The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1901: Wally Wood's T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #5, October 1986

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T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, like it's most famous creator Wally Wood, has sort of lurked at the edges of my comic book consciousness. I really didn't know much about the team, so I did a bit of research before reading today's issue, and got an idea of the weird publication history of the characters. I actually seem to recall a bit of the kerfuffle around the team and its ownership, and I'm not even remotely surprised to see that Rob Liefeld was involved somehow. That guy and his business decisions!

The comic itself is nicely put together. It features a lead story about the team and then a few short pieces focussing on members of the team. Though each story (there are 4) is short, the comic doesn't feel like it's cheated us of content - the lead feature is intriguing and action-packed, and the solo features do a nice job of advancing stories for their respective characters outside of the job of being a T.H.U.N.D.E.R. agent. Plus each story is written and drawn by stellar creators.

This series, I think, would make a very interesting comparison to Jim Lee's Stormwatch, as both are about teams of super-powered individuals working for the U.N. The idea of superhero as day job is cool - are their identities still secret? And if not (as one of today's stories seems to imply), how does anyone protect their loved ones?

D is for Deluxe

And a battle on the moon

But with this final issue 

The story ends too soon.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1317: Action Comics #1000, June 2018

I've fallen a bit behind on my current comics, so I though that in order to catch up on the new Brian Bendis Superman stories, I'd read them for the project. We'll start here, with Action Comics #1000, and see where he takes us.

What more can I say about Superman, though? There is actually something I have to try to work out. It's my understanding that Frank Miller is going to be writing a Superman series in the near future. I can't wrap my head around the idea of a right-wing nut job like Miller breathing life into Superman. Miller's politics seem antithetical to everything I believe about the Man of Steel. But that's the thing, isn't it? Superman's not real - he's a fictional character that can come to be representative of anything. This means he can come to be representative of things that I might not agree with. Not that I think you can push the character too far, unless you want a repeat of the original run of Supreme. There is always something of the socialist in Superman, right from the beginning. But if Superman is indeed for everyone, then he has to be for right- and left-leaning readers. Perhaps Miller's take will satisfy that other demographic.

As far as Mr. Bendis' work on the Big Blue, it's hard to say, thus far. He provides us with a nice little in media res prologue, and drops the bomb that Krypton's destruction may not have been what it seemed. Intriguing, but it's the handling of the characters that I'm more excited to see from Mr. Bendis. His gift for dialogue is virtually unparalleled in contemporary comics.

So, more Superman to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1266: Zero Hour: Crisis in Time #0, September 1994

This one's gonna have to wait too. My wife's leaving for Europe and things are in a bit of chaos at the Miller household!

On second thought. This was an utterly uninspired crossover. I don't want to say anything more about it.

More tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1265: Zero Hour: Crisis in Time #1, September 1994

Ugh.

Early 90s DC really was a mess. This series was obviously designed, in part, to bolster interest in some of the newer characters that DC had introduced, but they're so bland that by the time they've been erased from reality, you're not really that bothered. I often wonder, when I see a crop of these "new gods" spring from the pages of a venerable mythic structure like the DCU, whether any of them will go the same kind of distance as their progenitors. A similar thing is happening again at DC in the wake of the Metal Knights event. I think. I didn't follow it at all.

The other thing I'm trying to figure is the utter hate on DC seemed to have for Hal Jordan in this era. I know he went evil, but they seem to go out of their way to make him super-fucking-evil. It's a strange treatment for one of their more iconic characters.

Not that I mind. I really liked Kyle Rayner.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1264: Zero Hour: Crisis in Time #2, September 1994

Gah. Does the "crisis in time" involve my lost time from reading this series? They've lost me. Can you tell? Somehow Extant, who is also Monarch from "Armageddon 2001," and who is also Hawk, of Hawk and Dove, and has Waverider's powers to manipulate space and time, also has a couple of teams of superheroes under his control, and it's never actually explained how this happened, except to tell us on the last page that it's explained in the Team Titans ongoing series.

And that's where they lose me.

This was a major plot point of the entire issue, but there's no reason or logic to it unless you've read an ancillary title that you might not actually be reading regularly to begin with. Once line-wide crossovers started pulling stuff like this, they lost what the crossover was meant to accomplish - all your favourite heroes in one story together, and that story made, as much as superhero stories do, sense. The original Crisis did this par excellance, as did Hickman's Secret Wars. I read Crisis with no other context for the DCU except that I knew of Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman. And the series made sense. The first Secret Wars is the same. I didn't have to read any of the other ongoing series to get a good, complete story.

I've ranted about this before, but I think it bears repeating. Not only is it, in my opinion, rude for a company to expect us to spend even more of what little we earn on comics we wouldn't normally want to buy, but it's also demonstrating some class-based exclusion. In a lot of ways it's saying that if you can afford it, you can get the whole story, but if you can't, then you get an incomplete experience. And that's not fair, and it's certainly not how art or media should be. But, unfortunately, it is.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1263: Zero Hour: Crisis in Time #3, September 1994

I hadn't realized that this was a weekly event - I was about to complain that all kinds of stuff is alluded to in this issue that we never see, and that that's a sign, to me at least, of poor writing. But with a weekly crossover, you have the ability to so stuff like that. I think the DC One Million crossover is just about the most perfect line-wide weekly crossover I've ever seen. Perhaps some of the failings I'm noticing - rough pacing, moments that should be dramatic but lack any gravitas - are a result of not reading the crossover as it's envisioned, as a line-wide story.

Given the dodgy era that the story comes from, I'm not certain I want to track the issues down. DC was just finishing up with its experiments with grittier, Image-esque superheros, but Starman and The Flash, under Robinson and Waid respectively, were leading the DCU back to a place in which I think it flourished. But then, I quite like that Morrison guy who came on not too long after this.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1262: Zero Hour: Crisis in Time #4, September 1994

Let's just take a complete, 180 degree turn, and read some sort of crappy early 90s DC, shall we?

*sigh*

Another crisis. Granted, this is one of the earlier ones, but I think by this time, DC had figured out that they could make scads of cash doing multi-part crossovers. The one thing I will give Zero Hour is that it introduces Jack Knight, the best Starman, and one of the best superheroes, I've ever read.

That aside, meh.

I'll keep reading the rest of the series, and maybe some of the zero issues I have, but it's pretty run of the mill. I keep worrying that I'm judging these things by the standards I have now - crises like this weren't a dime a dozen back then, or not as much as they are now. But I think even by this point, they were getting a bit ridiculous. This is also around the time that the X-franchise seemed to have two or three major event crossovers every year.

Not that things are much better these days, though I do feel it might have slowed down a bit. Or, perhaps, I've stopped paying quite as much attention as I once did.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 366: DC Comics Presents: Mystery In Space, September 2004

To kick off my second year on the project, we're going to spend the week looking at some lesser-known Grant Morrison works. Though I've mentioned him frequently on this blog, and I'm not shy about proclaiming him one of our greatest living writers, I've only actually read one of his comics thus far for the 40 Years Project. Time to correct that. So welcome to the second year of the 40Years of Comics Project. Let's read some weird stuff.

This series of DC Comics Presents specials was produced after legendary DC editor Julius Schwartz passed away. Each of the titles in the series features a character somehow related to Schwartz, and served as a tribute to his legacy and influence on the industry. The first story, by Maggin and Williams, is a fairly straightforward adventure featuring Adam Strange, Ralph Dibney, and the dear, departed Sue Dibny dealing with corrupt governments on both Earth and Rann. Williams' artwork is, as always, completely fantastic, and as a whole, the story is remarkably "Silver Age." Morrison's story, illustrated by Jerry Ordway, is, unsurprisingly, a little stranger. There seem to be 3 different stories going on. In one, Adam Strange has been kidnapped and is being used to track a Zeta beam that will transport a military team to Rann on an invasion mission. In another, we're seeing an adventure Adam is having on Rann, but this adventure is interspersed with Lichtensteinian panels the caption boxes for which are telling a story of the creation of the character of Adam Strange by Julius Schwartz, so it's difficult to say what's real and what's not. Which, of course, is par for the course with Morrison. He's the PKD of the comics world in many ways.

This isn't my favourite Morrison story. It almost feels like it was written specifically as a "Grant Morrison Story," complete with metatexts and confusing, intertwining storylines. The strangeness feels forced. That said, as I've repeatedly claimed over the years, even a sub par Morrison story is light years ahead of most other comics, so it was still pretty brilliant. The short pieces I've selected for this week are culled from all across his career, with this one, from 2004, actually being the latest. It will be interesting to see how far his short comics story writing has come since the 2000 A.D. days of the 80s.

Year 2, Day 1. Onward!