The 40 Years of Comics Project Graphic Novel Number 82 - Green Lantern: Rebirth, 2005

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Let's just take it as read that Ethan Van Sciver is a comicsgating douche nozzle, and move on. I own the work, and I'm not going to let the inclusion of a whiny gatekeeper keep me from enjoying what is probably Geoff Johns' finest hour thus far.

Hal Jordan was never my favourite Green Lantern - that dubious honour is reserved for Kyle Rayner, who I found to be a very compelling and identifiable character. Hal is just absolutely nothing like me. He's the sort of guy that I imagine would have picked on me in high school, and I've always had a bit of a problem with police officers, so the character just never drew me in. Until my son started reading Green Lantern around the time of "Blackest Night," and I got into it. These are really very good stories that Mr. Johns is telling, and they all start here with a summation of Hal's time in the DCU for about the previous 10 years.

Rebirth sets up so much that plays out over the course of Johns' run on the character, not least of which is to retcon Hal's turn to evil as a parasitic infection from within the central Oan power battery. This prompts a plan to bring Hal back from the dead and separate him from the Spectre before Parallax can use that entity's power to become even more fearsome. It's a cool premise, and goes some way to redeeming Hal, though, as we'll see later, some heroes (Batman) need a bit more convincing.

We'll continue with these for a while. As I say, I think this is the best that Geoff Johns has been in superheroes. Johns is a competent writer, and obviously loves the characters and genre, though I often wish he'd push himself and his characters a little farther out toward the boundaries of the genre. I think he's more than capable of writing what might be considered a great comic, and his Green Lantern work comes very, very close.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 237: 52 #4, May 31, 2006

One of the things that's always struck me as I read 52 is trying to figure out which of the writers wrote each section. I'm sure that it's been broken down somewhere, but I think it's far more fun, and more indicative of one's immersion in the medium, to be able to pick a writer out by considering the situations and dialogues each of the characters takes part in. I'm pretty sure Rucka writes the Question and Renee Montoya stuff, but only because I've read subsequent treatments of these characters (and Batwoman, who'll be debuting in one of these issues eventually) by him. I imagine Waid writing the Steel sections, but he and Morrison have very similar superhero storytelling aesthetics, so it's a bit tricky there. I'm going with Johns for the Booster Gold stuff, mainly because Booster seems to be a character from the era of superheroes that Johns privileges. And, and I hate to say it because I've enjoyed some of his writing, but the Booster stuff is the stuff I enjoy least in this comic. I'm not sure about the Ralph Dibny stuff - perhaps Morrison, by dint of the fact that Ralph is enmeshed, at the moment, with a cult that has grown up around Superboy. Again, though, both Morrison and Waid have treated this idea in their own separate writings. I don't know about the Black Adam stuff. I'm also going to ascribe it to Johns, as he's a far more brutal storyteller than the others, and Black Adam has, so far, been fairly violent.

Let's have a look online, and see what we can find.

Just a sec. Gotta google this stuff.

Apparently, there's no real consensus. Most assume that Morrison wrote the Animal Man stuff that will come later, and that Rucka did the Question stuff. Keith Giffen provided layouts, and there's some conjecture that he contributed to the storytelling, most likely Booster. But it really looks like they may have bounced the characters around, depending on the situations within which each character finds him or herself. Which makes sense, really, given that each writer has a different forte.

That's the first chunk of 52 that I'm going to look at. Tomorrow I'll either return to early-eighties Canada with Alpha Flight, or pick up the AD&D comics again, since I've just procured enough of the issues I was missing to continue with that. We'll find out on the morrow. See you then!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 236: 52 #3, May 24, 2006

Rather than give a general overview of this comic, I'm going to instead focus on a couple of panels. In literary studies, we're often told that a whole analytical paper can be hinged upon a particular sentence, or even word, in an imaginative work. I have, in my undergrad, actually written on individual words and the ways in which we might interpret a whole work or section of a work based on that interpretation. This is called, or is a facet of, close reading, the fundamental tool of the literary critic.

Close reading in a comic is slightly different, because we have to look at both the narratological qualities of the art and words and also the semiotic qualities of the form. I'm going to look more at the former than the latter today.

Here's the first panel I want to consider:

Thus far in the series (as short a distance as that is), all we've seen of Booster Gold is a money-hungry, endorsement-seeking, future-mining dick. He's always been one of my least favourite heroes in the DCU, mainly for the above-stated reasons. Here, however, we see him taking a slightly more serious approach to things. When his information about the future starts to prove itself unreliable, rather than whining and moaning, he realizes that there's a good chance that something has gone wrong with time. In the wake of a universal crisis, such an assumption is not an unfair one to make. It's smart of the writers to give us a little more depth in Booster at this point, especially considering he's one of our focal characters for the series. The more prevalent characterization would have worn thin had it not been tempered by this side of the character. There's a reason he's been on the Justice League, and a reason he hasn't been shut down by any of the other heroes: he does actually care. It's just that the caring is buried deep, deep, deep beneath a shiny capitalist veneer.

Here's my favourite panel in the whole issue:

Continuity-wise, it's often difficult to say what adventures have happened to this point, and which have been retconned out of existence. Steel is, as far as I know, keenly aware of Luthor's criminal dealings. He was a member of the Justice League (during the Morrison years) when Lex was involved with the Injustice League, and thus knows that the act of caring President is just that with Lex. Their whispered exchange, the tacit acknowledgment of one anothers true feelings, is a lovely little moment. Neither can act on their true feelings, but that doesn't mean that neither can't make those feelings known. At least to each other.

52, as I've repeatedly called it, is an experiment. As the series progresses, I feel like the creative teams take the results of the early parts of the experiment and apply them to the later parts. My recollection is that the later parts of the series are far better, that the creators realize what they can do with the format, and what they don't need to do with the format. I suppose we'll see. So, that's a tiny little close reading, not terribly in depth, but what I was feeling like talking about today. See you tomorrow!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 235: 52 #2, May 17, 2006

One of the problems with telling a weekly, long-form story is that, in some instances, you have to tell stories that aren't really stories, but just he mundane things of life. While there are certainly superheroics in this issue, they're the stuff of life for these characters. The little revelation of the spray-painted S-shield on Sue Dibny's grave was intriguing, but the Booster stuff was lame, and the Montoya stuff just seemed gritty for the sake of being gritty. I really love Renee and Charlie's relationship later in the series, but this cloak and dagger-y stuff they do at the beginning is less interesting to me.

Just a short review today. What's interesting about the backup feature in this issue is that while ostensibly being a fictional narrative about the DC Universe, it's actually the real-life story of the DC Universe, in that it talks about all the reboots the continuity has undergone that were reflected in the publishing decisions of the company.

That's all for today. #2's are always a bit of a letdown. See you tomorrow for #3.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 234: 52 #1, May 10, 2006

I actually picked up the next issue of Alpha Flight this morning, and was about 4 pages in when I remembered that I'd decided to take a break from that comic. And what better way to pass a week than with DC's first foray into a weekly comic, 52.

52 picks up right after the events of the ridiculous clusterfuck that was Infinite Crisis. I call IC this because, rather than a nice, compact, followable event series, Infinite Crisis was a series of mini-series and one-shots and preludes and hints dropped in every comic leading up to it that, unless you were buying every single title DC was publishing at the time, made no sense whatsoever. I'm a strong proponent of the notion that an event series ought to tell a coherent story, and if there's crossovers or ancillary series, those series should enhance the story, but not be necessary to the enjoyment of the main title. Infinite Crisis did not do this. It's the same as with Marvel's Secret Invasion, which would have made absolutely no sense if I wasn't already reading the Avengers titles that crossed over into it.

Anyway, after the events, whatever they were, of IC, all DC comics jumped ahead one year. 52 is the story of what happened that year, week by week.

This issue gives introduces us to the six main characters with whom we're going to take this year-long journey. They're all B-list heroes (though Booster Gold certainly does not see himself that way), so it's kind of a cool ground-level look at the aftermath of one of these world-shaking crises. Steel's sections, helping with rescue efforts in Paris and chatting with the rescue workers, is particularly well-handled, as is Ralph Dibney's story. Dibney, it should be noted, is still reeling in the aftermath of the Identity Crisis mini-series, and the revelation that his wife Sue turned out to be a murderer. Of all the stories in 52, Ralph's is by far the most poignant, and probably the most well-realized. Though, having said that, the Renee Montoya/Question storyline is really pretty great too.

I admit, I only ever really picked up 52 when it came out because of the creative team. Though I'm not a big fan of Geoff Johns' subsequent mangling of the DCU, at this point he was riding high on a pretty fantastic run on Green Lantern. Grant Morrison, Mark Waid, and Greg Rucka are all amazing writers, and really any one of them on a title is reason enough to read it. All three? Sold. Add Keith Giffen on layouts, and you've got what promises to be a truly solid piece of work.

I guess over the next little while, we'll see if that promise is fulfilled. I've re-read 52 in its entirety only one other time, aside from when it was coming out, and I don't actually remember my reaction. I think the plan, at least for the foreseeable future will be to do a week of 52 and a week of Alpha Flight. The runs I have of both are quite lengthy, so this'll be a nice way of breaking them up. I know I said I was going to dive into the pile of "to read" comics sitting on my floor, but 52 called out to me, and I answered.

So. Week one sees Booster's knowledge of the future proved false, a bit of a crisis for him. Black Adam asserts his command and vision for Khandaq. Renee drinks a lot, Ralph wants to kill himself, Steel is heroic, and The Question commandeers the Bat-Signal for his own mysterious purposes. What will next week bring? Find out tomorrow!