Once upon a time, DC Comics superheroes wore their collars low and their underwear on the outside, and the Justice League consisted of second-generation heroes including Batman Dick Grayson, Donna Troy, Supergirl, and others. With focus shifted to the New 52, DC cancelled the hardcover of James Robinson’s final collection of his League run, Justice League of America: The Rise of Eclipso, but the book emerged later in paperback amidst the first wave of New 52 collections, a veritable message in a bottle from another era, bobbing in a sea of change.

Robinson’s story is enjoyable if madcap, as Robinson’s Justice League stories have tended to be — the action shifts back and forth in time, characters leave and return at random, the Leaguers call each other “babe” and “doll” and seem extraordinarily concerned with each others' emotional well-beings. That won’t be for everyone, but it’s clear Robinson likes and respects this team, and that the characters like one another — this League may be the closest to friends that I can recall — and that makes for a pleasant read especially when the team’s fate is decided in the last chapter.

[Review contains spoilers]

Justice League, like Bryan Miller’s Batgirl and indeed in many ways very similar to it, was a title that addressed the New 52 relaunch head-on in its closing pages. The team decides to disband, notably not because of any internal strife but simply because the team members have grown up and some have even been emotionally healed by their time with the League, and they’re ready for the next step in their lives. Dick and Donna speculate whether the world will remember their League; perhaps not, they think, but they agree at least that it’s been “a blast” serving together in the League.

Though the creation of this League was separate and unrelated to DC’s later decision to reboot their story universe, it does seem an appropriate League to end the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths Justice League on — indeed it’s hard to imagine the “old” Big Seven coming back after this League had filled their shoes. Former Robin Dick Grayson and Donna Troy, especially, are the original sidekicks, and to see them lead the Justice League and then, moreover, to leave it, seems inescapably the conclusion of the post-Crisis League’s story arc; this is even further compounded by having children of the Justice Society, Jade and Jessie Quick, present as well.

What may be most controversial in the conclusion is Donna's statement, via Robinson, that she herself hopes to be forgotten by the world (and by implication, the reader), though her wish makes perfect sense in terms of how Robinson has, smartly, portrayed Donna -- what may be the most honest portrayal of Donna Troy so far. Donna is a character considerably buffeted by the whims of creators — married, divorced, mystically pregnant, killed and resurrected, with multiple origins, and not only did her son die, but she later had to kill her son’s zombie corpse. The capriciousness with which creators have treated this character (specifically, this female character, while her male counterparts escape similar fates) ought offend the reader, and in his four Justice League volumes Robinson has channeled that offense into Donna’s new, considerable anger — she herself is angry at how the “universe” has treated her, and she struggles to control or surmount that anger.

It is a little easy, but then again necessary given Robinson’s foreshortened run, that it turns out that all the pain Donna has undergone has purified her soul such to allow her to defeat the villain du jour, Eclipso. With that success, Donna feels her anger has left her, and she decides to retire to a normal life, hoping, again, that her superhero days will be forgotten. Given the greater lows than highs of Donna’s adventures, I see Robinson’s point and I’m inclined to agree with him — perhaps the best thing for Donna would be to see her left alone, rather than brought back in the New 52 and subjected, invariably, to more shenanigans. More likely, however, Robinson probably gets it right when he has Dick Grayson, foreshadowing the Wally West/Stephanie Brown wars to come, grin at the camera and says, “I can guarantee not everyone is going to forget you.”

The other seven issues of Justice League collected here (plus, for good measure, one issue Robinson wrote of Justice Society) are, again, enjoyable, though the Eclipso story itself differs not that much from Eclipso stories past, despite Eclipso’s constant espousing that he’s committing his mayhem differently this time — though still on the moon, and still with a bevy of eclipsed heroes (where is my Eclipso: The Darkness Within omnibus, anyway?).

What does differentiate the story, however, are some of the philosophical knots that Robinson, through Eclipso and his alter-ego Bruce Gordon, ties himself in — how Eclipso believes his previous plots against Earth my have been inspired in him by God such to guarantee Eclipso’s defeat, and now by working against his own impulses he may be able to supersede that “determinism” and kill God himself; or how Eclipso identifies Earth as God’s device to channel faith out into the universe, and by disrupting the moon and therefore the water in people’s bodies, Eclipso can “break faith,” essentially, and kill God. It’s weird, heady stuff, but the fact that it’s heady is more than made up for by the fact that it’s also not superhero comics as usual, and that’s a good thing.

In all I found the preceding volume, Justice League: Omega, more focused and less predictable than Justice League: Rise of Eclipso, but Robinson’s erstwhile Justice League is still a joy to read. To be sure, Robinson has defined Congorilla’s voice for a generation, and it’s nice to have him write Starman Mikaal Tomas — any chance DC might take Robinson’s Starman and sew it more or less whole cloth to the fabric of his New 52 Earth 2 series? It’s unlikely, but we can hope.

[Includes original and variant covers]

Someone say Earth 2? We continue our James Robinson spotlight week with a review of Earth 2: The Gathering, coming up.

We have a theme week going, ”Boyoboy! Week” featuring kid gangs of Golden Age comics. Today we have the longest running of all, the Little Wise Guys from Daredevil Comics.

The group of youngsters first appeared in 1942, and lasted until publisher Lev Gleason closed his comic book line in 1956. This war-themed story is from Daredevil Comics #29 (1944), and Daredevil doesn’t appear until page 10 of the 16-page story. Oh, the ignominy —  the title character upstaged by a bunch of street kids!

The story features a torture scene, and off-camera more tortures and murders are alluded to. The cover, signed by Charles Biro, does not represent a scene in the book, but it is one of those covers sure to attract attention on the newsstand.

Drawn by Carl Hubbell, one of Biro’s regular artists, with script credited to editor Biro.

More Daredevil! First without the Little Wise Guys, and then one with them. Click on the pictures to go to the posts.

We’re beginning another theme week, “Boyoboy! Week,” where we’ll see some of the kid gangs of the Golden Age. I’ve got posts featuring Boy Commandos, the Newsboy Legion, and the Little Wise Guys following up today’s posting of a Boy Heroes strip from Harvey Comics' All-New Comics. A group I won’t be showing is Young Allies, because that bunch included Toro and Bucky, two superhero sidekicks. Our kid gangs are strictly from the streets, and while they might be heroes, they aren’t super.

The Boy Heroes were created by Louis Cazeneuve. The group mainly operated in Europe during the war years, making eight appearances in All-New. To begin this adventure in Transylvania they seem confident, boasting as they motor along, “Boy, we sure took care of them dratted Nazis back in Rumania, eh, kids?”

“Sure, we did! Dey’re duck soup!”

But of course the boys soon end up in the soup, and being in Transylvania they are fighting, of all things, a werewolf. I assume the idea behind having young boys behind enemy lines fighting Nazis was to feed into the fantasy of the young readers back home that even those too young to enlist could accomplish heroics during the war. In real life American kids were urged to collect scrap and buy savings stamps to aid in the war effort, but in the comics they could do what they really wanted to do — kick butt!

I’ve shown this story before back in the early days of this blog, but I’ve re-scanned the pages. Art attributed to Louis Cazeneuve, from All-New Comics #10 (1944):

Sam Hill, Private Eye was a short-lived series from Archie Comics. Sam, a bow-tie wearing keyhole-peeper, was a smartass, wise-cracking, two-fisted private eye in the tradition of the time. Sam had the advantage of being drawn by Harry Lucey, who was one of Archie’s top artists. He showed with this series he could draw more than teenage hijinks. He could draw just as sexy and as action-packed as the genre required.

This story, “The Double Trouble Caper,” is from Sam Hill #1 (1950).

In 2011 I showed another story starring Sam Hill. Click the cover pic to see it.

DC Comics’s loss of writer Joshua Hale Fialkov, before his tenure with the company ever truly started, becomes even more unfortunate. In I, Vampire Vol. 2: Rise of the Vampires, Fialkov writes not only vampire Andrew Bennett but also two of DC’s more troubled properties, Justice League Dark and Stormwatch, and handles them all with alacrity, proving the versatility the writer would have brought to the Green Lantern titles.

Fialkov, with artist Andrea Sorrentino, continue to offer an I, Vampire series that’s frightening and compelling — but also in this second volume, more so than in the first, wryly funny. I, Vampire is a can’t miss book; though cancelled, readers should still do themselves a favor and pick this one up.

[Review contains spoilers]

Rise of the Vampires starts roughly, with issues #7-8 interspersed with the same from Justice League Dark in a four-part crossover. Only the broad strokes of these issues are really important; scenes of the Justice League Dark and Bat-family fighting vampires are mostly just filler, and there’s a subplot where John Constantine and Deadman try to resurrect the deceased Bennett that ultimately comes to nothing. For four issues, what’s mainly important is just the end, where Bennett is reborn with souped-up magical powers, leading in to the rest of the book.

The crossover’s difficulties are hardly on I, Vampire’s end. Sorrentino’s work is always lovely to see, and here his gritty depictions of the Bat-family are just as good as the engraved look he gives to the flashback to the origin of the vampires. Fialkov offers nicely subtle moments in the grudging transition of Mary, Queen of Blood, from foe to friend. But Justice League Dark artists Admira Wijaya and Daniel Sampere have too clear a style in contrast to Sorrentino’s shadows, plus painterly coloring that clashes with the I, Vampire issues. Dark writer Peter Milligan still depicts his team as relatively impotent, their powers either depleted or misfunctioning, such that they mostly falter around until Bennett returns and the crossover ends.

I, Vampire grows scores better once Fialkov enters the second four-part arc, in which Bennett establishes a colony of vampires under his rule out in the Utah desert. I rather wish we’d been able to see more of the day to day life in Bennett’s enclave; Fialkov picks up with Bennett just before Mary, true to form, challenges him again for control of the other vampires, and then the two have to join forces again to fight the vampire hunter Van Helsings and their zombie vampire hunters.

This four-part story is many things — the fruition and collapse of Bennett’s idyllic vision for the vampires, an insight into the vampire’s struggle with the Van Helsings over time, a Stormwatch guest-shot — but it’ll probably be remembered best as “the zombie story.” There’s significant horror here, but Fialkov has some fun with how taken aback the vampires are, ironically, to have to fight equally undead enemies. Things get truly, monstrously wild when the vampires become zombies themselves (as Bennett calls them “zombie vampire vampire-hunters”), and that’s just before Apollo, Midnighter, and Jack Hawksmoor teleport on the scene.

At this point Bennett’s plan to broker peace (or unending, self-contained war) between the vampires and the Van Helsings has gone horribly wrong. Best here is Bennett’s voice, via Fialkov; for a title in which early critics feared emotional, sparkling vampires, Bennett’s narration is amusingly dry and sarcastic. “This is not going well for me,” he deadpans. “Let’s get all the vampires in the world — or, y'know, most of them, in one place and let me be their messiah. What could go wrong?” Mary, Bennett’s cohorts Prof. Troughton and Tig, and the Stormwatch crew are equally nonplussed; despite that things get downright bloody (especially when Bennett begins ripping the Van Helsings’s leader limb from limb), there’s a humor underlying this book that’s entertaining and balances the more absurd moments (see again “zombie vampire vampire-hunters”).

The emotional complexity of I, Vampire is also on display in Rise. Troughton and the Van Helsings' leader’s discussion of empirical moral relativism at the beginning of I, Vampire #10 is interesting enough (in what other comic do you find discussions of objective and subjective morality?), but more so when it gets to I, Vampire’s key pervading question — how can Bennett and Mary love each other, as they obviously do, and yet still so often be plotting to kill one another? It’s for this reason that Mary’s turns in the book — with Cain, then with Bennett and the League, then against Bennett, then with him against the Van Helsings — are so interesting, and why I wish we’d seen more of Bennett and Mary in relative peace in Utah before the crisis unfolded. The reader — and perhaps the characters — can’t quite understand how the two can live as a couple one moment and try to kill each other the next, and it makes for more compelling reading than the usual superhero versus villain.

Purposefully or not, Fialkov seems to be taking Bennett through an evolution of self on a trade-by-trade basis. Last time, Bennett died at the end of the book, returning here as a kind of super-vampire, changing from scourge of the vampires to their “messiah.” Rise of the Vampires ends much the same way, with Bennett having magically cured all the vampires, but at the same time taking their evil into himself and becoming the worst of the worst. If there were to be more volumes of I, Vampire, and the next few also ended with Bennett transforming, it might suggest it becoming predictable, but we should have such problems; unfortunately the next collection marks I, Vampire’s last.

Despite an errant crossover, I, Vampire: Rise of the Vampires is just as good as the previous volume, Tainted Love, and I look forward with both anticipation and dismay to the final book. More’s the pity, again, that Joshua Hale Fialkov has left DC, though I’m counting the days to Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino’s Green Arrow. Hopefully Sorrentino will have some way to draw marauding hordes in Green Arrow just the same as in I, Vampire; the third panel in issue #12, where Troughton and Tig are overrun by a score of zombie-vampires with scythes and pitchforks, is especially striking.

[Includes original covers, sketches and covers by Andrea Sorrentino and a sketch by Ryan Sook]

Next week is a James Robinson week here on Collected Editions, with reviews of Justice League: Rise of Eclipso and Earth 2: The Gathering. See you then!

[Review by Doug Glassman, who Tumblrs at Hell Yeah '80s Marvel!]

After spending a few reviews discussing comiXology and how the Internet has affected comics, I feel like I’ve left webcomics in the lurch. The webcomic spectrum is as vast as the print comic spectrum, from one-panel gag cartoons to multi-chapter epics. I don’t read as many of the more complex webcomics as I’d like to for the sole reason that I keep forgetting to check up on them when the pace slows.

So naturally, after all of this ruminating, I decided to go out and buy the first volume of webcomic Axe Cop in print. To paraphrase Homer Simpson in The Simpsons Movie, “I can’t believe you’re paying to get something you see on the Internet for free!” However, there’s one excellent reason to buy the printed version of Axe Cop: it contains numerous annotations from artist Ethan Nicolle explaining the thought process behind the comic. Considering the process by which the book is made, this can be very enlightening.

Axe Cop is the creation of brothers Ethan Nicolle and his much, much younger brother Malachai, who was five years old when he began “writing” the comic. It’s a journal, essentially, of Malachai’s playtime ideas and fantasies. In the introduction to the “Moon Warriors” arc, Ethan explains that the two create stories while playing together, whether in person or over the phone; as a result, many of the characters come in pairs or are brothers themselves. As Malachai grows up, you can see how different hobbies and life events change his view of the world, often to hilarious effect. For instance, God and Satan start appearing just as he would have started Sunday School, while later episodes take a distinct scatological bent as he discovers poop humor.

Many of the characters are influenced by the creators’ own likes and dislikes. The range of references is incredibly broad due to the generation gap between the brothers (Ethan is old enough to be Malachai’s father). The “Ten-Ben Matanga,” for instance, comes from Malachai’s love of Ben 10. At the same time, the Moon Warriors resemble the main characters of Double Dragon, one of Ethan’s favorite games. There’s some interesting subtext when it comes to how the comic treats women: namely, there are barely any. The women who do appear are mostly mothers or babies, with the main exception being The Best Fairy Ever. As the book goes on, you can also detect an interesting baby subtext; while Ethan doesn’t mention it, I wonder if Malachai gained a baby sister during Axe Cop’s inception.

The book alternates between longer chapters and shorter “Ask Axe Cop” half-page or one-page gags. According to Ethan, the continuity between the two types of strip isn’t entirely solid, but characters do migrate from one to the other. The “Ask Axe Cop” strips are amongst the funniest parts, with my personal favorite being Axe Cop’s “Prayer for the Sharks.” You can watch Axe Cop’s descent into madness throughout these strips. While the main stories feature him as a fairly straightforward protagonist, the “Ask Axe Cop” stories paint him as utterly psychotic, albeit with a softer side when it comes to killing mermaids.

For me, however, what really sells it is the art. Nicolle’s black and white artwork is really beautifully done; Dark Horse’s printing process granted the pages a wonderful crispness. Ethan also uses the art to playfully make fun of the stories he’s been forced to draw, with characters pointing out inconsistencies or plot holes away from the narrator’s interference. The apex of the artwork comes during the “Ultimate Battle” arc, in which the main story alternates with the near-wordless tale of Baby Man tracking down dinner ingredients. It plays out like a Die Hard film (according to Ethan, this was intentional), with elements like a man in a baby suit and eggs with legs portrayed with grim seriousness. If you’re curious, the brothers did in fact put up one strip written by Ethan and drawn by Malachai, with somewhat messy results.

When I first heard about Axe Cop, I thought it might be a gimmick, and that Ethan Nicolle was just making up the part about Malachai writing it to get better press. But there’s a certain bizarre logic that separates Axe Cop from surreal and absurd humor created by adults. For instance, I personally dislike Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job because it feels like it’s lazily written by stoners and for stoners. In contrast, plot elements in Axe Cop -- like that getting splashed with swordfish blood gives you a swordfish head -- make a certain kind of sense, if you consider that a kindergartener came up with it.

Since the comic’s introduction a few years ago, Axe Cop has gone from an online quirk into a fully-merchandized brand. With full-color original mini-series from Dark Horse, two animated adaptations, and even a Munchkin expansion (which I’ve played -- it’s hysterical), Ethan mentions numerous times in the trade his concern that Malachai’s creativity might get exhausted too quickly, but I hope the series goes on as long as it possibly can. After a long, painful week, I need some good absurdism.

Forbidden Worlds, ACG's companion to Adventures Into the Unknown, ended its run at #34 (1954), the last issue before the Comics Code kicked in. It was replaced for three issues with Young Heroes, a more Code-friendly book, numbers 35-37. But Young Heroes didn't last, and Forbidden Worlds came back with an issue dated about a year after #34, continuing the numbering from #35. Confused? Comic books used to change their names but not their numbering (trying to get around a postal regulation for second-class mailing permits), but sometimes they were caught and had to re-number. That may be what happened with Forbidden Worlds

Okay, that's our comic book history lesson for today. Within the pages of FW #34 are a couple of stories that show a change in direction for ACG’s supernatural titles to fit into the new Code, and a last blast from their pre-Code past. The newer-styled story is “Day of Reckoning!” which is science fiction with art attributed by the Grand Comics Database to Paul Gustavson, and the catchy-titled “My Fanged and Fiendish Darling” is a werewolf story, common in ACG’s titles until the Code. It's drawn by Emil Gershwin.

“Fanged and Fiendish” is very odd. A married woman and single man share a secret; they are both able to sit at home and send their “wolf-beings” into the night to rip and tear innocent passers-by. No credible reason is given for Karen taking up such a lycanthropic lifestyle except that she is “...so lonely that maybe even terror is welcome!” It’s a crazy plot, but that wasn’t uncommon for ACG.

The Grand Comics Database gives Ken Bald credit for the cover.