Number 1038


In and out of the closet


Jeez, it's only ten days until Halloween, and I've been so busy working on this blog that I haven't been able to re-wrap Ex-Lax wafers in Hershey Miniatures wrappers. See what I do for you? Blogging is work, sabotaging Halloween is fun, and for you I've chosen work.

Oh well. I've got a couple more horror stories for Halloween. We have two different stories dealing with putting people in closets. One is of a mean ol' aunt punishing her niece in that nasty dark closet, from Harvey Comics Tomb Of Terror #11 from 1953. The second story is from Charlton's Lawbreakers Suspense Stories #12, from 1954. Both comics regarded the stories as good enough to get the cover position, but then, the closet is a universal fear, isn't it? Being in a confined, dark space gives some folks the whim-whams.

"The Black Closet" is drawn by Art Cappello, and the cover is by Lou Morales. There's sleazy cheesecake (sleazecake?) in this story. This type of comic helped fuel the furor against comic books. I think it's just good sexy, sadistic fun, myself. "The Closet" is drawn by ?, according to the Grand Comics Database, with a cover by Lee Elias.

[This guest review comes from dedicated Aquaman fan Wayne Brooks; Wayne's local comics shop is AfterTime Comics in Alexandria, Virginia.]

Aquaman: Death of a Prince has three things going for it. One, it’s a really great introduction to the Aquaman universe (it even has his origin in it). Two, it reprints for the first time the greatest, darkest, and important era of Aquaman’s history. Three, and most important, it totally entertains.

The death of Arthur Jr. was, and still is, one of the most profound moments in Aquaman’s life. At the time the original stories were published (circa 1974-1977) no DC hero had experienced this kind of heartache. In Death of a Prince you will see Aquaman the hero and Aquaman the king, but at the story’s heart we find Aquaman the father, who experiences a parent’s worst nightmare.

The irony is, to some, Aquaman’s adventures are not that interesting. They see him (thanks to Super Friends and comic writers with limited imagination) as a second-to-third tier character, if that much. Bottom line, Aquaman is not cool. But every so often the comic book stars align and an editor selects an excellent creative team and proceeds to show what many fans knew from day one: when crafted with care, Aquaman can definitely have some excellent adventures and carry a book. Starting in 1974 Adventure Comics editor Joe Orlando did exactly that! If you are expecting the fish yappin’ boy scout from Super Friends or the “outrageous” hero from Cartoon Network’s Brave and the Bold you are going to be disappointed. What you get is a story that presents all the sides of Aquaman; you also get one hell of a great trade.

Death of a Prince collects Adventure Comics #435-437, 441-455, Aquaman #57-63. The entire creative talent involved is top tier. Paul (Justice Society and Legion Of Super-Heroes) Levitz, David (Iron Man) Michelinie, Steve (Aquaman) Skeates, Martin (Superman) Pasko, Gerry Conway (creator of Firestorm and long-time Justice League of America writer), and Paul Kupperberg handle the writing, plotting, and scripting. And there’s the art -- pure gold! We start with Mike (Legion Of Super-Heroes and Warlord) Grell, and then proceed with Jim (The Brave and the Bold) Aparo, and close with Don (Batman and Marvel Family stories) Newton. Now that’s quality.

One of the interesting aspects of Death of a Prince is several of the stories show the many different roles Aquaman has to play. In “Day in the Life” we see Aquaman, the man, just trying to take a day off. In the story “H in for Holocaust,” we see the King of Atlantis protecting his people. A number of stories feature Aquaman as a traditional super-hero. This all comes to a head in “And Death Before Dishonor,” where Aquaman is torn between his kingship and his role as a superhero; in the “Sea King in Exile” storyline, the Atlanteans de-throne Aquaman, accusing him of being an absentee ruler

I also appreciated that we see the entire Aqua-family throughout this book, including Mera, Garth (Aqualad, and later Tempest) and Tula (Aquagirl, often unknown to post-Crisis on Infinite Earths readers), Dr. Vulko, and Aquababy (even before he was known as Arthur Jr.). In “H is for Holocaust," we're also (re)introduced to one of Aquaman’s best unsung supporting characters, NATO General “Hair Trigger” Horgan. I'd love to see Geoff Johns bring this character back; his "ends justify the means" approach (even if that means harming the seas) is a perfect foil for Aquaman, and could even involve Aquaman in stories involving the Navy and Coast Guard.

Beginning with “Dark Destiny, Deadly Dreams” we experience Aquaman’s greatest failure, the death of Arthur Jr. at the hands of Black Manta. I remember my reaction when I read this as a kid . . . it shocked the hell out of me! In 1977, killing off supporting cast was still somewhat rare for DC (I know Alfred and Steve Trevor each died, but both came back). But to kill a child? Believe me, nobody saw that coming! I don't blame Aquaman for his rage when he goes after Black Manta, but justice and mercy prevails and Aquaman turns Manta over to the Navy. We’re left with this exchange between Aquaman and the Navy Captain:

Navy Captain: “…So I guess your job is over!”

Aquaman: “No, Captain, not quite yet. You see, I took off after The Black Manta so fast that I left a bit of unfinished business behind . . . one that could well prove to be the hardest task I’ve ever faced!”

“Oh Yeah? And what’s that?”

“Telling a mother that her only child . . . is dead.”

Now that’s chilling.

While the stories in this book were first rate and contain some gorgeous art by Grell and Newton, the reason this trade is gold is because of the fabulous art work of penciler/inker/letterer extraordinaire, Jim Aparo. From Aquaman clocking The Fisherman with a haymaker (I would love a poster of the cover of Adventure Comics #447) to ordering a school of attacking Men-O-War, to depicting a whale slamming into a submarine, in Mr. Aparo’s hands the Aqua-world never looked better. When Aparo drew a hero throwing a punch, mister, you felt it. In one panel Aquaman even clocks two goons with a hammerhead shark!

Aparo also never let you forget we’re underwater. From Aquaman’s flowing hair to his swimming at super-speed (sorry Flash, Arthur could give you a “run” for your money), Aparo drew the briny deep for all it’s worth. His art gave Arthur the presence, strength, and dignity some artist miss. From the passionate embrace of husband and wife to the sight of Aquaman hold the lifeless body of his son with pure rage on his face, Aparo shows us why he is one of comicdom’s greats. Fortunately books like this help to remind us how truly lucky we are to enjoy his work.

With Aquaman: Death of a Prince, we have a hero and a king who endures triumph and tragedy, and a trade well worth owning. This book shows the unsung versatility of Aquaman, and why he's one of comicdom’s greatest heroes. I strongly recommend it.

Thanks Wayne! And a shout out too to one of my favorite blogs, The Aquaman Shrine -- have you seen the swag they brought back from NYCC? More reviews coming up!

Cancelled Trade Cavalcade -- where the Collected Editions blog looks back at some trades that never quite made print. First up, from the annals of DC Comics's solicitations, Robin: The Final Fight:

All of Robin''s training and crime-fighting by Batman's side comes to a head in this spectacular volume as Batman goes missing and the Boy Wonder becomes the new Dark Knight.

Tying into the events of "Batman R.I.P." continues here as Robin and the Bat family search for their leader while engaging in all-out battle with Gotham City''s underworld. And with his once-dead girlfriend Spoiler now back among the living, Robin also has his hands full with a not-so-happy family reunion between his lady love and her father, Cluemaster!

The trade was supposedly written by Chuck Dixon, and appears to fit just after Dixon's Robin: Violent Tendencies trade paperback.

Dixon, however, left the Robin title after Tendencies in a much-publicized but still very hush-hush spat with DC Comics (see "My Unsolicited Take on the Chuck Dixon/DC Comics Split") and Fabian Nicieza saw the title to its conclusion with Robin: Search for a Hero.

What's interesting here is not only the hints at a certain Spoiler story, but also the solicitation's statement that "the Boy Wonder becomes the new Dark Knight." Granted, Tim did put on the cowl for a while in Batman: Battle for the Cowl, but this suggests a much different end to the story, with Tim Drake as the new Batman and not Dick Grayson.

To me, I think DC got it right -- I can't see Tim Drake becoming Batman without Dick Grayson being severely incapacitated; if Bruce Wayne isn't around and Dick is, it's Dick who deserves to be wearing the cowl before Tim Drake. Still, this is a glimpse at what might have been.

Tune in next week for another Cancelled Trade Cavalcade. See you then!

Number 1037


The fine art comic book artist


Gerald McCann was a comic book veteran, another journeyman, who was also a painter, a fine artist. I don't have much information on him beyond his birth year of 1916. If McCann is still alive he's about 95-years-old by now, but nowhere online could I find a date of death. If you google Gerald McCann you can find examples of his fine art.

McCann did comic books across the genres, but specialized in crime and later in TV tie-ins. He had a fine artist's eye for panel composition. The two moody crime stories I've got here have a noir feel to them. McCann worked into the 1960s, at least, for Dell (Ghost Stories) and for ACG editor, Richard E. Hughes. Today I'm showing one of his later stories from a 1963 issue of Adventures Into the Unknown.

Here's a link to a Western story McCann did for Avon.

From Murderous Gangsters #3, 1952:








From Real Clue Crime Stories Vol. 6 #2, 1951:








From Adventures Into the Unknown #143, 1963:

After a day of teasing out all of their January 2012 solicitations group by group on their blog (which I find a lot more fun than having to wait till 5 for everything), DC Comics has released their first 2012 offerings -- plus their collected editions. Here's what caught my eye:

* Batman vs. The Black Glove

You heard about this one first on Collected Editions, and now we know this joint collection of Batman and Son and Black Glove will be in stores March 28. All of you who speculated that this would be a deluxe edition, you were right -- my guess is DC will just skip over Batman: Resurrection of Ra's al Ghul, and we'll simply have a deluxe Batman and Son/Black Glove to put on our shelves next to Batman RIP (which will look thin, unfortunately, in comparison). Pity DC seems to have dropped the "and Son" from this boo's title -- I thought it paid good homage to both books inside.

* Batman Versus Bane

Unfortunately, this book doesn't collect everything I'd hoped. Looks like we just have the stories surrounding Batman: Legacy -- the Bane of the Demon miniseries preceding that crossover, and the Batman/Bane special following it -- and not the two great Vengeance of Bane specials nor any of Bane's other appearances in Batman.

* Batman: Gates of Gotham

Gates of Gotham has been Scott Snyder and Kyle Higgens's show, so it's surprising but certainly welcome that DC also includes the two part story from Batman Annual #28 and Detective Comics Annual #12 by David Hine. The solicitation here states outright what many of us already understood, that the barrier between pre- and post-Flashpoint Batman stories is largely permiable: "This miniseries spins out of recent events in the Batman titles and sets the stage for several exciting storylines in 2011," indeed.

* DC Comics Presents: The New 52 #1

Down among the trade collections is this solicitation for a DC Comics Presents issue that could've been called "New 52: The Dark, given that it includes Animal Man #1, Justice League Dark #1, I, Vampire #1 and Swamp Thing #1. So here we are in January, five issues into all of these series, and DC is releasing a mini-collection of issues four months old? I guess this would be a useful tool for new readers, but by January I imagine you're already hooked or you're not, and you can always get these digital -- I'd as soon see the first hardcovers of these titles arrive sooner than DC Comics Presents issues throughout the New 52 genres (see my Tumblr rant on DC Comics Presents issues).

* Hawk and Dove: Ghosts and Demons

I guess the original collection of the Karl Kesel/Rob Liefeld Hawk and Dove miniseries is well out of print, so that justifies simply re-issuing it, but I wish DC had gone bigger with this and included some material from the series itself, too, even if it no longer had Liefeld pencilling it.

* Justice Society of America: Monument Point
* Power Girl: Old Friends
* Titans: Broken Promises
* Xombi

All of these, thankfully, collect the final issues of their respective series before the DC Relaunch. Given we lost both the final Doom Patrol and JSA All-Stars collections (and the final Booster Gold collection is nowhere to be found), it's good to see these lower-tier titles with collections promised. Now, this doesn't ensure DC won't cancel them down the road, like the others I mentioned ... (The Titans solicitation, by the way, names issue #39, when the series ended with #38).

Meanwhile, John Rozum may have left the Static Shock title, but news of a collection of his most recent Xombi series should assuage some rumors of difficulties between he and DC. I'd be surprised to find DC was collecting this without plans to bring Xombi back in some form coming up.

* Flash Omnibus by Geoff Johns Vol. 2

As covered over at Speed Force, the second volume of the Flash by Geoff Johns omnibus will collect the Rogues, Crossfire, and Blitz trades (closing out artist Scott Kolins) plus a DC First special. This is one trade more than the first volume collected and more than we originally speculated when you heard about this series first on Collected Editions. DC's been doing a lot of this lately, pumping up the contents of books like the New Teen Titans Omnibus while leaving the price intact -- in this case, the second Flash volume has almost 200 pages more than the first, for the same price. More for your money is always better, of course, and I'm thrilled with a trend toward DC releasing collections with greater amounts of material.

That's my take -- what's on your pull list?

Tony Bedard's Green Lantern Corps: The Weaponer is an improvement over his previous volume, in large part because of this story's more interesting villain. Weaponer is shockingly similar to Revolt of the Alpha-Lanterns in terms of overall plot, however, and suffers from some of that book's same difficulties regarding characterization and decompressed storytelling.

[Contains spoilers]

"A villain kidnaps a member of the Corps, and the other Green Lanterns must foment a revolution on an alien planet to free their comrade." This is the plot of both Revolt of the Alpha-Lanterns and Weaponer. Kidnapper? The Cyborg-Superman on one side, the Weaponer on the other. Kidnapped? John Stewart and Soranik Natu (one for the purpose of luring Ganthet, the other for luring Sinestro). In the former, the Green Lanterns inspire the robots of Grenda to rise up against the Cyborg; in the latter, the Lanterns lead the Qwardian Thunderers against Sinestro. Both stories are five issues long, with a similar structure -- the kidnap, the rescue, a third party intervenes, and then the denouement.

Weaponer was of great interest to me in large part because of the Qwardian Weaponer himself, who forged Sinestro's original yellow ring and has now kidnapped Sinestro's daughter Natu in revenge for Sinestro's perceived neglect of the Qwardians. Similar to the history of the mystery villain at the center of the upcoming War of the Green Lanterns (I won't spoil it; see Green Lantern: Brightest Day), continuity in regards to the Qwardians is a tad shaky in view of what still did/didn't happen in Crisis on Infinite Earths. How Qwardian history coincides with the Sinestro Corps War is a story that's been waiting to be told for a while now, and I was pleased to see Bedard tell it. No great surprises, but some welcome mentions of the Anti-Monitor and so on.

Unfortunately, a lot of that history comes in the form of the Weaponer simply telling it all to Natu in this book's second chapter. That second chapter is a notable indicator of the rest of the book -- it involves eight pages of Lantern Kyle Rayner and Sinestro fist-fighting in Greenwich Village, two of Kyle rounding up other Lanterns to rescue Natu, and sixteen of Natu speaking with the Weaponer. Ordinarily I'd praise a single issue that bucks the need for a hero/villain fight to make that single piece complete, except that fairly little occurs in the issue, and that's true going forward, too. The Lanterns fight the Qwardians; the Sinestro Corps shows up and also fights the Qwardians; then finally Sinestro arrives and fights the Weaponer not once, but two different times.

In all of this, there's no great revelations about the Qwardians, no twist as to the nature of the Weaponer and Sinestro's conflict. The story is a series of battles, cliffhangers (usually the arrival of a new combatant), and more battles, all leading to the end where, most surprisingly, there's no real fallout from the story. It's unclear to me whether the the other Lanterns realize that Sinestro is Natu's father, but no one remarks on it -- even as it's a big deal and one would think they'd wonder why the Weaponer kidnapping Natu would summon Sinestro. The Weaponer leaves with Sinestro and the Lanterns are immediately drawn into the War of the Green Lanterns conflict, making the Weaponer's threat seem like mainly just something to bide the time between Green Lantern crossover stories.

Indeed, while I have enjoyed this period between Blackest Night and War of the Green Lanterns in which Green Lantern, Corps, and Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors have all been interconnected, so little happened in either of the tertiary series that DC could have just published Green Lantern only, and simply had the events of Corps and Warriors as subplots. The Weaponer has an honorable dignity that I enjoy in a villain, but the Warriors antagonist Zardor was entirely forgettable, and I don't sense the conflict with either will actually tie in to War. Warriors was a considerably better book that Weaponer, but entirely this was another case of DC Comics publishing three different series when they could have told the same story with just one.

I do hope, however, that Bedard is able to show more of Sinestro and Kyle's conflict in the Corps chapters of War of the Green Lanterns. With all the difficulty DC is having lately in regards to their representation of women, Kyle and Sinestro's conflict is something of a guilty pleasure -- on one hand, they're disappointingly fighting over who gets to speak for Natu, when it'd be better if Natu weren't defined by the men around her; on the other hand, it's chillingly wonderful every time Sinestro calls Kyle "alley rat." For as much as Kyle has accomplished as a Green Lantern, Sinestro still sees him as the shiftless California artist we met him as way back when, and this makes their conflicts crackle -- I like this even more, perhaps, than watching Hal Jordan mourn his lost friend when Sinestro is around.

A word to the Brightest Day crossover aspect of Green Lantern Corps: The Weaponer -- if that's why you might pick up this book, I'd pass. Firestorm shows up in the last chapter, and it's fun to see him flit among the Green Lanterns and shoot some bolts at the Sinestro Corps. Ultimately, however, Firestorm's just passing through and leaves the Lanterns in the end, changing the story not a whit. It's another example of the same difficulty this book has overall; it's five chapters long and there's art on every page, but when I got to the end I didn't find I had much more than when I started.

[Contains original and variant covers (including by favored Corps artist Patrick Gleason); printed on glossy paper]

Later this week, a look at a trade that never was, with Collected Editions' Cancelled Trade Cavalcade. Don't miss it!

Number 1036


The singing cowbunny


My friend, Eddie, has asked me a couple of times if I remember a Golden Age rabbit cowboy. Eddie, I believe the character you remember is "Red" Rabbit, who starred in his own comic book from 1947 to 1951.

"Red" Rabbit Comics was published by Dearfield Publishing Company of Chicago. According to the Grand Comics Database this publisher had a total of 44 issues of five different titles, and "Red" Rabbit accounted for half their output, with 22 issues. Since #5 is the only issue I've seen I can't say if animator and comic book artist Harvey Eisenberg created the look of the character, but he drew the contents of #5 (the GCD is sparse on information relating to this title). Eisenberg went on to draw Tom and Jerry, among other features in a prolific career with Dell Comics.

I've featured Eisenberg's work before, in Pappy's #397 and Pappy's #494.