The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 2355: Doctor Tomorrow #2, October 1997

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Publisher: Acclaim Comics

Writer: Bob Layton

Penciller: Dean Zachary

Cover Artist: Unknown, though suggested to be Butch Guice

I made a bit of a blunder this Remembrance Day and posted something on Facebook that hurt the feelings of a good friend of mine who serves in the military. Still trying to figure out how to apologize. But today's comic actually brings me back to something I raised in that post, and that's the rhetoric used to describe historical wars. Or, rather, recent historical wars, rather than all historical wars. The three-issue opening arc on Dr. Tomorrow is titled "The Glory War," and chronicle's the character's origins in the opening days of the Second World War. It's this notion of glory that set my blood boiling a bit this November. All we seem to hear about Remembrance Day is about the glory, about the honour, about the sacrifice, about how heroic it was that these brave young men and women gave their lives in defense of their country. And not just in the sense that some did not return from the battlefields - some did and still gave their lives. My Grandad was such a person, battered and scarred, from all that I can tell, from his experiences in WW2. Yet still, despite the cost in lives and lifetimes, we still revere these young people, we still only remember the glory, the honour, and not the fact that they were sent to die often for reasons that had nothing to do with what they were told. I'll stop there. That's not the point of this post. But that rhetoric of reverence for people who were sent, in some cases unwillingly, to war just rubs me the wrong way.

The character of Dr. Tomorrow appears first in the Acclaim Universe in 1941-42, as far as I can tell. Only a few years after Action Comics #1 goes on sale and kicks off the Golden Age of Superheroes. It's not a new device for installing a history into a newly-created shared narrative, but it's a good one. As we recognize various ages of comics, we also recognize how those ages work together to create the foundations of a shared narrative universe. When writing a story of the Golden Age of a setting, there are certain signs and signals that let us know what kind of a history is being installed. It's a superheroic history, of course, but that isn't just communicated by the captions and artwork - it's communicated in the way that the comic is in dialogue with the actual, "real world" history of the superhero genre. Like giving your hero an origin point near to the first big three DC heroes. In Gerard Way's take on Doom Patrol, he hints at a figure called the God of Superheroes, the Platonic form of all of the superheroes that have come since. By stationing Dr. Tomorrow so close to the early originals, the comic signals that he is to become a template figure for the shared universe moving forward, similarly to how Captain America has been positioned in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Sadly, I'm not sure Acclaim's version of the Valiant Universe lasted long enough for any of this admitted speculation to come to fruition.

But we got a pretty cool comic series out of it. Oh, and today's issue is a tribute to Will Eisner and his early Spirit adventures.

"I made it a rule to never look into the future more than a year at a time."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 2354: Doctor Tomorrow #1, September 1997

For information on stopping the spread of COVID-19, and on the importance of being vaccinated, have a look at the World Health Organization site.

 

(Yeah, yeah, 2 in a row. Contain yer excitement 😏 Going to try a bit of a format change for a while, see how it feels.)

Publisher: Acclaim Comics

Writer: Bob Layton

Penciller: Don Perlin

Cover Artist: Mike Mignola

I've had this one kicking about the collection for about 20 years now. I started finding Acclaim comics in the comic bin at a used bookstore in Kitchener, ON, that I'm sure has gone the way of most used bookstores nowadays. It's where I first found Quantum & Woody, and where I started poking my nose into the Valiant/Acclaim universe. I've always found the idea of a historically presented superhero universe, like Astro City, for example, and this series is a cool way for the Acclaim superhero universe, relatively new, to establish a history for itself.

I don't really know much about the series, having only read this issue, but I'm intrigued by the premise, though I have inklings already, of an ontological paradoxical nature, about what's going to happen.

Or, perhaps I think I do, except that I don't. Bear with me. The series is the brainchild of writer/inker Bob Layton. Each issue has a different art team, and is presented in tribute to a particular luminary of Comics' history. Today's is a paean to Jack Kirby. I'm missing a couple of the later issues, which I may try to track down in the next few days, but I noticed at some point that Mr. Layton's name does not appear on the final issue. And, being, as far as I can tell, a fairly open company about the ways things work behind the scenes, there's an explanation in the back matter of the final issue. According to this, Layton asked to have his name removed from the issue because he had differences with the editorial department over how the series should end. The editorial side had plans for a character from later in the series that must have somehow conflicted with Mr. Layton's, as the writer, original ending.

That got me thinking about The Eternals. Not the movie, but the mid-80s maxi-series from Marvel that dropped around the same time as Squadron Supreme. The last four issues of that series, originally helmed by Peter B. Gillis, were written by Walt Simonson. It's been a while since I've looked, but I imagine the excuse given for Gillis' departure is similar to that given for Layton's. I wondered, briefly, why this might be the case until I realized that by the end of the series, there would have been significant sales figures for previous issues, indicating whether or not it was worthwhile to continue the character/series somehow. And that continuity, the imposition of the shared narrative universe, on what looks to be a story with a definite end, has to cause some ruptures. Perhaps I'll look into it a bit more over the next few days as I continue Dr. Tomorrow's cool-ass history.

"Who is this mysterious man from the future who has joined forces with the allied march into Europe?"