Peter Milligan is a smart writer, proven over any number of his titles but not in the least the psychologically-explorative Infinity, Inc. DC Comics's announcement that Milligan would write the Red Lanterns title for the New 52 was something of a head-scratcher, as the fare would necessarily be more consistently cosmic than Milligan had written previously.

At the same time, the leading Red Lantern Atrocitus had long been a scene-stealing, morally-complex figure under Green Lantern writer Geoff Johns. Milligan's involvement perhaps portended some great exploration of the nature of rage (source of the Red Lanterns' power), why mankind is drawn to violence. and whether anger can ever be just.

Milligan approaches that in Red Lanterns: Blood and Rage, but the book is far from the crackshot study that readers might have hoped for. Instead, this first volume of Red Lanterns is strangely cautious, a slow and kind of paint-by-numbers introduction to the characters. Artist Ed Benes depicts the various alien species well, but his insistence on distorted cheesecake -- especially as pertains to the sole female protagonist of the book -- only drags Red Lanterns farther from what could have been a serious work and closer to what's essentially just another generic Green Lantern spin-off.

[Review contains spoilers]

In the end, Peter Milligan's grand statement about rage in Red Lanterns may be to point out rage's inability to ultimately cause any change. Unfortunately, if this is the intent, it is demonstrated through the inertia of Atrocitus, which makes for dull reading. With the death of Atrocitus's sworn enemy, the mad Guardian Krona, Atrocitus resolves to fight the greater injustice in the universe, vowing to become "an instrument of vengeance." At turn after turn, however, Atrocitus fails to do this in any compelling way.

Milligan's most cogent use of Atrocitus's mission is in Red Lanterns's second issue (whereas in the first issue, Milligan has Atrocitus almost stock still the entire time, recounting his origin). Here, Atrocitus lands in the middle of a war between occupiers and the occupied, meant entirely to parallel the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unfortunately, Milligan makes the good and bad guys crystal clear, and so Atrocitus's punishment of the soldier -- who shot children, thinking they were "hostiles" -- carries no controversy. Milligan gets points for giving the audience some basis on which they can relate to the alien conflict, but he ultimately fails to say anything besides the obvious.

Most of the rest of Blood and Rage, astoundingly, involves Atrocitus pacing the Red Lanterns' home planet of Ysmault and fretting about a potential coup within the Lanterns. The story within Blood takes place very methodically -- Atrocitus thinks about creating a companion Lantern in one issue, he throws the Lantern Bleez into the Blood Ocean to restore her intelligence in another, in a third he decides he's unhappy with Bleez so he throws some other Lanterns into the ocean, in the next issue they emerge from the ocean with their intelligence, and so on. By the end, the Red Lanterns cast is assembled, so to speak, but Atrocitus has neither grown, changed, nor accomplished much over the pages, and it seems likely most of this could have happened in fewer pages such to give Blood more content.

Simultaneous with Atrocitus's troubles, Milligan details the increasingly-worsening situation of one family on Earth -- Jack Moore's grandfather is murdered, Moore's brother sets fire to the murderer's house, the police arrest Moore's brother and then beat the brother to death, before Moore receives a Red Lantern ring. This, too, could have been a powerful meditation on anger versus pacifism, or the difference between pacifism and cowardice. Milligan, however, offers such little background on the family -- they emerge in the midst of the crisis -- and the angry brother is so unlikable and the quiet brother so weak-willed that it's hard for the reader to feel emotionally connected to their plight.

Not to mention that despite Milligan's writing prowess, the dialogue between the brothers is often awkward ("They think I tried to firebomb Baxter's house," Moore's brother says; "You did! I was there, remember?" replies Moore unnecessarily). When Moore finally has his ring, Milligan depicts him flailing around in a poor Hulk impression (he shouts at one point, ridiculously, "BAXXTEERRRR!!!"). Guest artist Diego Bernard draws the issue that features Red Lantern Moore; Bernard's style is similar to Freddie Williams's, more cartoony and less detailed than Benes's, and it makes it hard to take seriously what should be a significant moment in the book.

Blood and Rage begins to pick up only in the very last pages, after a coup among the Red Lanterns has actually taken place, strangely, off-screen. Atrocitus, alone, ventures to a part of Ysmault where he's buried failed experiments prior to his creation of the Red Lanterns and, not surprisingly, he's attacked by one of those experiments. Atrocitus faces an actual threat, finally; the Red Lantern abominations are impressively scary; and Red Lantern Moore crash-lands in the middle of it. It's a good cliffhanger, the only good one of the book, and it ought have arrived much earlier.

The next volume of Red Lanterns promises a cross-over with Stormwatch (which Milligan will write after Paul Cornell's second trade) and then Red Lanterns becomes involved in a Green Lantern event, so obviously DC Comics has this title positioned as a major player in the New 52. It makes it all the more surprising that Red Lanterns: Blood and Rage doesn't have much to recommend for it, seemingly wasting the potential of Atrocitus and his fellow Red Lanterns. If Red Lanterns is going to become a lynchpin of the larger stories in the DC Universe, hopefully its next volume will have more to show for it.

[Includes original covers]

We continue this week's look at the weird side of the DC New 52 with the Collected Editions review of Frankenstein, Agent of SHADE, coming up next.

Love comes to Captain Wings, hero of Wings Comics, in the form of a young girl who has a mad crush on the dashing flyboy war hero. Bitsy looks to be jailbait. Hard to tell with girls...they can be sixteen but look older, and a man has to be careful. “Sixteen will get you twenty,” as the old saying goes.

This is the first Captain Wings story I've shown, because I've never cared that much for aviation comics. But then, I've never given them much of a look. I admit this particular one intrigued me. I will be looking at other Captain Wings stories, as well as other stories from Wings Comics. It was published by Fiction House, famous for its female pulchritude, aimed at boys and young men who like that sort of thing. And old men who like it, too (heh-heh).

Bob Lubbers is credited by Grand Comics Database as the artist. Lubbers had a long comic art career, both in comic books and comic strips, as well as assisting on other strips. You can read more about Lubbers and his career here. Like the best of the Fiction House artists, Lubbers had a knack for drawing pretty girls. In my opinion Bitsy is too young for Captain Wings, but give her a couple of years and Captain Wings will hope she's still interested in an older man.

From Wings Comics #82 (1947):

Crazy was an attempt from Atlas Comics to lure some of the readers who were buying Mad into parting with their dimes. Any Mad loyalist would immediately see the attempt fell short. But even if it sounds as if I'm dismissing it, I actually like this comic with its frenetic energy and lunacy popping out of every panel. I like the sexy pin-up art of  Al Hartley, who later went on to Archie and then to Spire Christian Comics; I like Bill Everett's funny Frankenstein, and Joe Maneely's artwork is, as always, superb. Ed Winiarski was a comic book journeyman, and Davy Berg later became a Mad-man. What Crazy didn't have was Mad creator/writer/editor Harvey Kurtzman, and it makes all the difference. There was Mad and then there was everyone else. It didn't make the imitators bad comic books, and Crazy is entertaining in its own crazy way, but in my opinion no Mad imitator ever reached the heights to which Kurtzman had taken Mad. (See more in my review of John Benson's The Sincerest Form of Parody, below the scans.)

Here's Crazy #1 (1953):

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John Benson’s book, The Sincerest Form of Parody, is an excellent example of an overview (with examples) of a less-than-excellent subject. To wit (ho-ho), it is a book about all of them furshlugginer imitations of Mad comics that popped up in the wake of Mad’s success.

Benson, whom I admire as a comics historian,* obviously researched his subject matter. It appears that he read all of the Mad imitators of that period. The book reproduces a couple of dozen stories, some better than others, but none up to the high standards set by Harvey Kurtzman and Mad.

There just weren’t any other talents like Kurtzman out there at the time. There were writers who could write funny, and artists who could draw funny, but they couldn’t write and draw Kurtzman-funny. Even if the artists were technically good, they just didn’t come up to the level set by Kurtzman’s inspired cadre of cartoonists, artists like Elder, Wood, and Davis. At the time, they were the holy trinity of humor.

In my opinion, the best Mad imitations are what you see above you, the Mad-like comics from Atlas, and Harvey Comics’ short-lived Flip, with the sharp Davis-like drawing by Howard Nostrand.  EC Comics’ own in-house imitation, Panic, had some gems like Wood’s “African Scream,” shown in Pappy’s #871 or Elder’s “The Lady Or the Tiger,” the latter reproduced in Benson’s book. But same publisher or not, Panic was still a Mad imitator.

If Kurtzman worried at all about posterity, his name or his stories being remembered, he need not have been concerned. Kurtzman is one of the comic book geniuses, and they were rare, so we remember him. Reprints over the years have kept the twenty-three issues of Mad comics available to fans in various print formats, even two digital versions. The imitations just don’t get that kind of treatment, so The Sincerest Form of Parody makes some of the better imitators (“better” being subjective) available for the first time since their original publication almost sixty years ago.

I recommend The Sincerest Form of Parody with a qualification. The stories can be more bizarre than laugh-out-loud funny, and oftentimes (which happens with Mad, also) the satirical references are obscured by the half dozen decades between their first appearance and this book. Production is top notch, and the reproduction from the original four-color comic books is excellent.

It’s available from Amazon.com or your favorite bookseller. If your local comic shop has it or will order it for you, that’s even better.

The Sincerest Form of Parody by John Benson with introduction by Jay Lynch. Fantagraphics Book, 2011, trade paperback, 192 pages, 7 ¼” x 10”. $24.99 suggested retail.

*Benson also wrote Romance Without Tears, and Confessions, Romances, Secrets and Temptations, about the love comics of St. John publishing and writer Dana Dutch.

Frank the Tramp is so bad he doesn't know how many people he's killed. “I guess hundreds —” he says to himself. “I kinda forgot —” Whew. Now that’s a bad guy. Frank avoids detection for a long time the way real-life serial killer Henry Lee Lucas reportedly did, by traveling around and varying his methods of dispatching victims. As Frank puts it in his final attempt at murder, “I've killed people all sorts of ways, but never with a live wire!”

In my opinion this story from Daredevil #22 (1943) is really only interesting because of Frank, not because of Daredevil, who just steps in when necessary. Certainly not by Daredevil’s kid gang, the Little Wise Guys, even though Frank’s crime spree is stopped because of their suspicions. Frank’s two wives are there to build up the story and provide Frank with victims. The critics of comics, crime comics especially, were sensitive to this sort of thing. Biro followed a criminal’s career, right up until the criminal’s bad end. That wasn't anything new in fiction, but in four colors, sold to children, it caused alarm.

This story is by Charles Biro* and drawn by Norman Maurer.

*According to David Hajdu in The Ten Cent Plague, Biro also used Virginia Hubbell as a ghost-writer, but the Grand Comics Database credits this story to Biro.