Number 991



"If you go out in the woods today..."


According to Don Markstein's Toonopedia website, the Flame was created in 1939 by Will Eisner and Lou Fine for Fox Features' Wonderworld Comics #3. This particular episode, from Fox's Big 3 Comics #6, is dated November, 1941. The Flame was gone by January, 1942. A brief flaming career, snuffed out like a candle.

Also according to Toonopedia, the Flame's first appearance pre-dated the Human Torch by a few months.

This story seems old, even for 70 years ago when it appeared, because despite its comic book trappings and superheroics, it's just an old fashioned melodrama. The rich guy will foreclose on the mortgage unless the daughter of his enemy marries him! Baaaaa-hahaha! All he needs is a top hat, cape, and a long mustache to twirl. Wait a mo'...he does have a long mustache when he's in the persona of the monster kidnapper. Ooops. I didn't spoil it for you, did I? I thought the denouement was telegraphed quite early in the story, so if you hadn't guessed you were probably not reading, just scanning the bright primary-colored artwork.

Speaking of artwork, attribution is given to comic book journeymen Pierce Rice and Arturo Cazeneuve.
















Number 990


Mothman to the flame


This well drawn story by Gil Kane and John Giunta is from Mystery In Space #3, 1951. Kane learned his comic art lessons well since the 1948 crime story of his I showed you in Pappy's #787. In "Vengeance of the Moth" with Kane's powerful drawings of the human figure in action you're getting an advance look at his work on Green Lantern and The Atom a few years later.

The story has nothing to do with space, despite appearing in Mystery In Space. It likely belonged in Strange Adventures, and perhaps it was placed in this comic to fill up a hole left by an artist who wasn't as fast as Kane.









In between Blackest Night and the next Green Lantern event, War of the Green Lanterns, the reader might expect to find a bit of quiet, as was writer Geoff Johns's wont in his JSA series, among others. "The New Guardians" storyline collected in Green Lantern: Brightest Day is quieter in the sense that it's an Earth-bound tale and lacks the Corps-crowded panels of Blackest Night. Green Lantern: Brightest Day, however, offers no formal epilogue to Blackest Night, and rather takes its introspection on the run -- it's action-packed, perhaps overly so, and contains sweeping, mythos-altering revelations about the Green Lantern Corps just like Blackest Night did, without a resting point in sight.

[Contains spoilers]

Though the Green Lantern title doesn't rest after Blackest Night -- misses the chance for some lower-tempo issues, even -- Green Lantern: Brightest Day certainly offers a tonal shift. The first few chapters of this ten-issue collection are full of blithe superhero violence -- Lobo guest stars, and you can't get much more blithely violent than that.

In a kind of road trip to locate the missing Lantern entities, Green Lantern Hal Jordan and Star Sapphire Carol Ferris fight Sinestro, the three of them fight Lobo, Hal fights the Orange Lantern Larfleeze and villain Hector Hammond, Carol fights the rogue Star Sapphire entity the Predator, and so on. Artist Doug Mahnke's gritty work has always emphasized the weird, so it's not difficult for the reader to turn off their brain and watch the alien tentacles fly. In that way, while Green Lantern: Brightest Day lacks the one-off, "everyone relaxes and talks about the war" issue found post-Blackest Night in Green Lantern Corps, for instance, the first part of this book is at least slightly less cerebral, and the stakes less high, than Blackest Night before it.

I did like that Green Lantern: Brightest Day is more Earth-bound than this Green Lantern series' stories have been of late, though not perfectly so. The destruction and resurrection of Coast City have been such an integral part of the Green Lantern mythos of late that I'd like to see Hal Jordan actually exist there for a while, fly planes for the Air Force and stop a traditional super-villain -- you know, classic superhero stuff.

While Johns does let Hal interact with some civilians (including a charming scene involving a security guard and a lawn flamingo), one underlying idea that comes out of Green Lantern: Brightest Day is that the green ring may be at best causing Hal to isolate himself and at worst driving him mad. It is a testament to Geoff Johns's writing and creativity that, even as he's kept me compelled and wanted to follow Hal Jordan over sixty-plus issues, the one complaint I've had about Hal's lack of interaction with his supporting cast may turn out to be an intentional character element on Johns's part, foreshadowing a plotline to come.

The beginning of this trade will seem familiar to Green Lantern movie-goers. Johns, who consulted on the movie, obviously knew there'd be movie-directed attention on the first post-Blackest Night Green Lantern collection, and that this would be the series' newest trade around movie time. Carol has been an ongoing presence in the Green Lantern series, but for almost the first time since Green Lantern: Rebirth she gets one-on-one screen time with Hal Jordan here, in a bar scene and in dueling fighter jets reminiscent of the Green Lantern movie (not to mention movie villain Hector Hammond's sudden increased presence).

Hal and Carol's relationship is appropriately complicated, to a great extent because Hal doesn't know how to react to Carol's unconditional love that doesn't require anything back from him, giving him nothing to run away from. The reader intuits Hal's greatest objection to Carol becoming queen of the Star Sapphires is that it brings her most fully into the superheroic side of his world, when he spends most of the book trying to separate those aspects of his life and keep his friends out of danger -- in part out of guilt over his time as Parallax, and in part due to the corrupting influence of his ring. Though Hal and guest star Flash Barry Allen discuss the metaphorical aspects of their feelings far too much to be believable, one gets a fannish thrill here when Barry himself gets possessed by Parallax, and Barry's concern over Hal's behavior is what finally sheds light for the reader that something more is going on with Hal than just Hal's inherent bluster.

Johns, however, suddenly interrupts the main action of "New Guardians" for a single-issue solely devoted to the Red Lantern Atrocitus -- who interrupts a capitol execution and runs afoul of the Spectre -- and the story is suspenseful and gripping; Johns's short origin of the Red Lantern Dex-Starr at the end of the book is equally moving, and in only a couple of pages. (The Spectre story, on the heels of another in Blackest Night: Green Lantern, argues strongly for Mahnke getting to draw a Spectre series or special). Johns's stories do not quite convince me of the necessity of the upcoming DC Comics Relaunch Red Lanterns series, which seems mainly meant to take advantage of the name recognition of the new villains of the Green Lantern animated series -- but I will be curious to see if writer Peter Milligan brings the same kind of depth as found here, and what he does with the characters.

As recently as Blackest Night, Johns has been constantly revamping the Green Lantern mythos, often in the form of "revealing" lies that the Guardians of the Universe have told. Johns adds one more lie on top of the others here, that mainstay DC cosmic villain Krona was once an agent of the Guardians, and it seems a step too far if only because we haven't yet quite sorted out what's true or not about the Guardians' origins as presented in Blackest Night (also, I like Krona's larger look, seen as recently as Kurt Busiek's Trinity, over the shrunken form in which Johns and Mahnke present him). But I was quite caught off guard by an image in the great War of the Green Lanterns preview that DC includes at the end of this book of Krona and the Guardians in white cloaks with the Brightest Day White Lantern symbol on them. This book shares a scene with the first volume of Brightest Day, and Hal takes his mission to find the entities from the White Lantern, but I had not expected that the Guardians were in some way White Lanterns in their days before the Corps.

It's there and in the final pages of the main story that this book really distinguishes itself. It seemed to me Johns had made Hal too egotistical and focused too much on Hal's Corps life to the detriment of Green Lantern: Brightest Day, until all at once the story turns and the reader understands all of this is to demonstrate the psychological influence of Hal's ring. Larfleeze, the Star Sapphires, the Red Lanterns, and the Indigo Tribe are all have their minds controlled to a great extent by their rings, but we had believed the Green Lanterns at the center of the emotional spectrum were immune; now we understand the green rings have a corrupting influence also. This ignites this engaging but somewhat nondescript story; Green Lantern: Brightest Day was good, but it seems War of the Green Lanterns is going to be "can't miss."

[Contains full and variant covers, preview of the War of the Green Lanterns trade]

This is the fourth time recently that I've encountered one of these previews for a forthcoming trade at the end of one of DC's books -- Birds of Prey: Endrun, Justice League: Rise and Fall, and Superman: Last Stand of New Krypton Vol. 2. These are great, and I applaud DC for including them -- it's a recognition that trade-readers aren't "done in one," but rather that we follow the DC Universe in serial form, too, just not necessarily in periodicals, and that we want to be marketed to and teased about upcoming storylines just like "regular" fans. If you see more of these, let me know -- I'd love to think these are becoming standard in DC's books.

Next week, our review of Green Lantern Corps: Revolt of the Alpha Lanterns and Justice League: Generation Lost!

Number 989


Statues and tombs


Lou Cameron is one of the better artists of the early '50s horror comics. His work popped up with regularity, even if he didn't seem to be exclusive with any one publisher. Cameron usually signed his name to his work, when many other artists didn't.

A few years later Lou traded his drawing board for a typewriter. He went into writing paperback novels, which was a very good career move.

A couple of years ago via e-mail I was in touch with Lou's son-in-law, who reported Cameron was quite elderly, but still living. Let's hope that's still true.

"The Night the Statues Walked" is from Ace Comics' Web Of Mystery #19, 1953, and "Within the Tomb of Terror," is from Chilling Tales of Horror, a black-and-white reprint magazine from 1970. Under its original title, "The Tomb of Terror," it was published in ACG's Forbidden Worlds #5, 1951. I featured it five years ago in Pappy's #47. The scans are pretty bad, but if you've got to see it you can click on the link.















As constant readers know, I read the Blackest Night event for the first time in its individual collected hardcovers -- Blackest Night all at once, then Blackest Night: Green Lantern all at once, Green Lantern Corps, and so on. This was not, as many people advised me, the best way to read these stories, but it would be the way that some unsuspecting person might read them if they picked up just Blackest Night at the bookstore, and that was the way I wanted to experience and review them.

As I prepared to continue reading Brightest Day and a number of other books that spin-off from Blackest Night however, I wanted to take an opportunity to read the Blackest Night saga again -- and this time, in order. Using the Blackest Night Reading Order as a guide, I lined up just my Blackest Night, Green Lantern, and Green Lantern Corps hardcovers, and dug in.

It is a different, interesting, better, and worse experience reading Blackest Night in issue-by-issue order. By the time I finished reading the three hardcovers individually, I wasn't confused about any plot points that reading issue by issue illuminated; that is, I didn't gain any greater understanding of the story reading it in order than I did by series. What I felt were unrelated tangents in the individual books still seem to be unrelated tangents read intersected; the places I felt the story marked time book by book it still marks time read together.

It did, however, seem a bit more fluid.

[Contains spoilers]

For instance, the Spectre makes an early appearance in Blackest Night, and then never appears again in that series. He returns for a fantastic two-part story in Green Lantern (well-written by Geoff Johns and moreover magnificently drawn by Doug Mahnke) that's never mentioned in Blackest Night, and as such while the Spectre issues in Green Lantern fit between the pages of Blackest Night, it's clear they're just using up Green Lantern pages while Blackest Night's going on. But whereas the Spectre's appearance in Blackest Night seems incomplete and his appearance in Green Lantern seems unnecessary, read together they make a loose whole that mitigated the problem. Worse, in that it's more obvious, but better, in that it works more cohesively.

In a similar way, Green Lantern John Stewart appears early in Blackest Night and then all but disappears until the end, without much role to play. He gets a single issue all to himself in Green Lantern that doesn't quite work in that, with all the attention on Hal Jordan and Barry Allen and the DC Universe heroes throughout the book, a single issue focusing on just one character right in the middle is too strangely quiet and disconnected. However, reading Blackest Night and Green Lantern interspersed, the John Stewart chapter again serves to unify the two series, and specifically this is an instance where the cliffhanger at the end of the John Stewart Green Lantern issue picks up at the exact same moment in Blackest Night. If it's a little jarring, it's also nicely fluid.

Another example is a late sequence in Blackest Night where Sinestro gains White Lantern powers, proceeds in Green Lantern to lose them, nearly die, and then regain them, and then continues back in Blackest Night as if nothing happened. That issue is strange in Green Lantern because Sinestro doesn't have the White Lantern powers in the chapter before, and then the issue ends with "Continued in Blackest Night," part of what makes the Green Lantern book an awkward reading experience on its own. Now at least, even if the White Lantern Green Lantern issue still seems obviously inconsequential, it does at least gain some context sandwiched between Blackest Night issues.

Indeed, these were the parts of the Blackest Night saga I liked the best -- when Hal left Barry in Blackest Night to seek out additional Lanterns in Green Lantern, when the Indigo Lantern Munk leaves Green Lantern to provide help elsewhere in Green Lantern Corps, and when the Corps abandons their own title entirely to appear in one of Blackest Night's many eye-popping two-page spreads. Though I'm undecided whether the entire Blackest Night saga ought have been collected by series or by issue, there's a unique joy that comes from reading these issues in separate books and have the characters jump -- as if by magic or osmosis -- from one volume to the next and back, something that can only be replicated otherwise by actually reading the separate periodical issues. Maybe there's too much continuity and crossover in comics, but I maintain this kind of overt celebration of a shared universe is the key thing that makes comics distinct from any other media.

There was some discussion on the Collected Editions Facebook page as to whether Green Lantern Corps was quite necessary for an issue-by-issue reading of the Blackest Night saga. Though I myself decided initially that it wasn't necessary -- recalling from my Green Lantern Corps review that Corps only intersects with the main action of Blackest Night toward the end of the book -- I made a last-minute decision to include it in my re-reading. This was influenced largely and subjectively by my remembrance that Munk goes from Green Lantern to Corps and that Corps later re-intersects Blackest Night; I felt no such compunction to trade Dove from Blackest Night to Titans and back, but as the ties between the main series, Lantern, and Corps were so strong (and that Peter Tomasi writes Corps and then Brightest Day with Geoff Johns, and that I'd be reading the new volume of Corps not long after this), I ended up looping it in.

It does inevitably make for some unusual cliffhangers -- Kyle Rayner dies, there's a bunch of action with Barry and Hal in the other books, then we rejoin the struggle to revive Kyle; and also Guy Gardner becomes a Red Lantern, we leave Corps for the two-issue Spectre story in Green Lantern, and then we return to Corps right in the same place.

This latter loop is especially strange (Corps #44, Lantern #50-51, Corps #45), but has more to do with Blackest Night #6 coming before the other issues and Corps #45 dove-tailing right into Blackest Night #7 than it does with any real reason that Lantern should interrupt Corps. Personally, I rather liked reading Lantern #50 and #51 in one sitting, rather like an "extra-sized episode," but probably one could put the two Corps issues together before or after the Lantern issues here and understand the story about the same. Essentially, there's a little wiggle room for re-organization based on personal preference here and elsewhere.

I am still undecided whether I'd have wanted DC to collect Blackest Night as one volume with the main series, Green Lantern, and Corps interspersed. The answer with Corps is likely "probably not," given difficulties like the one above and given that book largely stands on its own. With Blackest Night and Lantern, the answer is closer to "maybe" because interspersing the books benefits Lantern considerably, though not necessarily the main series. Still -- as I might have said the first time around -- the uniformity in the art of the Blackest Night and Green Lantern volumes individually gives each one a distinct identity, and I would find it distracting to be reading one volume where the art kept changing, much like it's distracting in the Sinestro Corps War volumes; that's an argument in favor of DC collecting Blackest Night the way they did.

Overall, I've been impressed with Geoff Johns's "event" writing over the past five years. Infinite Crisis and Blackest Night are significantly more readable than Zero Hour or Final Night, due in large part to Johns focusing the story within the event series, rather than the event series being just a through-way to the events' various crossover titles, as was DC's previous custom. But Johns and company's inter-title crossovers never quite work for me in collected form, as is the case with Sinestro Corps War; even as the different parts lead in to one another, there's such an artificial emphasis on Hal Jordan or the Corps in every other chapter as to seem unnatural (not to mention radically shifting artists).

The same is true, for instance, of the Batman crossover Resurrection of Ra's al Ghul; the general quality of that crossover aside, the necessity to have each chapter focus on a different specific character when numerous titles are involved comes off as artificial when read in a collection (see also Cataclysm, Contagion, and so on). I'd like to see Johns and company write an inter-title crossover more like 52, where each character gets an ongoing subplot, than the current piecemeal approach; in that way, Green Lantern Corps might've fit more naturally with Blackest Night and Green Lantern because they all would've been telling the same story (and if the artists could follow a certain segment of the story across titles, as they did for Batman: No Man's Land, even better).

I like Blackest Night as a story different from the way I like Final Crisis; Final Crisis is cerebral and meta-textual and layered with double-meanings, while Blackest Night is great because it's just the opposite, a DC Comics superhero story not caught up for once in streamlining or correcting DC's continuity. Reading it in single-issue order is not essential, I don't think, but it increases the number of explosions and thrills and near misses, and I think that's worth experiencing. Flashpoint differs from both Blackest Night and Final Crisis in that it has no intersecting series or miniseries whatsoever, just tertiary titles -- if that holds true for DC's next crossover event, somewhere down the line in the newly relaunched DC Universe, maybe we can interpret that as some lesson DC learned from the collection difficulties with Blackest Night.

Don't miss our official Blackest Night review, back when the books first came out, in which I consider among other things the rather strange nationalist sentiment inherit in the Blackest Night story.

We'll continue from here to the Green Lantern and Corps Brightest Day tie-ins, and then Justice League: Generation Lost and more. Don't miss it!

Number 988


The Ditsy Chicks


Owen Fitzgerald was an animator, first with Disney, then Fleischer Brothers, then went into comic book work with the Sangor (ACG) shop. At some point he went to DC and did Adventures Of Bob Hope comics (a very well done comic book, by the way, in both writing and art), then at another point replaced Al Wiseman as the artist on the Dennis the Menace comic books. Fitzgerald died in 1994.

Bob Wick (Wickersham) was also an animator/comic book artist, and did excellent work for ACG, including the wonderful Kilroys comic book. These two stories, Moronica by Fitzgerald and Our Kid Sister by "Bob Wick", appeared in The Kilroys #28, from 1951. As a character Moronica is more from the My Friend Irma mold, and sixty years later, dumb blonde jokes are still funny. As for Sis, she's a normal teenager, easily distracted in her own little world.

Something I really like about Fitzgerald's artwork is economy of line. He doesn't have any more lines in his drawings than what needs to be shown. His inking is beautiful. He made it look easy, which as we all know, means it isn't easy at all.

Wickersham's Kid Sister is in motion all the time; I love the sequence in the chair while she talks on the phone. I also like that she wants to save her comic books when she thinks the house is on fire. Personally, I would have gone for the comics first, records second (records being more easily replaced than comic books), but everyone has their priorities. She'd even try to save her pictures of Van Johnson. Like I said, ditsy.