange case took them to the United Kingdom. They don't actually meet up with Supergirl in this issue, though both she and the Patrol face menaces that are affecting local gravity with some pretty catastrophic consequences. I'll likely get sick of writing it, but they act very much like superheroes here, saving people and trying to stop the menace, and there's nothing wrong with that, but usually it's more of a struggle for the Doom Patrol to act like superheroes. More often than not the situations within which they find themselves remind our heroes of just how fragile they really are, which in turn prompts them to adopt more unorthodox thinking. Not so with the New Doom Patrol. They wade in, hands blazing, and blow things up.

(Oh, the Lois Lane story today has the intrepid reporter tracking down a baby trafficking ring and just about beating the leader of it to death. Literally. She has to be pulled off at the last moment. It was pretty intense, and not at all what I was expecting from this series.)

"For all our insecurities, it seems we have some use in this world, after all!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 785: Super-Villain Team-Up #17, June 1980

I was looking at Arvell Jones' Wikipedia page, to see what kinds of extended runs he has done, that I might know him from. I found out that he drew a Supergirl/Doom Patrol team-up story one of the numerous Super-anthologies of the Seventies. He only has two pages of credits as a penciller at the GCD, the most sustained being a run on All-Star Squadron in the mid-Eighties. Not a series I have any real familiarity with. I can't for the life of me, figure out why his name rings out so prevalently in my head. Ah well. It does, and perhaps that's enough.

Today's comic was very, very fucking weird. What we're seeing is the final chapter of a 3-part story in which The Red Skull, The Hate Monger, and Arnim Zola are trying to create a new Cosmic Cube (basically the Tesseract from the movies, for you non-comics Marvel fans). So we all know that Skull and Zola are nazis, right? Their basic back stories are that they're nazi mad scientists. But what I didn't realize is that the Hate Monger, under that hood, is actually a clone of Adolf Hitler. No fucking joke. So we've got these three full-on nazis trying to become gods. Hate Monger's actual identity is no secret to anyone, and is referred to slyly until his reveal partway through. But there's one moment where the Cube is nearly ready and Monger and Skull look at each other and realize that they're actually going to end up betraying one another, and then the Red Skull has this soliloquy-style lament, alone in his darkened chamber, sitting at his desk, over how all he ever wanted was for he and Hitler to be able to work together, to achieve their goals together. It's very. Fucking. Strange.

Of course, the Skull ends up betraying Hitler, and seals his soul inside the Cube, which is not in fact a Cosmic Cube but actually a prison for Hitler's psyche. Because reasons.

Now, the aforementioned Mr. Jones guides us through this very odd comic with aplomb. I imagine that when an artist gets a script, there's only a few reactions one can have. I think mine, upon reading this, would be "What the hell?" But I suppose the practice of art requires one, and teaches one, to stretch the creative muscles into things we may not have expected. I can't imagine this story was expected. Mr. Jones' work has to a bit of the Kirby, I think. But it's Kirby in a more organic style that's reminiscent of the big names of the era: Brunner, Buckler, Mayerik. But in the facial expressions I sometimes think I see a bit of the undergrounds, a bit of that dark cartooniness. I'll have to keep an eye out as I read more of his work.

To be continued.