The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 753: Justice League of America #200

A lazy Sunday morning in bed reading an oversized Justice League comic and having a bowl of cereal. While outside, it looks like it might actually be Spring (I fool myself, but sometimes we have to).

Today's comic follows in that long tradition of comics about superheroes fighting superheroes. I'm not sure where this particular subgenre comes from. Sometimes I think that it has a lot to do with why diverse religions have battled one another over the course of human history. We place our faith in something and can't possibly understand how someone else could place something so important and vital in something different. Everyone has a favourite superhero, one that we place our faith in, so it's natural (?) to want to know who'd come out on top. My god is stronger than your god, I suppose.

On the other hand, it might just come from the idea that we want to see the cool characters duking it out with one another. Yeah, when they fight a villain, it's cool. But villains, by their nature in these kinds of comics, will always lose. If it's heroes fighting one another, who's the villain? Who's going to lose? Such contests offer a bit more suspense.

That aside, this was a fairly standard early 80s DC comic. The artists jam on the issue was pretty sweet, bringing together some of the truly great DC artists of the last few decades. It was also a nice hearkening back to the original JLA case from The Brave and the Bold, though how it would fit in with Mark Waid's retcon in JLA:Year One, I'm not sure. Though I'm fairly certain that's not canon anymore anyway. Well, given DC's propensity for multiverses, it's canon somewhere, I'm sure.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 425: Last Kiss #2, August, 2001 ("Wuv, twue wuv" Week, Day 5)

You should go to John Lustig's "Last Kiss" site and read his comics.

I'll make an admission: I don't usually read text pieces in the comics I blog. I'll have a peep at "Stan's Soapbox" every now and again, or let my eyes wander over a letters page or two, but generally I'm more interested in the comics stories themselves. But with this comic, I thought maybe getting some context would be helpful. Let me explain.

Last Kiss is a romance comic, to be sure, but it's a romance comic with a twist (and that's a bit twisted!). John Lustig, apparently, bought the rights to a Charlton romance comic called First Kiss, and subsequently started re-scripting and manipulating them and making them into ironic 21st century parodies of the original pieces. This is not to say that he is not reverent of the source material - in some ways, in order to really skewer something, you have to love it a lot. This issue featured work by renowned inker Dick Giordano, even including an original piece scripted and drawn for this issue. The jewel in the crown that is this comic, though, is an interview with Giordano about his time working on romance comics for Charlton. He offers a rather wonderful articulation of the differences between drawing a superhero story and a romance story, and why, as an artist, he finds them interesting. I'd never really put together that there are different artistic vocabularies depending on the genre one is working in. Giordano notes that a romance comic is about subtlety and emotion, rather than action and hyperbole. It's one of those things that, of course, makes sense after the fact, but that I'd never thought of before.

So, much as the comics sections of this issue were funny, and I enjoyed them, the interview with Giordano was the best bit. Perhaps I'll have to start paying a bit more attention to text pieces in future.

Moving on, almost done our week of romance. Onward!