This story has a pretty clear message: rich people are bad to hardworking common people. That sounds a lot like pinko talk, doesn't it? Except we are still having a discussion in America about rich vs. poor. I doubt it will ever be resolved, but while the rich would like us commoners to believe that speaking up for one's economic class is tantamount to treason, we're less interested in sedition and just trying to get our slice of the American pie, nowadays sliced pretty thin.

Cattlemen against sodbusters! I watched stories like that in many cowboy movies when I was growing up. The movies demonized bankers and rich cattlemen because as little as the poor sodbusters had, the greedy bastards wanted it all! Bankers were hard hit because they were looked at with suspicion by the generation who came out of the Great Depression, including the people who wrote and drew comic books. This tale, where love trumps wealth, is from Quality Comics Range Romances #1 (1949), It's credited by Heritage Auctions and the CGC people as being by Paul Gustavson. The Grand Comics Database has ? for the artist.

“Education of Iron Fist Gookin,” from Star Spangled Comics #18 (1943) is a fine example of how Simon and Kirby could break up their action-filled stories with funny business. It’s well done in all the ways Joe and Jack could craft a story, has laughs and action, and a great pay-off at the end. Gookin, the villain, is looking for a way to make his gang look up to him, to look smart by expanding his vocabulary, which he does thanks to the Newsboy Legion's most erudite member, Big Words.

This is just not something you would see in most comic books of the era, a panel where the bad guy says, “Hi, Gang!! As Shakespeare put it...slappin' cops around is like exacerbatin' de quantitative hyperbole...” It's nonsense — “word salad” —  but maybe it got a few 1943 readers to crack the dictionary.

I love these early forties stories S and K did for DC. I read them as reprints in the Fourth World series of comics DC published in the early seventies.

The Hangman (Bob Dickering) had an interesting gimmick. When he cornered the guy he was after the shadow of the gallows fell on the felon's face. I wondered how he did that...then I watched one of those “reality” shows where we’re not supposed to think about a platoon of cameramen, lighting techs, sound guys, etc., following these “real” people around in their “real” daily endeavors. Maybe Hangman had a lighting guy who stood over his shoulder, and when the time was right would hold up a tiny gallows in front of a powerful light. Okay...so it’s a comic book and they don't have cameramen. I just needed to get that out, because Hangman's gimmick always bugged me, and if they explained it in any of the Hangman stories I've missed it (or forgotten).

This story, which comes from Pep Comics #34 (1942) is a good example of the series. Bob Fujitani, working in his early style with overtones of Will Eisner’s influence, drew some very dynamic and dramatic pages. There's even a scene of a guy getting shot through the head, which wasn't exactly typical of these stories, but gory stuff did happen. M.L.J. Magazines, Inc., publishers, was into the action, violence and horror that appalled parents and grownups across America. They also sold to servicemen who were more likely to handle this sort of thing, but it was the kids everybody worried about. After a time the line began concentrating on their teenage comics and out of bloody M.L.J. cleancut Archie Comics was born. Well, cleancut compared to this episode of Hangman. I remember some sexy stuff going on in Archie, but no one got a bullet through the brain.

I'm including a page on editor Harry Shorten. Shorten did comics, paperback book publishing, a comic strip (“There Oughta Be A Law” with Al Fagaly) and then comics again in the sixties with T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents. All of that was ahead of Shorten when this biography was written, but you can see from it that Shorten took to the industry early on.

Jeff Lemire's Animal Man: The Hunt has so far been the breakout star of DC Comics's New 52 initiative, the best of the new series and the one that makes what disappointments there may be in the New 52 worth it. Prior to the New 52, however, Lemire's Superboy: Smallville Attacks was a slow tale of talking heads (albeit Eisner-nominated) and his Flashpoint tie-in "Frankenstein and the Creature Commandos" lacked the monstrous mayhem of Grant Morrison's earlier Seven Soldiers Frankenstein series.

Fortunately, the premiere of Lemire's DC New 52 Frankenstein series, Frankenstein: Agent of SHADE: War of the Monsters, is up there in quality with his Animal Man. Lemire more-than accomplishes the big monster horror of Morrison's book, with an extra helping of mad science thrown in. Frankenstein is really out there, achieving exactly the tone that the DC New 52 needs; to some extent, Lemire's Frankenstein is what Paul Cornell's Stormwatch should have been.

[Review contains spoilers]

At every turn in War of the Monsters, Jeff Lemire deconstructs what it means to be a "monster." Though there's plenty of creatures that go bump in the night, there aren't really any "monsters" here, at least in the sense of characters with a strong intention to do evil. Frankenstein himself is a noble beast, readily dealing death but always trying first to find peaceable solutions, as when he encounters OMAC or when he's sent to assassinate his old friend Colonel Quantum. And in both cases, Frankenstein's foes are hardly villains -- OMAC, the reader intuits, is a victim of circumstances, and Quantum is a pathetic figure who regrets the murders he's committed.

Even the book's more traditional monsters are depicted with some kind of catch to their monstrosity. The "original" Creature Commandos who escape from the SHADE's organization's prison are quite bloodthirsty, but they've also been imprisoned without due process. At the beginning of the book, it seems a "monster planet" is attacking Earth, but it turns out the planet is a sentient being that's been pressed into service by the parasitic monsters who live on it; even these grim creatures are mitigated, however, when one of them mistakes SHADE agent Nina "The Mermaid" Mazursky for its mate and Nina looks on it with pity.

Just as Peter Milligan takes the often-violent title characters in Red Lanterns and plays them as philosophers, Lemire is equally working both for and against type (only Lemire's doing it better). Here there be monsters, for sure, but the monsters in Frankenstein are traditional in appearance only, not in character.

Among those traditional monsters are genetically-engineered versions of a werewolf, a vampire, and a mummy, along with Frankstein, his bride, and the "mermaid" (more akin to the creature from the Black Lagoon). Lemire names them and gives them relatively the same personalities as the Creature Commando's in his Flashpoint story, whether this will ever be relevant or not. The Commandos come off as more likeable, however, benefiting from the increased page count to show their different facets.

Mazursky is timid yet brave, and an interesting romantic foil for Frankenstein aside from his estranged wife. Griffiths, the werewolf, is less vapid than in Flashpoint (he's so loyal to Frankenstein that I wonder what Griffiths will do if Frankenstein betrays his trust) and Velcoro, while still sarcastic, comes off as far less mean than he did before. Velcoro and Griffiths's moments of teamwork are quite endearing, actually -- they're in the running to be the new "Blue and Gold" ("Tooth and Fang," maybe?) of the DC New 52.

Once the opening "Monster Planet" story finishes and the OMAC crossover is out of the way, Lemire pauses for a one-off story in issue #6, and it's clearly the star of this book. Lemire sends Frankenstein to track down former comrade Colonel Quantum in Vietnam, revealing indeed that Frankenstein fought in Vietnam; Lemire opens up now a variety of options for flashback stories featuring Frankenstein in various eras. Quantum is essentially Watchmen's Dr. Manhattan and indeed the whole sequence strongly evokes Watchmen's Vietnam sequence.

What stands out here the most, however, is simply how Lemire gives the story a moment to breathe, that he demonstrates that Frankenstein is a guy who has friends, and that he gives "normal" moments to Ray "not yet the Atom" Palmer and the SHADE staff, and that he teams the Bride and Mazursky, who missed each other in the previous arc. In short, inasmuch as Lemire world-builds, Frankenstein is also a story with a richly imagined supporting cast who work in both big adventures and small, and that's a good sign for the future.

All of this is set against a wildly well-imagined SHADE backdrop, from headquarters shrunken down to microscopic size to physics-challenging vehicles, and killer tanks and robots much too large for their own good. Lemire somehow ducks the confusion that was inherit in Paul Cornell's Stormwatch debut and yet at the same time Lemire's story emerges as more complex and more imaginative. As a matter of course, Lemire's Palmer rattles off that the "demon portal" that's emerged in the middle of a lake is actually a "small wormhole that leads to something I've dubbed 'dead space,'" and then Palmer's anti-portal weapon, of course, shoots lasers in the shape of a pentagram. Weird and funny and clever, DC would do well to have Frankenstein be the standard for how far the New 52 writers reach.

The book includes two pages of J. G. Jones's cover sketches, but nothing from Alberto Ponticelli, unfortunately, whose sketchy line-work is just right for Frankenstein: War of the Monsters's weird horror, not coincidentally akin to Travel Forman's art in Lemire's Animal Man.

[Includes original covers, sketchbook section]

Win one, lose one this week, then, with Frankenstein emerging victorious while Red Lanterns ... not so much. Next week, guest reviewers Doug Glassman and Zach King will be your hosts, and then I'll be back the week after with the last Legion of Super-Heroes trade of the old DCU and the first of the New 52. See you then!

[Guest review by Doug Glassman. Spoilers ahead for The Avengers movie.]

Shortly after Avengers came out, I sought a copy of Infinity Gauntlet, the likely source material for the film’s sequel. Upon reading it, however, I felt that something was missing. It opened as if it were the third act of an epic, with characters returning having been killed off-screen. As it turns out, there was a huge chunk of story missing … and thankfully, Marvel has collected this in Silver Surfer: Rebirth of Thanos. Though the title has been out in hardcover for some time, it was recently put out in paperback just in time for readers to get ready for Thanos’s entry onto the big screen.

Collected here are two major stories: “Rebirth of Thanos,” which was told in the Silver Surfer series, and “The Thanos Quest,” a two-issue miniseries. The Silver Surfer isn’t one of my favorite characters. My favorite moments featuring him are smaller cameos, such as his epic fight with Cable in Cable and Deadpool or his turn as a gladiator in Planet Hulk. Perhaps the Surfer’s greatest issue is that he suffers from Superman Syndrome: the difficulty of coming up with a threat great enough to be serious for such a powerful hero. Jim Starlin sidesteps this problem in two ways.

Firstly, Starlin spends a lot of time humanizing the Surfer. In the first few pages, for instance, he gets to sleep for the first time in years. Unlike Superman, who can go from sleeping to flying off within seconds, the Surfer travels such great distances that he can’t afford to rest. His irritation at being saddled with Drax the Destroyer (who is basically Space Hulk) is palpable, and the Surfer gets rid of Drax not through strength, but through intelligence and patience.

But the key to Rebirth of Thanos is its title character. Thanos may have begun as Marvel’s rip-off of Darkseid, but his death and resurrection turned him into a new kind of conqueror. Where Darkseid wants to be worshipped, Thanos simply wants to be seen as an equal. The only problem is that he wants to be an equal of Death. If you saw The Avengers with a Marvel fan and they cheered when Thanos’ advisor says that he’s “courting death,” well, this is why. Marvel and DC both personify Death as a woman, but while DC’s Death is a perky Goth, Marvel’s death is a hooded, often skeletal figure who only speaks through others. In fact, Death’s refusal to speak directly to Thanos ends up as a major plot point at the end of “Thanos Quest,” and one that leads into Infinity Gauntlet.

Darkseid and Thanos also differ in how they relate with others. Darkseid is, for a lack of a better term, “personable.” He’s constantly surrounded by underlings, and even when they want to rebel against him, they fall back when he’s ready to launch a plan. Thanos, meanwhile, is very much on his own by his own choice. After his resurrection, he goes after Nebula, a dangerous warlord claiming to be his granddaughter. Where Darkseid would try to convince her into an alliance, Thanos just blasts her forces.

Thanos also has a cold sort of reason about him. His plan to “balance the scales” by killing half of the universe’s population is presented as not just a logical choice, but the only possible solution to the ills of existence. He takes the Surfer to the modern, polluted, and overcrowded Earth and tries to make his case that the entire universe would be better off if the Surfer helped him in his genocide. Starlin takes what would have been just a silly supervillain scheme and pushes it up a level by putting in the hands of an immensely powerful and incredibly intelligent planner who fully believes that he’s slaughtering populations for love. The cruel trick he pulls on an overpopulated, predator-less planet is just the start.

I’ve written about the difficulties about villain-driven series before, and how characters like Carnage and Venom couldn’t carry their own title. Thanos’ miniseries demonstrates that he can hold his own as a lead character. In his quest for the Soul Gems (rebranded the Infinity Gems in this title), he goes up against six of the most powerful beings in the Marvel Universe and outwits them. He accomplishes this by going in a very specific order, using each new gem to enhance the ones before them. When he uses the Gems in turn, you can get a sense of just how powerful the Infinity Gauntlet itself is. Starlin then goes the extra step and demonstrates the Gauntlet’s sheer might, and the threat is made all too real.

Ron Lim provides the art for both stories. Starlin and Lim are considered one of the best writer/artist teams in comic book history, and Rebirth of Thanos demonstrates just why this is. Lim consistently provides lush backgrounds and intricate panel layouts, allowing him to convey action-driven, large-scale stories with great clarity. He also adds to Thanos’ design through the removal of his eyes. Thanos had always been presented as having a huge brow, but the only time he has eyes in Lim’s artwork is when he has a manic gleam. Otherwise, they’re hollow sockets, a fitting touch for a lover of Death. Lim even makes background characters interesting. Death is accompanied by a rotting corpse and a humanoid rat, and I wanted to know more about both of them. (Perhaps they’re visitors from Discworld?)

If you’re interested at all in Infinity Gauntlet, then you must read Silver Surfer: Rebirth of Thanos. This is Act I of the story, and I wish Marvel could find a better way to get word out about it. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Thanos Omnibus in the future, but for now, pick this up for a fantastic supervillain’s rise. An extra story from Logan’s Run is collected as well, and it shows off just how far Thanos has come from.

As a feature, “Roy Raymond, TV Detective,” lasted a long time in Detective Comics, 1949 to 1961. For the first few years the feature was called “Impossible -- But True!” with art chores handled originally by Ruben Moreira. The strip's name change came in 1953. Roy Raymond had a busy career, spanning radio and then television. He was a professional debunker, whose investigative powers would be used to expose fakers. In his very first tale, shown here, Raymond is challenged by stories of a valley where people instantly age fifty years (gee, the story of my life!) and the second puts Roy underwater with a group of mermen.

Moreira, who also used the name Rubimor to draw the Sunday comic strip Tarzan in the mid-'40s, both penciled and inked. Moreira was born in Puerto Rico. He moved back in 1958 and mailed in his work. In 1962 Moreira quit comics. He died in 1984.

From Detective Comics #153 (1949) and #252 (1958):