A couple notes this morning on some DC Comics collection solicitations for July 2009:

- DC Comics Classics Library: Batman — A Death in the Family
When Collected Editions first announced this hardcover collection of Death in the Family, we all wondered how four issues could justify a hardcover. Here's our answer: this book collects not only Death in the Family, which saw the (now temporary) offing of the second Robin Jason Todd, but also the Lonely Place of Dying story that introduced current Robin Tim Drake (and included that era's New Titans).

- Gotham Central Vol. 2: Jokers and Madmen
Shooting to the top of my to-buy list is this new round of Gotham Central hardcovers. The first hardcover, Gotham Central: In the Line of Duty, collected the first two trade paperbacks (the first with the same name, and the second, the Eisner award-winning Half a Life), containing the first ten issues of the series. This new hardcover collects issues #11-22, of which #11 (a day in the life of Stacy, who runs the Bat-signal) and #16-18 (single-issue stories, includes appearance by the Huntress) are previously uncollected. This is the news we've been waiting for, because it means these new Gotham Central hardcovers will indeed be the definitive collection of the series.

Other notables:

- Brave and the Bold will be paperback from here on now that Book of Destiny is out in softcover. Ditto for Booster Gold: Reality Lost.

- Nightwing: The Great Leap and Robin: Search for a Hero finish off those two series. I guess the last issues of Birds of Prey will end up collected with Oracle: The Cure.

- Glad to see Duncan Roleau's Metal Men in trade paperback now; I'll have to pick that up before the co-feature trades.

What's on your to-buy list for this month?

I've come to realize in thinking over Will Pfeifer's Catwoman: Crime Pays that what I've been expecting isn't exactly what Pfeifer's delivering. Whereas your average Teen Titans storyline, for instance, is a six-part tale where every chapter builds on the next with a conclusion that ties up threads from the beginning, Pfeifer's story is more of a picaresque, moving Catwoman from escapade to escapade often with no real tie between them.

This manner of storytelling is largely annoying for a trade reader, because instead of anything much really happening in the story, it often just feels like Pfeifer's wasting time. If it were not for the fact that Pfeifer writes a really nuanced, respectful Catwoman character, and artist David Lopez, I might not bother, but it's apparent on every page that these two know what they're doing (even if the reader doesn't always).

For instance, Crime Pays starts out with Catwoman on the trail of a master thief who's stolen all her belongings, including her own bed while she was sleeping on it. (How? We never find out.) Because she doesn't have a costume, Catwoman robs a billionaire with a collection of villain memorabilia (we never see said billionaire again). Catwoman goes to apprehend the thief, but is whisked away to the Salvation Run planet (we never see or hear from said thief again). Catwoman only briefly interacts with other villains on the planet before whisked off to an alternate reality story (which factors on the main story, in the end, not even a little).

It's disjointed, to be sure. And lest I paint with too broad a brush, Pfeifer is using many of these events to explore Catwoman's broken inner psyche after giving up her daughter, something Pfeifer does quite well. It also couldn't be terribly easy for the writer to fit in his own storylines between Amazons Attack and Salvation Run. But both the "costume stealing" storyline and the "alternate reality" storylines especially feel like softballs -- issues to fill space rather than ones with real bearing on the Catwoman story overall.

Catwoman ends with the next trade. In my opinion, this has been one of the all-time greatest character reimaginings; if you consider the purple-costumed Chuck Dixon/Bronwyn Carlton series that preceded this (which had, at some point, Catwoman fighting in the showers of a women's prison), the crime-noir, sensibly-costumed run that began with Ed Brubaker and ends with Will Pfeifer was nothing short of brilliant. Pfeifer's putting Catwoman talking about alternate realities and multiple earths signals to me it's time to bring the story to a close, but hopefully DC Comics will keep the character much as is. Co-feature, anyone?

[Contains full covers, "What Came Before" page]

We'll finish up Catwoman next time, and then on to some Jack Kirby Fourth World goodness.

Number 509


Cathy the Cat Girl


Mrs. Pappy, whose name is Sally, went on a collecting binge a few years ago, finding and buying anything with the name Sally on it. Among the other stuff she found she bought a 1975 Sally Annual from the UK. She liked the cover, but she opened it, saw comics, and closed it right back up. I've told you before about the balance in the Pappy marriage. I love comics, she hates them.

I took a look and found this cute 4-page duotone strip featuring Cat Girl, who is Cathy, a prepubescent girl with a cat suit that gives her the agility of a cat. The story is as fluffy as my own cat; it's also unsigned, as is everything else in the Sally Annual. But it gives me an excuse to show you some other stuff about Catwoman, who we all know. These are panels from Batman #35, by Bob Kane.


Here's a babe in a Halloween costume who could trick or treat at my house:

Here's a photo called "catsuits" my son sent me last year. He knows what his Pappy likes:

I dunno if those are really catsuits, but I like the picture and wanted to share.

Number 508


Blackout


I usually don't get into origins of superheroes because they can be so silly. Consider some of the chemical accidents that happen to turn those guys into superheroes...or nuclear explosions...or gifts from alien beings. Might as well say a magic word like "Shazam," because it makes as much sense.

Dr. Basil Brusiloff of Belgrade, Yugoslavia, is in on one of those big explosions, in this case working in his lab when the Nazis bomb the place. It turns him into a hairy ebony black guy who can fly. We can even see his hairy bum in the last panel, so is he wearing pants? It's probably no wonder that he only showed up in Captain Battle #1 in 1941, #3, and #5, and #5 was a reprint of #1. The scans for this story come from that reprint issue, dated Summer 1943. Artist Don Rico signed the strip in the last panel.

Blackout was created for Charles Biro and Bob Wood by George Roussos, because Roussos was an assistant to Bob Kane on Batman, and Biro wanted a bit of the Bat magic to rub off. At the same time, Jerry Robinson, another Kane assistant, created London for them. Blackout never hit the big time. Maybe it was the hairy bum. Even in the superhero world where logic does not rule Blackout seems more odd than most.

Number 507


Puglyon's Crypt


I always liked Ramona Fradon's artwork; she worked on the Aquaman backup strip in the 1950s and into the early '60s, then drew Metamorpho. The last work I saw by her was on Super Friends in the 1970s. I thought she had one of those great old-fashioned styles, solid drawing and cartoony exaggeration when necessary. This story, from House of Secrets #116, February 1974, is one where that exaggeration plays a part. It doesn't look all Fradon to me, more like a collaboration of Fradon and Jerry Grandinetti. If it is then Grandinetti isn't credited, or maybe it was just Ramona being influenced by his style. Writer David Michelinie plays on the Poe-esque premature burial idea, but why set the story in 1923? I dunno. It's a good story, though. It observes Pappy's First Law of Horror Comics: "The main character shall be as awful and unredeemable as possible, to justify his horrible fate." Yet it is Code approved. By the early '70s, after twenty years and the rising age of comic book readers, the Code was backing down from prohibiting horror themes.

I'm beginning to see a trend now in Countdown spin-off mini-series. Like Countdown: Arena and Salvation Run, Batman: Gotham Underground is greatly entertaining while at the same time largely pointless, a fine combination only if you're content to go for a ride and leave your larger questions at the door.

Gotham Underground reads in part like a Bat-title crossover from the late 1990s; Batman is kidnapped and sent to Blackgate Prison, and Nightwing and Robin have to stop a gang war while he's gone. (This is, come to think of it, perhaps the plots of two Bat-crossovers combined.) I always enjoyed team-up parts of these crossovers, while resenting the disparate titles and art teams. Gotham Underground is perhaps a model for what the most recent Bat-crossover, The Resurrection of Ra's al Ghul, should have been -- Ra's lacked consistency, while Gotham Underground ultimately lacks relevance.

Writer Frank Tieri offers some great moments, however, which make the story worthwhile if you have the patience for it. Obviously Tieri did his homework; there's a single page where Bane thinks back to the Knightfall story that's as good as Bane has been in a while. The relationships he shows between classic Batman villains like the Joker, the Penguin, and the Riddler are also spot-on; when Penguin reflects on the Joker, it took me back to the days the two teamed-up in the Adam West Batman or Super Friends. One gets the sense that Tieri worked under the mandate of using every Bat-character he could squeeze in here, and while he misses some (Ra's al Ghul, Azrael), I thought the way he shoe-horned in others like Leslie Thompkins and Spoiler was creatively inspired.

Unfortunately, I struggle to understand the point of Gotham Underground. The story explores the Countdown Suicide Squad plotline from the perspective of Batman's villains, but nothing is revealed about that plotline of which we weren't already aware. It suggests large changes to the status quo of Batman and his villains, but in the end just peters out with a non-specific ending. The climax comes when Batman has a giant fight with Vigilante -- only Vigilante's hardly been a major player in the tale; it's as if Tieri went so far with the story and then couldn't necessarily tie things together in the way he originally imagined.

At its center, Gotham Underground is in part a sequel to Batman: Face the Face, a seemingly important Batman story post-Infinite Crisis which was itself largely ignored. In this partnership, Gotham Underground seems to set itself up for irrelevance as well. Fans of the Crime Bible elements of 52 will find some connection as well. But it's as if Gotham Underground exists in this nether-region of the DC Universe that acknowledges a number of changes post-Infinite Crisis (the Freedom of Power Treaty, for instance) that are largely ignored in the mainstream titles themselves. To this end, Gotham Central is really just Final Crisis crossover fluff, but good crossover fluff -- those looking for real impact need not apply.

[Contains full covers, nice uncolored art by J. Calafiore]

Still following the threads of Salvation Run next time with some Catwoman trades. Read along!

Number 506


Readin' is important


I haven't shown a Superkatt* story before; this is from Giggle Comics #54, June 1948. Dan Gordon was another of the group of moonlighting animators who provided the funny animal strips for Giggle and Ha Ha Comics. They didn't write down to their young readers. For the most part these comics were probably bought and read by parents to young children, but because of the skill level of the artists the comics are raised to a level where parents could also enjoy reading them.

I loved the cucumber gag on the first page. My dirty mind saw something the artist probably didn't intend. Oh well, it's funnier to me the way I see it.

*I have no idea what makes this "katt" super.